In college, I encountered some lines from Gregory Wolfe about the vocation of the artist. As someone who had been carrying the desire to write, and the desire to make this writing my life work, the words were perfect. “Vocation,” Greg wrote, “is a mysterious thing. It seems to come to us both from without—as a call…

At my local yarn shop, we were sitting on the couches talking about what knitting means in our lives. As the conversation revved up, with everyone tossing out comments about how knitting can be at once meditative, creative, solitary, and communal, one knitter threw in, “It’s like we all have a yarn to share.” As…

When I was a freshman at UC Berkeley, I took a yearlong Western Civ. class. We began with the ancient Greeks and ended somewhere after Freud. (I probably kept that syllabus, the way I keep everything, but where?) Of all that I read and wrote about that year, here’s one sentence that has stuck with…

Every Monday through Friday morning, the whole family (my wife, eighteen-month-old son, five-year-old daughter, and myself), pile into our Saturn and drive the three miles to drop off our daughter at school. (The drive takes exactly seven minutes.) The Saturn needs work that we can’t really afford to have done right now, and so there’s…

When I was growing up in the Catholic Church, November 1st was a Holy Day. All Saints Day, they called it. Aside from the obligatory Mass I attended, it was a day to stop, to take time out of our busy lives to remember, to pray for, and to be thankful for all the saints…

My eleven year-old, Caleb, asked me one afternoon if he’d ever cheated death. Caleb likes adventure books. He believes that even though people in Kansas don’t talk the way Johann Wyss and Jules Verne wrote, phrasings like “death-defying feat” and “brave young hero” are common parlance. I remember when that ended for me. It was…

When I leave early in the morning for work, I often pass Eleanor Rigby. She is coming, I am going; her day ending as mine begins. She never looks at me as we pass, but I look at her. Mostly what I see is through the glass of her windshield, but I occasionally pass her…

  Tonight, I’m paying attention to one of my “essentials.” You probably have a movie like this one—a movie that repairs you, that restores your spirits, that put everything into perspective. (If you do, leave a comment so we can all check it out.) But let me tell you what I’m watching. I see a…

I am not overly interested in the so called battle between Science and Religion. I have my opinions, but my deep interest is elsewhere. It just seems to keep popping up around me lately. In response to my last post, Beth Bevis wrote that what she noticed was how “people need a sense of transcendence…

Even as I made the desperate, early September phone call to sign up for Mommy and Me ballet, I was watching myself, with more than a little bit of amusement. I’d been monitoring the website for weeks, trying to wait until the last possible minute when available class space would coincide with my ability to…