August 21, 2026

Each Day A New God

Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.

Annie Dillard opens Holy the Firm with this line, written during a stretch of solitary living in a cabin on an island in Puget Sound. The book unfolds over three days and confronts hard questions raised by a moth burning to death in a candle flame and a child badly burned in a plane crash nearby. Dillard refuses to let one day explain or excuse another, insisting each day stands complete and sacred, cut off from what came before. It speaks to beginning again because no matter what yesterday held, today arrives as its own god, owing nothing to the last one.