Note: This is an essay originally sent to subscribers on my mailing list, where I send essays every 1-2 months. If you would like to...

Note: this is not a full essay, but a segment taken from a longer piece sent to subscribers. If you want to receive essays in your inbox...

Note: This is an essay originally sent to subscribers on my mailing list, where I send essays every 1-2 months. If you would like to...

There is no ideal life. There is only the life that you have chosen freely. Sometimes, a line arrives fully formed in my life, like a...

Note: This post consists of a few excerpts from Ousia, a book that I am currently writing. These sections are not finished, but I felt...

Let us begin with a clarification: the existence of God is beside the point. The fact that we can question God's existence as external...

I have long believed that my work is useless. Useless unless its beauty crawls beneath your own sight, hatching new seeds of seeing....

Sun clutters the floor. Still, no words. My objects have not yet bent their bodies to the shape of this new space. Opened boxes, my...

The hand of summer has felled interior wanderings. The whoosh of cars and the buzz of lawnmowers sound thickly through a viscous heat....

(This is an excerpt from my memoir, The Sea Once Swallowed Me). The earth wakes stark with white light, the air tastes of iron. As I...

Evening, the sun still un-setted. Light shatters through the outside trees, breaking through windows and landing on my typing hands....

There is a profound alienation at the heart of the modern self: we move through seas of strangers, we feel trapped between the cramped...

Note: This essay was originally written for my email subscribers. If you struggle (as I do) with reading very long essays on the...

"Spacetime is the individuation of entities." —Schopenhauer Blinking into self-consciousness, you are birthed into a terrible weight. You...

A truth is found in fragments, scattered throughout all disciplines. Each thinker employs a distinct language, but the essence is the...

These are early excerpts from a book that's been gestating for about three years now. If you'd like to receive more early excerpts...

Note: This is an excerpt from my next book, Ousia: Performance Poems for New World-ing. There are symbols in the original book that...

Dear Readers, What’s distracting her? I’m not sure; my eyes are fixed on her child. He is maybe a year old, wearing only a diaper—with no...

Dear Readers, From cold air and brightly-colored trees to a perfect 70 something degrees and stunning sunsets: we are back in Arizona to...

(This and the next three posts are from a three-part email series about the workings of love. I rarely post emails to my website, but if...

"My aesthetic perspective is to hold a mirror in front of the world so that we as adults are able to see what we have created." -Maïmouna...

This morning when I opened the blinds, the sun was of a different quality. This is summer sun, I thought, or at least the sun of middle...

Once upon a time, there was a garden. And a woman and a man walked in the cool of noon and were unafraid. Things changed. We began to...

We are too big in our brains, too little in our bodies. This is what I tell myself, at least, when Georg takes Sophie on a hike so I can...

Our mythology sinks deep. It is whispered through us since birth, the axioms of our doctrine. "Blessed are the wealthy," they whisper,...

It is so much easier to write about the frustration than the joy. I have expressed dissatisfaction with staying home all day (my life for...

It seems unreasonable to claim that any of us could be responsible for the actions of a stranger. But I am beginning to believe that...

It appears that our neighbor has committed suicide. It appears that my love wasn't enough to save him. Or rather, it appears that I...

I speak from hypocrisy, as we all must speak. Georg is listless and depressed at the end of each day working from home. Last night, he...

Here are detailed instructions from an ancient letter, on how to turn copper into gold: Step 1: Take 9 chicken eggs Step 2: Place them in...

The cool silence of a morning with the blinds pulled shut. Hearing the rain on the windows behind, while Sophie breastfeeds on the couch....

Over the weekend we ate pandemic pizza, quarantine cookies. If it's alliteration, it feels justified. But today is Tuesday, the beginning...

People in desperation will always welcome tragedy with a strange intermingling of relief. I can't quite explain it, but I think it has...

Today a friend called me, then texted. I was away from my phone, chasing Sophie through the sun-lit grass while other moms chatted and...

Morality is taking personal responsibility for the wrongness of all things. This seems impossible. This requires caring, and we think we...

I had the strangest thought today while taking out the trash. It was in answer to a question which isn't so strange during this season....

What I didn't mention is that we spent all weekend looking to buy a condo. Utah is expensive, especially near Salt Lake, which is where...

As we age, we become reconciled to the earth. No. But that’s the idea anyway. Reconciliation. It’s why we breathe to begin with, you...

The light came through the glass door this evening while I drank peppermint tea. Sophie tried begging for cartoons, but I insisted on...

To track the living, dying light. This is essential to me. And I'm not sure what it means (I'm not sure what anything important means). I...

You can only love someone whom you do not need. How is this possible? We must fill the crater-sized hole inside us with something other...

We aren't taking Sophie (to Costa Rica). She is almost two years old, but it still feels like abandonment. When I booked the flights, I...

I am trying to hide from myself. That's my excuse. Good days and bad days this winter; lately, the days have been bad. I have no desire...

The broiled red peppers inside, the breaking light outside. Cold. And God in everything: the feeling of something sacred stalking me. The...

Joan Miro: I can't stop thinking about him, the abstract artist who aimed to reveal the inner stillness of things. "[Stillness] strikes...

Precious people have been blown open like sacks, their brains and organs unseaming. The image hit me in the stomach as I walked past my...

"I sing the body electric." These are the words of Walt Whitman, the poet to whom the body was not just bound by bones and sinews. “And...

I was washing dishes, preparing my world for the sunrise. Everything becomes symbolic in winter, you see, as we plunge into the inner...

Death is such a passing thing. It comes and goes like a cold, leaving germs of life in its wake. Something always remains. If not me, at...

I see the light through the glass porch door as I drink lemon water and eat a thin slice of bread. I am "fasting" today, and this is my...