Writer Between Worlds

Soulful writing about humans and places

Category: ENGLISH

Reawakening

Hear them shriek: virgin vitality, gratuitous vigor. Gull-ibility?…
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Inarticulate

So little left to express. Spleen? Acedia? The signifiers have lost their signifieds and are straying. Ideas, heavy as rock, sink to the bottom of rivers waiting to be swept away by a sudden flood of effervescence or settle, with the mud, along the banks of dam lakes and rot. Occasionally, some debris resurfaces –…
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Quote of the day

“Understanding a people’s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity. (…) It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.” Clifford Geertz – The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books Classics)
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Words of wisdom, cautionary words

On creativity: “If too few opportunities for curiosity are available, if too many obstacles are placed in the way of risk and exploration, the motivation to engage in creative behavior is easily extinguished. (…) So, if the next generation is to face the future with zest and self-confidence, we must educate them to be original…
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Quote of the day

“Plato (…) also discovered the very insecure position of truth in the world, for ‘from opinions comes persuasion, and not from truth’ (Phaedrus 260). The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want…
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On migration and diasporas

“To live “in diaspora” is to reside in one place but to keep in motion an emotional, cultural, or political relationship with another, whether it is the site of one’s nativity that subsequently became a point of departure or an ancestral “homeland” virtually conjured but never visited. (…) Diasporas (…) are platforms where received notions…
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Quote of the day

“To yield to the mere process of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation, not only because it has assumed the spurious grandeur of ‘historical necessity’, but also because everything outside it has begun to appear lifeless, bloodless, meaningless, and unreal. (…) Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous (…). It means, rather, examining and bearing…
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Leave your shadows behind

that hour. on the long path to spring, when darkness clears and the trees drop their skeletal shadows in the snow like a bad memory, like baggage one no longer needs to carry. when the frost glistens with a gazillion different suns in a myriad different eyes and the crows’ croaking falls silent silent… that…
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New Year’s Eve 2020

You can tell by the fireworks. To this day, people’s hearts are set to the clocks in their homelands, far away. They go off at different times, then the smoke clears and the sky remains mysterious and quiet until the next full hour. You can tell by the fireworks. To this fateful day, the last…
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Falling in Love

In the dead of night – In that longest of nights he came to me, all aglow. An illumination of love. I was ready to let go, having run out of things to hold on to. “The world has done violence to your spirit”, he spoke through my sleeplessness, and his voice was husky. “But…
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The colors of healing

Healing is a feline treading stealthily around the concrete monoliths of the neighborhood – slow and lazy and clandestine. A striped tow of light, sheaves of color falling from the trees, pigment dripping from the November sky and gathering in little pools of gold in your heart to glitter in the dark of winter.
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Questions

Setting: Catholic religion class at school. Characters: New teacher – a man. A bunch of 9-year-olds. Open discussion about covenants. (Based loosely on recollection, don’t shoot the messenger!) Girl in my daughter’s class, with genuine curiosity: Why are all the priests men? Why are there no women priests? Teacher, gently: Well, you see, Jesus was…
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