The way a cloud breaks, after wicking water from the sky for several days of a moon’s turn inward, and a droplet of water taps a leaf on its way to the ground, and says, I have heard you, is the way that we are blessed: with premonitions of what has already been given. My heart is Bell’s Inequality. On one side there is meaning and on the other side there is only its absence. […]
[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] When I was a boy who needed to be in nearly continuous motion on long summer days, lest I become bored and try to rappel off the porch using a clothesline, or hitch the family dog to my bicycle so we could pretend we lived in a Jack London novel, I went (briefly) to a summer camp about thirty miles east of Birmingham. I was dropped off […]
Writing fiction well is intractably difficult. You begin with maybe one or two bricks at the ready, stand facing an unruly forest that is neither for nor against you, but possesses all the density and might of any previously uncontested wilderness, and you are armed only with the vague feeling that a Taj Mahal-like structure of beauty and possibility is alive inside you. There really is no way to know where to place the first […]
When I saw Linda’s Magnificence Challenge it gave me a moment of pause to think about how I might answer it, but it did not take long for me to recall a favorite quotation of mine I thought might get the ball rolling: “You are the work of God, and His work is wholly lovable and wholly loving. This is how a man must think of himself in his heart, because this is what he […]
I’ll keep the post here short since I’m providing a link to a short article I wrote in response to the election for a newsletter named “The Embrace,” which is circulated by the publisher of A Course of Love. I do think it is hard to understand the overall implications of what is happening in this election, and the world at large, and my sense is there is a great deal here that is not […]
The last few weeks have been challenging for me, and I have felt the awkward stretching that comes sometimes when change is upon us. There is this desire to be certain of things, to know what lies ahead, to make nothing but informed decisions, and to navigate the consequences with aplomb. We want to understand the right way to go about things, to think about things– the proper way to perceive, and to know. Today […]
Hafiz and I have started an air band. It’s a summer thing. I guess. A now and forever thing. Like being eight years old and playing tag with your cousin on a wrap-around porch on a day that will never, ever forget you. The sky behind the house turns pink and orange in a valley between tall trees and we appear on the widow’s walk just as the bass line sets the table. We’re both […]
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 […]
I’ve been thinking lately about things I have no business thinking about, like how to reconcile the capital-‘S’ Self from A Course of Love with what I’ve glimpsed of the Buddhist teaching of anatta, or no-self. Let me say right at the outset that this is not purely an intellectual exercise. One of the great miracles of starting this blog has been the dialogue with people whose words, and possibly (though it remains hard to […]
This post is part of a short fictional series. It comes with a brief apology about the length. I’m aiming to keep each segment under a thousand words, but, well… yeah… The beginning is here. * * * * * Click. They were gone. The sound seemed to shrivel and disappear beneath the threshold, pulling every other sound with it. There was nothing left but my breathing, and the blank-faced stare of the walls. For a moment, […]
Embracing Forever 