[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] When I was a boy who needed to be in nearly continuous motion on long summer days, lest I become bored and try to rappel off the porch using a clothesline, or hitch the family dog to my bicycle so we could pretend we lived in a Jack London novel, I went (briefly) to a summer camp about thirty miles east of Birmingham. I was dropped off […]
[Part 1] The biggest challenge of my young life was finding my way to a meaningful existence. Like all children I wanted to enjoy myself and have fun, but something about this desire required companions, and from an early age I discovered true companions were hard to come by. My settings as a being have always been oriented towards introspection, and because I was gifted intellectually and also fairly athletic, and perhaps because of other […]
Writing fiction well is intractably difficult. You begin with maybe one or two bricks at the ready, stand facing an unruly forest that is neither for nor against you, but possesses all the density and might of any previously uncontested wilderness, and you are armed only with the vague feeling that a Taj Mahal-like structure of beauty and possibility is alive inside you. There really is no way to know where to place the first […]
Things that appear to be so under one set of conditions, are often found to be quite different under another. It is for this reason that most of our conclusions formed historically, in the context of separation consciousness, are erroneous. What’s remarkable about the experience of life is that we can be completely incorrect about ultimate reality, and have a very real and vivid experience of our own false conclusions up to and even through […]
“I feel better. But I did that thing again, didn’t I, Hafiz?” “Yes.” “How come we both know what I’m talking about, but we can’t explain it?” “The horses giving chase always get mud in their eyes.” “That was easier than I thought. But giving chase to what?” “To whatever you think is over there.” He waved his hand limply towards the distance, indicating that somewhere along the periphery of my mind there were these […]
The last few weeks have been challenging for me, and I have felt the awkward stretching that comes sometimes when change is upon us. There is this desire to be certain of things, to know what lies ahead, to make nothing but informed decisions, and to navigate the consequences with aplomb. We want to understand the right way to go about things, to think about things– the proper way to perceive, and to know. Today […]
I believe a lot of interesting things, things I’ve collected along the way. I have pages and pages of notes. Scribblings. Arrows and half-thoughts running up and down the margins. Ellipses and question marks. Coffee stains. My life is a draft copy full of edits. I’m always circling back– leaping from one passage to another, sifting through my notes, strengthening the narrative, discovering what was and might have been. We are revealed in the living of […]
I take the pack of index cards out of my shirt pocket, slide the rubber band off, and lay them on the table. Hafiz has prepared a few placards and set them up at credible intervals. They read, “No Way, José,” “I Sure Hope Not,” “Why, Of Course!” “Prepare Yourself For Tears,” and “Jesus Christ!” I take a breath and shuffle the cards. Place them in a neat pile on the table. The first card […]
The dream is unobtrusive, glowing where no one can see it, following beside me but deep in the ground, visible only by looking straight down through the center of myself, from the inside of my senses. It’s a thought immune to the semi-annual dental check-ups, the unsolicited catalogs that arrive in the mail, the bouts of automotive repair and immune system reconfiguration, and the dangerous lines of cars queueing behind plow trucks that plod along […]
Once I was mumbling under my breath about a feeling that kept coming back to roost in the lee of my chest like a forlorn and beaten pigeon– a feeling like I was mumbling at altitude and couldn’t get enough air inside of me on the upstroke, or like I was gonna’ blow my own heart’s timing belt if I did anything too, too crazy… …like play a few rounds of Truth or Dare with Hafiz. […]
Embracing Forever 