an old writer and his words

  • STARING

    She stares at you, unwavering. You find this strange, wanting to see something more in her looks, but you get nothing from her, as you have gotten nothing from so many others before her. You know men are as capable of such stares as she, but you don’t tend to see them, your own gender…

    Lou Faber

  • APPROACHING WINTER

    We are in the season of stasis where nothing wants to move and nothing should shed the mantle of snow that has announced winter’s arrival in terms we full understand, as do the finches clinging to the feeder casting nervous glances skyward. The neighbor’s cat has decided that the remote chance of catching a bird…

    Lou Faber

  • ALOFT

    As a child I often flew kites, which is to say that I ran haphazardly pulling a string and dragging a wood frames paper rhombus across the park. My father laughed until seeing me on the edge of tears he took up the string and dragged the kite across the park. One day a strong…

    Lou Faber

  • THOU SHALT NOT

    “I don’t want to” is hardly a sagacious way to run a country and “just because” probably didn’t work when you were a child, why would you think adults would accept it now? And when we all expressed our displeasure, disdain and contempt, which part of “no” did you have trouble grasping, Mr. President? The…

    Lou Faber

  • ANCESTORS

    He clearly remembers standing on the edge peering down into the almost bottomless canyon, listening to the narrow river slide across the rocks thrown down by its walls over millennia. He was a visitor here, knew he would stay only briefly, then leave, his spirit hiding among the rocks in the nearby mountains, staring down…

    Lou Faber

  • MOMENT

    If you are patient and do not look for it, there is a still moment in each day when nothing at all happens, when the silence without demands a silence within, when thoughts evaporate like the mist of an early morning dew, when you have precisely enough and cannot imagine needing more, when where you…

    Lou Faber

  • BODHIDHARMA’S VAST EMPTINESS

    If you go walking one day and meet a person you think may be the Buddha, ask him what is the heart of all of the sutras. If he answers you with Dharma will you be certain this person is not the Buddha? If, on the other hand, he says nothing at all, and merely…

    Lou Faber

  • GODS ONCE

    The once gods have been reduced again to mere mortals and find the change disquieting. Just the other day I saw Hermes meandering along Fifth Avenue pausing to look at scarves in a window of a store he never imagined. Even the once great queen finds herself behaving like a love-struck teenager. One who bred…

    Lou Faber

  • A SHORT LONG LINE

    There is a statue of William Penn atop the city hall in Philadelphia seeming to stare down over the city with bronze eyes incapable of seeing. Hagar wandered the wilderness after she was evicted by Abraham at Sarah’s urging, the price of jealousy, with bread and water and the promise of a great nation. It…

    Lou Faber

  • APPROACHING WINTER

    The temperature falls, slowly at first but gaining speed, as though in the grip of winter’s gravity. Winter has the potential to be a black hole season into which we enter and imagine we will never reemerge into spring. The wind whispers stories to us of a time when this was all ice when no…

    Lou Faber