As we embark on a new calendar year, I am intrigued, as I usually am, by the notion that a life is a unique and particular trace through the unknown. But I am even more deeply stirred by the idea that an integrity to each path is preserved, akin to the deepest natural laws ever discovered, that sustains at all times a most succinct route possible through suffering, regardless of what our choices may have […]
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 […]
Eternity sometimes feels like a boundless readiness coiled up and squashed into every point there is, like a swoop of clowns hidden inside a mote of pixie dust that’s hovering in the air just a foot or two in front of your left eye, all of them banging on the glass and reciting plays and brewing antidotes and tuning chainsaws and singing scales and lighting firecrackers and twitching with anticipation in there, just waiting on […]
Our dear friend Hariod asked me after my last post what the word miracle means to me, and as I thought about how to answer I realized my response would very quickly get out of hand in the post commentary. Hence this post. It’s a question I savor answering because I don’t quite know how I’m going to do it. I have a feeling about what I wish to say, but the closer I get to the center […]
It started with an idea, as these things usually do. “I need your help with something,” I said. Hafiz was working on his Nerf ball free throw. “I’m listening.” His face was an expressionless intensity, but the perforated foam hope fell short of the mark. He seemed to savor the data point. Silent as a feather in long term storage, the ball hit the knob on the closet door, rolled across the floor and settled […]
The other day there was a miracle, but I was looking the other way when it happened and it blew past me like a round of silent artillery. So does it count if I figured it out a week later? If I pieced it all together? And if it does count, do I just make a notch on a piece of wood or something? Once I get ten, can I trade ’em in for something […]
Staggering through the dim light of Heaven’s front yard, slinking into the greenish shadows of distant outdoor halogens as if to hide forever, and ranting silently about the burden of makeshift woes and ramshackle postulates with which I’d saddled myself– including my favorite one about the pending arrival of something hellish but indeterminate in nature that no being should ever have to face– why wouldn’t I accept the cocktail napkin and the nice sandwich offered to me […]
Jesus is a condiment you can sprinkle onto any moment, to give it life. This is, I think, his greatest miracle. While most condiments come in glass jars or plastic bottles, Jesus comes inside of people. He’s a salt that melts the ice around the heart. He’s a sauce that turns every pain into delectable mystery. When you dunk those french-fried ideas of who you are into him, they become something else entirely… Lotus blossoms. Sea glass. Abandoned […]
Hafiz came along and asked what I was doing up there in that tree with soot all over my face and my hair in greasy knots, my feet scratched, blistered and bleeding, my wick burned down to the sputtering last, my eyes wild and leering, and talking to myself in curses and run-ons about trying one last time to impregnate the sky with the signal flare seed of the holy calvary I required. The snarling, yipping […]
Every once in a while reality gets in a mood. Wants to bust up the ice. Show us our options. Get the lead out. Crumple up history into a ball. Rubs its hands together. Blows on the dice. Not for luck. Oh no. The devoted– the ones alone in the gym before daylight about to shoot their five hundred free throws– they do the same. Twirl the world in their hands. Breathe deep. Visualize it. […]
Embracing Forever 