What is the meaning of life?" asked man. "Seek and ye shall find," said God. "That was my method." The man replied, "How might I do that?" "Take a setting," instructed God. "Add some dirt and water, mold it into something likeable. Let there be light...
Man will be on the path to perfection when he feels that he is one with space that knows no bounds and with the ocean that has no shores; when he becomes that undying fire, that ever-gleaming light, that still air or that violent storm, those clouds ...
When the heart Is cut or cracked or broken Do not clutch it Let the wound lie open Let the wind From the good old sea blow in To bathe the wound with salt And let it sting. Let a stray dog lick it Let a bird lean in the hole and sing A simple song li...
The garden has wrapped itself in autumn haze. An unusual autumn, lacking that thrill of vegetal warmth when the sap is still alive and holds up the trees, drunk on solar gold. It is the sorrowful climax of a summer's drought. Never before was I so st...
Rainer Maria Rilke greeted and wrestled with the angels of his Duino Elegies in the solitude of a castle surrounded by white cliffs tall trees and the sea. I greeted most of mine in the solitude of a house that still vibrated with the throbs of a sin...
In answer, the news of the Gospel is that extraordinary things happen. ... Lear goes berserk on a heath but comes out of it for a few brief hours every inch a king. Zaccheus climbs up a sycamore tree a crook and climbs down a saint. Paul sets out a h...
The compelling thing about making art—or making anything, I suppose—is the moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid , a thing, a substance in a world of substances. Circe, Nimbue, Artemis, Athena, all the old sorceresses: they...
Oh, is that right? You know, a lioness will protect her cub by baring her teeth, by roaring, using her claws to defend her cub if she feels she has to - this mother, has other means. You are standing in the way of my daughter's best interests. If you...
It was Sunday, and Mumma had gone next door with Lena and the little ones. Under the pepper tree in the yard Pa was sorting, counting, the empty bottles he would sell back: the bottles going clink clink as Pa stuck them in the sack. The fowls were fl...
As participants in a mobile culture, our default is to move. God embraces our broken world, and I have no doubt that God can use our movement for good. But I am convinced that we lose something essential to our existence as creatures if we do not rec...
Someone could cut through the mess in our house and look at it like one might look at rings on a tree or layers of sediment. They'd find the black-and-white hairs of a dog we had when I was six, the acid-washed jeans my mother once wore, the seven bl...
Child," she said placing her head to mine and her callused fingers on my cheek, "you can whip it and beat it senseless, you can drag it through the streets and spin on it, you can even dangle it from a tree, drive spikes trough it, and drain the last...
As we actually taste the flavor of what he's teaching, we begin to see that it's not proverbs for daily living, or ways of being virtuous. He's proposing a total meltdown and recasting of human consciousness, bursting through the tiny acorn-selfhood ...
Outside the youth center, between the liquor store and the police station, a little dogwood tree is losing its mind; overflowing with blossomfoam, like a sudsy mug of beer; like a bride ripping off her clothes, dropping snow white petals to the groun...
After the keen still days of September, the October sun filled the world with mellow warmth...The maple tree in front of the doorstep burned like a gigantic red torch. The oaks along the roadway glowed yellow and bronze. The fields stretched like a c...
Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with th...
It had been so silent in the wake of that commotion, a kind of potent silence that seemed to contain everything. The songs of the birds and the creak of the trees. The dying snow and the unseen gurgling water. The glimmering sun. The certain sky. The...
I had a dream about you. You were a tax collector, and I was a man with a noose around my neck hanging from a tree. You said I could be freed if I’d only pay my taxes, and I said as long as I paid taxes I’d never be free. I said I was freer in a ...
According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals int...
As a revolutionary people, we Americans won a probable victory over the best and biggest army in the world because we learned to fight from the Indians. You can do a lot of damage with a Kentucky rifle from behind a tree. You don't put on a peaked ha...
It was not enough that food aplenty was within Man’s grasp: he wanted more. It was not enough that prey surrendered themselves to Man according to the natural order: Man wanted to cook his prey. Man had discovered fire when lightning stuck and set ...
