The little towns in their squares light up, as do the scattered lights of farmyards in the tilting, fuzzy squares they’re locked in. I balance a Chilian red on a bumpy flight out to one of those squares. The West is red too, after we bump to a cruising altitude through clouds threatening snow. I’ve been here before, but not in this sundown; in these clouds; drinking this wine; in the lines of this poem. Somewhere... Read more
[More king cakes than you can imagine and only two weeks into Epiphany, I am still tugging on the promise of this season, even as I find myself tugging on clothes that seem strangely tighter…] Kathleen Norris notes the irony that King Herod “appears in the Christian liturgical year when the gospel is read on the Epiphany, a feast of light…Because of his fear, [Herod] can only pretend to see the light that the Magi have offered him” (Amazing Grace:... Read more
I recently asked a friend, via e-mail, what her daily routine was like. It was delightful to get a sense of her day in an hour-by-hour play-by-play sort of way. I could tell from her rough daily itinerary where she lived (and that she and her family are enjoying the warm southern-California winter weather) and what her priorities are (her children, family, spiritual practice, personal health). I loved learning about how she wove into her family’s life some semblance of... Read more
A few weeks ago, I decided that this is the year that I am going to smash a few windows. I wrote all about it in this post here. I wrote about my struggles with comparisons and image and perfectionism, about all the ways that I let fear and doubt and what others might think hold me back, about the ways that I am trying to carve out a new way to define what is means to be balanced and successful and happy. And I wrote about how it has become painfully clear to me that I am... Read more
There’s an old Zen story that does like this: Once there was a great warrior. He had never been defeated, and he continued to win every confrontation into old age. He was known far and wide as the only warrior who had never suffered a defeat. This of course was a challenge to younger warriors, and one day a young man appeared to challenge the old warrior. He, too, had never suffered defeat. His technique had become famous: he... Read more
Much talk is made of gentrification, but I want to take a moment and lift up the shadow side of all the cool new coffee houses and increased property taxes – dispossession. New Orleanians who managed to return post-flood are finding themselves pushed out of the city by the incredible post-2005 rent & tax increases and city liens on properties. Now this city is in the process of being dispossessed of it primary cultural expression – music. On Friday, January... Read more
A very simple thing happened the other day. Someone bought me the 20 cent stamp I needed to mail my father’s birthday card. But it wowed me. You see, I had included in the same envelope a card from my spouse and myself and one I had made from my two-month-old daughter to her grandfather. I was feeling proud of myself for being almost a week ahead of time this year. I had even managed to find a stamp! With... Read more
As winter draws close around us here in the northern hemisphere, I find myself drawn ever more to the flame of candles. A couple of years ago, I spent the month of January in Oslo, Norway. Though the climate in Oslo is similar to my home in northern New York, the days are significantly shorter. I noticed when I first arrived that when night fell, houses across the landscape extravagantly twinkled with lights in every window. The ski Jump at... Read more
Once I crossed the Sierra Madres with a bus driver named Arturo who had one arm and a stick-shift bus. Sometimes between the the shift and wheel Arturo’s good right arm would pause to make the sign of the cross toward a portrait of the Virgin that banged the windshield from a string. The lesson here is that never is a miracle more than beating the percentages. Perhaps Arturo still is waving down... Read more
OK, we’re now a week into the new year, which is about the time that people’s New Year’s resolutions generally start biting the dust. I have a theory about why this is the case, why all our good intentions dissolve so quickly. It’s my conviction that the problem with most resolutions is that we resolve to do stuff that we don’t actually want to do. Nobody wants to go on a diet. If you liked exercising you’d probably be doing... Read more
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