Zephyr

When I was 14 or so, my father reclaimed a sailboat that had been left untended for years on a trailer under the trees near our house. The open…

The dangers of percolating

The art in percolation is knowing when to stop.

Witnessing the piety of Bishop Ansgar Nelson

On late days one summer, I would walk through the rich heat to the small chapel in the sacristy in the rear of the church, off the corridor that joined the monastery and the church together.

Finding adaptive technologies at the heart of the human soul

“At the moment when human beings cut themselves off from the consciousness of themselves as nature, all purposes for which they keep themselves alive — social progress, the heightening of material and intellectual forces…

Make your computer a typewriter

I’m a typewriter lover…have a five old portables of different vintage. My core typewriter — the one that brought my voice out when I was young and stood by me while I struggled to become a writer — was a Smith Corona Clipper portable.

Last year I worked my way through a…

A sense of humanness?

Try to describe something that you have witnessed. Supply only spare details and be brief. Try to tell an experience that caught you in an instance, that was outside of the normal flow of a day because of some quality that was especially human.

Notebooks

Over the past two years, I’ve worked my way out of a 20-year writer’s block. Or, less dramatically, I started writing regularly again after a 20-year hiatus.

Through this process, I’ve had to watch out for patterns of thought and activity that would take me back to the place where I…

The Wind

I came home last night in a huge windstorm. The gusts we blowing from the west. as my plane dropped down into White Plains, the wind caught the pockets under its wings and batted at its nose like a wrestler trying to grab hold and slam it into the ground.