Blackout: Long exposure of Seventh Avenue and West 4th, 2012.

Today is the first day back to work at the Dominican Foundation after my Thanksgiving respite.  Photographer, writer, and social media promoter are the hats that I currently wear.  I will crank out great stories this week.  That’s the plan.  The present-day missions in Kenya, genuine conversions of heart, and Dominican missionaries during the communist revolution in China are just a taste of the subject matter.  It is humbling because the stories are phenomenal and I want the writing to communicate that awesome-ness.

Today, I remembered a fellow student from my freshman year of college who asked me what my purpose in taking a particular class was.  My response was that it was to fulfill the requirement.  He fired back, “No!  You must live each day with passion!  There is no just getting by with the bare minimum!”  His inflections and enthusiasm could not be faked.  I can’t say that I have followed his advice all the time, but what a beautiful philosophy to be so animated in each moment for doing the best, that there is never a danger of mediocrity.

The clock is ticking closer to the 7 p.m. start of my Dante lecture for the week.  I was up until midnight catching up on the reading.  Dante creates truly grotesque imagery in his Inferno.

Amidst a labyrinth of others I find this passage disturbing:

“As I kept my eyes fixed upon those sinners, a serpent with six feet springs out against one of the three, and clutches him completely.  It gripped his belly with its middle feet, and with its forefeet grappled his two arms; and then it sank its teeth in both his cheeks; it stretched its rear feet out along his thighs and ran its tail along between the two, and then straightened it again behind his loins.  No ivy ever gripped a tree so fast as when that horrifying monster clasped and intertwined the other’s limbs with its.”

On my daily pilgrimage uptown to work I caught sight of numerous homeless.  There was one sight where I had to do a double-take.  There was a substantial line of people in front of the automated Metro Card teller, and nestled at the front corner was a homeless man. He was curled up in a ball like a child snug in his bed.

Perhaps the material for Dante’s genius was the world he lived in, chock full of infernal, purgatorial, and divine images waiting for an artist honest enough to describe the glory and the horror of human creation.  Or at least to try and write about it!