Category: Changefulness

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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

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Throw Me the Ball! (Side B)

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“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

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“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

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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.

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What Flag Are You Flying?

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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

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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

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

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Transformatives: An Introduction

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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 […]

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Mark’s Bookshelf

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(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 agent to surprising effect. The agent, […]

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Faucets

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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? […]

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Time’s Gravity

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[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 […]

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Once a Mouse…

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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 […]

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Paris, Kansas

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(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

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

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

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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 […]

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Changegivers

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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 […]