an old writer and his words

  • MUSEUMS NO MORE

    Travel guides always wantto send me to museums of art,of history, of culture, of science.I appreciate their guidance but Iwould prefer to spend my timevisiting zoos, looking at animalsand ignoring the placardspainfully detailing what I am seeing.I have been to countlessmuseums and while each offeredbeauty and knowledge, eachdemanded that I needed to learn,to interpret, to…

    Lou Faber

  • ONLY ONE WORLD

    Everyone wants to go back tothe “I wish it were like this world,”one that never existed, couldn’twith each of those worlds beingunique and unlike every otherand even if it were possibleonly one person would gettheir wish fulfilled leavingthe rest of us in a placethat we can never fully imagine,So knowing they cannot go there,they want…

    Lou Faber

  • FETCH

    I think I stopped going to partiesbecause I grew tired of hearing howso many other’s lives had gone to hell,how they hated their jobs, and a fewhated their significant others and hopedto make them insignificant othersif they could ever get the courageto leave or ship them out, butmaybe it was just because Istopped getting invited…

    Lou Faber

  • LOOKING IN

    You are standing on the edgepeering in, wondering ifit is always this way, alwaysundulating between sheer joyand frustration, swept upin the calm and maelstromthat is a large family, wishingyou had that family for yours.There is always great love,and you can sense that, butthere is a tension, a frictionof personalities rubbing againsteach other, building a heatthat…

    Lou Faber

  • A MOMENT

    A night of broken dreams,a day of trembling handsminutes of knocking kneeswearing a path into an alreadyaging and worn wooden deck.A moment of sight,a moment when time stoppedand words failed, paralyzedby fear, by beauty, by a smile.A meal prattling on, tryingto see signs, not knowing whatthose signs might be.Twenty-three years of a joyI hadn’t known…

    Lou Faber

  • INSTAHELL OR METAHELL?

    Some might call us linguistic sadistsand it would be difficult to argue that point.We take a perverse joy in torturing language,as though trying to make it agree with whatwe imagine it should do in our delusional world.And I am willing (and quite able) to lay someof the blame on social media, that baneof modern existence…

    Lou Faber

  • PHOTOGRAPHER

    Photographers we know are struggling,the wedding business has dried up, dessicatedby the years of the pandemic, the tighteningof matrimonial cost belts, no doubt other reasons.Wedding photography is hard on both the coupleand those with fingers on the shutter button.I cannot remember by first wedding, the marriageitself thankfully fading as well with the freedomof time, the…

    Lou Faber

  • AT THE TEMPLE

    He stood stilljust outside the Buddha Hallhis back to the altar lookingat the great bell, watchingthe young robed monk approach.He knew what was coming,steeled himself for the momentas the monk walked into the shoro,pulled back on the suspended log,waited for that one instantwhen the log would strike the bell,the moment of atari, and he smiledknowing…

    Lou Faber

  • HAGAR’S SON

    Did you so fear being Hagarthat you deemed me Esau, stolemy birthright, my name, my pastand cast me off into a wilderness?I knew nothing of this, your secrettaken with you to the grave as you wished.Did you consider that I might beIshmael, never knowing my father,adopted into a culture that wouldnever be mine, a child…

    Lou Faber

  • BONUS CHRISTMAS POST: THE PEACEABLE KINGDOM

    They are meeting for the first time. Neither anticipated this meeting, but neither has shied away from it. They come from two different worlds and yet they seem to fascinate each other. Neither care is that we are watching  them for in this moment, in this place, this is their world. And mere feet apart,…

    Lou Faber