suspended animotion

I had assumed that during the gift of 24… no… 36 hours of in-between I would not only uncompress my brain but flowers of thought and creativity would poke up their shoots. Boredom will do that, or so goes the truism. (I write this in an Econolodge lobby in Grand Rapids, to which I repaired […]

violets, not shrinking

My hotel room had a few… ummm… foibles. The first I discovered was that one of the shower doors–both attractively poised on barn-door-style rollers–refused to stay shut. Upon reflection, I’d vote that the shower itself is off plumb: at one end of the shower the door (either door), once pulled closed, gently rolls back open. […]

festivating

By the time this posts, My Sweetie will be back at the house. So the coast is clear for my mosaic of yesterday (Th 12 Apr) and a little of today. I am sitting on a blond wood bench tucked in a corner below a concrete stair landing in Calvin College’s Fine Arts Center. It’s […]

economy of stories

Reading a blog-post from a pastor friend of mine, I started thinking about the last in-person conversation we had. (Yes, my brain operates via the thinnest of threads!) We were quickly exchanging thoughts for each other that didn’t belong in our meeting, and I had at last handed him a particular poem of mine. I’d […]

hashtag enneafive-life

So in the system that is Enneagram, Fives are particularly known not just as withdraw-ers par excellence, but as tempted most by the sin of avarice. What I find most interesting is that this isn’t the default understanding of avarice (that is, hoarding money), but a wider and/or more thorough avarice: hoarding time, hoarding energy, […]

neither here nor there

The wind has driven me indoors. I stand leaning into the window, knees pressed against the deep sill. My nose would smear the glass if it was any closer: I want to be folded in the veiled sunniness on the other side. But I lack the right gear—no anorak, no gloves, no toque, no boots […]

Two Look At Two / Robert Frost

Love and forgetting might have carried them A little further up the mountainside With night so near, but not much further up. They must have halted soon in any case With thoughts of the path back, how rough it was With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness; When they were halted by a tumbled […]

provisional

I was commuting home, and thinking about this blog. Recalling how I’ve had a few questions lately from non-subscribers, “What do you blog about?” “Well, I’m doing it old-school. Writing about whatever comes to mind when I sit down. So it’s a lot of different stuff.” While driving, I think: it’s provisional. And not in […]

blossoming

My friend sculpted this dogwood. On this the first day of Eastertide, I wanted to visually celebrate — like I visually commemorated Good Friday. The dogwood’s link to Easter is a tradition in the eastern South, so I thought I’d go with that. Plus I am wiped out from cleaning up after Easter dinner (only […]