A beautiful bit of interior space recently opened for me when I read a friend’s reaction to the death of Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche community. She posted the announcement and commented—A great loss for this side of eternity. That way of putting it washed over me with an exquisite tenderness. Ever so true…

Today is very beautiful—just as bright, just as blue, just as green and as white, and as crimson, as the cherry trees full in bloom, and the half opening peach blossoms, and the grass just waving, and sky and hill and cloud, can make it, if they try…You thought last Saturday beautiful—yet to this golden…

This morning before Mass, I stopped for a moment while walking along College Street, enroute to Victoria Park.  In and among cars, ambulances, and other urban groanings, the distinctly percussive Rubbee-dedubbeedee-dub….rubbee-dedubbeedee-dub.   There was a woodpecker somewhere nearby.  After winter’s dormancy, crocuses are stretching their blooms over by the cemetery and I understood why when I looked…

Someone asked me recently about my vision of heaven,,,and then I made soup… A Vision of Heaven or,  Help with the Dishes A jukebox stretchingfrom Handel to hip-hopin the corner of a kitchen;A dutch oven, a sharp chef blade;a cast iron skillet and a heavy bottomtwo quart pot with a lid.Counters for working:chopping, writing, thinking.A…

2 April, 2019 Dear Poet, Writer, Versifier, It can be slam, or a sonnet, or sometimes a hip-hop finesse, that is a quicksilver key slid into the slot and turned around the axis of a pen, freeing the pins and swinging the hasp so that the voice may breathe the life-verse that moves the universe…

Ahhh spring…fertile time for observers of creation. Among other dogs I’ve encountered over these last several days of longer walks under skies of broad blue, I have met Lupin, the greyhound, who loved being loved on and leaned right in for as much as she could get.  I also met a dog that absolutely galumphed…

World Poetry Day, 2019 A poem is outline and indication, possibility and shadow; Companion to the eye, the ear, and soul; enamoured of  the comma and ellipsis…because, within a reflective breath there is acreage enough for the loom  that weaves language into the whole cloth upon which this, the banquet of being laid out, becomes…

I was reading through tweets this morning and stopped for a longer while at the feed of a favourite:  @BrainPicker.  She, Maria Popova, had posted this delight: I shook my head knowingly.  Indeed, in so many ways, that level of clarity would be helpful—especially to someone who has regularly bumbled her way through social interactions for…

Let me begin by asking you to bear with me. This should all eventually connect… A long while ago I had decided that the students who would receive my fictional millions as scholarships would be those students who sometimes receive instead a sigh and a look to the distance, as if wondering how to characterize…

The other morning, I looked out from where I usually sit to have a mugfull of something comforting and wakening, and had an insight. Nothing outlandish, nothing any more existential or deep than the amber of my Assam that was steeping beside me…yet somehow still pleasantly buzzy within me because it had never come to…