Taking a Safety
I got to the computer yesterday by way of Stephen Harrod Buhner’s Ensouling Language, a book I am still s-l-o-w-l-y making my way through (and now that I’ve shared it with Dennis, it’s often in his office, where I don’t…
The Best I Could Give
I recently started following a poet on Instagram. His name is David Gates, and today he shared verse that stood out. It relates to the question, When do we, as humans, become afraid to ask for help? As Gates points out, we’re…
Out in the Cold
C.S. Lewis retells the myth of Cupid and Psyche in his powerful novel Till We Have Faces. This is my second reading of the book, and everything’s different for me now that I’ve moved my starting point and see clearly…
A Harsh Truth
A few months ago, I read Savage Wisdom by Adam Cam, after following him for a while on Instagram. The man is brutal (and he loves his four-letter words), but I’ve long found myself attracted to people who tell the harsh truth…
One Piece Leads to Another
Well, goodness knows, I’m tenacious. I certainly wouldn’t be here writing if I weren’t. On my kitchen table right now sits a 28 x 22” slab of foamcore board and on it is a partially complete jigsaw puzzle. I wanted…
Continue the Conversation
Everything is interconnected, which is why I cannot try to isolate the books I read. I need to keep a dozen or so in process. I need to stop worrying about not finishing one or another: no more self-imposed rules,…
Holding onto My Own Soul
I sometimes worry that I’ll copy down 99 percent of the words in this book, and if I do that, it will mean that I’m still trying to hide behind the words of others, still trying to avoid my own.…
How Many Will Make It Past the Prison Walls and Never Get Locked in Again?
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside Thoughts, conversations, experiences, memories, things that I’m reading are all coming together and leading me on. For Tolstoy, the self is not a system, but an aggregate. It is a cluster of habits and…
Words and Light
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be blind? If so, whatever you’ve imagined is probably wrong. According to Jacques Lusseyran, who lost his sight in an accident when he was eight years old, the world doesn’t…
What Meets the Eye
Thanks to Camille Paglia, I have mixed (and rather confused) feelings about the Romantic poets. In short, I don’t know what to make of them. If I am to believe Paglia, they were all perverts with strange sexual proclivities that…
On the Hunt
Quiet weekend afternoons in my adolescent years were sometimes spent reorganizing dresser drawers and closet shelves. My mother was pleased to get things straightened up and pared down, but I was in it for the treasures to be found, the…
Reading, Writing, Rules, and Reason
Was it a year ago already that a friend told me about an unlikely book she was reading and finding fascinating? I describe the book as unlikely because if anyone were taking bets on either of us reading it, he…
