For a while now I’ve been tip-toeing gingerly around this little tear in the fabric of my whole world and everything I’ve ever known or questioned or waved to from afar or shouted at or outsmarted or dreamed of lassoing with real jute rope or fallen in love with or skipped rocks across or retreated from or tripped over. Every time I ask Hafiz about cashing in what’s left of my heart for whatever it’ll […]
At the clock makers convention we arranged ourselves neatly around a life-sized cutaway of a gravitational escapement, observing the pendulum bearing the maker’s seal that swung to and fro behind a nest of hypnotic linkages, together recalling amidst polite chuckles and knowing nods the virtuous marriage of metallurgy and time-keeping. Not too many really understood what we did… Not too many could even fathom the significance of what was on display… Pretty cool, eh? said the gentleman […]
I read an article the other day about some people who did what all the books said to do and they were explaining in very simple terms how now their every movement opens up before them like a strawberry shortcake snack at the Center for Incredibleness and their every breath brings with it some beneficent manifestation like a phone call from some Swiss lawyer representing a great uncle they never knew they had who made some […]
I’m not so naive as to think I fully understand my own beliefs and feelings, nor to assume they form an exactly rational system when laid bare by attempts at explanation. But in making the effort, I discover things– inconsistencies in thought, many of them delightful(!); powerful feelings that cannot be explained, yet explain much; ineffable inner realms I realize are part and parcel to who I am; or the existence of ideas operating one […]
When I see a leaf as big as a baby elephant’s ear bouncing in sunlight, plunged like an open hand into a river of life-giving rays 93 million miles deep, and behaving so mysteriously— responding to the way of things with medicinal colors and chemistries only it can offer, as if flush with a secret I once discarded in favor of concocted ideas of legitimacy that involve passing out cards with my name on them in […]
Hafiz picked me up and drove me out into the countryside, aiming the right front tire for every mud puddle he could find, and filling the rearview mirror with volley after volley of clay starbursts. Then, much to the relief of both my kidneys and the vehicle’s suspension, we came across a dog breeder and popped in to say hello. After a cup of tea and a profound discussion of canine nutrition, she invited us […]
Hafiz came along and asked what I was doing up there in that tree with soot all over my face and my hair in greasy knots, my feet scratched, blistered and bleeding, my wick burned down to the sputtering last, my eyes wild and leering, and talking to myself in curses and run-ons about trying one last time to impregnate the sky with the signal flare seed of the holy calvary I required. The snarling, yipping […]
There’s a new policy in heaven I wish to discuss. Instead of a life review, they set you out in a meadow full of this special grass that tickles your feet incessantly— a meadow with songbirds full of mirth and wit that line up in the sky to land on your shoulder one after another and offer a joke or a poem before disappearing altogether… Oh—! …and of tornadoes that swoop through sporadically, thunderous, crashing […]
I used to think the very act of coming out to this frontier town, to this slat-walled refuge set down in the wild light and crooning darkness, would be sufficient. A proof of concept. Like I could purchase everlasting freedom with an act of unexpected boldness. Without thinking it per se, I believed that after packing just my necessaries and lashing them down, selling the house and the grandfather clock, then riding west across creaking leagues […]
I Jesus is my breath. He is the blood in my veins, the white of my bones, and the thoughts of my heart. He is the stones in the ground, the birds in the field, and the wood drifting down the river. Behind the wincing in thieves, the sighs of politicians, and the crackling static of the sherriff’s radio when no one is near, you will find him. He is the root, the marrow, the […]
Embracing Forever 