Reading, Writing, Rules, and Reason
Was it a year ago already that a friend told me about an unlikely book she was reading and finding fascinating? I describe the book as unlikely because if anyone were taking bets on either of us reading it, he…
Stop Signs
Do I know how to do this? To write once I’ve followed a golden thread, or do I only know how to write as a student does: crafting sentences that will please a teacher or a professor and earn that…
Hope is Enough
Hope is an instinct only the reasoning human mind can kill. —Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory Greene makes his statement about a starving dog with a broken back or broken legs that drags herself to the door of…
Don’t Believe Their Answers
Generally what is more important than getting water-tight answers is learning to ask the right questions. —Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water When I came across those words about a decade ago, I had no idea how true they’d turn out…
Stop and Look Around
I have so many ways of collecting my thoughts—or more accurately, I guess, of prompting my thoughts in an attempt to write something coherent. It’s good to look around, and doing so today netted me the following in Evernote (ironically…
Which Way?
If Diamond had had to find out the riddle in order to see Mr. Raymond again, I doubt if he would ever have seen him. “Oh then,” I think I hear some little reader say, “he could not have been…
Just a Pebble in a Pond
St. Thérèse taught the value of the “Little Way”—a path to holiness that lay in performing all our daily tasks and duties in a spirit of love and in the presence of God. Dorothy embraced this teaching. She believed that…
Something Stronger Within
How do we go about finding meaning in existence? Are we ever explicitly taught to do so? Where would one go for such teaching? Perhaps long ago, the answer would have been some form of institutional school, but that no…
Turn Around; It’s not All in Front of You
Andrew Forge’s essays on mostly 20th-century art has me thinking about paintings that tend to elicit the response “I could do that” and wondering why they are important. I think it comes down to a relatively simple distinction: perhaps we…
Competition? Cooperation?
The artist who acts as if he could have conceived his art by himself, sealed off from other artists, is stupid—he merely tries to conform to the idiotic romantic image of the artists as primeval energy, as a demiurge. The continual…
The Touch of the Unknown
I don’t know that a year can go by without me vowing, again, to read all the poems in The Giant Book of Poetry (edited by William H. Roetzheim) that I bought in 2011, when I decided to embark upon…
We Are Not Crazy
Our disconnection from nature and our disavowal of interior depth—of soul—from animals, plants, and landscapes occurs all the time in all of us. But there is more depth than we have come to believe, than we have been taught. Connection…
