My 100 Words a day for March muses in a rambling, fragmented sort of way on the non-existence (or existence) of the spirit.

How can I write, with a new universe erupting beside my head? Maybe not a universe, just an unexpected Amaryllis.

Mom gave me the bulb for Christmas in 2007. All winter while she died, it erupted. After it bloomed I didn’t know what to do. Mom used to set her Amaryllis pots in a shady part of the garden for the summer and next winter they would ( Read more... )

Ursula Le Guin reasserts herself as my favourite writer, this strikes so close to my personal credo. Here she reviews a Salman Rushdie novel in The Guardian:Some boast that science has ousted the incomprehensible; others cry that science has driven magic out of the world and plead for “re-enchantment”. But it’s clear that Charles Darwin lived in as ( Read more... )

Mother on the phone, with the immediacy of mortality, says she grows less and less religious. All the teachings of the world offer good lessons, but she hasn't heard any description of heaven that she likes. Funny how our beliefs have converged, Mom and I: no interminable praise sessions with noisy angel choirs for us, no divine egomaniacs, thank ( Read more... )

Some people die despising. I wonder if their universe gets narrower and narrower until it crushes them. If there is an afterlife, it is the space between the vice grips of what you believe. In the moment when lightning strikes and the life force flickers off and on, then off again, your imagination overtakes eternity.

I posted some writing to free_write.

A ( Read more... )

Once in a while a certain image takes residence for a season in my mind. It is always a real image, a place and time, but evolves gradually into a metaphor. Frequently these images come while I'm driving, perhaps because that's one of the few times I'm naked and alone with my thoughts, not distracted by things I give myself to do.

The most recent ( Read more... )

We talk about time management as if it could be managed. Really we can only manage ourselves. Time does what it wants, always the same thing: an inexorable drama drawing us into vortices of life, love and death. Moons and planets revolve. Great lights flicker. People respond like automatons, repeating the same movements over and over. Or they break ( Read more... )

I am a religious man. These days I rise before 8, make coffee and sit at the morning desk, notebook open, facing the light to ward off shreds of despair, gold weight of sun falling across paper and skin. I write. Writing is my religion, or god, if you will. I depend on it the way others depend on a higher power: for balance, insight, sanity, ( Read more... )

One of the difficulties with atheism is it draws one to the conclusion life is essentially meaningless. To suggest we're a cosmic accident is too extreme; in infinite time universes as complex as ours will likely arise based on natural laws. But those laws offer little moral guidance, besides how hard to hit the ground when we fall.

Evolutionary ( Read more... )

Driving into more and more distances, the long, winding highway glitters under passing chariots. It leads to countless doors: blue ones on quiet streets, red ones on stone houses, a thousand sidewalks approaching the park with a fragrant rose at every corner.

At any opportunity one of these drivers could stop paying attention. When I felt the smack ( Read more... )