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meeting with a god

The Mackinaw and I are now face to face. Nose to nose. In its world, not mine. It regards me with surprising calm. Thanks to the treachery in my heart, I regard it far less calmly. My fingers are in position, just behind its gills. The fish remains motionless. It’s time.

Traveling Mercies

I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I remembered that wonderful line of Blake’s — that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love — I took a long, deep breath and forced these words out of my strangulated throat: “Thank you.”

September 2000

The English language sighs. The politicians can’t keep their hands off her. They buy her clothes. They buy her jewelry. They can’t stop making promises. How weary she is, and the campaign has only just begun.

Sunbeams

Eighty years old! No eyes left, no ears, no teeth, no legs, no wind! And when all is said and done, how astonishingly well one does without them!

Paul Claudel

The Force Of The Face

Baby Face/Death Mask. Right away, at birth, the infant no sooner delivered, breathing, and bathed, its face is studied for clues to character. It looks so fierce, so wisely old, so placid, so much like “your” side of the family. . . . And, at the end, quiescent and struggle-free on the deathbed, they used to come with the plaster to make a death mask. The custom, begun almost five thousand years ago in Egypt, would capture the essence of character in the features of the face.

Sunbeams

I remember a medicine man in Africa who said to me almost with tears in his eyes: “We have no dreams anymore since the British are in the country.” When I asked him why, he answered, “The District Commissioner knows everything.”

Carl Jung

Where The Buffalo Go

How Science Ignores The Living World — An Interview With Vine Deloria

I think the primary difference is that Indians experience and relate to a living universe, whereas Western people — especially scientists — reduce all things, living or not, to objects. The implications of this are immense. If you see the world around you as a collection of objects for you to manipulate and exploit, you will inevitably destroy the world while attempting to control it. Not only that, but by perceiving the world as lifeless, you rob yourself of the richness, beauty, and wisdom to be found by participating in its larger design.

Sunbeams

He had vowed long ago, and renewed his vow frequently, that if holding hands in a circle and singing hymns . . . was what it took to make life endurable, he would rather die.

Annie Dillard

Winning And Losing

It’s been almost a year and a half since my book of poems was accepted for publication by a small press. This spring, I got a call informing me that the book would come out in the summer. Now, with only a few days of summer remaining, I am getting discouraged. Impulsively, I pick up the phone to call the publisher for news of my book. If I thought about it for very long, I wouldn’t call. I fear that maybe he has lost interest in the book or changed his mind.

May 2000

I want to live like a man who knows he’s going to die and knows that everyone he loves is going to die, yet remembers that life is an unfathomable mystery that neither birth nor death explains.