In the last year or so I’ve been listening to scores of podcasts and as many books on Audible. Any time in the car, even twenty minutes to the grocery, I’m listening to Tolkien or Wendell Berry or a history of Mexico, ahead of our fall trip there. Washing dishes and cleaning up the house […]
Reality--trusting it
We Came. We Sat. They Sang
After a run of hot days and nights, a cool spell descended. It was early morning, an almost chilly breeze in the air, and Pam and I decided to sit for meditation out on the deck. After the morning reading, we sat in silence—or so we thought. The surrounding trees seemed to teem with birds, […]
The Power To Fall
I remember the day Pam got off the train, from her increasingly miserable daily commute into New York City, and said, “I am done with this.” We had two little girls and I wasn’t earning much in my first job out of seminary. She made more than I did. How were we going to survive? […]
The Return of Innocence: A Week With Two Children
Our grandchildren, ages eight and four, are with us for a week. All day every day. By about day four an adult reaches a saturation point and becomes, in some sense, a child too. After days and nights participating in play, story, physical and imaginative games, make-believe, general silliness, and the deep need for security […]
When Home Isn’t Where You Left It
I think of South Dakota, the place I left on my way to college, as Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone: “The little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve.” But, as I found on my visit last week, time has not unremembered my old home. It’s both the same as ever, and yet dramatically […]
AI Is Here. How Can I Know What’s Real?
The headlines these days are splashed with scary stories of AI and the end of reality. Soon, the experts warn, no one will be able to tell what images or videos are real and what is generated by an all-knowing machine. The AI threat is merely the latest, most intense form of unreality to wash […]
When Memory Becomes Our Master
Nobel winning psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman tells this story. A man is listening to a symphony, and it’s glorious. Three movements that build toward a brilliant climax. And then, just as the symphony is ending there is a horrid screeching sound. “It ruined the whole thing,” the man says. “Wiped out the whole experience.” […]
Spring Fever
Spring, the most yearned-for season, is also the most crazy-making. If you have a back yard or a garden, a kind of obsession can take over. You go to a nursery and imagine this in that little empty corner of the front garden, and that in the bed beside the potting shed. You don’t have […]