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 […]
This post is part of a short fictional series. It comes with a brief apology about the length. I’m aiming to keep each segment under a thousand words, but, well… yeah… The beginning is here. * * * * * Click. They were gone. The sound seemed to shrivel and disappear beneath the threshold, pulling every other sound with it. There was nothing left but my breathing, and the blank-faced stare of the walls. For a moment, […]
Well, I couldn’t squish this into a single post… I promise it won’t be too many. Welcome to my short foray into serial fiction… * * * * * It was just a small apartment. I don’t know what I had really expected, but not something so patently vacant. It would end here? There was a dinged up coffee table, a faded olive sofa that didn’t match the carpet, a landslide of unsorted mail on […]
Several posts I read this week raised a similar question about the New: what would it look like to you? What would it feel like? Who would we be? I wrote in one response that it seemed to me we would trust one another and all that is around us— meaning the heart of the world itself—in a very deep way. Then I went out and lived the type of week that made my musings […]
The sleek apparatus we call progress has failed us. The signs are all around, if we but dare heed them. I’m very clear, for instance, that the curdling of country lanes into frost-heaved mogul courses should be a bygone phenomenon. You shouldn’t be forced to drink the day’s first cup of coffee while your kidneys are undergoing paratrooper training. Similarly, had progress been successful, tests of the Emergency Broadcast System would have been moot by […]
The last half of this year, and the last two months in particular, have reduced the aperture of my life down to such a tight radius that I feel as though I’ve been scanning the field of experience and possibility one dim pixel at a time. There’s not much plot to derive from such a view– not much context or depth with which to work. Day and night are shades of brightness, but little more. […]
Recent events in my life served the function of popping the vacuum sealed lid of a small glass jar of fear I had been carrying around in my coat pocket. I smacked dab into some real world events—moments of indeterminate outcome surrounded by a steadily gathering mob of foreboding consequences—and you could hear the audible inrush of air as the jar was pried open. Out spilled vestiges of a future I had sworn to abandon, […]
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 […]
Roughly a week ago I wrote about acceptance and not looking back. It was fun. It felt good. I felt whole, and alive. I was aware of a nurturing Invisibility with which I was joined, as if I was wading into a body of water that has no opposite shore, shaking my arms loose, wiggling my head around, and generally preparing to dive forward and start doing a Michael Phelps impersonation at a right angle […]
There are so many amazing things a person could choose to learn about in this world, enough to fill whole lifetimes– like the way photons make decisions when faced with the conundrum of a diffraction grating, or the way high-speed traders manipulate the flow of money on time scales that make the pace of human thought seem like canyon-making, or how the fashion industry unraveled the mystery of the neons. There was a time when […]
Embracing Forever 