Nail

Everyone should learn how to hit the nail on the head--in an argument if not carpentry.

Anyone, of course, could see her, could see her eyes. If you walked up the Dixie Pike most any time of day, you´d be most like to see her resting listless-like on the railing of her porch, back propped against a post, head tilted a little forward because there was a nail in the porch post just where her head came which for some reason or other she never took the trouble to pull out.

Have you ever considered the nails used to pinion Jesus to the Cross? I see them as the attachments, the lusts and desires, that bind our psyche to the material world. During the individuation process, which C.G. Jung explored and described so well, such a nail could be seen as a love of fine things or a lust for another person. But it can equally be the desire to be the best at something, or our pride in a group or nation. Individuation begins to happen when we give up our 'attachments' to the material world. As Jesus said, »he who clings to his life shall lose it while he who let's it go shall find it.«

Nails and mortar! Nails and mortar! Yells abound as such things are needed at a construction site. nails for wooden boards and mortar for them brick walls. Nail aand mortar!!!

And then there is nail and mortar of a different sort: mortars and nails, mortars and nails! and you throw nails into the mortars, they go THUMP and them nails fly high, onto the enemy ranks.
but serious man use special grenades or maybe rockets for their mortars.
I just read a book about war in Angola in the seventies, and on the MPLA side there was a single garrison way deep into the south, where they had two mortars and two portuguese partisans would fire them without tripods, from their very own hands, burning themselves seriously in the process.

Everyone talks about being in pursuit of the Holy Grail – from Parsifal to Indiana Jones. But why is no-one on the trail of the equally Holy and Significant Nail – the one mentioned somewhere in the Old Testament as having been left hidden in the world by God, the only remaining recipient of divine purpose in the midst of chaos?

'For the want of a nail the battle was lost...' Which nail would that be, then? In a horse shoe, on the cross, adorning a hand or a foot...?