From Home: “A Single Garment of Destiny”

Friends: Today I begin a series of reflections titled “From Home.” While I, like millions of others during this pandemic, am working and writing from home, I want to use some of my time to reflect on our times, our world, my country, my own days. I begin this series exploring one of Dr. Martin Luther

Christmas 2019: A Wounded World

In the northern hemisphere, these are the darkest days of the year. The hours of daylight drop to their smallest number until the Solstice, on December 22nd. Until then, the light in the world dims. The world’s darkness isn’t only physical, of course. In Washington, D.C. where I live, the physical world is darkening with

Using Winter – Using Darkness

I often dread the winter. I don’t know if it’s undiagnosed Seasonal Mood Disorder or just my Southern California upbringing disliking the cold. But I do. I don’t want less sunlight. I want more. I don’t want to wear sweaters and coats. I want warmth. Recently, I’ve been making a more deliberate effort to find

Remember the Martyrs of Birmingham

September 15, 1963 was a dreadful day in America. It was an especially brutal day in Birmingham, Alabama. Just a few weeks after the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when Dr. King spoke of “The Dream” and peoples’ hopes for civil rights victories soared, Birmingham, Alabama reminded America how painful and costly the

Teaching Year 31: Questions & Hope

Last week, I began my thirty-first year teaching. That number sounds a little jarring to me sometimes, but I have loved this profession so much that the number thirty-one actually sounds about right. I’ve been at this “for a minute,” as some of my students would say. This year has begun very well. After seven

The Healing Ocean

It has always been a healing place for me. When I was a boy my family would go to Corona del Mar and Newport Beach, both less than an hour from where we lived outside of Los Angeles. As little kids we would play in the sand and my parents taught us how to swim

The Healing Gift of Summer

As one who has lived most of his life on the academic calendar, I appreciate and savor the healing gift of summer. It’s not even the specific of summer so much as the connected quilt of unplanned days. Something gentle happens in my mind when I have several unplanned days ahead of me. I have

Photograph to Poem

Over the last few months, I have seen various photographs and thought about writing poems drawn from them. For the first month or so of my summer break, I’m going to do Photograph to Poem, a project of writing several poems from photographs. The photographs will come from all kinds of sources and I will

Philip C. Kolin’s REACHING FOREVER: These Poems Are Comfort & Revolution

When I write a review / reflection on a book of poems, I usually read through it many times and fold down the page corner on a poem I want to quote. With Philip C. Kolin’s Reaching Forever, after the first few reads, I’d turned the corner down on nearly every poem. This book teems

If Martin Luther King Were Living

Three days ago, on April 4th, we marked fifty-one years since Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. That awful act changed the course of America’s history. It’s impossible to know exactly how our country would have grown if he had lived. This year, he would be ninety years old. Imagine if Dr. King