A self is a heavy burden to carry with you across the desert. Despite being invisible and weightless in principle, it is the often overlooked, but necessary battery of accoutrements that are required to render the self manifest and functional that take their toll. There is the steamer trunk full of historical data, for instance, with its rather robust coefficient of sliding friction across the hot sand– the modern take on an old classic, a […]
The process of shifting identity from the false perceptions of the ego to the valid identity we all share in Christ appears, at least for me, to involve passage through states that closely resemble one or more of the following: a flock of large metal plates approaching both the speed of sound and the US Naval Artillery Rail Gun Test Range; a repeating dream in which you hike up the side of a mountain to […]
At one level, the human body is an Enigma– a code machine. All day long they run: informing, creating, conducting. There’s the genetic code, sure. Then there’s the histone code, the sugar code, the signal transduction code, the ubiquitin code, the adhesive code, the splicing code, the tubulin code, the metabolic code, and so on and so forth. Kids, too– they know this game. We’ve all dabbled. We sprinted across the yard, dove into leaf piles, barked […]
The heavy lifting is done in the invisible realms. What’s left to be done here is simplicity itself. Beauty emerges from tending to the obvious. Get some water. Carry stones. When we’re like this, we live inside of choreography, though we’ve never seen the script. We couldn’t read it, anyways– ten million movements on planes of existence whose names we cannot understand, all conspiring to make our next step plain. Just take it. Don’t wonder about what […]
They look at me funny when I tell them I’m a cosmic stunt man, like I have a condition because I can’t stop coming to Jesus about the elaborate nature of this phenomenal ruse. Like indifference is a rational response to having undergone such a prompt step into existence, to having donned that stretchy, knowledge-retardant suit and climbed down the business end of a circus artillery piece, only to fall asleep just prior to the moment […]
See if this helps: Christ is a fisherman whose nets are cast nightly into the sea of non-existence, pulling haul after haul of shimmering beings out of the abyss. The seas are black as ink, the waves like rolling hills of liquefied obsidian, impenetrable to plain sight, but the nets emerge from the deep full of wriggling, unspeakable colors. We were each caught like that, scooped out of the darkness in nets woven by angels, hauled […]
It is possible, strange though it may seem, to imagine that right now is a most exquisite Love note written with you in mind, to imagine that this very moment– with all its shortcomings, flaws, minor aches and pains, pain killers, and just plain killers, the war department, the paperwork, and the miffed populace in which you’re mired– is a tactical choreography offered in the only language you yet understand, suggesting with all due respect that […]
Embracing Forever 