It’s not so much what I say but what you hear – I can pick through my words like fruit, choosing what’s ripe and ready – I can order them meticulously, like mosaic tiles turning tiny chips of meaning into a shining image – I can pack them like pipe bombs,
Walk into any professional kitchen and you will most likely find two things at a premium: knives and cutting boards. In fact, in many restaurants, it is customary for the chefs to provide their own knives. Practically, it means when you get a hold of a cutting board, you make
In life, most days, it’s not so much what happens as it is what we notice, what we choose to remember and carry with us. A week or two ago, I noticed Julia Cameron’s The Writing Diet on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. She is the author
I've spent two days this week with the folks from Bountiful Backyards working on turning our front yard, which is shaded by a hundred year old pin oak, from the scraped landscape it was into something both beautiful and useful. They brought in edible, medicinal, sustainable, and native
In the middle of a sunny Chuck Taylor afternoon, I sit in the space between work and obligations, hoping for time to read and write and then the day descended – closed in from all sides like shrink wrap on a shiny toy and I had only a moment this moment
Ginger called me from the Festival of Homiletics today after hearing Craig Barnes because she wanted to pass along something he said (and I’m writing it as I remember it, not as a direct quote): “Preachers are ‘minor poets,’ which is to say they speak a particular truth to
Somedays you have a chance to give hope hands and feet or, should I say, leaves and flowers. With the help of some who know more than I about planting, we dug holes in our front yard, etching out earthy invitations for heurchera, hellebores; edworthia, and elderberry; currant, fiddlehead, lobelia,
The end of my shift yesterday marked the first time in eleven days (and thirteen shifts) that I had a day off to look forward to. In fact, if I count the hours from the time I got off work until I have to go back tomorrow afternoon, I had
It was a dark and stormy afternoon and I was trapped in the Barnes and Noble by a thunderstorm. Ginger was on the other end of the Streets of Southpoint looking for shoes. Since I had the time, I migrated upstairs to the poetry section to see what I could
I’m looking for? (Not that anyone has asked for a word, you understand) Still – the swirl around the swine flu has left me looking for a word or two with which to respond . . . I could say something about malaria, or cholera, or tuberculosis, or hunger – all bigger killers we
My morning, so far, has been made up of coffee shop chatter and a pretty good ham and cheese croissant served with an complimentary portion of overhead disco (thank God for headphones and Patty Griffin) My afternoon will call me to the kitchen to assemble a fajita bar for fifty
I just got home from a great weekend in Jackson, where I got to preach this morning at Calvary Baptist Church. Here is the sermon. __________________________ You have to wonder how soon it started. I’m guessing, even in the early church, where two or three were gathered there were two