• Poetry - Religion

    Poems, Prayers and Peaches: Reflections on Li-Young Lee’s “From Blossoms”

    June 29, 2013 - By 

    How is a poem like a prayer like a peach? In this season when farmer’s markets (if we’re lucky enough to live by them) and our backyard trees (if we’re luckier still) lavish us with an almost guilt-inducing abundance of textured, fleshy, bursting-with-juicypleasure peaches, what can we glean about this world—and our inner worlds— from their continued bequeathal of life-giving goodness that so richly satisfies both body and soul? I remember when futurists were predicting not only that we’d be zipping around in our own solo aircraft someday, but that we’d also get all the nutrients we need in a…

  • Music

    Songs of Summer

    June 21, 2013 - By 

    Too much fun, too many fine memories & associations, too much heart-gladdening goodness & grooviness not to share this trio of songs on this glorious NorCal morning. You no doubt have your own favorite songs of the season, your own lovingly tended images of tops down, sand in every nook and cranny of your skin, barefootin’ and bare whatever-else. Savor them, indulge, slow the hell down for just a minute or two or quite a few more—it’s a good day for it. Happy solstice, dear readers–now get going on that epic amblin’ & shamblin’ along that restores and reminds us…

  • Music - Personal Reflections

    A Summer’s Music Idyll in Mountain View, Arkansas

    June 20, 2013 - By 

    O.K., this is more like it. You know: It. The peace, the glow, the warm enveloping vibe spreading through your body & soul like a sweet dreamy transfusion, a triple dose of calm, clarity, cohesion. Exhaling now, are we? Nice ‘n easy, sip a bit o’ lemonade, let the inhale just follow all natural-like, while these geetar and fiddle and bass players turn us a tune? Ahhhhhh…yesssss…. No alcohol. (Dry county, not a brown bag nor slightly deranged looking character in sight. And no bar noise spilling out onto the square louder by the hour.) No amps. (Acoustic county, not…

  • General Nonfiction - Personal Reflections

    Letter From Birmingham

    June 14, 2013 - By 

    Please forgive the impossibly pretentious headline above. I think Rev. Martin Luther King would both forgive and understand it, because he above all would appreciate the tremendous sense of solidarity engendered by his justifiably famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail” and all the other events of 1963 in this quintessentially Southern town that would so change the course of history. I arrived here on the eve of the 50th anniversary of George Wallace’s theatrical standing in the University of Alabama school doors to ostensibly prevent the admittance of black students in defiance of a federal court order. (Wallace at least had…

  • General Nonfiction - Odds & Ends

    Technology: Savior and Slayer

    June 2, 2013 - By 

    Is the sheer number of stimuli our beleaguered brains are exposed to on a minute-by-minute basis in modern life driving us out of our minds? Does the multi-tasking we joke nervously about to our family and office mates increasingly make us perform those tasks poorly and absent-mindedly, with little of what we do manage to accomplish sticking in our memory as we click our way through yet more stimuli that press in upon our attention like hungry children clamoring for food? I have been trying to think through these questions in prepping this post over the past week, but incoming…