Flowing, Together
I’ve always liked the word “confluence” for the fact that, if I could see  and hear through the wall in front of me, I’d experience the joining music and rush of Goose Creek where it merges with Nameless Creek. Both…
Category The Writing Life
And I Live to Tell
Against the same smudged window out of which the Gollum gazed, a pedestaled two-dimensional mummified cat cast a terrible silhouette against the gray sky beyond.Was this a totem to ward off cat-kind, or a monument to celebrate them–in a most…
Strangeness on the Moors
I don’t know what I intended from my walk up the steep ridge behind the house. It was so foggy when I set out that I almost turned around right away for fear of quickly becoming lost. But something drew…
Try to Find the Words
I stepped quietly in the darkness, coffee in hand, with only the lightning showing the way to the front door this morning. Ann still asleep, I slipped out onto the porch and sat in the swing while my eyes learned…
What We Hold In Our Hands: The Missing Preface
[su_heading size=”14″]I was looking for a particular quote from my 2009 book when I ran across this short passage labeled as Preface, but which never got into the printing of the book. I don’t know if this was intentional or…
Gone With the Wind: Abandoned Lands
For two decades far back in the last millennium, climate chaos resulted in increasingly violent and increasingly wide tornados. The scale that had once measured storm intensity had to be revised by an order of magnitude in order to measure…
Images Video from What We Hold
Not all these images made the final cut, but fifty did–as black and white illustrations that support the narrative from or about the picture. I think (and readers have told me) that having the pictures is a good thing. You…
Author’s Note What We Hold In Our Hands: a Slow Road Reader
You will find a few moments of pleasant reading in this book, I trust. More than this, it is my hope that as you look out at my world through my eyes, you will come to know the “Ah, Aha,…
Author’s Note Slow Road Home
You will find a few moments of pleasant reading in this book, I trust. More than this, it is my hope that as you look out at my world through my eyes, you will come to know the “Ah, Aha,…
Coercing Creativity
The Muse responds poorly to pressure. In fact, She cannot be conjured, cajoled or bribed. But it is possible to create the kind of accommodations that increase the likelihood that cerebral light bulbs will flash and pop, and an idea…
Through A Glass, Darkly
Sometimes on this morning page, words come and image follows. Today at 5 a.m., the picture comes first–a spontaneous shot from my chair of the wood stove, the glass door cleaned on a warmish day for the first time in…
On Long Form Writing
[In obvious conflict with the last post on keeping written thoughts in staccato mode.] First, long is relative. But as we’ve had occasion to note here recently, it is getting shorter all the time. TL; DR. And I’ve been aware…
Blunder, Bluster, Blessing, Blogging and Being
It is, after all, the cusp of a new year–a convenient time to consider change. If we do what we’ve always done, we’ll get what we’ve always got, they say. And if what we’ve got has been other than what…
To Us a Child is Born
From Slow Road Home, a memory shared… “The Herdmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars and used the Lord’s name in vain. They hit little kids and cussed…