Select Page

Be Quiet

These days, finding silence is both difficult and necessary. It’s hard enough to find external silence. Even in the early morning hours, I hear the low hum of appliances, the whirring of fans, the on-again, off-again cycle of the HVAC unit, and the faint sounds...

Healthcare and Just-Love

Maybe you remember the desperate and destitute sharecropper in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath who was being evicted from farming the land by its owners who had to return it to the bank.  The “owner men,” as Steinbeck called them,.  . . were all...

Treasures New and Old

Jesus once said: “Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Matthew 13:52).  A householder managed a large estate on behalf of its wealthy owners:...

A Conversation on Art And Spirituality

This afternoon, I had the joy to be part of a conversation occasioned by the visit of choreographer Ronald K. Brown who is the artistic director of Evidence Dance Company (scheduled to perform in Asheville on November 10-11 at the Diana Wortham Theater).  Diana...

Little Control, Much Love

This past Monday was the somber 16th anniversary of the 9/11/2001 terror attacks: a plane went down in a Pennsylvania field, another plowed into the side of the Pentagon, and two became passenger-bearing bombs which brought down the Twin Towers of the World Trade...

A Brief Reminder to “Look for the Helpers”

The images of devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey have been stunning and overwhelming: whole cities and towns under water; highways turned to rivers; thousands driven from their homes, and hope nearly drowning in despair. It will take years and billions of dollars...

I am not Innocent and I Cannot be Silent

Both sides in Charlottesville last weekend were not the same. To claim, as the President of the United States did, that the neo-Nazis, Klansmen, alt-righters, and ethno-nationalists—clad in body armor, carrying torches, wearing swastikas, bearing Confederate Battle...

It’s All Gift

Last week, I took a few days to be alone, hike, read, and reflect. My heart had become a clamorous echo chamber; I needed quiet solitude and the sweet music of wind in the trees, water flowing and falling over rocks, the rumble of an occasional thunderstorm, and...

Making an Idol of Trauma?

Cancer has changed—is changing—me in, I imagine, the ways that a variety of life-limiting, life-diminishing, and life-threatening experiences change other people.When, 3½ years ago, my oncologist confirmed that I have Multiple Myeloma (MM), I began a relationship with...

The Music’s Got to Come Out

“Many people die with their music still in them.” I first heard that phrase more than forty years ago from one of my teachers. It registered with me as profoundly true. I haven’t always played my music.I’ve had stretches of time in which I played other...