All posts tagged: Unlearning

The Engines of Experience

comments 36
Course Ideas / Reflections

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 […]

Back to Basics

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Poetry

I came in the door grunting like a bison with four empty stomachs and a calf at home with a head cold, dragged a toe on the threshold and nearly sent five half-shredded bags of heart healthy fruits and vegetables two bottles of heart healthy wine a heart healthy dark chocolate bar and a glass bottle of the most perfect most heart healthy cold-pressed olive oil Mother Nature could produce shooting across the floor in […]

After the Memories

comments 54
Christ / Course Ideas

Our pain is bound up in our memories.  We don’t see what’s in front of us, we just see strange reenactments of our past.  It’s not really our past even, just the things we concluded from our past.  Our conclusions travel with us wherever we go.  This is what Jesus calls learning.  It’s our loyalty to all the stuff we made up.  We keep these little statues woven to the inside of our coats to remind […]

Entrenched in Remembering

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Course Ideas

For the past six weeks I’ve been entrenched in the birth throes of an industrial project, feeling myself slowly succumb to its eye-dimming cocktail of fatigue and necessity.  I’ve been watching myself sigh in the hallway, crack jokes over the intercom, eat meals with forks unable to spear anything that wasn’t already mashed, and enter a stupor of gratitude when the person beside me stepped out of the darkness carrying a solution– something half-corroded with wires […]

Never Mind How…

comments 39
Poetry

Sometimes the clouds roll in a few at a time like spectators to a barrel jumping competition, and before you know it the sky is bruised, the waves have run out of room, and they’re colliding on all sides like a legion of cymatic vendettas, or a black body radiation field composed of infinitesimal ballerinas and one-way mirrors. It’s the same way particles come into existence, always in pairs, up and down, here and there, […]

No. I Am Not.

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Poetry

Obviously I am not a Christian, but Jesus is my companion. More than that, even. We were bound together in darkness, in a moment we both chose without resistance. The ropes encircling us are sacred. We are each other’s atrium and ventricle. We live in the same house. We love the same woman. We lay together on a raft sometimes, continuing our passage across the sea to visit the birth of life. At night, when I’m […]

How This Works

comments 27
Course Ideas

Why am I carrying this barbed piece of steel around with me? Because it hurt when it was dropped into my open palms? And now I want to repay the favor should the world present me with such an opportunity? There’s no such thing as even-steven in this world, but there is holiness. There are rivers wide as ball fields that dredge bald tires and old box springs off the bottom and carry them off to the […]

Some Forgetting Required

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Poetry

They’re at it again in there– getting organized so no one gets hurt once that one drummer we all love catches hold of a comet in each hand and starts hanging on for dear life. He’s the one the elephants still remember from the last world that went south, who appears in stories kept alive in their great ribbed vaults, where his memory ages with each migration into the delicate musk of ancestry and power. They’re […]

The Trail Up the Mountain

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Christ

This post was written in response to the Inner Child Blog Challenge that Ka sent my way…  Thank you, Ka, for the prompt… As children, what happens swallows us whole.  We occupy slices of heaven easily.  They’re what we expect to find.  There are no beliefs to suspend in order to gain access, for our minds have yet to form them.  Our physical brains are malleable potentials, taking in light and sound with curiosity, measuring […]

Paper Vision and a Turnaround

comments 36
Christ / Poetry

A cardboard tube can make all the difference, and I’ll tell you how. Walking through a flavor of solitude in which I find myself sometimes, covering my face to ward off the trace of distant putrefaction, and squinting into the heat to see if my suspicion is correct about the horizon stockpiling behind its dusty curvature all the sad carcasses not fortunate enough to receive a proper burial– I’m wheezing in the fumes of my […]