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Browse Topics
Consciousness
Quotations
Sunbeams
May 2010I know a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up to the day he killed himself.
Poetry
Enlightenment Is A Bitch
At first it isn’t so bad — a taste of ecstasy, / the world covered in honey. Even snails / scrawl the names of buddhas with their silvery trails.
March 2010The Dog-Eared Pageexcerpted from
excerpted from
The Kill Hole
A change is required of us, a healing of the betrayed trust between humans and earth. Caretaking is the utmost spiritual and physical responsibility of our time, and perhaps that stewardship is finally our place in the web of life, our work, the solution to the mystery of what we are.
January 2010Poetry
Selected Poems
— from “An Encounter” | We met naked on the sun deck by the / clothing-optional hot springs, / and I saw the long scar / like a smile across his furred abdomen
January 2010Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Monk, The Woodcarver, And The Sage
The Parisians are smoking hash again and playing guitar on the terrace. I decide it’s a good time to walk to the top of the hill, where a white temple perches among the pines. I’m feeling a bit lonely today, a bit lost on this subcontinent. I can’t even remember why I’ve come to India, but I know it wasn’t to eat hummus and pita and get high.
November 2009
The Dog-Eared Page
The Question Holds The Lantern
The greatest friend of the soul is the unknown. Yet we are afraid of the unknown because it lies outside our vision and our control. We avoid it or quell it by filtering it through our protective barriers of domestication and control. The normal way never leads home.
November 2009Poetry
Fictional Characters
Do they ever want to escape? / Climb out of the curved white pages / and enter our world?
November 2009Readers Write
Selling Out
Handwritten letters, instant mashed potatoes, an armed-forces recruiting office
November 2009
Quotations
Sunbeams
October 2009You can live without anything you weren’t born with, and you can make it through on even half of that.
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Confessions From A Conversion Van
The owner of the sports bar knows I sleep in the parking lot on weeknights. He doesn’t seem to mind. I’m a curiosity — the homeless professor. He thinks I must be one of a kind, but I’m not so sure. Anyway, I’m not even a professor. More like an adjunct instructor. I’d move closer to work, but I could never afford to live in Martinsburg now that it’s becoming a D.C. bedroom community.
October 2009
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