Hafiz and I have started an air band. It’s a summer thing. I guess. A now and forever thing. Like being eight years old and playing tag with your cousin on a wrap-around porch on a day that will never, ever forget you. The sky behind the house turns pink and orange in a valley between tall trees and we appear on the widow’s walk just as the bass line sets the table. We’re both […]
This place as we call it, so full of needs, is the silence turned inside out– a realm of voices and wilderness– as if the crumpled piece of paper with our Meaning written on it couldn’t be found by our groping alone and so the satchel with Everything in it had to be turned over and shaken loose onto the table, spilling out moons and raindrops, car keys, a flock of herons, thresholds and nooks full […]
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 […]
Everything you see is a trick. And Love is the punchline. These skins are just the charade we need, to remember what can never grow old. Children with eyes overflowing— they don’t tire of hearing it over and over and over again. All those goo goo gah gah faces we make— so certain of our personal contribution to their pleasure… They’re not even listening. It’s what’s in our eyes they crave, that punchline peeking through our […]
Each of my wounds, every pain, was a withholding. Never mind the reasons. You don’t need ten plagues to make the point if you have the miracle of uncertainty in your life. It teaches unceasingly, without relent. I realized the other evening in the car: the only fear I’ve ever had is a question about what I might be asked to give. Jesus knows this question well—has explored its every angle— but no one can […]
What I saw was a line of smoke scribed upon the sky in a confident hand, like the swift first streak of an artist’s signature. This was not some willy-nilly scribble of carbonized particulates. No. Graphical in nature, the arc was infused with information. It was an ember-tipped flourish that induced a state of euphoric anticipation in the mind of every beholder– a clear-slated readiness for whatever might come next. Spontaneous genuflections and the unconscious recitation […]
Snow tip-toes through the sunlight, falling in a dappled caress, a lingering sweetness, as the world bends around the corner. The passing season is saying its good-byes, asking to be thought of kindly for all that was and had to be. The blown kiss leaves the forest empty again, a landscape between tenants– a hallowed silence filled with the changing light. Who will come next? A caravan of deer march through this question in a […]
I had a moment, very recently in fact, to which you might be able to relate, when I was looking up into the starry sky and thinking: why not…? Because it wouldn’t even be a violation would it? Statistically speaking, I mean. There’s so many of you… It’s like a goo goo cluster up there, right? Couldn’t there be some kind of unexpected gravitational perturbation? Like a universal sloshing effect where just one of you […]
The place itself, the physical structure, was built to produce a return. It’s all right angles and flashing from a tube, inoperable windows, and two-tone exterior panels of artificial masonry. But it’s where we do it. Each morning we drive in from all points of the compass to the center, gathering together as befits us, to produce work. That’s the key, really. To produce work. To offer something up. The flimsy walls don’t matter. The […]
Until you’ve given yourself to it entirely– until you’ve stepped forward in the silence of your own heart, drenched in commitment, and called your life’s bluff, or taken a sabbatical from what makes sense and spent a few of those precious vacation days sleeping in back of a rusted car that is flying awkwardly in gutted stasis on a litter of cinder blocks strewn along the ground like the crumbs of a passing barrage of scrapped cities, […]
Embracing Forever 