April 5, 2018

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding (Prov. 3.5).

In the Old Testament, the ‘heart’ refers to the seat of a person’s inner-most being, including their conscience, emotions, will, ratiocination, and understanding. So, in at least one respect, it overlapped with the functions of the mind – the domain of thinking (and also of understanding, in some senses of the word). Heart and mind were, therefore, not as far a part as we place them today, culturally. They overlapped. In this proverb, the heart and understanding are both distinguished and interrelated. Wholehearted trust in God implies that we fully yield our desires, feelings, plans, and grasp of what we think is going on in our life to him, in the belief that he has our best and highest interests at heart, acts with compassion and integrity, shepherds our comings and goings, and promises to help. (And he always keeps his promises.) In short, we trust him because he’s trustworthy.

Our understanding is God given. But it doesn’t necessarily provide a true representation of reality. The knowledge that informs our understanding may be either partial, incorrectly interpreted, or erroneous. So, we daren’t make important decisions based solely upon it – particularly, if we know that we don’t know the full picture. God does; he sees everything, including the future consequences of our choices, and will determine his will for us accordingly.

Tuesday. A virus (possibly) put pay to the day. I could do little other than sit in the rocking chair and ruminate upon life and its present challenges. By mid afternoon, I was flagging and took to bed, where I slept for the next seventeen hours. Wednesday. Was I over the hump? With background ME, I’m always reluctant to make the call. In the studio, I began to capture the unamplified sound of the stylus as it tracked across several Scourby Bible vinyls. In July 1964, when the recording was made, the USA launched Ranger 7. It was the first probe to record the lunar surface. Over 4,300 photographs were transmitted back to the Earth. I was recording the surface of another round object:

Today. I’ve been recording the surface of only those verses (51 of them) that mention the Moon. Over the headphones, the edits in the recording (some of which are a little cack-handed) made, presumably, in order to excise muffed words or lines, are evident. The sonorities of the capture aren’t consistent. Some parts feel variously warmer and more moderately reverberant than others. Occasionally, the drone of a passing vehicle and noises in the studio are audible. I still don’t know where the recording was made.

I stood in the sunlight which poured through the studio skylight. It soothed my body with a warmth that seemed to penetrate to the marrow and the soul. Only sunlight has this capacity:

After a period of respite, I moved forward with my ‘moon’ search. 3.00 pm: I was in the Psalms. There can be few otherwise mundane research processes that are so rich in their performance. A discussion with Crimson Guitars has begun regarding a new and better bridge for the Custom RF. This may be less of an ordeal than I’d anticipated:

In the evening, I made some initial considerations regarding a keynote paper that I hope to deliver in October.

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