Here’s where I ramble on about stuff I care about.
Every family tree has secrets, but sometimes it’s the family name that conceals the biggest secret of all.
As a kid I always thought Cumby was odd-sounding, a little embarrassing, and nothing like the Scotch-Irish names of the other white families in my small Southern town. MacDonald. Spencer. Kennedy. Those were regular names. Cumby sounded like a cartoon character. Its history was a mystery; if anyone knew its true origin, they had decided to keep it to themselves.
A hike through a California forest reveals a plain truth about America’s past—and her future.
I don’t notice it at first. The trail is a carpet of clover-like sorrel, trillium, fairy bells, and redwood orchids. The burbling of the creek, the shadows of forest and ravine, cool and inviting, fill my senses. But every hundred feet or so I experience an unsettling sensation, a gentle pull from the forest, like the gravitational tug of a great mass. Giants lurk in the shadows, hiding behind the dense scrub of undergrowth. Every so often through the leafy shade I glimpse a cliff of gray—large, much too large for my Eastern sensibilities. Something is out of scale. That can’t be a tree. Even here in the American West, where everything is big, trees don’t grow as big as mountainsides.
One of the most memorable places I ever stayed was a little guesthouse in Mek’ele, Ethiopia. It was December, 2019, right about the time a novel coronavirus was claiming its first victim at a fish market in Wuhan, and about a year before Mek’ele was overrun by rebel Ethiopian forces who brutally rounded up the young men of military age and executed them while gleefully filming the murders with their cell phones.
A dozen different shades of lichen spot its surface, along with a clump of yellow moss it wears like a haughty sailor’s cap. Strands of old barbed-wire stick out threateningly from several of the ancient staples. This thing looks like a fierce, grizzled old warrior, ready to stab me and send me to the hospital with a fatal case of tetanus.
The act of transferring thoughts from the insubstantial vapor of our minds onto the real and tangible surface of a whiteboard sets into motion a mysterious cosmic power.
Many years ago I had a friend and colleague named Doug who was smart, talented, courageous, and loyal. I once worked with him on an important consulting project for almost…
Jeanne and I were six months into a three-year around-the-world journey when we were both struck down by a mysterious illness. Self-quarantining in an AirBNB in Colombo, Sri Lanka, we…
Watching the not-so-peaceful transition of power here in the USA reminds me of our time in Arabia when the Sultan of Oman unexpectedly died. At the time of his death…
The boy eyes the window in the old brick tower, sees a glint of wholeness amidst surrounding shards. He has no knowledge of physics or geology or religion, but he knows the wonder of the day, the sunshine and the cool air pouring through the pines. The wonder of the perfectly sized rock in the ditch. The wonder of the last unbroken pane, all the way at the top.
The rock has realness, both smooth and jagged in his palm. It exists. It is quite obvious to the boy that every single instant of time stretching back to the moment of Creation has culminated in this rock. The tools of God—quantum forces, gravity, geologic processes spanning the ages—have conspired to create its perfect form, and place it here in the gravel road behind the cotton mill. All of history has occurred so that this rock might meet the last unbroken window and achieve its destiny.
Attending a writer’s conference is a wonderful way to connect with agents and editors, but pitching a novel in person can be a nerve-wracking experience. I recently attended two of the…
