When I turned fifty I did a ten-day silent retreat at the Benedictine monastery at Snowmass, Colorado, an immersion in a Christian form of meditation called Centering Prayer. The retreat was hard. At 5:15 a.m., under a black bowl of stars, I trekked a quarter mile up an icy hill banked by snow, huffing from …
Nine p.m., Gwyn and I drive from her second Park & Rec volleyball game through the night toward home and she’s bouncing with energy. I’ve just told her how proud I am. “I know!” she enthuses. “With tennis, it took me years to be mediocre. Volleyball’s much easier. I’m already mediocre!” Thus my pride. …
At the close of the year I like to pay tribute to those books that have moved me, molded me, transported me, and made me laugh. After all, books usher me into sleep each night and ground me each morning; they are my abiding, faithful companions. Isn’t it amazing that we can sink into another …
“No justice, no peace” is a metaphysical statement, a irreducible truth that describes how the world functions, with no exceptions. If a society is unjust, it is never peaceful.
The question that presses at me daily now is this: Will I allow myself to be changed for the better by this pandemic? Today? Even
Back then I called it “coming out.” Today I think of it more as a coming into consciousness.
My dreams are scriptural because they are oddly wiser than me. They know me and change me into a truer me, even when I don’t remember them.
The fact that the artistic process includes emptiness says something important, I think, about creation itself. Emptiness is part of becoming.
Thank goodness there’s an adult in Gwyn’s life eyes spark at the magnificence of mathematics.But I’m also grateful to our pastor, who sees Gwyn’s cynicism about that great bearded white guy in the sky for what it is—an early and woefully simplistic understanding of (and then rejection of) holiness. Here’s hoping we can communicate to Gwyn—to anyone, to everyone—the beautiful calculus of faith.
One of the hardest things about creative writing, as far as I’m concerned, is the pervasive sense of getting nowhere. Sure, I might have a productive morning and crank out a few thousand words, but tomorrow I’ll cut half of them, and even if I don’t I’ll likely wait years before those words see the …