Essays
Longer works — reflections, arguments, and testimony.
It Wasn't Resilience
Resilience only comes after the fall.
On the strength that was never strength, and the quiet practice of accepting what can't be fixed.
Asking to Be Seen
Art is an expression not intended to be explained. Perhaps a life is too.
On a small vase, a joke at the clubhouse, and the explanations we stop needing.
The Interspace
The practices are not a way of attracting a different reality but a way of perceiving more of the one that was already here.
Go By Yourself
“Peace is not a destination, and not a possession. It is what happens in the second after the disappointment arrives.”
The Instrument and the Failure
Fifty evenings photographing the same ridge, and never once getting it right. On practice, attention, and the gap between the instrument and the thing.
While I Still Had It
“I put it down anyway. While I still had it.”
Honoring the One Who Is Dying
“It is not only the unknown ahead. It is the unmourned behind.”
The Spark Is Patient Too
“Most of the leaving is quiet.”
The Aperture
“It is the aperture, not the destination.”
A Breath Longer
“The peace is real for about a breath.”
Reaching Through Glass
“I was standing at a window my whole life, reaching through the glass for someone outside to hold me here, and the whole time the thing that could hold me was behind me, in the room.”
Worry Exists in the Mind. Faith Lives in the Heart.
“The work is to remember, on the braced morning, which organ to trust across time.”
What the Surrender Asks
“Surrender is a willing act. Submission is something done to you.”
The Thin Hour
On the peace that comes from oblivion, the exhaustion that mistakes rest for disappearance, and the morning that gives the verb back.
The Distance We Have Yet to Travel
“Our best self is not an achievement. It is who we already are, when we get out of our own way.”
The Slow Erosion
Hope widens perception. Hopelessness narrows it.
The Door That Keeps Opening
“The lightning shows you the path. The walking is the rest of your life.”
Beginning Again
“Loving where you came from is not a betrayal of where you’re going.”
Always More Than I Think
“I was never meant to arrive at one fixed version of myself and stop there.”
The Space Between Words
“The space between words isn’t empty. It’s where the reader meets me.”