an old writer and his words

  • AND CHARITY

    Faith, or is it hope, seems directly proportional to the need we have to believe in what some would call a miracle. In Hebrew the word for charity can also be translated justice. Faith, he says, is hope with a Godly intervention for hopes can easily go unfulfilled, but faith lingers, and isn’t given up…

    Lou Faber

  • TUNG SHAN’S NO COLD OR HEAT

    You say all you seek is moderation, simply finding a middle way, though nothing at all would suffice for you, no pleasure, no pain, no loss or gain, you would willingly attach to nothing at all. This is not the path the Buddha would tell you, for the place you claim to seek cannot ever…

    Lou Faber

  • WASH IN

    The morning paper said that a surprising number of Portuguese man o’ war washed up on the beach yesterday, bringing out the Dangerous Marine Life flags. The paper also featured stories on two fatal hit and runs, a person killed in an apparent drug deal gone bad and the opening of a redone highway exit…

    Lou Faber

  • LAKE SHORE LIMITED

    The little girl-women pile onto the train carrying backpacks, pillows and stuffed animals, all they will soon leave in the rooms of childhood. In the train’s café, Gerald welcomes us back his “established customers,” he says to all, as we sit beneath the wide awning that is his smile, sipping the much needed coffee.

    Lou Faber

  • KNOT WHAT YOU THINK

    “Trying to explain the Old Testament is like trying to untie a series of Gordian Knots.” He said that often, and few argued with him. Whether they did not argue because they agreed, or simply wanted to avoid his unwillingness to cease pushing until the other or others conceded whatever point he was making hardly…

    Lou Faber

  • BORDER

    He wants to know why we draw a distinction between dreams and what we like to call reality, as if the former is somehow less than real. We want to laugh at him, but we listen anyway. If all my senses end up in my mind then all that is real is real only in…

    Lou Faber

  • THOSE WHO CAN’T DO (OR TEACH)

    “You know,” she said, “it is the critics, they are the real problem, all holy and self-proclaimed arbiters of taste, deciding what is and is not art, as if God spoke late one night and declared to each one that he or she and only he or she would determine what is art.” I wanted…

    Lou Faber

  • BSOD U SOB

    The screen, a shade of blue you have come to hate, stares back at you defiantly. You expected something like this, though there is never good reason for it. You check your calendar and clear the next two days of all non-critical items. You adjust the chair carefully, for it will be your home for…

    Lou Faber

  • MORTALITY

    Before you wish for immortality carefully consider all the consequences. It’s true you will avoid the fires of hell and the lawyers and politicians who make up a surprising portion of the populace, but you’ll also never pass through the pearly gates, to languish in the esteemed company of poets and musicians who will, at…

    Lou Faber

  • NARA

    It was inside Nara that it finally slipped away. Its tether had grown ever weaker, the first slip was decades before, a book, brief meetings an answerless question. It stretched further in Tokyo, basin incense under the watchful third eye and hung perilously by fewer and fewer threads until, with the monks’ gentle bow, it…

    Lou Faber