Life
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Wendell Berry never ceases to amaze me. Here, I am reminded of the hours my father spent behind one of those old clunky VHS camcorders of the late 1980s. Rather than taking part in our family vacations, he served as video historian and ended up watching us and everything we experienced through a small lens,…
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Autumn has always been my favorite season. Perhaps my birthday coming shortly after the autumnal equinox has biased me in favor of this rich time of harvest and change, but as I meditated on turning forty-six and my desire to live to be one hundred years old, the following sonnet emerged. I struggled to capture…
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Summer draws to a close, a new week begins, and I return to the deepening ground of Mary Oliver’s poetry. Hear the invitation to spend our lives “on some / unstinting happiness,” but not according to the world’s definition. Rather, the simple overlooked gifts that poets like Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry capture so beautifully.…
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Reading Andrew Klavan’s The Truth and Beauty stirred up the embers of my Romantic poetry fires. Most importantly, it led to a deeper appreciation for the poetry of John Keats. I have loved his most famous works for years including “Bright Star” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” but I came upon these two wonderful…
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July draws to a close, a month bookended by two key celebrations: the birth of America and the birth of my marriage! Between those two memorial stones falls a variety of family trips, community gatherings, and musical gigs that encompass a typical summer with August’s shadow looming. School is just around the corner. Time to…
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It’s not Wolf Creek, but it will have to do. If I could have had a decent camera with me a few Sundays ago as I floated down the creek that borders our property, staring up into the cerulean sky with only a few cumulus clouds floating by, then I could have captured the exact…
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The academic year winds down, and all the responsibilities and tasks that come with it come crashing in like a tsunami. At the same time, gigs are picking up and I’m readying myself to serve as an AP reader in early June. In the midst of this, I tweaked my neck and it’s taken multiple…
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As I sat in bed last night, debating between Marilynne Robinson’s Home, Andrew Klavan’s The Truth and Beauty, or Mary Oliver’s Devotions, I eventually settled on Oliver’s collection of poems. Sleep would be coming quick, so a poem or two felt like a safe bet, especially when Robinson’s novel doesn’t include any chapter breaks (sheer…
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For one final celebration of National Poetry Month, I’ll dip back into my collection of Photo of the Day poems drawn from The Guardian website back in 2019. Three years ago, in the final week of April, the following two images appeared and inspired these poetic responses. The stark contrast between these images needs to…
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If you’ve followed my blog for the past two years, you will be familiar with Wendell Berry. His Mad Farmer poems have brought such life to my soul (these two years especially). So it’s somewhat surprising that I haven’t posted one of his poems until today during National Poetry Month. However, as I flipped through…
the deepening ground 