Were it not for shadows
This past year, I turned 70, published my first collection of short stories, and lost my eldest brother to cancer. These events left me feeling as if I am only now beginning to know who
Take a Peek Inside Our Wonderful World of Stories
Love Finds Us
When I or someone I love is going through something heavy, I look to Spiritbox’s album “Eternal Blue.” Its brutal but beautiful songs were a constant companion during the COVID-19 lockdowns…
Crossing the Great Divide in a Fast Car
At the Grammys, Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs came together for a performance of “Fast Car” and brought down the house. The improbability of them appearing together added to the impact.
Can we create community with each other?
With all the bitter divides in the U.S. and around the world, it’s hard to believe that human beings can create community with each other. But we can and we do…
Think That You Might Be Wrong
In 2010, recovering from a traumatic brain injury and traveling across the country with my wife, I was taken aback at seeing this handwritten sign on a telephone pole in New Orleans.
Happiness Is Not a Place
My mother died last summer. She was 91. This quote is from her book about a young girl happily living on a Kentucky farm with her extended family until poverty forces her and her parents
The Courage to Age
My mother frequently narrated her aging experience. She remarked about having “good days” and “bad days” and how there were fewer “good days” the older she became.
One Day You Will Look Back
This quote has helped me trust that a flower’s journey from seed to blooming is also true for me (and other people, too).
It’s easy to admire a flower and forget that it was once a…
Trying to be perfect kept me afraid
“Good, better, best. Never let it rest. Until your good is better and your better best.” As a first grader in catholic school, this is what the nuns said, nay sang to us….
True understanding is unattainable without both love and detachment
In the summer of 1980, I was responsible for a Kettering Foundation symposium in Woodstock, VT, that brought together scientists, theologians, psychologists, and others to explore the subject “Recovery of Wholeness.”
If You’re Ready (Come Go With Me)
Mavis Staples deep, rich voice carries me into a land where there’s “total communication” because of the love that’s present in all of us. Her voice surrounds my heart…
Epitaph for the Race of Man
I am 79, in need of repair, much like the rest of the country, and it seems to me that in the last twenty years the arc of history has definitely turned downward. The horrors…
List of Stories by Category
Sayings
Quotes
Songs
Poetry
Sayings
“Good, better, best. Never let it rest. Until your good is better and your better best.”
I see something in you that you don’t see in yourself.
— Mrs. Robinson
Quotes
One day you will look back and see that all along you were blooming
– Morgan Harper Nichols, All Along You Were Blooming
True understanding is unattainable without both love and detachment.
– Owen Barfield, History in English Words
Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.
— from “Unforgiven,” Clint Eastwood, dir.
Songs
Love is the only transportation / To where there’s total communication
— from If You’re Ready (Come Go With Me) sung by Mavis Staples and the Staple Singers and written by Homer Banks, Carl Hampton and Ray Jackson
If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.
— Charlie Parker from Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz As Told by the Men Who Made It by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff
Loving you is not a choice It’s who I am.
— from the song “Loving You” from the musical Passion, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
Poetry
And scull across his roof and make for shore, / With twisted face and pocket full of seeds.
— from “Epitaph for the Race of Man” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
But still, like dust, I rise.
— from “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou
Every day is a reenactment of the creation story.
— from “A Postcolonial Tale,” by Joy Harjo. This is both a poem and a song.
…you must Be the thing you see.
— from “To Look at Any Thing,” by John Moffett
Play the scene you’re in. / Shift the plot. Tell me / Where we can go together.
— from “In The Moment” by Lynn Ungar