cynicism comes with coffeeas artificial as sweetenerwe’ve grown accustomedto the bitter aftertastenegative is normalcritiques and criticismspass for conversation ina culture short on courageand long on loud gratitude is hard workto choose to be thankfulrequires the tenacityof a heart broken openand willing to sit silentlyon a starlight night or inthe shadow of a bee’s wingthe opposite…

A couple of weeks ago, I took a Friday morning to do an exercise from Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write, which was to construct a time line of my life. I left the house thinking I would be gone a couple of hours. Almost three hours later, I came home with one section done:…

Mondays are long days in the restaurant at Duke because, in the parlance of the kitchen, we have to “rebuild our prep”: we have to make all things (0r most things) new. We are open Monday through Thursday nights, and, well, we don’t really want to serve stuff that has sat around while we were…

As I was reading this morning, I reached for David Rosenberg’s A Poet’s Bible: Rediscovering the Voices of the Original Text and his translation of parts of Job and Ecclesiastes took me on a wonderful little journey. A Poet’s Bible I found it used, on the shelfin the basement of the HarvardBookstore, one blurb proclaiming,…

I have several friends who are authors. Not that I’ve ever met them, you understand. They don’t even know who I am. Yet I count them as friends because their words have helped me to learn and grow. And so I carry deep gratitude and affection toward Madeleine L’Engle, Frederick Buechner, Naomi Shihab Nye, and…

As the remnants of Ida make their way through our neighborhood, I thought tonight might be a good one to think about rain songs. I’ll start with a great clip of Usher dancing along side of Gene Kelley and “Singing in the Rain.” I’ll follow with a clip of a very young Nanci Griffith singing…

The loading dock area behind the West Union at Duke, in which my restaurant is located, is also where we go to throw away our trash. The singular term no longer applies because of the way we are expected to separate and organize our refuse for disposal. There is a giant dumpster where the garbage…

It’s not so much the wordsas the way they sometimesline up, the way they areplaced on the page —single syllables can speak,tear open false healings,deep calling to deepwith faith and familiarityboth brand new and ages old.I saw these four words:our own best lightsat the tail end of a sentenceabout being true and I wondered wheremy…

I’m a collector. Not a keep-it-in-the-box-so-it-will-be-valuable-someday kind of guy, as much as I like to keep things around for a few days (weeks, years) before I let them go. Things like grocery store receipts, ticket stubs, random pieces of paper that somehow ended up in my pocket. I have brochures and postcards, old magazines, business…

I had a camera once that could take pictureswith everything in focus, from front to back,each detail crisp, sharp, and identifiable.I can’t do that with my own eyes, as I learned again this week, driving throughDuke Forest, the variegated veil of fall flavorscascading down from the tree tops to street level.I pulled to the side…