Linda’s blog challenge this year is about transformation—inner transformation particularly. It’s an interesting subject, as it can be hard to assess oneself, but clearly I’ve become quieter the past year or so. More inward-facing. Times of true connection with others have been precious and have served as markers upon this sea I’ve been traversing. I imagine when one is at sea for a while, for what seems a very long time, things start to really […]
I am pleased to announce that my short story Power was released this week in Issue 25 of the Ginosko Literary Journal. (For those of you who may be more inclined to listen to the story, I’ve also prepared an audio recording that you can stream or download.) This is a story about honesty, vulnerability and authenticity–qualities lacking in so much of the content that bombards us today. The images we encounter are cultivated with […]
The way a cloud breaks, after wicking water from the sky for several days of a moon’s turn inward, and a droplet of water taps a leaf on its way to the ground, and says, I have heard you, is the way that we are blessed: with premonitions of what has already been given. My heart is Bell’s Inequality. On one side there is meaning and on the other side there is only its absence. […]
The first task with a subject like genius might be to define it, but I’m going to resist that temptation. I’d rather develop the ideas as we go, so that just about the time we think we’ve put our finger on it, we’ll understand why we can’t. What I’ll say is that while genius may seem to be a rare bird in our present society, it is not because any one of us lack access […]
A number of elements drew me to Linda’s Mission-Possible Blog Challenge this year, but the first was the Louise Hayes desk calendar image she posted that read, “I chose to come to this planet, and I am delighted to be here.” The image included the eyes of a fox peering playfully over the top of a log. Something about that just cracked me up. It’s certainly not what we’ve been feeling of late—it’s not the […]
When I was in high school I underwent one of those sea changes that sweep through us. My mother was hospitalized for a time for treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder, my dad lost his job, we made weekly trips down to the church’s food pantry, and eventually my parents separated. The real weight of it occurred during my senior year. One of the interesting things that came out of this was the freedom to leave […]
I’ve been in a different space most of this year– different than before I mean. Don’t ask before what: I don’t know. Maybe the stars pulled a fast one on me. Maybe my memories got together with my dreams and staged an intervention. Maybe something fell away I don’t need anymore and it made room for something new. What I know is I’ve got this bug I want to be a writer, which I know […]
Shakti Ingenue began his spiritual quest during a commercial break in the Games of the Thirty-First Olympiad. Having just witnessed Katie Ledecky clean house in the women’s 800m freestyle, during which time he had consumed two-thirds of a beer and half a mushroom pesto pizza, he was riding a high and not being realistic about what it was he was hoping to accomplish. Thoughts were colliding willy-nilly in his mind. An entire spectrum of personal […]
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 […]
Two, three—call it four decades on, and I’m both better and worse. I’ve settled into it in the way that precedes disappearance, as if I was placed in the back of an otherwise empty cabinet, sheltered by the presence of wood, where I’ve become a study in knowing something more that you can only glimpse in the repair of oily machinery, or the bailing of water from a low spot on the land where two surveyors […]
Embracing Forever 