I’m about a week and a half into the resurrection of the ritual of writing my Morning Pages and I’m already feeling a shift. I’m getting used to getting up and, other than making the coffee, letting those three handwritten pages be the first thing I do. Those scribbles are starting to shake up my…

It’s not somuch what I saybut what you hear – I can pick throughmy words like fruit,choosing what’sripe and ready – I can order themmeticulously, likemosaic tiles turningtiny chips of meaninginto a shining image – I can pack themlike pipe bombs, fullof all I know the worldneeds to explodewhat is wrong and leavepeace in the…

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 the most of it –…

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 of The Artist’s Way, a book that…

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 plants to give our yard a new…

In the middle of a sunnyChuck Taylor afternoon, I sitin the space between work and obligations, hopingfor time to read and writeand then the day descended – closed in from all sideslike shrink wrap on a shiny toyand I had only a moment this moment to write away the defeatbrief lines offering a chanceto slip…

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 a particular people.” The point is…

Somedays you have a chanceto give hope hands and feetor, should I say, leaves and flowers. With the help of some who knowmore than I about planting,we dug holes in our front yard, etching out earthy invitations forheurchera, hellebores; edworthia, andelderberry; currant, fiddlehead, lobelia, and white wood aster;paw paw and — of course — wildginger…

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 forty-eight of them to do…

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 see. There I found a…