by Susannah Brister Proverbs 13:12 “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but desire fulfilled is a tree of life.” I have always hated New Year’s resolutions. Every year I faced January 1st full of stolid determination, ready to jog more miles, go to bed earlier, be more generous, eat less sugar. My list of “shoulds” and … Continue reading Make It New: Unresolved
by Karen Bjork Kubin I wish you could have seen the look on his face, walking home from school. I wish you could carry it with you, etched under your ribs, the way I do. My son’s face was luminous, open, free. It was early in the school year, late August or maybe early September. … Continue reading Rainbow Boy
With a poem, faith is a hidden constellation, beginning with the still-mysterious act of writing. The blank page, which is simultaneously white and dark, is the abyss each writer stares into until the moment, as Nietzsche said, where the abyss stares back into the writer.
In the same way, if I spend so much energy and effort trying to create music or art or poetry that is meaningful, or beautiful, shot-through with light, grace, insight, and love, how can that not spill over into working for these things in the larger world?
Zealot might not be the kind of book everyone would consider a “summer read”—but really, aren’t we past being limited to breezy love stories with no substance? This is a book that is worth all of the buckling down, you’ll need to apply to reading it.
Eventually, life happens to everyone - it is the great equalizer. Someday, you might be in the position to not contribute anything.
Every time I prayed, a gentle, insistent sense arose in me – Do this…You can do this…I want you to do this – the same sense that had been prodding me during the past six months as my husband and I discussed fostering a child and researched the process, and I, initially resistant to the idea, had begun praying about it.
So when I learned the Lord’s Prayer, it was one of the most liberating moments of my early religious development. The roteness and authority of it were exactly what I needed to get through meal- and bed-time rituals.
But it was music that drew out her deepest emotions, her greatest performances. When we were very young, she would sing to us at night the saddest songs you can imagine.
hese poems are my way of honoring the mysteries of the natural world—weather, geology, our human impermanence—using metaphor and image, rhythm and form to understand our roles in such an intricate system.
