I’ve been feeling pretty low. That song’s been replaying in my head, the one that goes: I’d love to change the world, but I don’t know what to do. I see through so much of it, beneath so many problems down to the core, to some fundamental disconnect in the fabrics of our institutions and […]
52 Stories, Week 4
Marginalia God had never spoken to Mr. McPhee, not once, and this irritated the old man. Mr. McPhee had known some people in his day who’d had a word with God. God told them to do this, God told them to do that. Mr. McPhee listened, he opened his heart and listened, and God didn’t […]
52 Stories, Week 3
Cellar 1942 was not a good year. You can taste the trenches in the wine. Three years later, you can smell the celebration. If you look under the right light, the blood color is gone. I have the right light. I picked it just for this. Every bottle tells a story. You can’t fake wine. […]
52 Stories, Week 2
I was in the woods all weekend, so this one is a bit late. Mary of the Flowers When I was a girl, my mother told me God was in the flowers. She kept a garden like a zoo. She said that everything was God, and God was everything, and here we were, alive in […]
52 Stories, Week 1
A few weeks ago I went to the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference. While I found the event, on the whole, a bit of a disappointment, I did get one piece of great advice from a literary consultant there: Challenge yourself to write one short story a week, every week, for a year. I thought the […]
Be your utopia
How do we undo this world? How do we unravel ourselves from the coils of a system that traumatizes us, controls us, oppresses us or turns us oppressor, degrades us, punishes us, imprisons us mind and body? How do we survive? The current of this world runs within us. We are caught in a circle […]
To sum up this chapter.
I’m on the last day of this trip. The past few days have been a test of every bit of trust I have in myself, in flow, in what I’m trying to do here. The short of it is that I had one whole life plan left, which was to spend the summer living on […]
