Life
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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…
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When I first saw this photograph posted by Vova Zinger on his website back on February 10, 2022, I knew there was a poem waiting to be found. At the time, I didn’t exactly know where to go with it, but I knew it was there, lurking just beneath the surface of those rippled waters.…
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C. S. Lewis once addressed the topic of whether one should continue learning in the midst of troubled times in his sermon “Learning in War-Time” given at St. Mary the Virgin Church, Oxford, on Sunday, October 22, 1939. He would argue that, yes, we must continue to learn in spite of, or, perhaps, even because…
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Sitting down to breakfast early on February 18th, God served up a fresh poem just outside my windows. Wolf Creek had leapt its bounds and was slowly creeping up the lawn as a result of the hard rains and melting snows of multiple weeks. In the midst of attending my sons’ basketball tournaments, filing taxes,…
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Returning to The Guardian photo of the day poems I penned three years ago, I found the play on Aesop’s “The Hare and the Tortoise” a fitting theme for tonight’s post. Like the classic fable, there is a moral to be found in each poem. Yet unlike that beloved tale, the hart (or deer) and…
