Christ is a friend best made before you try and set things straight in the world, because that’s a tall order usually involving such experiential delicacies as walking through fire, negotiating with fanatics, imbibing poisoned tonics, standing trial before a stadium-sized jury of the bitter and scorned, writing defiant op-eds no one understands, being shoved out of a slow-rolling car, or spraying something minty into your mouth right before doing something reckless as a last […]
Calculus reveals itself to be the study of my fears. The tangent to a curve is a line, a rock slung into the void of space, a cannonball flight untempered by gravity, a prognosis insulated from relationship and possibility. If we take the vector properties of this miniscule instant, extrapolate them, and play the tape, well… uh oh. When the Studebaker is whipping around a turn, an antique rocking chair strapped inadequately to the roof, once […]
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 […]
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 […]
I was in Washington, D.C. this past weekend with my wife and her eight year old grandson, and we went to an IMAX film to see the story of Fred and Norah Urquhart, who spent much of their lives in a quest to understand the migratory path of monarch butterflies. After several weeks of an extremely busy schedule at work and an annoying skin infection that has been insistent on delivering its message– a time […]
Illusion is a grid of two-way streets, an endless network of choices. Asphalt riddled with diesels, sirens, and street lamps. Buildings with decisions stacked up to the sky like trays of factory-laid eggs waiting for chicks. Dropped ceiling meanings. Angled views. Helo pads on top. A strange silence up there. What if the engine fails? Parachute racks, lightning rods and hose reels. Tightropes strung from peak to peak. Wind socks for safety and guidance. The heavy […]
For a time it was vitally important that I witness the sunset, that I look up from whatever act of commerce or gastronomy had caught my attention that day and look west, to pause and listen to far away places that seemed, for just a moment, to pour through the offices of my heart in fleeting snippets of a cosmic dialect. That was the moment, the precise time to say it: whatever this is… I […]
Embracing Forever 