A self is a heavy burden to carry with you across the desert. Despite being invisible and weightless in principle, it is the often overlooked, but necessary battery of accoutrements that are required to render the self manifest and functional that take their toll. There is the steamer trunk full of historical data, for instance, with its rather robust coefficient of sliding friction across the hot sand– the modern take on an old classic, a […]
It is possible, strange though it may seem, to imagine that right now is a most exquisite Love note written with you in mind, to imagine that this very moment– with all its shortcomings, flaws, minor aches and pains, pain killers, and just plain killers, the war department, the paperwork, and the miffed populace in which you’re mired– is a tactical choreography offered in the only language you yet understand, suggesting with all due respect that […]
I was in Washington, D.C. this past weekend with my wife and her eight year old grandson, and we went to an IMAX film to see the story of Fred and Norah Urquhart, who spent much of their lives in a quest to understand the migratory path of monarch butterflies. After several weeks of an extremely busy schedule at work and an annoying skin infection that has been insistent on delivering its message– a time […]
A body is neither a limit nor a cage, but a flower on the vine of who you are. And those bees buzzing all around you? Those zoom-zoom experiences that keep swarming your life? They just want to collect your holy nectar and take it back to their hive so they can toast you all winter long, quite possibly for the rest of their lives. Best to stop swatting them away and open your petals […]
I met Jesus while crawling on my belly beneath a rock, scratched and bleeding, panting with the effort to catch a single drop of dew with my swollen tongue, straining to taste its coolness before it swelled, and gravity plucked it out from under me. I’d been trying the same stunt every morning at this spot for three days. Now I was too weak to move on. At the last moment, I hesitated. It was […]
I am fragile, but when I shatter– as I must, and soon– a warmth will remain. You will find me again. That is the most dazzling magic. This realization comes while standing at the edge of this life, looking down, hovering weightless– a sand grain witness to a vast sea. Each arriving wave softens the distance into which my longing stretches. I am readying to dissolve. Together, can we cover the Vastness? Or will I buckle, […]
The instruction to just be myself resulted in a pretty meandering to-and-fro up-over-and-down there and back again maybe, but maybe not, should I educate myself better or get a few more life skills first type of thing until one day when I was brushing my teeth I came to a scrunchy halt, arm cocked like a frozen piston, and I looked into the silvered plate hung on the wall, the one framed by garishly bright […]
Who are we? It is perhaps the fundamental question of both science and religion, and certainly of what we call “spirituality”, a catch-all word with which I resonate in steadily decreasing degrees as time passes. Spirituality is all too often a repository for that which fails to fit nicely into one of the generally accepted practices for knowledge cultivation in our dominant cultures. Definitions aside, for most of us I think the essential purpose of […]
There’s a poverty I sometimes settle into, a clawing for connection. It’s a painful question that picks me out of the world’s line-up of chiefs and princetains, captains and raconteurs, the divas and the daring, and squares me up for examination. Him. He’s hiding something for sure– a limp of some sort, a wound that hasn’t healed, one eye that betrays him with its flickering tic, a slow, creeping failing he strives to ignore. Protectiveness […]
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– […]
Embracing Forever 