For Christmas this year I received a copy of George Saunders’ collection of short stories entitled Tenth of December. I had never heard of Saunders before, and didn’t know what to expect, but the giver of this gift– an inspiring young man securing his MFA in film directing with whom I’ve been known to occasionally watch Celtics games, make an Indian food run, or share a conversation in support of a draft screenplay in which […]
I’m not really prophet material, but how do you know if you don’t try…? Right…? (Lots of forced, intensely preparatory meditative breaths.) (Some swearing in confused frustration.) (And then…!) A few early warning signs Heaven on Earth is about to pull into the driveway: The number of trumpet players per capita starts feeling like a metric that can no longer be ignored. It starts to make intuitive sense why everything is so beautiful. Professional sports teams […]
I don’t know who or what God is anymore. Each time I say this, my Loving doubles. Once I stepped into a room with block walls and old, worn carpets to sit in the circle with a prayer in my heart while the man who travels through worlds was bound at the center. Light was extinguished, and darkness soared. Singers joined us from the air itself. The drummers poked holes in our boundaries. Lightning tickled the […]
I love me some Treatises1. Mmmm-mm! I love me some Jesus breakin’ it down, makin’ that holy road clear. I love me some Truth expo-zishuns! I love me some brotherly tutelage, some way pointin’, some little bing-bang dose of reality checkin’. I do, I do, I do– I do love me some Treat-sies… * * * * * 1In the second book of A Course of Love there are four Treatises, the first of which is entitled […]
A line of fir trees have taken up watch, wooden and resolute, their tips a Gaussian congregation of navy black steeples hung upon a night sky so clear and cold you remember what it’s like to open your door and venture out into an endless, moaning whistle that has frozen into place. The trees– they are like loaded questions, sentries of the borealis pantomiming secrets you can guess at if you pay attention to the way their […]
What we are… is invisible, alive, dancing— an incandescence of possibilities whirling through the dark, flickering— always one step ahead of the pin— from one instant to the next, traversing chasms between worlds, discarding moments that flutter softly to the ground like feathers pinched in the closing doors of our fractured timelines. What we are… is immobile but forever growing, forever reaching out, fruit-bearing and branched, a tree whose upper-and-lower, inner-and-outer limbs snake through the […]
I was weaving my way through the desert, trailing just behind them, warmed by their presence, soaking in their words– a particle being carried across the sea by a raft of delicious intelligence. I came into a violent world, the first said. I came into a world without a future– a world on the brink, a world on fire, a world outflanked by death… God “the Father” was this idea I came up with. Alone […]
I’m not big on conspiracy theories, but, man when your heart becomes a field of grinning beings pulling rubies out of a passed hat and, there that goddamned magnificent moon is staring you down with a pregnant candor that makes rocks moan in their sockets and try to sneak you answers to the question of your existence, and all this with the whole domed sky watching, I do grant you there’s a certain bald logic to keeping on […]
Everywhere you look, everywhere your gaze lands, there the angels, carpenters, playwrights and arborists, bus drivers, tanners, rain-makers and silversmiths populate the invisible, dashing into position at the end of your glance, blossoming from time and space wherever your vision rests, hidden but present inside your every view like the blood in your own hand, just out of sight, just behind the world as it seems to be, just giving a bit of color to the […]
I am ever grateful to you who have given of your valuable time this year to lend the gift of your presence, and to share a moment or two with me here by the fire. As a token of my heartfelt appreciation I have posted two new stories on the Fiction page today. They are intended as gifts to you, and I hope if time and desire present themselves in equal measure, that you enjoy them. I further […]
Embracing Forever 