"What You Hear in a Whisper"
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.
8 Minute Read
Your love is such a thrill. But your love won’t pay my bills. —Janie Bradford & Berry Gordy, Money
7 Minute Read
Being and Change is a U-tube. But what is a U-tube when it’s at home?
4 Minute Read
This post was mostly written by a computer scientist/physicist friend of mine, Ken Ritley, and his favorite AI. It took me all of two minutes to sprinkle about my contribution to Ken’s dialog with a machine. Judge for yourself which of its three authors speaks to you.
11 Minute Read
In which I pose the question to anyone who stopped (or started) something because of the Pandemic: Have you now restarted (or stopped) it?
11 Minute Read
Or How I Inadvertently—and Then Intentionally—Impersonated a Secret Service Agent at a Special Preview of The Phantom of the Opera.
< 1 Minute Read
In which I posit the restoration of a changeful idea.
7 Minute Read
In which I restore a forgotten nuance of a blessed life.
11 Minute Read
In which I commit to becoming the stranger I wish to meet in the world.
18 Minute Read
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming
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 […]
13 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 agent to surprising effect. The agent, […]
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? […]
12 Minute Read
The truth of something is not the thing itself, only the knowledge of it.–Stephen Covey
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 […]
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 […]
2 Minute Read
For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me: in prison and ye visited me. Matthew, Chapter 36, Verses 25 & 26 40 years ago today, my wife Kari and I were looking forward to spending a simple Christmas with our three-year-old daughter Sarah and her baby brother, Timothy. I had just […]
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 […]
