I believe a lot of interesting things, things I’ve collected along the way. I have pages and pages of notes. Scribblings. Arrows and half-thoughts running up and down the margins. Ellipses and question marks. Coffee stains. My life is a draft copy full of edits. I’m always circling back– leaping from one passage to another, sifting through my notes, strengthening the narrative, discovering what was and might have been. We are revealed in the living of […]
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 wind is blowing softly, and just earlier today, three morning doves were nestled in the grass, their rounded faces poking up like a clan of bottle-tops drifting along together in a quiet green sea. We were watching from behind the window, and they were watching, too– each of us studying the way our own reflection was illumined by the vision of the other. We were all looking, blinking, beholding– when we touched hearts sweetly in a pane […]
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 […]
If the premonitions of being that scythe through your soul’s back forty all day like shadowy pendulums hung from a pivot so insanely near to the nodal origins of your existence that it’s a perpetually mild discomfort to your otherwise undistracted mind cause you to tremble, take a quick, nervous breath and brace for impact, dive towards an embankment, spontaneously recite procedures for exiting sunken cars, or climb the stairs of tall buildings to burden […]
There’s a kindness that isn’t about doing the right thing, or being good. It’s not about holding the door open for a stranger to be polite, or even nice. There’s a kindness that’s about upping the ante and challenging the status quo, about asking the kind of question that provokes a crisp rebuke from your inner skeptic, that elicits a little wait and see because here comes another sweet dose of I told you so– […]
If you make a plot of human population over the past few thousand years, the results are– well listen, let’s speak plainly here, as friends who have not the time for posturing or taking offense: the results are startling. If you are inclined towards levity you may even have a chuckle as you gape at the steeply rising curve and reflect upon the multiplicative industriousness of the recent age. Experts in prognostication and the statistical arts such as […]
“The way will be muddy and seemingly alone, even when you find yourself in crowds, even when all the refugees are funneled together through a narrow pass. You will find yourself trying to avoid being crushed, trying to avoid being left behind, trying to avoid being starved, trying to avoid being plundered. You may dream of blue skies and sunlight, but your path will wind beneath overcast skies and sprinkling rain. You may dream of virgin […]
Embracing Forever 