“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” Psalm 8:3-4
The Psalmist, gazing beneath the vault of stars, marvels aloud: What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? The heavens dwarf him, the dust clings to him, yet he dares believe the Maker bends low, remembers, and grants worth.
But even in that astonishment, the shadow of doubt stirs. Another voice—the Philosopher’s—finds in the same expanse not remembrance but silence. The stars speak only of distance, the void carries no voice. Armenia and Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Rwanda, Ukraine and Gaza— the graves of countless innocents cry out: how can one still say, Thou art mindful? Likewise, science has stripped the heavens bare: no angels in the spheres, only galaxies colliding in indifferent law. Scripture, once oracle, is now artifact, sifted by history. Thus the question sharpens: not What is man, that Thou art mindful? but Is Thou mindful at all?
Between astonishment and silence stands the Poet, unable to forsake either. He reveres the psalm, yet trembles with the Philosopher’s doubt. Inheritance falters: the words remain precious, but their certainty slips from them. Still, he will not cast them aside. Instead, he holds the fragments as one might hold a candle in the wind: not enough to illumine the void, yet enough to keep the darkness from being complete. He labors to shape language into vigil, to bind meaning against the scatter of grief, to weave remembrance into flame so silence is not the final word.
Perhaps mindfulness is only man’s work— to remember, to wrest coherence from the scatter of loss. Or perhaps it is more: a presence that waits rather than speaks, a silence that shelters rather than denies. The Poet does not resolve the question; he learns instead to live within it, to practice reverence without assurance, until the asking itself becomes our mindfulness.
Every morning of late, when I step outside and survey my small parcel of earth around the sixth hour, I am greeted by a quiet republic. The lawn, though tamed in patches, has yielded here and there to flourishing clover, and amidst this gentle sprawl, the early risers—the rabbits—make their appearance. They bound lightly through their meadow-realm, untroubled by the weight of human concerns.
The poem which follows is inspired by the above and a line from my recent poem, Summer’s Surest Guide, in which I reflected on a single lightning bug, bowing a blade of grass beneath its small, radiant body. In that poem, in particular, I spoke of standing barefoot in the Republic of Clover, declaring allegiance to the unnoticed—those quiet, living moments that affirm our being.
This latest poem expands on that idea—an ode to the small republic I witness each day in my own backyard.
A Rabbit in the Republic of Clover in Cleveland, Ohio. Photograph by the Author, 2025
Ode to the Republic of Clover
By Donald S. Yarab
I. Beneath the sober sky of men and their grim affairs lies the Republic of Clover, unconquered, unperturbed, a verdant sovereignty where no flag flies, yet freedom dances on every stem.
II. Here, the rabbits are princes of lightness, bounding with the grace of unspoken decrees, their courts held in morning silence, their triumphs measured by joy alone.
III. I walk, barefoot, unadorned, an uninvited guest granted quiet citizenship, each step sinking into softness, each toe anointed by dew, by life untroubled by task or time.
IV. The bees, those solemn emissaries, chart invisible paths from bloom to bloom, carrying the golden commerce of summer with no need for treaties, no hunger for dominion, only the rhythm of the sun and the pull of sweet fragrance.
V. And overhead, the butterflies perform their gentle ballet, wings painted in festival colors, gliding upon invisible currents, while from time to time, robins, wrens, and cheerful chickadees descend from their sky-gabled realms to rest upon these humble fields, chirruping briefly, then flitting on, light as thoughts untroubled.
VI. And in these small republics, stitched together in fields, in backyards, at the edge of forgotten lanes, the world smiles again—not in the grandiloquence of monuments, but in the humble confederacy of clover, where joy is law, laughter the unspoken anthem, and every footstep is a vote for wonder.
VII. Blessed be the clover, green banner of quiet gladness; blessed be the rabbits, fleet couriers of delight; blessed be the bees, artisans of golden abundance; blessed be the butterflies, dancers in the cathedral air; blessed be the birds, brief pilgrims of feathered grace. And blessed be the bare foot, the open palm, the unguarded heart— for in this gentle republic, joy requires no conquest, only presence, and the simple, smiling gift of being.
Some time ago—perhaps a year or more—I shared the thought with a friend that, in the absence of a life partner, career milestones, or the outward markers many associate with ongoing joy and fulfillment, I found myself sustained by something smaller, more elusive, yet no less profound: moments. Fleeting as they are, these glimpses—of joy, beauty, tenderness, or connection—carry a weight that lingers long after they pass. Whether in laughter with a friend, a burst of color in nature, the unexpected joy found in art and music, or the hush of shared silence, these moments are what remain.
This conversation was brought to mind earlier today, during a pause in some simple yard work. A robin—one I have come to recognize—perched beside me on a rock for nearly twenty minutes. He did not fly, only hopped, watching me as if we were resting together. That brief companionship, quiet and unexpected, brought back the full force of that earlier insight.
The poem that follows is a first, rough attempt to give shape to that reflection.
This robin, who kept me quiet company, reminded me of the beauty in small moments—and even allowed me, kindly, to take his portrait.
Moments
by Donald S. Yarab
After so long, I see it now— life is not the grand arc we thought we were writing, not triumph etched in time or years stacked with care. It is moments.
The held door, a beat longer than required. A cloud painting itself across the sky. A flower blooming through a crack in concrete.
The hum of a bee, the song of a bird, a friend’s first hello— welcome, familiar music in the air. Laughter spilling like light through a quiet room.
A touch that speaks without language. Sunlight flickering through leaves— nature’s own Morse code. The warm drift from the kitchen: garlic, hope, onions, memory.
The first bite of something sweet dissolving on the tongue. The joy of someone you love laughing till they snort, till they can’t breathe, till you’re laughing too at nothing, at everything.
These— small rebellions against the world’s weight: its monotony, its cold indifference.
But the moments— oh, they persist. They slip through the cracks of our hardest days and remind us why we stay, why we watch, why we dare to hope for just one more:
one more kindness, one more beauty, one more laugh, one more flicker of light— each a defiance, each a benediction in this brief, bright, impossible gift of being alive.
Recently, I read with great interest Hari Kunzru’s article “Doing Their Own Research” in the New York Review of Books (May 29, 2025). It is a piercing, sometimes surreal examination of the strange coalition now shaping American political and spiritual culture: a “New Weird Fusionism” of right-wing conspiracy, countercultural wellness, and mystical absolutism. The portrait he offers—of a society increasingly shaped by magical thinking, selective paranoia, and a weaponized imagination—was as disturbing as it was insightful.
But what struck me most was the realization that the cultural atmosphere Kunzru describes makes it increasingly likely that contemplative works like my recent Liber Agglutivi will be not merely misread—but conscripted into the very worldview they seek to resist.
In that work, framed as a fictional medieval treatise on sacred language, I explore how language, when approached with reverence and silence, becomes not a tool of communication but a site of presence—how it may not only speak about reality, but participate in it. Yet as I read Kunzru’s analysis of conspirituality—the synthesis of conspiracy and New Age belief—I saw an eerie proximity between certain rhetorical structures in Liber Agglutivi and the thought patterns of this cultural formation: secrecy, marginalia, hidden knowledge, the recovery of “true” language lost to corruption.
The danger is real: in an age where every form of mystery gets weaponized, how do we distinguish between authentic contemplative practice and its paranoid simulacra?
It is precisely here that the contrast must be made explicit.
The Liber is not a manual for decoding reality through esoteric symbols or a codebook for revealing global plots. It is not a mystical justification for control, nor an invitation to gnostic certainty. Its words are not “keys” to hidden truths in the paranoid sense Kunzru describes. Rather, it is a contemplative experiment—a poetic, philosophical invitation to see language as something we enter with humility, not something we wield with certainty.
What conspirituality offers is often a form of linguistic inflation: a conviction that to name something is to master it, that to imagine is to manifest, that hidden truths are personal weapons in a war against “them.” This is not reverence for mystery but inflation through proximity to it. The practitioner of conspirituality approaches mystery as a puzzle to be solved, a code to be cracked that will grant power over reality itself.
By contrast, the Liber offers a theology of kenosis—a self-emptying approach to speech in which the word is not a sword, but a veil; not a control mechanism, but a site of transfigured listening. Where conspirituality seeks to decode, contemplation seeks to be changed by what it encounters.
Consider the difference in practice. A conspirituality adherent might read the Liber’s phrase about “memory that knows not what it remembers” as a hint toward recovering suppressed historical truths or accessing forbidden knowledge that “they” do not want you to have.
A contemplative reader approaches the same phrase as an invitation to sit with unknowing itself—to let the mystery remain mysterious while allowing it to transform one’s relationship to knowledge. The first approach inflates the ego; the second empties it.
Kunzru’s analysis is especially compelling in its treatment of magical thinking across the domains of politics, religion, and economics. It is alarming to witness the persistence of the nineteenth-century “mind-cure” tradition—the belief that reality is downstream of personal attitude—now manifesting as national governance logic.
That Donald Trump, among others, internalized Norman Vincent Peale’s message of mental affirmation to the point that factuality became irrelevant is not merely a character trait—it is a symptom of an epistemological crisis. Similarly, the self-help gospel of The Secret, evangelical prosperity teachings, and the memetic evangelism of internet conspiracists all illustrate a culture in which to believe is to make it so.
The boundary between wish and world is not merely blurred—it is denied.
The Liber Agglutivi, by contrast, insists that language’s creative power arises not from assertive will but from contemplative reception. The phrase “word that becomes the thing” does not mean that the self wills reality into being. It means that, in sacred silence, the word discloses what is already most true.
This is a fundamentally different ontology. It is not manifestation; it is reverent participation.
Kunzru rightly notes how easily mystical language can be conscripted by paranoid styles. The idea that “everything is connected,” which in contemplative practice leads to compassion and humility, in conspiracy often leads to reductionism and scapegoating.
The Liber speaks of memory that “knows not what it remembers”—a phrase meant to evoke mystery and presence, not cognitive shortcuts to hidden truths.
So while Kunzru’s essay is not a critique of my work, it felt like a necessary caution about the times in which such a work might be read. In an age of epistemic confusion and symbolic inflation, sacred language must be handled with even greater care.
We must distinguish between language as control and language as communion; between the voice that silences others and the voice that emerges from deep silence. We must recognize that in our current moment, the very practices that might lead us toward wisdom—attention to mystery, reverence for hidden dimensions of experience, suspicion of surface explanations—can be corrupted into tools of manipulation and division.
The Liber Agglutivi may look like a book of secrets, but it is really a book about unknowing—about hearing the spaces where speech begins. And in a world where every utterance is increasingly co-opted for political or psychological leverage, the commitment to silence, reverence, and the mystery of meaning may itself be the most radical stance available to us.
Words that reign do so only when they have ceased to serve the self. In our age of weaponized mysticism, that may be the difference between wisdom and delusion, between contemplation and conspiracy.
