When is the last time you’ve had to say goodbye to someone? I mean really had to say goodbye, the kind of goodbye that means, “I don’t know when we will see each other or talk to each other again on this earth.” Most likely it was when someone you knew was dying. Think about…

Continued from Friday. In my last two posts, I wrote about disappointing and rewarding time-travels at the movies. But the strangest film I’ve seen recently took me back in time even farther, into realms of folklore and primitive religion. And like both The Tree of Life and Cave of Forgotten Dreams, it brought me to…

Doc Brown might disagree, but Hollywood says you don’t need a DeLorean to visit the past. This summer, your local cineplex is offering time travel at twelve bucks a ticket. In my last Good Letters post, I noticed that most 2011 moviegoers are visiting old familiar faces—Captain Jack Sparrow, the Transformers, the Muppets, Magneto, the…

I grew up in an apartment in the city. Through my formative years, my environment was made mostly of cement, yardless buildings, narrow alleyways, laundromats, buses, storefronts, and house cats. We did live a few blocks from Golden Gate Park, but it’s not the kind of park where you can go so deep in that…

First, perhaps most prominently, there was the dress I wore to my mother’s funeral: a cotton broadcloth shift dress, princess-seamed and with box pleats around the knee-length hem, that had been a hand-me-over from my sister-in-law. The dress was sleeveless, but I did wear high-heeled shoes, a black spandex slip, and stockings. It was around…

The first night I was in Rwanda, I was asked to facilitate group discussion among the thirteen students and five faculty members who were about to spend our ten days there. So I did what I usually do when I am asked to teach. I came up with fourteen questions that dealt with various abstract…

The word “conversion” reminds me of Anne Lamott, whose own Damascus Road story is one that I love telling my students: Lamott recalls the fevered days after an abortion when, drunk and spotting blood, she noticed a stray cat sitting at her doorstep. The cat followed Lamott everywhere, down the street and to the liquor…

Part of the delight of preparing my new course on Poetry as a Spiritual Practice for the Glen Online has been returning to some favorite interviews with poets in past issues of Image. I enjoy reading what contemporary poets have to say about their art almost as much as I enjoy reading their poems. I love, for…

My wife and I have seven college degrees between us. We share more layoffs than that. All those degrees, minus the dubious M.B.A. I earned a few years back, are in liberal arts fields. This may also help to explain those layoffs, although I suppose that sheer workplace incompetence can never be ruled out entirely.…

It is darkest night, and it is the last night my four children will ever go to sleep thinking their mother and father will always be married. Tomorrow we tell them it’s not to be that way. My heart quails at the thought of what we have planned, how it would be better to slap…