Ineffable You

There is something inside you so beautiful and ferocious it cannot be fully known or expressed in words. It is your job to protect and preserve it, and to let it loose on the world when the time is right. Not everyone will honor it the way you want them to, but even if they don’t, it doesn’t lose any of its power or vitality. You will always be able to locate it and get back in touch with it in its primordial state.

The ineffable you is eternal. Not everyone remembers that all the time. (They ...  Keep reading

Triangling

Peace is not made by avoiding or even just reducing the intensity of conflict, but by moving through it with eyes wide open and the knowledge and hope there is something better on the other side. We become belligerent and irresponsible in our communication when we believe there is no hope for resolution or when something we value deeply is at stake. Then we also act in contempt, believing there is nothing redeemable about the other side and that they deserve to be destroyed.

Our ...  Keep reading

The Spirit of Things

There is this Spirit we all know. You know it when you see it. And just like heaven, it always takes you by surprise. That’s because it will not be contained in any one place or by any one person or by understanding itself. It is free, and it is traveling around, in and out of spaces, and weaving itself through and around things. Then it appears, like a bird landing on a rail in front of you, out of nowhere and for no good reason except just to make itself known to you again.

You can feel its ...  Keep reading

The Best of All Possible Worlds

Sometimes I feel like I’m in heaven now. It comes in small doses: a tender kiss from my wife, a rapturous laugh with my whole family, a soft and pillowy snowfall, a moment of epiphany. Time stands still and you catch a glimpse – if only for a moment – of what it is like to be in wonder. It’s hard to believe it’s happening when it happens. Heaven is never what you thought or hoped it was going to be. It catches you by surprise.

Jesus said, “the Kingdom has come near/is at hand,” but ...  Keep reading

Breathing/Oscillating

All of life is a steady, rhythmed breathing in and out. That process occurs without any thought or intent on your part, and yet, it is the thing that keeps you alive. Your whole life, you oscillate between utter breathlessness and lungs full of air, aching to be pushed out. Life happens because of the movement from one to the other and back.

Our lives are made up of the coming and going between two poles on many dimensions. Everyday, you wake up and move forward with the day’s activities. Then ...  Keep reading

Working The Words

The words contained here are nothing. They are merely a static representation of the way the writer interfaced with the world at a given point in time and attempted to relate that back to the reader. The words on the page are a crystallized take on reality at one specific moment in time, but not the end. That’s the beauty of dialogue. You work and re-work the words until you have said what you needed to say and it has been heard the way you mean it to be heard. You get as many chances as you ...  Keep reading

Loss is Where You Live

Once you have experienced your first big grief, you live your whole life looking back on that thing. You also spend it looking forward to the rest of life’s losses that will eventually occur. That is why the feeling of anxious anticipation – waiting for the other shoe to drop – is so normal. Life balances itself out. The sum always returns to zero. If things are going swimmingly at the moment, you can be sure a time of want is coming. Don’t worry – once you learn how to grieve, you ...  Keep reading

It Takes A Long Time To Change

What you are experiencing today is just the aggregate of all the days and experiences you have had up until this moment. Your body is a recorder for every experience, no matter how minute, so nothing is lost. You might think you can avoid, neutralize, or forget the ones you are not sure what to do with, but you have assimilated all of them in some way. You are just a container for all the things that have happened and how you have metabolized them. This might make you feel helpless, but nothing ...  Keep reading