It is a quiet overcast Sunday. Daffodils roll up their sleeves. Grass makes room for the dandelions. A silent green and yellow parade of acknowledgement. Look closer if you don’t believe in redemption. White blooms on the pear trees die for young leaves. The blossoms are new every year, no matter how old the branches are. Daffodils reveal their orange smiles, periscopes of life.    

There are different kinds of crying. There is the terror of dusk, the sun’s acquiescence to closing darkness, the starkness of the emptied trees in silhouette as it goes, second by second, deeper into the unknown. There is that relief, and that hollowness, and that awareness, that puncture of sudden comprehension, when the sun finally finishes its descent, when the blackness settles in and you can bear it no longer, when you have no choice but to turn your face the other way and wait for the dawn.  ...

It’s Labor Day, cloudy and full of rain-laden wind and the cooler weather I longed for it to bring this weekend.   It’s so appropriately wistful.   I’ve been reading Robert Frost this morning. His autumn poems seemed to blow in through my open windows, settling around my soul with fresh understanding. I love poets: They express so well feelings and moments that might otherwise go unexamined.   In my last blog I wrote about my long season of “in between,” a characteristic of September simply and beautifully expressed by my lovely late mother—who did not often put her own spirit’s poetry...

This summer has been one long and challenging transition for me. So much has changed in my life over the past 18 months, and I’m still adjusting.   It may take me a while longer.   God is doing good things in my life, to be sure. But sometimes those good things are the result of hard things. I’m feeling a bit glad that the main months of summer have passed, hoping that my internal world will soon begin afresh like that first fallish morning with a hint of frost in the air. For that reason, I’m so glad it’s September.   Yet, I’m reminded that September is...

Nashville your green and yellow hills won my heart from the very beginning   your tree-lined fence-lined two-lane roads and Southern pillars and porches   became home away from home   now your rock-faced shoulders are mine, with their summer vines, slick surfaces after a rain and icicles in winter   your blue skies and orange sunsets are copies of the ones in my favorite childhood nursery rhyme book   Nashville city-town of dreams and dreamerswho believe in miracles and magic when they arrive with sweet expectations and leave with something different and more   as I will...