You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because...
Roads are a record of those who have gone before.
It's tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after.
Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situati...
What’s meant by reproductive rights, of course, is the right of women to control their own bodies. Didn’t I mention earlier that violence against women is a control issue?
I wish that I could put up yesterday’s evening sky for all posterity, could preserve a night of love, the sound of a mountain stream, a realization as it sets my mind afire, a dance, a day of harmony,...
In the wildlife sanctuaries of literature, we study the species of speech, the flight patterns of individual words, the herd behavior of words together, and we learn what language does and why it matt...
To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on your futures, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the oppos...
No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more.
Not to know yourself is dangerous, to that self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and fro...
My friend Chip Ward speaks of the tyranny of the quantifiable, of the way what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot: private profit over public good; speed and efficiency ov...
There's a kind of activism that's more about bolstering identity than achieving results, one that sometimes seems to make the left the true heirs of the Puritans. Puritanical in that the point becomes...
How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that the...
To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully p...
Always, just beyond all these things, was the silver sea, the lace border around all land like the silence around sounds or the unknowns beyond all knowledge.
A Presbyterian pastor who had performed a number of such marriages told me, I remember coming to this realization when I was meeting with same-sex couples before performing their ceremonies when it wa...
The word for teardrinkers is lachryphagous, and for the eaters of human flesh it is anthropophagous, and the rest of us feed on sorrow all the time. It is the essence of many of the most beautiful bal...
How long does it take to see something, to know someone? If you put in years, you realize how little you grasped at the start, even when you thought you knew. We move through life mostly not seeing wh...
We write history with our feet and with our presece and our collective voice and vision. And yet, of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointles...
To which I’d like to append a variation on Lewis’s Law (all comments on feminism justify feminism): the plethora of men attacking women and anyone who stands up for women in order to prove that women...
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