The Winding Cloth
The electronic revolution increasingly knits us all on planet Earth into a common consciousness, a common memory. It also makes possible an increasing degree of empathy across the barriers of race, class, language, geography, and religion. We suffer together even as we hope together. As the horrific death of over a thousand people in the [...]
Mountains, Men, Mines and Minerals
We have just returned from six weeks in the Western Cape of South Africa and ten days exploring central Namibia, its neighbor to the north. While it is the people in all their rich diversity and turmoil that has brought me back repeatedly over the past fifteen years, this time it is the mountains, the [...]
Titanic Revelations
Sometimes we don’t know where certain messages come from as we muse, fingering some words to give our intuitions substance. I think this poem comes from the haunting reverberations of the Newtown massacre, but also the dim sense that the nation may have been shocked a little out of its worship of the Great God [...]
Moving Midway: Toward Reconciliation
We recently saw an arresting documentary film entitled “Moving Midway,” a story about saving an old North Carolina plantation house and discovering the family histories behind it. Midway was a plantation founded near Raleigh in the 1840s. The old house and outbuildings (not as pictured in Gone with the Wind, by the way) were now [...]
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wood upon a lathe, these poems are word-turnings that reveal the inner grain of our human experience. They are bowls to catch our turnings of memory, conversion, falling in love, and passing through our seasons and the wrenching turns that mark our lives. Above all these turnings are a shout of praise, a murmur of wonder, a turning away from life as usual, a merciful re-turning to the songs, images and stories that move our lives.
Red Clay, Blood River