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 […]
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 […]
When I sit down to write, I try to put forth a fresh take on what is. The result may not always be top shelf, but I find you can always find a way of expressing yourself that is authentic to who you are in that moment. When you do, it is delicious. It is revealing, at least to you. It is awesome. Sometimes you have to dig for it, sure. You have to get […]
Jesus’ birthday was here, and I wanted to get him something nice, but after three hours of slogging through one store after another, I was bogging down a bit. Okay- a lot. I was desperate. What’s he going to do with a leather coat? Or a pair of fluorescent teal Nike Air Max Lebron X’s? I couldn’t picture it. Okay, ha! I’m not that daft. I wasn’t really thinking the material gift was the thing, […]
I have a confession to make, and it is related to the recent reflections on power. The purpose of this blog is the transformation of the world. This may seem naive, ambitious, ridiculous, inconceivable, prideful, or as I am coming to see it- perfectly reasonable and natural. I should point out that I am in the camp of “two or more gathered in my name”, and don’t think that more than a handful of people […]
It’s late in a long day. You know the ones. A few aches and pains are emerging: the backing is starting to show through the pile. Something wants to be slept off, rebooted, allowed to lose its way, permitted to dissolve, misplaced, or forgotten. That’s when Hafiz drops by unannounced, bubbly as a mountain spring, says, “Wanna’ go dancing?” Eyes roll… “You kidding me?” “Well,” he says, “it just seemed like you were starting to take […]
Wings aflutter, like a curious dart connecting invisible dots across the sky, a collage of frozen frames- a beak, a wingtip, an eye- excerpted from whirling Possibility, a solitary thrush comes in for a landing on a crackling braid of steel, a stranded iron dance hall populated by troupe after troupe of Hertzian dervishes, a fire brigade of magnetic flowers opening, blooming, and then collapsing into electric echoes. Twenty stories above the desert floor, head […]
Time capsules are intriguing. Your elementary school teacher encourages you to round up some receipts, a few movie tickets, maybe a back-of-the-envelope journal entry with your favorite candy bar or song written on it, along with a note of encouragement to your future self, and then you and your classmates shove all these notions into a box or a tube and bury it. Kickball, the old standby, would probably have been a more thrilling recess […]
Some days I am more afflicted by my view of history than others. What I mean by my view of history is the set of instructions, assumptions, patterns and perceptions that I have agglomerated within myself, that I carry around tucked inside of me like a bolus of half-eaten horsecrap, portions of which I take out and mentally deconstruct from time to time, but which I have yet to moreorless rear back and hurl like […]
There’s nothing quite like a good paradox to peel the shrink wrap off your inner life and release the beautiful flavors that you are, or to suggest the intersection of hidden dimensions with the particular version of Flatland we’ve been calling our own. Let’s try one. Consulting the book of Rumi, as translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne (The Essential Rumi), we find the following lyrical paradox poised atop the 105th page, like a […]
Embracing Forever 