poems
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Finally! After a long hiatus spent tending the various fields of my life, I’ve found my way back to the deepening ground. So much was going on here over the last fortnight, including closing out a marking period at school and multiple birthdays, that it left me little time to just still myself enough (and
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A few years back, the start of my school year was interrupted by jury duty. Rather than welcoming students back to the study of Advanced Placement English or British Literature after another seemingly-too-short summer (I know, I shouldn’t complain), I spent my days weighing the evidence in a civil court case. In all, I only
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Last week a freight train stalled my usual morning commute. Of course, in the vast scheme of things, the few minutes I spent waiting at the crossing were nothing. But coupled with two other events over the past week, I found myself asking the question that I’ve used as the title of this post: am
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For purists, you’ll never actually find the statement, “Elementary, my dear Watson!” in any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s sixty Sherlock Holmes stories. As I read on multiple sites today, Holmes uses both phrases separately in the stories, but never together in this way. An interesting fact, but what has that to do with a
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In the beginning…there was a blank page. Sitting down to prepare Friday’s devotion for the speech and debate league our family has been involved with for nearly a decade, my first thoughts drifted back to those beautiful words in Genesis 1:1 – “בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים” (In the beginning, God created). In verse two, we read,
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Today, as I was sharing about my week while sitting in the Observatory with good friends, one of them leaned over to her husband and whispered something to him while looking out the windows behind me. I figured one of the squirrels caught her attention, hanging upside down (as they often do) on the side
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Usually, I put a hard stop on the day around lunchtime to just read or pray. It’s become a regular part of my deepening. This Thursday, I shut the door to my room and turned to face the windows overlooking the courtyard. The snow lazily fell from the sky until stirred to life again by
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If I recall correctly, this poem sprouted from five word-seeds, including immutably, ineluctable, and ostensibly. I love the sound and weight of these words. On one hand, we’re told by writing “experts” to avoid overusing adverbs, but used fittingly (cough, cough), they add flavor, like any good seasoning, to the main course of the poem
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January 1st has historically been a time for reevaluating one’s life and planning for the future with greater purpose and resolution. It’s that bridge suspended between years (although it begins the new year), linking the past and the future in a fleeting present. For me, it has become a reminder of loss and the fragility
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Last week I willingly missed a moment. I neglected the divine intrusion for a bowl of gruel (not literally – just a bowl of Panda Puffs cereal) before heading up to my bedroom to teach English all day. I slept in, forgetting that I would have to dig out from the snow – most importantly,
the deepening ground 