Fallow Ground

Every year since 2007 I’ve participated in a ritual of reflection involving the music I’ve listened to throughout the previous year. Music is so emotionally resonant, and specific songs connect so tenaciously to specific moments in time. I’ve found that making a playlist of songs is a great way to both process and preserve a…

The world is full of only new light. Every instant every ray that is born from every source is brief and bright and breaks upon whatever surface it strikes bouncing until it has spent its energy and is no more. “Let there be light,” He said, and there was light, and it kept being, only…

Time flies. It mounts up on wings like eagles and soars into the sky, its talons tight on my shoulders, the steady THRUM-THRUM THRUM-THRUM of its wings angering the ever-present though most-often-quiet gravity to grasp at my body and try, futilely, to keep me on earth. Time carries me away. Swallowing my fear, I look…

Writing is paralegal research. Each scratch of the pencil across the page is a scratching away at the layers of falsity applied to my personality. Each click of the keyboard is chipping away at the calcified lies concealing my heart. Writing is trial. Each fiction crafted is truth teased out by hypothetical character and action.…

Back in April, Paul Simon released a new album called So Beautiful, So What. The opening song on the album is “Getting Ready for Christmas Day,” a 4 minute and 6 second long meditation on the many things that weigh us down and make us long for the liberation of Christ’s coming. Interspersed throughout the song…

We’ve slipped into week seven of the ten week quarter like a political candidate into a sex scandal, and just like one of those candidate’s chances for election, my mental space for reflection has slipped away. I’m even writing this brief post in class. (It’s an audit, so it’s ok.) The end of the quarter…

“Men and women, who through almost superhuman hard work and without the slightest help from the legal state (in fact in the face of its declared hostility), have learned how to create more jobs and more wealth in the zones in which they have been able to function than the all-powerful state.  They have often…