The Moment After the Blow
Preface In 1885, the Russian painter Ilya Repin created one of the most unsettling images in art history: Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on November 16, 1581.
The Mocking of Christ
" The Mocking of Christ " by Carl Bloch, ca. 1880 (Christ's) penetrating look breaks the fourth wall, turning us from observers into participants, forcing a confrontation with the suffering we witness. - Author Unknown I stop because something in the room has already noticed me. Not the guards. Not the crown. Him.
Sting-Rays and Summer Nights - 1974
Elmira, 1974 I was ten, and we were halfway up the hill before I knew we shouldn’t be. Mama laughing in the wind, “ Just a little farther ,” she said.
3:13 a.m.
At 3:13 a.m. the night sharpens. Even the dark feels awake. The house holds its breath.
On Almost Beginning
One sits and reads, and the hours pass, and this passing seems not loss but a kind of staying. - adapted from Virginia Woolf’s notebooks The library was not a building but a condition sustained by attention.
And...
And is the word I use when the truth won’t fit cleanly. Family and friends. I needed both. I still do.
Prayer for 2026
Let us pray first for steadiness - not triumph, not ease, but the ability to stay when the ground feels thin.
October in Stockbridge
A New England reflection We came where Berkshire whispers dwell, To walk the streets where silence fell On painted doors and windowpanes, Where autumn’s breath through white walls strains.
The Stone I Took
I was driving somewhere, past the part of Massachusetts where maps just get tired and give up - Otis, maybe, or a town pretending to be Otis because it liked the sound of the name.
The Bench Under the Apple Tree
We made a bench one smoky day When clouds hung low and woodsmoke stayed, To sit beneath the apple tree Out front, at Boulevard and Street.
At Authors’ Ridge - 2024
For The Steady One We came not just to walk, but remember... Past Concord’s hush, past pine and ember - Where word and wind and granite sleep, And roots hold secrets buried deep. No fanfare marked the path we chose - Just lichen bloom on aging rows, And leaves like letters overhead That whispered names we’d long since read.
First Kings of Elmira - 1975
In the summer of 1975, the grass along Eldridge Park field ‘neath the old wooden roller coaster was patchy, tall in places, thin in others - but to us, it was emerald, endless, a kingdom under the slow, benevolent sun.
That One Bottle — 1989
A Memory in Sweat and Grace In Nuremberg, summer pressed its full weight down - thick as iron, bright as judgment - onto a rugby pitch ringed by trees too wise to move.
Kahu
Before the first bark split the quiet, before small paws stitched themselves into the rhythm of the house, I didn’t know what I was becoming, only that something in me kept listening toward the door. They called it Kahu. I didn’t ask what it meant. Then Bruegger arrived, all noise and momentum, ears too big for his head, feet that never seemed to land in the same place twice. He didn’t enter the house, he broke into it. Skidded across floors, claimed corners, dragged the outside in with him; mud, leaves, whatever the world offered. My ch…
Mountainish Inhumanity
...would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper, that, breaking out in hideous violence, would not afford you an abode on earth,...what would you think to be thus used? this is the strangers case; And this
What the Hands Carry
Be not solicitous for the shadow of a great name, nor for acquaintance with many… (Imitation of Christ III,24)
Unflappable
Before the sun lifted its face from the river, I was already awake, listening to the day breathe - the low cough of trucks on the road, a bird testing one clear note, my own bones answering the cold. There are mornings when the world expects panic. I give it attention instead.
