Corresponding Author:  

David W Jardine, PhD 

Professor Emeritus, University of Calgary 

Email: jardine@ucalgary.ca 

Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 

ISSN: 1927-4416 

Online date 

©The Author(s) 2022   
DOI: 

https://doi.org/10.11575/jah.v2022i2022.

74349 

 

Guest Editorial 
 

Beet Juice 

 
 

 

 

David W. Jardine 

 

 

 

I’m not trying to describe experience – my own or yours. I’m trying to shape my experiences, 

my immediacies, into more beautiful shapes and contours, richer colors, full of more vivid 

memories and vivid dreaming, more alert to the relations roiling under the surface of my “lived-

experience.” My own life – any life – is full of forgetting, is inevitably wrought with inadequacy, 

is inevitably finite, located, frail and limited. Every tradition, every voice, betrays itself when it 

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Jardine  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2022 Editorial 1    2 

feels itself fully adequate: 

 

The issue today is not simply a matter of making pure choices for one tradition over 

another, which is psychologically and conceptually impossible anyway, given that there 

is no such thing as a ‘pure’ tradition. The real challenge is to face the truth that no one 

tradition can say everything that needs to be said about the full expression of human 

experience in the world and that what the global community requires more than anything 

else is mutual recognition of the various poverties of every tradition. The search to cure 

the poverty of one’s own tradition works in all directions at once. (Smith, 2020, p. 334)  

 

And that search only works if those traditions that have been marginalized, silenced, or betrayed 

come to full voice, not because we might choose this instead of that, but because each voice can 

only be what it is in the daresay beautifully poverty-stricken admixture of the whole of the breath 

of things. 

 

The very same be true of any one life, whatever tradition it beckons, summons, forgets, or 

remembers. This is our collective fate, and it includes the fate of Ravens, too, of planted beets 

and their harvest, of the fail of that harvest or its success. These relations –where my living 

experience, with all its traditional entrails, is exposed to the open wind -- are often buried, 

forgotten, distorted, marginalized, unheeded, simply fallen for, taken for granted, occluded, 

distorted, intermingled. And, well, often suppressed, repressed, denied, erased, stolen, 

subjectivized, objectivized, exaggerated, and so on and so on.  

 

And let me invert this. I’m trying to plumb things hidden from the immediacies of my own self-

reflection – things lingering in the words we use, I use, ideas we wittingly or unwittingly 

inherited and this from wherever and whomever. “Neither . . . is it enough simply to ‘let 

differences be,’ as if there could never be any points of address between them” (Smith, 2020, p. 

334). The proof? I live on unceded land and I breathe. These are both proofs the attention to 

which will take more life than I’ve got left. That attention can never be adequate to the full 

expression of human experience in the world because that fullness keeps coming.  

 

It is the desire for it to finally fully succeed that is the real common enemy in relation to which 

we must all marshal our poor little gifts (pre-Latin pau-paros, --you can spot the word “pauper” 

here, involving parare “to produce, bring forth” and the root pau- “few, little” (See the Online 

Etymological Dictionary entries under “poor” and “poverty”). 

 

So, I take a picture and offer it here for good reasons that I am too frail to understand all by 

myself. I think it is beautiful and that may be part of our locales of commiseration and healing. It 

is not “enough.” 

 

We’ve all become of mixed blood, Earth blood. Beet juice. It’s a joke. Smile. Here we are, all of 

us. First born. Second born. Indigenous. Exogenous. No one of these locales is fully adequate to 

the things themselves.  

 

The voles eat up the composted leaves after we’ve sorted the edible beet greens. 

  



Jardine  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2022 Editorial 1    3 

References 

 

Online etymological dictionary. (n.d.)  https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=poor and 

https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=poverty. 

 

Smith, D.G. (2020). The farthest West is but the farthest East: The long way of 

Oriental/Occidental engagement. In D. Smith, Confluences: intercultural journeying in research 

and teaching. From hermeneutics to a changing world order (pp. 311-338). Information Age 

Publishing.  

 

Smith, D.G. (2020). Confluences: Intercultural journeying in research and teaching. From 

hermeneutics to a changing world order. Information Age Publishing.  

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=poor
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=poverty