Dust

Keep Death always before your eyes

The Days of Your Youth, by Colin O’Brien, mixed media on panel, 2023

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lenten season when the Church fasts, prays, and gives alms in preparation for celebration of the Lord’s Resurrection.

I have always liked Lent. Time slows down and I live with a little more deliberation than at other times.

Fasting lends an immediacy to the day: the body and its needs come to the forefront of consciousness that it ordinarly does not enjoy, at least in my case. I spend so much of my ordinary days dissociating, coasting through life, a mind and an imagination loosely tethered to earth by my physical self.

To fast is to illuminate the needs of the body through temporary, conscious deprivation. The needs of the body, the scandalous needs that make us burdensome and inconvenient to ourselves and to others. The needs insist and persist: ignore them long enough and they force their way forward, past reason or logic or inner moral monologue. You can’t think your way out of a situation you didn’t think yourself into.