A passage from The Madonna Secret

And my own body felt more alive than it ever had, as if the woman's long-nailed finger had reached into my chest and kindled the flame in my heart. I could hear every sound around me again, painfully. I swallowed, tasting each particular smell. Human piss. Dirty wool. The sweat of a person about to die. Gummy and blue, like rainwater caught in a stone's cleft. Bird droppings. Balsam perfume. Galbanum incense. The dense, moist center of yeasty bread.

- Sophie Strand, The Madonna Secret

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"It’s tempting to hide in small rooms built from quick answers."

". . . it’s not always easy to be comfortable in the space created by open questions. Agoraphobia can set in. It’s tempting to hide in small rooms built from quick answers." I am prompted to write by this metaphor. Agoraphobia can be disabling. The limitation of movement. Consensus agrees this is generally considered a negative. However, we humans crave quick and uncomplicated answers. We seek the comfort of black and white, the solace of definitive solutions. We want them now. The quick and easy answers generally considered a positive. Yet, life rarely offers such neatly packaged resolutions. Instead, it throws us curveballs, presents us with riddles wrapped in enigmas, and leaves us standing amidst a kaleidoscope of uncertainties. Life gives us unsolvable conundrums. Sheldrake suggests that the easy answers may be disabling to us. Limiting. To be true, we are afraid of getting lost in its infinite possibilities. But what if we embraced the discomfor...

Making a spiral (1 of 2)

You're sitting on your back deck. It's mid-morning in late Spring. You have your coffee in hand and the local paper on your lap. You're looking out over the back 40. You decided not to plant corn on this parcel to let the soil recuperate a bit. There's an article in the paper about a farmer who lives not too far from you who swears he saw a UFO. You don't think so. But to prove to yourself you're open-minded, you get the idea to make some kind of design on your parcel that would signal to a UFO that there is semi-intelligent life down here. You look up how to make a spiral. You decide that an Archimedean spiral (named after the 3rd-century BC Greek mathematician Archimedes) will suffice. You are going to make something that looks like this: You figure 800 footsteps will do. You grab a stake, measuring tape, and a pair of snow shoes. You pound the stake and start walking in a circle, letting out the measuring tape a little at a time. It takes you less than 20 ...

Dear Diary

I'm reading Brian Eno's diary, which is just a day by day journal of one year in his life. In it somewhere he lists his idea of some of the things he is, in the form of I am... and then each of the things he considers himself to be are either a or an. So "I am creative" wouldn't work, but "I am a music producer" would. I quickly closed the book before I read his list and began writing my own, which I may or may not share here. But I wanted you guys to think about creating your own list and think about sharing it here. Maybe I'm an optimist to think you might be interested in doing so, but really it might be fun. There might even be some overlap! And don't worry, it seems only two other people would be reading your list.

Reading, Writing, & Arithmetic Club

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