Today I took a day off work and went walking. I teach the opening two weeks for each new cohort of fellows at LMI. I always emerge from these weeks feeling emotionally raw. Teaching stretches me between an agony of inadequacy that I can't convey the beauty, scope, and effect…
A pigeon bobs between the table legs with a shawl about its neck like oil while dogs gaze with an entirety of purpose, the sharp lines of their bodies—noses, ears—converging on a human, its figure or absence. Looking at the doorway of the cafe where the owner has…
For Evie When you see what I have seen And see it better When you love what I love, and better, Then let my hand slip from yours Do not grasp And let me fall behind you on the strand And pass Let me see one last thing you have…
Sometimes in a fallen world you're presented with moral choices that have no clean solutions. You have to walk the path but you can't avoid a brush with tragedy. It's a grief that a Christian leader needs to know how to accept. Without a category for lament in your worship,…
An encounter between our hero and a stranger on a hilltop. An observatory, the creaking sounds of telescopes moving in the dark, the white domes the only things visible in the pine forest. Creeping in along the road past the locked gate, no cars allowed – light pollution. The door-keeper to…
For Nat, in his 9th year. Follow Rossi Street to its terminus and you’ll find an unexpected fold in the land. It marks one possible end of the town of Yass. A geological circumstance—a fault—swallows the river and on either side the lolloping hills of the Southern…
Before the day starts, in the small hours when waking means lying awake, you came to me with a pain in your leg. The pain of growing. Your bones and ligaments, muscles adjusting to each other. A dull aching that never achieves sharpness but whose intensity—lying awake—rises and…
for Nat, turning seven The tacit knowledge of a stride begins in the thigh, the four muscles of the quadriceps gathering, calling to the bend of the knee, tendons tightening, outstretching the calf, the ankle stiffening to encounter the unknown, fine bones of the foot splaying as they receive the…