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…
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,…
For Nat, beginning School Ride the wind with me. To ride the wind – in any form – to fly a kite, loft a balloon in the gloaming, hear the snap of a sail, or glide on feckless membranes over a salt white deathful-playful roil – to be grasped by the wind is…
The Macquarie University train station took my breath away the first time I slipped below the surface of Herring Road: the long gliding descent into a cavern shaped like a monster’s egg laid in the crust of a world—vanished leaving only its negative space. I was entranced. But,…
There is a dead rosemary growing out of the Cafe table, dried silvery and leaning. It’s a victim of the vogue for indoor greening. Planted in a corner, where it is too sheltered. Rosemary is a full-sun kind of plant and its paused form is expressive of this love.…
There is a man making bubbles by the Archibald fountain in the park — a street entertainer drawn here by the crowds. In this place at the northern end of the park all the pathways converge and the sound of water announces the confluence, a pedestrian eddy of suits, tourists, joggers,…
Leaves don’t fall. Not in any straightforward sense. You really get a sense of this if you watch widely, unfocus that point in the centre of your looking and gaze from the sides of your eyes. Delight your peripheral vision. Wait for the great exhalation to pass over an…