When you start out on something that seems promising but outside your comfort zone, you can easily lose momentum, chicken out. You hear the countering voices. What was I thinking? I am making too much of this. I’ve been feeling this about my little Traychon project, about the young man who was shot behind our house, which I wrote about just two days ago. Nevertheless, I have persisted in following my impulses or perhaps the Spirit. Continue reading
relationships
Extravagant beauty
With full awareness of all that is ugly in the world, I am obsessing about beauty. I don’t believe these thoughts represent escapism so much as astonishment. A lesson that has unfolded for me over the past year is that nothing in this world is to be taken for granted. And so I’m trying to keep my eyes and my heart open and when I do this the beauty of life nearly overwhelms me, as does the impulse to experience, create, and extend this beauty, which represents Love. Continue reading
Celebrating compromise
The snow has been here for so long that I feel like we need more vocabulary for it, like the people of the north do. Light and fluffy, heavy and wet, settled snow, crusted snow, plowed snow, dirty snow, melting snow. Patterns of snow melt. Do you notice that it melts first around the bases of trees? A pocket for each tree, perforating the puffy snow duvet like knots in a comforter. It must be because the dark color of the trees absorbs what little sunlight there is, heating a bit, prompting the first melt.
Sunlight. The days are longer and the temperatures bump up now and then, but not enough to bring spring. One longs for real sun, real warmth. I just dawdled away an entire week planning a vacation in the tropics. It helped me get through the latest blizzard. Continue reading
the practical mystic 