Category: Changefulness

1 min read

What Flag Are You Flying?

3 Minute Read

If the proper aim of life were handwritten on a secret card before we drew our first breath, what would it say? 

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Irrational Will

18 Minute Read

The proper aim of life, even at its least creative, is handwritten on a secret card placed face down on the table before we draw our first breath. Our mothers, by some undiscoverable trick of love and light, seem always to know each word on the underside of not just their own card but of ours as well. 

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Silver Water

7 Minute Read

Being and Change is a U-tube. But what is a U-tube when it’s at home?

67 min read

Transformatives: An Introduction

44 Minute Read

Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today.  David Bohm Author’s Preface I began this post as a placeholder for the introduction to five articles on the topic of what I have come to call in my work, Transformatives. What happened instead is worth summarizing before proceeding to the […]

18 min read

Mark’s Bookshelf

12 Minute Read

(For Mark Magleby) I knew who I was this morning, but I’ve changed a few times since then. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland This post owes its title to a short story in Adventures in Contentment in which David Grayson, the pseudonymous author and principal hero of Ray Stannard Baker’s early 20th-century tales about pastoral life in western Massachusetts, meets and flips the fortunes of a door-to-door book ageng. The agent, after his meek […]

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Faucets

9 Minute Read

Why do I write? I write to remember. I write to understand. I write to change. Scott Knell This morning, as I waited for my head to clear to the sight and sound of running water in my bathroom sink, I found myself staring at a familiar object posing as the favorite faucet of my youth. I had just run a finger across the top of a mirage reflected in its polished nickel–a water spot? […]

26 min read

Time’s Gravity

17 Minute Read

[This post was originally published in three parts: First Person Metacognitive; Then, Now, & Yet; and Nowland. All three parts have been re-consolidated into this post.] Part I. First Person Metacognitive I have a full-scale map of the United States. One mile equals one mile. Last summer I folded it. Steven Wright Before he retired to minister to people’s hearts in a more figurative way, world-renown cardiovascular surgeon and medical pioneer Dr. Russell M. Nelson […]

12 min read

Once a Mouse…

8 Minute Read

I saw the rain-dirty valley You saw Brigadoon I saw the crescent You saw the whole of the moon Mike Scott, The Whole of the Moon In 1963, when I was still learning to read, my Aunt Jennie (Campbell) gave me for Christmas Marcia Brown’s 1962 Caldecott recipient Once a Mouse… Because that same Christmas, Jennie gave my siblings way cooler 1940s picture book classics by Robert McCloskey–Make Way for Ducklings and One Morning in […]

8 min read

Paris, Kansas

6 Minute Read

(For Peter) The angels do not reside on a planet like this earth; But … in the presence of God, on a globe like a sea of glass and fire, where all things for their glory are manifest, past, present, and future, and are continually before the Lord. Joseph Smith, The Doctrine and Covenants, Section 130, Verses 4 through 7 In my “novelist” days (1984 to 1992) I spent my spare writing time wrestling to […]

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The Proper Aim of Art

7 Minute Read

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.  Oscar Wilde

14 min read

Failure Is Not an Option. It’s an Imperative.

10 Minute Read

The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is. Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Few analogies to the Law of the Harvest command our imagination more vividly than sports. From the proper and timely preparation to compete, the contest itself, and its completion within a fixed timebox, the organic microcosm of athletic competition condenses the lessons and patterns of […]

1 min read

Changegivers

< 1 Minute Read

I have given up all I loved so much: chivalry and pride; and since it pleases God, I accept it all, that He may keep me by Him. Guillaume IX d’Aquitaine, Pos de chantar m’es pres talenz A beauty queen now crowned an angel fairThe world your stage you chose serenityTo turn like Eve your face from fruited treeYou gave away your majesty to bear The racquet and the feather were your handsBroad strokes soft […]

11 min read

Communication Theory

8 Minute Read

All the light you see is from the past. Alicia Eggert Almost every engineer in my professional orbit in the early 80s sat somewhere beneath the three-acre hangar-turned-cube-farm that was Building Three of Rockwell International’s Space Systems in Seal Beach, California. Rockwell built spacecraft and satellites in those days, and the engineers in Building Three wrote the systems that tracked the more than one million parts that combined to form America’s first space shuttles. And […]