When I stepped out of the building in which I work this evening, my head seemed to have been pressed into a perfect, steaming cube– a polished alloy ingot of ordered rectilinear thoughts. You could have bounced a laser off it. My normally fluid mind had been sintered by the heat of prolonged concentration into a dazed ceramic. Even my cells had conformed to the geometric demands of the day’s efforts, having tugged their cytoskeletons […]
Since the invention of night vision goggles, you kind of have to wonder if the whole “Thief in the night theory” will hold up. I mean, we’ll see Him coming from a mile away. That could never work. Can you imagine? A safe cracker with a bootleg copy of the Plans to your Heart strolling down your front walk in clear darkness? Ha! What’s He going to do? Knock on the door and ask to […]
One thing I’ve been observing recently is the weather pattern of my psyche. There are dominant feelings that arise and then linger like a slowly fading echo, serving as the backdrop to a strand of days. It’s like visiting a foreign country. You’re still you, but everything feels a little different at the same time. This inner weather is always moving around, always shifting. Unpredictable. The weather of three weeks ago is long forgotten, but […]
Your body is an ambassador, a communication technology, really, and you are the Message given it to convey to the world. Right off you might assume there would be far simpler and more reliable delivery mechanisms available in the cosmos for sending Messages, but the Writer has a unique problem in that Everything She touches comes to Life… Alright, alright, shush and look here, now- it’s not a problem, it’s an Opportunity is really the best way to […]
When I was young, my favorite Saturday morning super heroes were Aquaman, the Wonder Twins, and Superman. Now they are Rumi, Hafiz, and Jesus, and I am the one in the cartoon. Every day is a new episode in accepting freedom. Wonder Woman had a strong effect also, but I was hesitant to admit it at first. They haven’t made her a movie yet. The thing is: I believe in balance in the Force. I think […]
I have made modest progress over the past eight or nine months on the draft of a novel. If the 100k word mark is what puts you in the ballpark to being able to say a novel has been written, I’m just over 2/3 of the way there– sans editing. I have no previous experience in this sort of thing, but I figured the first and most important part was just to write and don’t […]
The places within us that are not yet healed, and have not yet been dissolved into the pure and guiltless and shameless and never-confounded substance of being, are like movie stars, and the events of the lives we lead the flash bulbs of a traveling horde of annoying paparazzi. Our wounded places simply can’t avoid them—can’t get a break. Offstage, without their make-up on, these stars just want to be left alone. Can we not […]
I was standing on the end of the pier on a crisp morning, leaning against the half-petrified rail, watching gulls weave in and out of one another without ever getting anywhere– watching my breath roil into translucent clouds that caught the sun and held it for a moment, and then fizzled. In the background the gulls were rising and falling on the wind, their heads swiveling back and forth with the persistence of algorithms as […]
I have had a longstanding interest in both science and spirituality, and since I don’t even know what these words mean anymore, let’s just call it a longstanding interest in desiring to know and understand the experience you and I have found ourselves within. This process of coming to know has been alive within me since early days, and it has been fueled by my daily encounters with a broken world, with a self whose […]
It’s easy to think I have made a breakthrough, put the pieces together just right, as if I were a scientist grappling with and making plain the mysteries of salvation. It wouldn’t be all that difficult to conjure an image of myself twirling a dry erase marker in one hand and sloshing a cup of coffee absentmindedly in the other while pacing back and forth in front of wall-to-wall white boards. On them are scribbled […]
Embracing Forever 