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…

I’m looking for?(Not that anyone has askedfor a word, you understand) Still – the swirl aroundthe swine flu has left melooking for a word or twowith which to respond . . . I could say somethingabout malaria, or cholera,or tuberculosis, or hunger –all bigger killers we could dosomething about, but that too quickly begins tosound…

My morning, so far, has been made upof coffee shop chatter and a pretty goodham and cheese croissant served with ancomplimentary portion of overhead disco(thank God for headphones and Patty Griffin) My afternoon will call me to the kitchento assemble a fajita bar for fifty folks whomI will not see; I will cook and then…

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 or three differing opinions. Though we…

On this, the last day of National Poetry Month, the least I can do is offer a verse of my own. vocabulary treppenwitz is a word that means“a clever remark that comes to mindwhen it is too late to utter it”(of course, you have to be speakingGerman for it to make sense) In New Guinea…