Years ago, a neighbor came to my door fighting mad.  My kids were playing out back, and they were screaming and hollering and having a great time.  That wasn’t the source of Pete’s complaint.  He was angry that our dachshund Brandy was jumping around and barking at all their antics.  He wanted the b...

Flooded with angled sunlight
and the nearest highway’s white noise,

the stones line the riverbed,
tumbled down by torrents that have traveled on

and left them high and dry.  Distant houses dot
the mountain base, infiltrating the wilderness

with green lawns and desert planting--
faux reproductions ...

Every person’s life has dark corners and slashes of light… a realization that has made me reticent to talk about “sin” in any context other than my own.  Every self-destructive behavior that alienates us from another, every carping criticism leveled at a group or individual, could be called sin. 

S...

It’s that time of year again; I’ve been considering what to give up for Lent.  Giving up chocolate seems too easy and self-serving.  My chocolate cravings would abate after a few days, and I would no longer experience its loss as a prompt to pray.  I might actually lose weight (which would probably ...

“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them and they follow me.”  John 10:27

The way Jesus speaks here is weirdly subtle.  I think that I’ve always subliminally read this as “my sheep hear my voice and THEY know ME.”  But that’s not what Jesus said.  The sheep hear, and Jesus knows them…and THEN they ...

O brook, older than
any generation can recall,
drafting ferric-red
through mountain gullies,
eons of erosion
scraping sandstone
to the sea;
superannuated,
yet running faster than
all the memories
that teem and tumble
from my brain,
sweet reminiscences
as well as pain, all
churned and pushed
farther and further
from...

When my child was gravely ill
I would feed birds
from plexiglass shelters
suction-cupped
to the kitchen windows;
there I first met
black-capped juncos.
I learned that they flew to us
from distant Oregon;
such tiny wings to carry
such a long, long way. 
How did they do it?
What instinct
brought them hundreds of m...

Inauguration day arrives, and I am the most politically hopeful that I have been in fifty years. I know that sounds odd, even crazy, given all that is happening, so I’ll explain:

I was raised by dyed-in-the-wool, rock-ribbed Republicans, a whole slew of them: aunts, uncles, grandparents.  My dad be...

I was recently watching the film “Born Yesterday”…the 1950 version with Judy Holliday, William Holden, and Broderick Crawford.  I’m quite familiar with it.  In the 1970s I acted in two different productions of the Garson Kanin play, originally written in 1946.  Trying to educate the ditzy showgirl B...

I remember it so vividly.  I was standing in the Gap store in Old Town Pasadena, when my heart started racing and I began to hyperventilate.  What was happening?  I was much too young for a heart attack…it was clearly some sort of anxiety.  Agoraphobia?  There weren’t that many people in the store o...