Located between Sedona and the Village of Oak Creek is one of the region’s manmade (and woman-designed!) wonders: The Chapel of the Holy Cross.
Out on the beach today, I saw an old guy sitting in a wheelchair, staring out at the surging ocean. The waves off Daytona Beach were crashing loudly just 50 feet out, but by the time they reached the wheels of his chair they were just harmless bubbles and foam. He sat there for some [...]
The point is this: We don’t really own the land. We are given the blessing of calling bits and pieces of it “home” for a while, but it belongs to the creator and to the lives of all who have touched it and worked it and walked it over the years.
As a writer, I am reminded of something I once heard the late Frank McCourt say at a lecture about writing “Angela’s Ashes”: “Nothing is significant until you make it significant.”
Have you experienced moments where that sense of a “ghost” has haunted your mind, your experiences, your feelings of “I am not alone here?” Have you ever tied those moments to real or imagined ancestors? Or to those who lived in your house, worshipped in your church, walked down your street?
So that’s my challenge to myself this lent – to come before God in prayer more often than I do now, and to present myself in that divine presence in a way that recognizes that God knows me better than I know myself anyway. No games, no baggage, no excuses, no masks. Just me, naked on the stage before him like a 300-year-old cello that cannot speak for itself but can only respond by vibrating to the working of the master’s hand.
We all have our ideas of how the world came into being. I liked to think God was having a good time when that first light was cast…
[an occasional series of essays about life, spirit, and the music that makes up the soundtrack of my life]
Bright eyes, burning like fire.
Bright eyes, how can you close and fail?
How can the light that burned so brightly
Suddenly burn so pale?
Bright eyes.
–Mike Batt, recorded by Art Garfunkel
Not long ago on an oldies station, I [...]
As a writer and songwriter, I can tell my stories and hope and trust that someone will see a grain of truth in them–a semblance of something real that maybe they have felt themselves.
In this blog, I will be writing about those ideas and memories and sparks of creativity that come to me in a flash and also the kind that brew and percolate inside me for months at a time. When I teach writing occasionally I tell my students to remember that they should always be writing, even when they are not physically typing or writing. Writing is a full-time job. I’ll be writing, in one way or another, about two things that are most important to me and drive my life and everything in it: creativity and spirituality.