With a Whimper?
The house is quiet now, except for the ticking of the clocks in the kitchen and occasional birdsong. The robins, phoebes, and others had a lot to say a few minutes ago, when they treated me to a lovely morning…
What Meets the Eye
Thanks to Camille Paglia, I have mixed (and rather confused) feelings about the Romantic poets. In short, I don’t know what to make of them. If I am to believe Paglia, they were all perverts with strange sexual proclivities that…
On the Hunt
Quiet weekend afternoons in my adolescent years were sometimes spent reorganizing dresser drawers and closet shelves. My mother was pleased to get things straightened up and pared down, but I was in it for the treasures to be found, the…
Fear and Substack
Fear is a formidable beast. Like most things in life, though, it has its good points and its bad. Fear often preserves our very lives, but—likely, more regularly—it keeps us from living. I try to remind myself that fear seldom…
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…
