1 min read

Bella Lingua

4 Minute Read

The neighboring countries of Blinkinboor and Bellalingua could not have been more different. Cursed with a rugged topology, Blinkinboor sat atop vast iron deposits, its citizens hard-scrabble, silent types whose brute force culture forged from the earth a veritable mining machine that cranked out money by the ton. Adjacent to Blinkinboor, but possessing no natural resources of her own, Bellalingua was blessed with a rich language that steeped its people in centuries of poetry and literature.

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Therefore Perfect

5 Minute Read

Legend has it that at the gates of the ancient city of Thebes, there crouched on legs of iron, brandishing the wings of an eagle and speaking from the head of a woman, a feral creature. Whenever a stranger approached the city, the Sphinx, as she was called, put to them a deadly riddle.

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The Bamboo Forest

2 Minute Read

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem.” Albert Camus, The Myth of Sysiphus

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Change This Post

4 Minute Read

Barely a month into the New Year, I can already feel my resolutions shift beneath my feet. Institutional change can be elusive, and personal transformation downright brutal.

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Truth Eternal

< 1 Minute Read

My best friend for fifty years is the real communicator in our marriage.

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The Housetops

4 Minute Read

I have recently written my first Instagram posts. Four, in fact. They represent the consummation of a 25-year intention to be deliberate about the life of the spirit. Now that I have broken through what increasingly feels like receding resistance to the commitment, here are my initial offerings from @TheHousetops.

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The Life You Change May Be Your Own

6 Minute Read

I write history the way some people read horoscopes. What is history, after all, but prophecy in reverse? The following story is true both root and branch. Like O. Henry’s leaf painter (and at P.’s request), I have camouflaged in its undergrowth of strange names and places a vine of living history more or less as P. recounted it to me on Christmas Sunday 1986.

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A Moment of Giants

3 Minute Read

There are giants in the sky! There are big tall terrible giants in the sky! Stephen Sondheim The day I met Ray Bradbury, he gave it as his life’s dream that there might one day be a museum on every street corner. “Perspective is everything, you see. We come to this planet with a sacred obligation to preserve for the future the record of every success and failure of the past.”

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Throw Me the Ball! (Side B)

4 Minute Read

“These are kids. It’s a game! You should be ashamed.” Before taking a summer break from writing, I posted Side A of this two-parter, suggesting that when tight ends, teachers, and emergency medical responders demand ‘the ball,’ they do so largely from their heart. Intrinsically prepared and quietly confident, they sense that in their hands, the situation can only get better. But if their motives are ‘largely’ unselfish, what are we to make of those […]

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The Lemonade Stand

3 Minute Read

“There is no such thing as a long-term, sustainable, competitive advantage.” So preached my graduate school Microeconomics professor, often enough that the old saw about the supply bone connecting to the demand bone sums up the totality of my remembrance from business school forty years after graduation. That, and, of course, The Lesson of the Lemonade Stand.

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As the Crow Rightly Flies

2 Minute Read

Is There Method in Your Migration? [For Josh] Through my library window this morning, I spied above me several murders. One after another, a dozen crows each, they jagged toward some unknown conspiracy convening somewhere to my north-north-west. They came our way for years, in October-November, until bird flu knocked them from the sky a decade or so back. They must have resurrected.

1 min read

Throw Me the Ball! (Side A)

4 Minute Read

“So, what’s it going to be?” invites the savvy supervisor, loathe to micromanage, slow to bail out her team, and dead determined not to have the last word.