(I’m late to the game discovering Hopkins’s incredible poetry—what a treasure!)

We keep reading, and it turns out this is something Moses has in common with God. Look at all these sensory verbs: seeing (emphatically!), hearing, knowing.

God and God’s prophet in this story are figures who know how to slow down and pay attention. It’s a skill in short supply these days.

At minimum, these are the disciplines learning an ancient language requires of us and sharpens in us.

Anyways. Lots of these folks will go on to be pastors, leaders, community organizers. And perseverance through this mess will require nothing less of us than the capacity to be attentive, to be rooted, to be willing to be vulnerable, to do something hard over and over again.

Are we sticking our heads in the sand when we do this deep work? Or are we spreading roots that keep us stable in this windy mess of a tempest we’re in?

We’re spending time at the beginning of class each week to think and chat about what it is we do when we buckle down to cultivate our attention toward this deep, difficult, slow work. Memorizing paradigms, vocab, rereading the same pages in the grammar over and over again.

I'm partial to bîdi (<*bi-yadi, loss of morphemic boundary, & vowel syncope?)