• AMONG ELDERS

    I sit outside, on the mesa having watched the mauve, fuchsia and coral sky finally concede to night. The two orange orbs sit twenty yards away, staring back and in this moment coyote and I have known each other for moments, and for generations, and we are content. Coyote tells me he was once an…


  • USER’S MANUAL

    In my dreams last night I thought I came across the Buddha while off wandering somewhere I could not recognize. I thought long and hard about following Linji’s proscription and killing the Buddha, but while lost in contemplation the Buddha took up his keisaku, said “if you cannot follow the simplest of directions, if you…


  • DREAMS

    Dreams are a place where the dead are free to walk about, where they speak in voices barely recalled, but which seem so familiar to the ear. They are willing to engage you in conversations left unfinished, you are always surprised at what they have to say, at how it is not at all what…


  • THE FACT OF ADOPTION

    The fado fades under the weight of the Highland pipes and dreams of Cascais fade into the Scottish sky. Where once I thought of wandering Lisbon looking for my face, I imagine I see it in the Grampians, reflected off the lochs whose headwaters now feed my dreams. One joy of being adopted is that…


  • CELESTIAL HARMONY

    The summer sky barely pauses to consider what might be going on beneath it. Everything seems to move, there can be no stillness. Once in the rarest of whiles, the sky and the river align, and each is frozen in a stasis that defies understanding or categorization. The stars realize this and shine a moment…


  • ON WRITING

      All too often it is just a matter of tossing words into the air and wondering where, or even if, they land, and if they do, what we will find when they finally settle on the paper.


  • A LIFE, LIVED

    The moon, a warm summer night, two ducks, a pond, utter stillness, a mirror weeping, deep purple velvet, a feather racing a leaf across the morning sky, a door swinging, a gate without hinges.


  • SLIPPING AWAY

    Each day I am certain something more slips away, forgotten, no longer able to be recalled, lost in the vast abyss of yesterdays. I would like to think this happens because something new, something better has taken its place, and I had no choice but to displace it. That is the convenient story I tell…


  • AN ALIEN(‘S) JOURNEY

    He has just returned from the land of Others, where he expected to see all manner of things that would, could never happened to him. He thought he would be able to explain why this was, but now those things are happening to him. He suspects it is because he came to close to the…


  • TAI YRA MANO MOTINA (THIS IS MY MOTHER)

    It’s odd how your stature has grown as I dream of you occasionally staring at your yearbook picture. It was only four years ago that I knew you existed, but hadn’t the faintest idea of who you were, anything about your life, why you gave me up, and, therefore who it was I might have…