We had our first snow the day before yesterday—a sticky-heavy whiteness you could tamp into stable shapes—then a smattering more yesterday, and this morning I am witness to wonders I realize only now have been in the making for days. The third act is the revelation. Soft golden light pours sideways across the sky from a low-lying sun, and the second ridge is garnished with fog. The air and the land are rising together, drawing […]
There are things we say sometimes to make a point– sweeping recapitulations of history, or statements of what is so in this world– and when we invoke them we do so as if they are self-evident. Obvious to those who would see. It is easy to forget how deeply we occupy our own lives and perspectives, and we can lose sight of the fact that what seems unmistakable to us is but the flowering of […]
A cardboard tube can make all the difference, and I’ll tell you how. Walking through a flavor of solitude in which I find myself sometimes, covering my face to ward off the trace of distant putrefaction, and squinting into the heat to see if my suspicion is correct about the horizon stockpiling behind its dusty curvature all the sad carcasses not fortunate enough to receive a proper burial– I’m wheezing in the fumes of my […]
On that summer day, that I still remember… doorways beckoned from every direction, hovering near stacked horizons as if the Beloved had hung wreaths of heat and time along our world’s borders. There were voices you could see occasionally, ribbons of them wafting up from the ends to mix with the sky like jugs of clear sap poured into whiskey, swirling and touching noses and everything at once… merging. And the air, too. The air….! […]
At the center of every human being, something stupendous is happening– something deadpan naked beautiful, a trembling madness, a high outcropping of multiplying swooning cliff diving lovers. I don’t know what it is, but I think it might be related to the fact that the sky is peppered with drums so vast their beats shake galaxies out of the darkness like dust from the Beloved’s rug, that it’s full of light transmissions, secret messages, and the odd comet, […]
I’m not so naive as to think I fully understand my own beliefs and feelings, nor to assume they form an exactly rational system when laid bare by attempts at explanation. But in making the effort, I discover things– inconsistencies in thought, many of them delightful(!); powerful feelings that cannot be explained, yet explain much; ineffable inner realms I realize are part and parcel to who I am; or the existence of ideas operating one […]
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 […]
I’ve been thinking lately about things I have no business thinking about, like how to reconcile the capital-‘S’ Self from A Course of Love with what I’ve glimpsed of the Buddhist teaching of anatta, or no-self. Let me say right at the outset that this is not purely an intellectual exercise. One of the great miracles of starting this blog has been the dialogue with people whose words, and possibly (though it remains hard to […]
I Jesus is my breath. He is the blood in my veins, the white of my bones, and the thoughts of my heart. He is the stones in the ground, the birds in the field, and the wood drifting down the river. Behind the wincing in thieves, the sighs of politicians, and the crackling static of the sherriff’s radio when no one is near, you will find him. He is the root, the marrow, the […]
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 […]
Embracing Forever 