One sultry August evening many years ago, I was in the embrace of my hammock, sheltered in the shade, listening to Miles Davis. With my eyes closed and Davis’s mesmerizing horn in my ears, I was startled when my four-year-old son started to climb up next to me. I pulled him into the hammock, took…
You’re broken. You’re beautiful Matt and I met for lunch a couple of hours before his plea hearing. The hearing itself was routine. We would enter a guilty plea for driving under the influence of intoxicants (DUII), and he would be entered into a diversion program, meaning if he met a set of conditions over…
Children love the night sky When my children were younger, they would often point to the night sky and ask me about a star or light. Sometimes it was an airplane, often it was not really a star at all but a planet like Venus or Mars. Sometimes, I didn’t know the answer, and we…
The eulogy I couldn’t give. The obituary I never wrote I did not attend my mother’s funeral. She died on December 25, 2018. My father was comforted that his wife died on her favorite holiday, feeling like God gave her the gift of release from her suffering for Christmas. She was not buried by her…
Life is better when you’re chasing your curiosity instead of the approval of others “Everyone else can sit here, why can’t you?” This is what my then mother-in-law asked me when I got up from my seat, after the church meeting was supposed to be over, and when the speaker began a new story. I’ve been asked some version of this question regularly ever since…
To love means being open to heartbreak Sometimes, I feel that everything I write, draw, and say is just a remix of All You Need Is Love by The Beatles. Fundamentally, all of us want to be happy, and we understand that happiness and being loved are linked together. But often, we find happiness eludes us because we are unwilling to love first. We are taught to harden ourselves against the threat of rejection. We play it cool, never being fully vulnerable with those closest to us, and we never risk heartbreak by loving too freely. Connecting with strangers becomes a game of chicken: who will be soft and vulnerable first? Men are especially reticent to open themselves up to rejection, and too many men only know how to react to even the gentlest letdown with rage and violence. Happiness doesn’t come from…
What happens when dreams are your only escape? our quarantine dreamsescape from realitytranquil oasis What have your quarantine dreams been like? I like to think that my dreams offer me a respite from both the creeping existential dread of a world careening towards oblivion and the mundane stress of keeping a business and household afloat…