an old writer and his words

  • DIFFERENT TODAY

    The air we breathe is different today,and we inhale more deeplywith the energy of our youth. The tears we cry today are notsolely tears of loss and sorrow,but also of promise and hope. The wine that we drink todaywill be the same as before, butnow sweeter on the tongue. The sleep that we sleep tonightwill…

    Lou Faber

  • UMMON’S THREE DAYS 鐵笛倒吹 六十八

    What were you doingthree days agoand what will you dothree days from now.Are you the same person nowas you were, will be? While your face in the mirrorKoanseems much the sameeach day you die a biteach day you are reborn.A thousand daysa thousand yearsa passing moment,how do they differ? A reflection on Case 68 of…

    Lou Faber

  • FINITE LOOP

    As it turns out, lifeis an ongoing process of accretionand deconstruction, of growthand eventual shrinkage. I started with 20 teethI am told, and got to 32,only to fall back to 23thanks to orthodontia and wear. We start with 270 or morebones, but we knit that numberdown to 206, or in my case under200, the orthopaedist’s…

    Lou Faber

  • A MOMENT

    He would be the first to admitthat he hated most things avant-gardeparticularly when it appliedto either art or music.It was simply a matter of beingin the moment, and he knewyou could not be ahead of timefor there was only the momentin which you were in.

    Lou Faber

  • BARGING IN

    It would help, she said, if you would stop imagining your life as a barge moving slowly down the Mississippi River, one in an endless procession, following like so many lemmings looking without hope of finding a cliff. Yes, she adds, from time to time one may break free, it happens but you have to…

    Lou Faber

  • KEEPING FOCUS

    It is of little surprise that we find this a dizzying world, for we always try to look forward, but since the future is often vague, we try and keep one eye on the past to understand what our other eye is poorly seeing. The mind does not care to be pulled in two directions…

    Lou Faber

  • THE SON

    He hangs on the guest room wall, simply framed in black, adjoining his more ornate, Cheshire- cat smiling sister. He isn’t brooding really, there is just a certain needful sadness, as he stares out, imagining how he pictured things would be, how they were supposed to be, realizing here, they never were, never will be,…

    Lou Faber

  • MUSHOTOKU

    We spend far too much time clinging to what was as the flames fade, and far too little time feeding the fire and grasping what could be.

    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

  • THE FUTURE’S PAST, PRESENTLY

    Before the after now is present. It was never like this before it will not be again anytime soon for there is no time soon that has yet to be or just gone by. After the before we find ourselves here and now.

    Lou Faber