Change is in the air, within our personal lives, in our communities and nation and around the globe. We find ourselves in a land charted as “terra incognita,” where the only path through it is one that begins in the imagination. We reach for words, and words too fall short, except perhaps for a few […]
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“Do not depend on the hope of results,” Thomas Merton said in his letter to a young activist who was suffering from despair. Truth be told, whether in our work for social change or in our personal lives, most of us have pinned our hopes to results or particular outcomes at one point or another. […]
+ Read MoreIt was easily the widest threshold I have come across in an interior doorway – a beautifully finished piece of Pippy Oak stretching more than half a foot on either side of the door. It was sanded smooth as a riverbed stone and varnished like a sacred text written in the script of the tree’s […]
+ Read MoreOvernight, my commute changed. On one river bank, the route 21 bus pulled over and we debarked and boarded a large van that shuttled us across the bridge in smaller numbers. On the other side, we left the van and climbed aboard another 21 bus to continue our way down Lake Street. Decades later, in […]
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Finally, spring has arrived. Even so, I hear many folks growing weary of the political storms blowing about every day. The blustery posturing that hawks fear like a street peddler desperate to make a sale. On many a day, I find it hard to believe in the seasonal rising of hope that typically blooms in […]
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Earth but cloaks our heaven, Giovanni Giocondo wrote on a Christmas Eve almost 500 years ago. By which I understand him to be saying that the holy glimmers everywhere around us and within us, if we would but look beneath the coverings that conceal it. I beseech you to look, he says and continues: We, judging […]
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“Every moment happens twice, inside and outside, and they are very different histories.” Zadie Smith Decades ago, when I was studying the who-what-when-where-why’s of journalism, we used to talk about getting the “inside story.” By this we meant the real story told by primary sources – people who experienced or witnessed the events first-hand. Today […]
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