Dear friend—

I came to your question
expecting to study the charts,
to sound the depth,
to name the distance
between here and open water.

But the night would not permit
so knowing of an answer.

The comforter met me in the dark
and left me limping
toward a blessing.

So I write from beside you,
not from the farther shore.

Your vessel has always carried
more than its cargo.

Long before the channel narrowed,
you were asking
what more it might carry—

whether care could inhabit exchange,
whether gain could become gift,
whether work might bear witness
without announcing itself.

That question was not painted
on the vessel.

It was laid into the keel.

Now the tide has turned uncertain,
and every instrument
offers only part of the truth.

I cannot tell you
whether the sea is calling
or warning.

Perhaps wisdom begins there—

not with the outcome,
but with the truer reckoning:

When you knew the truth,
did you face it?

When the wind pressed you,
did you keep love aboard?

When appearances asked you
to hold tighter,
did you open your hands?

A vessel is one expression
of a quest.

It is not the quest itself.

If called to sail, sail.
If called to anchor, anchor.
Neither motion nor stillness
alone is obedience.

May you be freed
from forcing the tide.

May there be light enough
for the next faithful step.

And know that here,
where salt and sweetness meet,
I am grateful to stand
in the narrow water beside you.

August 2026

Accompanying Note & Art

This poem began with an exchange of emails and a conversation.

A dear friend is in a difficult season with a venture he has given himself to deeply. Beneath our correspondence and the conversation that followed was a practical question, though I sensed there was something deeper in it: Do I press on, or is it time to let this go?

I initially found myself wanting to study the spreadsheets, dive into the pitch decks, review the cap table, all the things I would naturally bring to the conversation as an attentive advisor. I wanted to understand the venture, sound its depths, and perhaps offer some useful counsel. But friendship asks, no, demands, something more and quite different. Sometimes the faithful place is beside rather than above.

That became the posture of the poem.

I chose a verse epistle, a poem written as a letter, because I wanted to preserve something of the intimacy of the original exchange. I had never written one before, which made the form interesting and a little uncomfortable. As I began sketching words and images, I knew I wanted to encourage my friend and tell the truth without telling his story. Friendship, prayer, stewardship and obedience were all somewhere underneath.

The water came next. I began to see a vessel in a narrow channel, the tide changing, the instruments useful but incomplete. I have been learning to trust a metaphor enough to let it carry its own weight. Perhaps that is especially important here. There are times when all the instruments can be working and we still do not know whether to sail or anchor.

What interested me more as I wrote was the way we hold the work we love. This becomes harder when the work has absorbed our hopes, our longings, perhaps even some of our grief. I recognize that tendency in myself. I can confuse the vessel with the quest.

The narrow water is where the way ahead cannot yet be seen. A friend cannot see it for us. But a friend can stay near.

There may be light enough for the next faithful step.

The Boat Project / everythingwillbefine by Ernest Daetwyler, McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 2022

I came upon this work while looking for an image to accompany Epistle from the Narrow Water. I knew almost immediately that I wanted to stay with it.

Mr. Daetwyler made this boat from driftwood gathered along the shores of Lake Huron. That detail stayed with me.

The wood has already been somewhere. Water has carried it, weather has worked on it, and at some point it washed ashore. The artist and craftsman gathered those separate pieces and gave them the recognizable shape of a boat, large enough that we can step inside. There is a vessel in the poem, of course, yet here it looked like something anticipating another journey.

And yet the boat is not sailing. We can enter it. We can stand inside it. We can imagine where it has been or where it might go. But it offers no answer.

The museum describes the work in terms of time, memory, flux and uncertainty. I can see all of those in it. What I find myself noticing, though, is simpler: someone gathered what the water had worked upon and made a place we can enter. That feels very near to the poem.

There are seasons when the instruments tell only part of the truth and the water ahead narrows. We may not know yet whether to sail or anchor.

Perhaps friendship begins by climbing into the boat together.

Audio Version

They began with mornings around a table,
three friends passing one question among them:
what would it mean to stay long enough
for a place to tell them what it needed?

One knew the patience of the earth—
how much could be asked of it,
what must be left undisturbed,
which promises would not survive being hurried.

The second listened for what happens quietly:
a voice crowded out, a welcome wearing thin,
the small conditions in which belonging
withers or takes hold.

The third kept asking what the work was for,
what every dollar, doorway, and decision
would shelter—or expose;
what they owed to lives they could not finish.

They disagreed. They walked the streets.
They came back to the table.
Through more than one hard season
friendship held what none could carry alone.

Nothing announced itself.
A path widened under many feet.
Walls rose without closing people out.
Bread and wages, soil beneath the nails,
a chair kept open beside another chair—
these were the first signs.

They had not come to save a neighborhood,
or press one shape upon its future.
They learned the discipline of returning,
of tending what had been entrusted,
of leaving some good for hands not yet here.

And slowly, in that particular corner,
work became worthy, strangers became known,
and hope, given room and weather,
reached toward the light.

July 2026

“The only way in which Christianity can become effective in the modern world is through the lives of those who are committed to it.”

— Elton Trueblood, 1961, The Company of the Committed

They did not set out to build a project. They set out to remain faithful to one another.

Long before there was a name like North End, before plans or financing or timelines, there were three friends who kept returning to the same quiet question: what would it mean to live as a company of the committed—not as an idea, but as a way of being together, in a particular place, for particular people?

What bound them was attentiveness. To friendship. To faith. To a neighborhood with a past, a fragility, and an unrealized promise. Friendship came before purpose. Commitment grew slowly, like trust, through conversations, walks, disagreements, and the shared refusal to rush.

One of them carried a steady vision for place and time. He understood that land was not simply an asset, but an inheritance, and that development could either extract value or hold possibility open. He was patient with complexity, willing to let North End emerge rather than be forced. For him, commitment looked like stewardship—choosing continuity over acceleration, presence over control.

Another brought a deep attentiveness to people. She noticed how culture is shaped long before it is named—how dignity is either upheld or quietly eroded in meetings, processes, and decisions. She insisted that North End be built with people, not merely around them. Commitment, for her, meant formation: shaping a place where belonging was not an aspiration but an operational reality.

The third friend often named what lay beneath the work itself. He helped them see North End not simply as development, but as vocation—a moral and theological undertaking. He reminded them that capital, labor, and leadership are never neutral, because they shape the conditions under which image-bearers live and work. Commitment, in his telling, meant faithfulness without illusion: acting responsibly without pretending to complete the work of renewal.

Together they became more than partners. They became a company—not in the corporate sense, but in the ancient meaning of companionship. None was sufficient alone. Their friendship became the vessel capable of holding risk, patience, disagreement, and hope.

North End began to take shape as an extension of that shared life. Sidewalks were designed not only to move bodies, but to create proximity. Buildings did more than house activity; they invited belonging. Commerce became a way to dignify work rather than merely transact. What emerged was not just a place, but a posture—moral infrastructure disguised as development.

They were guided by the conviction that the world is not renewed by crowds or institutions, but by small groups of people who accept responsibility for their corner of it. They did not imagine North End as a solution or a model to be replicated. They simply chose to stay—to resist shortcuts, to grow fruit on other people’s trees, to let care take flesh in leases, conversations, and long obedience.

In time, fruit appeared. Not spectacular fruit, but human fruit: trust deepened, work dignified, a neighborhood made a little more whole. Whatever they built bore the marks of how it was made—slowly, relationally, with restraint.

They learned that being a company of the committed did not mean having everything resolved. It meant refusing to walk away. It meant choosing friendship over efficiency, responsibility over control, hope over futility.

And so they stayed. Friends first. Committed together. In a particular place, with particular people. Trusting that faith becomes credible when it is lived in company—and that this quiet, patient obedience is how the world is gently, faithfully renewed.

Gallery collection, North End / Fields Market Garden / Freelands Restaurant

Carmel, Indiana, circa 2024

These photographs are not a picture of things but a a record of posture—and of promises kept in more than one register.

What you see here is what happens when patience is allowed to take shape with intention. Before there were facades and balconies, there were tables—real ones—where people lingered, listened, disagreed, and stayed. The poem names that order deliberately: friendship before plan, care before claim, trust before pace. This image is the visible residue of that invisible work.

The grills and pergola matter because they signal that this place was never meant to be merely occupied. It was meant to be shared. Architecture here pauses for proximity. Side-by-side grills invite parallel presence as much as conversation—room for those who connect through words and those who connect simply by being nearby.

That posture extends beyond housing. Fields Market Garden also grounds this place in work that is tactile, rhythmic, and dignifying as does the exceptional Freelands, a land and people honoring restaurant. Both exude hospitality and are expressions of the same conviction that neurodiversity is not an edge case, but a design premise.

In the note, North End is described as moral infrastructure disguised as development. These photographs makes that claim concrete. The images shows what that looks like when hope keeps its word: a place built slowly enough—and thoughtfully enough—to hold everyone.

I have been scattered
more than I knew.

Not always outwardly.
Not in ways
that would trouble
the surface of a life.

I have kept building.
Kept speaking.
Kept tending
what appeared
to require my care.

And still,
somewhere beneath
the practiced faithfulness,
I have wandered.

Not from belief, perhaps,
but from nearness.

Not from worship entirely,
but from the kind
that rearranges
the hidden rooms.

The story of return
has taught me this:

God does not abandon
the ruins
my own evasions
have helped make.

He does not wait
for me
to become less scattered
before He calls.

He enters
the broken field.

He gathers
what I had assumed
was too dispersed
to be made whole.

He names me
still His own.

But return
is not merely arrival.

It is possible
to come back
and remain far off.

To rebuild the wall
and leave the heart
unguarded.

To restore the temple
and let worship
grow thin.

To speak of covenant
while withholding
the trust
covenant requires.

This, too,
has been part
of my learning:

that faithfulness
cannot be measured
only by visible devotion,
good intentions,
or the worthy things
I have helped carry.

The truer question
comes quieter
and cuts deeper:

What in me
has become casual
before God?

Where have I offered
language
instead of surrender?

Where have I asked
to be restored
without consenting
to be changed?

And yet
the final word
is not exposure
for its own sake.

It is mercy
with a voice.

Return to Me.

Not as accusation only.
As invitation.

Return
with the habits
that have stiffened,
the loves
that have cooled,
the obedience
I have delayed
by calling it complicated.

Return
before the day
that burns away
what cannot live.

Return
so that what is false
may be relinquished,
and reverence
rise again
like warmth
after a long winter.

Return
so that this scattered heart,
having been gathered
by grace,
might turn again—

toward God,
toward others,
toward the life
I cannot make whole
but may finally
receive.

May 2026

Accompanying Note & Art

For the past nine months, I have lived for sustained stretches inside the story of Israel’s exile and return. What began as a study of an ancient people has become an uncomfortable examination of my own life.

I have come to see that exile is not only geographic. It can take place quietly within a person like me—someone who keeps building, speaking, tending, and outwardly appearing faithful, even as some interior nearness begins to thin. Return, likewise, is not merely a matter of arrival. One may stand again in familiar places and still remain far from the God who calls.

I have been reminded not to treat the present moment as though it were somehow exempt from the long story of humanness. The facts change. The technologies change. The pace, the language, the scale of our reach—all of that changes. But the deeper narrative does not. We are not the first to confuse activity with faithfulness, certainty with wisdom, or self-protection with discernment. Nor are we always discovering what no one before us could possibly have seen. More often, we are encountering again the warnings long given and too easily ignored. We are simply living our portion of the same story. And His call remains what it has always been: return to Me.

That call is merciful, but mercy does not mean the absence of pain. Redemption always asks something of us. Something must be relinquished, borne, offered, or laid down if what is broken is to be restored. I believe this, and yet I still find myself wanting redemption without cost, renewal without surrender, healing without the wound being touched. We resist sacrifice because sacrifice reveals what love will require. But the story of exile and return will not let me look away. God gathers the scattered. He restores the ruined. And He invites me, even now, to come home more fully than I realized I had left.

The Prodigal Son, Auguste Rodin, Conceived in 1905, this cast was made in 1942, Musée Rodin, Paris.

This sculpture feels especially fitting beside the poem and note. The poem arose from my time this year in Israel’s story of exile and return, and Rodin’s figure carries that same movement into the more intimate register of Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15:11–32. I would not say Israel’s exile and return foreshadows that parable in a narrow predictive sense. However, I do think the parable echoes and gathers up the same biblical pattern: departure, estrangement, awakening, return, and the astonishing mercy of being received again.

Rodin does not sculpt the embrace. He captures the moment before it—the son exposed, off balance, arms flung upward, return still costly because surrender has not yet been met by the father’s welcome. That matters for this poem. Return is not merely arrival. It is the relinquishing of the self that wandered, the painful recognition that redemption asks something of us. We shy from sacrifice; Rodin’s figure does not. He gives bodily form to the soul finally turning home.

The more costly way
does not let the symbol
remain decorative.

It asks to pervade
the one who bears it.

It asks for my speech
to become slower.

For my listening
to become braver.

For my questions
to become less performative
and more willing to be answered.

For my leadership
to be recognized
not first by force, or fluency,
or the elegance of my frame,

but by whether
I can be corrected
without becoming cruel.

Whether I can hear what is true
without punishing the messenger.

Whether I can act
before the hour passes
and then call my delay prudence.

This is the mercy that feels, at first,
like judgment:

to discover that experience alone
does not make me wise.

That the years can harden
as easily as deepen.

That I can live through nearly anything
and still learn
only what I wanted to learn.

So I am learning to ask differently.

To stand closer to the actual.

To let the ordinary teach me again.

To trust that a fear may be a fear,
a wound may be a wound,

and the truth may be
simpler than my resistance to it.

Not simple as in easy.

Simple as in whole.

Simple as in undivided.

Simple as in requiring all of me.

And when the hour comes,
as it will,
when the room grows still,
when the counsel has ended,

when the mirror has done
its quiet violence,
may I not reach first
for the sentence that preserves me.

May I reach for the truth
that frees the captive thing,

even if the first captive is me.

May I become less impressive
and more faithful.

Less defended
and more awake.

Less certain
of the pattern I have made
and more available
to the reality God has given.

For there is a kind of seeing
that becomes a summons,

a kind of hearing
that becomes a wound,

a kind of wound
that becomes a mercy,

and a kind of mercy
that will not let me remain
as I was.

May 2026

Accompanying Note & Art

Costly emerged for me not from a place of certainty, nor even from finally arriving at a decision, but from the slower and often less comfortable work of discernment. The last several poems have come from that same terrain. I have found myself less interested in forcing clarity and more willing to remain present long enough for truth to uncover itself in its own time. That has been both unsettling and strangely merciful.

The experiences of the past six months have especially shaped this way of seeing. Much of that has been formed through studying Nehemiah with friends scattered across the world, reflecting together on rebuilding, responsibility, sacrifice, courage, and the quiet weight of stewardship. Again and again, I have been struck by how often discernment arrives not as sudden illumination, but as the patient stripping away of what cannot finally endure. Nehemiah’s story is not only about rebuilding walls. It is also about learning what kind of people we become while rebuilding them.

Alongside that has been a deeper and richer awareness of how unexpectedly mercy has appeared in my own life. I would have assumed receiving mercy would feel natural, almost easy. Instead, I have found it strangely awkward at times, as though some hidden part of me still believes mercy must first be justified or earned before it can be accepted. My mind knows better. My heart still argues. Perhaps that tension itself has become part of the learning. Mercy, when it arrives honestly, exposes how accustomed we become to proving our worth rather than receiving love as gift.

At the same time, I find myself anticipating another gathering soon with friends who are similarly pursuing what I can only describe as a redemptive quest. There is something deeply sustaining about being among people who are both like-minded and like-hearted, yet still willing to ask difficult questions of one another in pursuit of faithfulness rather than performance.

I am especially grateful for the close friends who have patiently endured my ramblings over these months, pressing, sharpening, questioning, and helping me find clearer exposition for things I could initially only sense dimly. Much of this poem exists because others cared enough not to leave my thoughts untested.

Reconciliation (originally named Reunion), Josefina de Vasconcellos, 1977. Multiple casts, this one is placed at Coventry Cathedral, Coventry, West Midlands, England.

What draws me to this work is not its subject, but its posture. Nothing about it feels hurried toward resolution or shaped for performance. The figures kneel toward one another with a kind of weary tenderness, as though reconciliation has arrived not through victory, but through the relinquishing of self-protection. They do not rise above the wound or explain it away. They remain near enough to it that mercy still carries weight.

In that sense, the sculpture evokes what I am saying in Costly. The poem is less concerned with arriving at an answer than with learning to remain present long enough for something true to reveal itself. Over these past months I have been discovering, often awkwardly, how difficult it can be to receive mercy without first trying to justify it, earn it, or make myself worthy of it. My mind reaches grace much faster than my heart does. This sculpture seems to understand that tension instinctively. The embrace does not feel sentimental or naïve. It feels chosen. Hard won but not earned.

In many ways, that mirrors the interior landscape beneath the poem itself. Discernment rarely arrives cleanly or all at once. More often it emerges slowly from rubble: through friendship, grief, confession, sharpening conversation, and the painful uncovering of what cannot finally endure.

What continues to move me most is that the sculpture does not deny fracture. It stands beside it. And in doing so, it quietly suggests that something deeply human and holy grows there, an expression of the Imago Dei.

The hour comes
not when I am ready,
but when mercy has grown tired
of my evasions.

It comes quietly at first.

A question I cannot answer
without rearranging my life.

A voice I would rather admire
from a distance
than actually obey.

A face made blurry
by the language
I have placed over it.

A truth standing near enough
to touch,
and still
I call it complicated.

The hour comes
when the argument
is no longer the argument.

When the question changes from
Can this be justified?
to
Can this be offered?

When I see
that the thing I have been defending
may need instead
to be returned.

That the burden
I thought proved my strength
may be the very weight
keeping my hands from obedience.

That the voice
I least wanted to hear
may be the voice most needed
for my freedom.

There is a kind of power
that cannot survive the truth.

Let it die.

There is a kind of certainty
that requires too many people
to remain unseen.

Let it die.

There is a kind of order
that asks the image-bearer
to become useful first
and human second.

Let it die.

I do not want
to write this too quickly.

The dying is not rhetorical.

The dying has names
I am not permitted
to use as decoration.

The dying has invoices,
relationships,
reputations,
plans,
explanations already drafted
and waiting to be sent.

The dying asks
whether I wanted the cross
as a sign over my work
or as the shape within it.

That is the question
I keep trying not to hear.

It would be easier
to carry the sign
than to be carried by it.

Easier to place it
at the front of the ship,
at the top of the document,
in the language of the mission,

than to let it enter
the engine room,
the hiring plan,
the investment memo,
the board conversation,
the apology not yet made.

But the hour
is not cruel.

It is severe mercy.

It does not come
to humiliate the soul,
but to return it
to the real.

It strips away
what cannot be offered
so that what remains
might finally become gift.

And perhaps this is why
I fear it.

Not because truth
will ask too little,
but because truth may ask
exactly what love requires.

May 2026

Accompanying Note & Art

This poem feels different to me because it names the matter more plainly. There are poems where I want the image to do most of the work, where metaphor can carry the weight without pressing too hard on the reader. This one would not let me do that. It insisted on first person because the address is first to myself. The reader is invited in, but almost as an observer to an inward conversation I could no longer postpone.

The phrase “mercy has grown tired / of my evasions” came from that uncomfortable recognition that mercy is not always soft in the way I prefer. Sometimes mercy is the interruption that refuses to let me keep admiring the truth from a distance. “A face / made blurry / by the language / I have placed over it” names a temptation I know well: to let frameworks, strategy, complexity, even good theological language, obscure the person standing nearest to the consequence of my choices.

The turn from “Can this be justified?” to “Can this be offered?” is the central movement of the poem. Justification can remain abstract. Offering cannot. Offering asks whether the thing in my hands can be given back to God without concealment.

At the heart of the poem is the question of whether the cross is merely a sign over my work, or the shape within it. That question still feels severe. But I am learning to trust that severity as mercy.

Public Figures, Do Ho Suh, 2024, Freer Plaza, Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, D.C.

I love this work because it makes visible the hidden moral architecture beneath public order. I’ve had the chance to see it in D.C., where I’m able to be with some regularity, and I’ve long wanted to include it as a visual companion in my writing. This poem, to some surprise, gave me the right occasion.

The sculpture presents an empty monument, nearly ten feet high, seven feet wide, and nine feet long, held aloft by “many small figures in mid-stride.” The figures themselves are roughly eighteen to twenty-four inches tall, but what matters most is the contrast: a monumental public form carried by a crowd of small, individualized bodies.

That is why I have included both images: the longer view and the close-up detail. The long view lets us feel the weight and scale of the monument. The close-up asks us to notice the ones beneath it.

This work gives visual form to the poem’s concern with power, certainty, and order that require “too many people / to remain unseen.” It also echoes my own concern that language, frameworks, mission, strategy, and even theological vocabulary can blur the face of the person nearest to the consequence.

The power of this sculpture, and what I appreciate most, is that it simply reveals. The work asks who carries the burden of what we build, defend, justify, or celebrate. In that sense, it belongs beside my own reckoning: the hour comes when I can no longer admire the truth from a distance, but must ask whether what I hold can be offered.

A sign.

A silence.

A phrase repeated
by the wrong person
at the wrong time.

A door left open.

A dog barking.

A number on a page
that seems to know
more than it should.

I can gather these things
into a pattern,
then kneel before
the pattern I have made.

I can call it wisdom
because it feels
more interesting
than obedience.

I can call it discernment
because it keeps me
from having to repent.

This is one of the quieter mercies:
to be interrupted
before my cleverness
becomes a creed.

To hear someone ask,
not loudly,
but with enough patience
to unsettle me,

Have you looked
at the thing itself?

Not the shadow of it.

Not the theory
that makes it useful.

Not the fear
that makes it larger.

Not the story
I am already preparing
to tell about it.

The thing itself.

The wound as wound.

The person as person.

The creature as creature.

The work as work.

The truth
as something received
before it is defended.

I have lived long enough
to know
that complexity can be
a faithful servant,

and also
a very elegant hiding place.

There are always
more factors to consider.

Always another room
where the matter
can be made less plain.

Always another sentence
that lets the wound
sound strategic.

Always another chart
where the arrows move cleanly
and no one has to bleed.

I do not say this
from outside the room.

I know the room.

I know the long table.

I know the careful language
of necessary tradeoffs.

I know the voice in me
that wants order preserved
before I have asked
whether the order
is preserving life.

I know how quickly
mission can become
a shield for appetite.

How easily stewardship
can become possession
with better manners.

How often I have wanted
truth to arrive
with less cost attached.

But truth is not
improved by my readiness.

It does not become true
when I can bear it.

It waits.

Patient as a fact.

Plain as a wound.

Nearer than I wanted.

April 2026

Accompanying Note & Art

This poem came slowly, through a season of contemplation rather than a single moment of arrival. I have been sitting in a number of board meetings lately, returning again and again to the long table of responsibility, language, tradeoffs, and stewardship. Those are good words, and necessary ones. They belong in rooms where persons are trying to govern wisely and carry real obligations.

Still, I began to notice something in myself. Complexity is almost always real; it is also almost always available as “a very elegant hiding place.” I can keep adding factors until the wound becomes less visible. I can reach for careful language that makes something sound strategic when it may first need to be seen as human.

That awareness deepened during time with like-minded investors who are asking not only what capital can accomplish, but what kind of persons we are becoming as we deploy it. I left grateful, but also gently chastened. There is a subtle line between stewardship and possession with better manners, and I know how easy it is for me to step across it while still using words I trust.

So this poem is not written as an accusation of the room. It is written from my place inside it. It is a mirror held up to my own temptation to make an oracle of patterns, explanations, and apparent wisdom when the plainer invitation may be obedience.

I hope it speaks beyond me, but only because it first spoke to me. It became, in the end, a prayer to be interrupted before cleverness becomes creed, and to receive the mercy of seeing what is plain.

The Caring Hand, Beat Huber with Eva Oertli, 2004, Glarus, Switzerland

I found this work to be a tender visual companion to the poem because it holds strength and restraint together so beautifully. The hand is large, concrete, and unmistakably capable; yet it does not clutch, extract, or possess. It shelters a living tree. Though I have only encountered the work through photographs, I am drawn to the way it depicts a distinction that matters.

The poem is asking whether stewardship can remain care, or whether, almost without noticing, it can become possession with better manners. In the sculpture, the hand is not diminished by gentleness. Its strength is revealed in the space it makes for life to keep growing. That names the longing of the poem: to sit at the table of responsibility without allowing complexity to hide the person, the wound, or the living thing entrusted to our care.

The sculpture does not explain that tension; it embodies it. It asks whether the hand that governs, invests, leads, or protects can become open enough to receive what it has been holding all along.

Slow down.

Not because desire is wrong.
Not because enterprise has lost its summons.

But because speed
can become a false gospel,
promising reach without rootedness,
scale without stewardship,
output without offering.

There is a way of working
that asks first
what can be extracted—

from the hour,
from the body,
from the customer,
from the land,
from the future,
from the worker’s own soul.

It names itself prudent.
It calls itself realistic.
It points to numbers
as though numbers alone
could bless.

And yet
there is a better way.

A way that learns restraint,
that seeks fairness,
that tries not to wound,
that refuses
the most obvious forms of harm.

This is real good.

But even here
the deepest question remains.

Because work is not redeemed
simply when it becomes less cruel.

And a business is not yet whole
simply because it has learned
to blush at exploitation.

The truer invitation
is more costly than that.

Worthy II

To make something
for the love of making it well.

To regard labor
not first as transaction
but as vocation.

To ask of the work
not merely whether it wins,
but whether it is worthy.

Worthy of the hands
that shape it.
Worthy of the persons
it touches.
Worthy of the world
into which it is released.

This cannot be hurried.

Not in the dashboard.
Not in the pitch.
Not in the boast
about how frictionless
the thing has become.

But in the quieter reckoning:

Is it good?
Is it true?
Is it useful in the deep sense—

not merely wanted,
not merely market-clever,
not merely capable
of being sold?

Does it honor
the material it is made from,
the people who make it,
the people who receive it?

Does it enlarge life,
or only stimulate appetite?

There is a speed
that makes such questions
feel inefficient.

A speed that turns craftsmanship
into throughput,
neighbors into users,
places into platforms,
and vocation into an endlessly optimized
supply of labor.

But slowness, rightly held,
is not reluctance.
It is discipline.

It is the willingness
to remain near enough to the work
to know when it has become thin—

when excellence has given way
to adequacy,
when adequacy has given way
to spectacle,
and when spectacle has begun
to masquerade as service.

Worthy III

The redemptive way gives pause.
It is
the more costly way.

Because it asks more
than clean hands.

It asks for sacrifice.

Not sacrifice as performance.
Not sacrifice as branding.
Not sacrifice as noble language
draped over ordinary ambition.

But real surrender
of the lesser win
so that others
might truly flourish.

This is not sentimental.
It is demanding.

It means the work itself
must matter.

Its integrity.
Its beauty.
Its durability.
Its truthfulness.

Not only the story told about it,
but the thing itself—

what goes into it,
what holds it together,
whether it can bear weight
without deception,
whether those who make it
are allowed to remain persons
in the making.

And here, too,
the soul is tested.

Because one may do
religious things
and still fail at holy work.

One may speak with piety
and build badly.

But to make well—
with honesty,
with discipline,
with inward coherence,
with love for the task itself—

this, too, is worship.
This, too,
is praise.

So the call is not
simply to slow down,
but to stay.

To let resistance
become teacher.
To let limits
become mercy.
To let excellence
mean more than polish.

And if this produces less,
or earns less applause
from those who know only
how to count,
then let it.

Better to build
at the pace required
for faithfulness,
until the work itself
becomes a witness:

that business can become
an offering,
and that to labor
with care,
with sacrifice,
with delight,
with one’s humanity still intact,
is not a detour from the point.

It is the point.

April 2026

Accompanying Note & Art

This poem arrived slowly, which felt fitting given what it is trying to say. It has been forming for at least two months, not as a single burst of inspiration but as a gathering conversation—partly in real life, partly in my own head. It grew out of overlapping moments: a conversation about a business in transition, a set of live and still-unfolding dialogues within a faith-and-work setting, the fruit made available to me through shepherding an eight-week redemptive business cohort, and several exchanges with two exceptional operators I admire deeply—both redemptively minded, though one works at significant scale and the other much closer to startup life.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, a local instinct toward speed kept echoing in my mind. Not as a straw man, and not even as a simple disagreement, but as a provocation. What does speed make possible? What does it make harder to see? When does pace become energy, and when does it become ideology? Those questions stayed with me as I listened to people trying to build faithfully under real pressure, with real payrolls, real markets, real hopes, and real limitations. I kept returning to the tension between momentum and formation, between scale and stewardship, between what can be accelerated and what simply cannot be hurried without loss.

Part of what made this poem difficult is that it did not want to arrive in my more natural form. I find myself longing to return to the Petrarchan sonnet, but that return seems deferred for a bit as I continue experimenting with free verse and, in this case, a triptych in free verse. This material wanted more room. It wanted to develop slowly, to turn the subject in the light, and to let one movement lead into the next without pressing too quickly toward closure.

That tension is still present for me. At times this reads like an essay disguised as a poem, and I do not entirely like that. But I know why it came this way. Poetry is the one form that allows me to express what I am feeling and what I am thinking simultaneously in time. That is what first drew me to poetry at all. I wanted a form in which intellect and emotion did not have to take turns speaking.

The triptych gave the tension a shape spacious enough to hold it. In Worthy I, “The False Gospel,” I name the seduction of speed when it slips free of rootedness, stewardship, and offering. In Worthy II, “The Quieter Reckoning,” the poem slows and looks more carefully at the work itself, asking whether what is being made is actually good, true, and worthy. Then in Worthy III, “The More Costly Way,” the turn is toward sacrifice, integrity, and offering as the deeper marks of redemptive focus. Taken together, the three poems move the way this reflection moved in me: from diagnosis, to discernment, to surrender.

Another Place, Antony Gormley, Crosby Beach Liverpool UK, 2005

I chose this work as a companion to the poem because it carries, in physical form, much of what the triptych is trying to name. One hundred cast-iron figures stand along nearly three kilometers of shoreline at Crosby Beach, all facing outward toward the sea, with some extending far enough into the water that tide and weather alternately reveal and submerge them. What draws me most deeply is not first its scale, but its posture. These figures do not perform. They do not advertise. They simply stand and remain. In that sense, they resist nearly everything Worthy is wrestling with. They are the opposite of frictionless. They are not optimized. They embody patience, exposure, endurance, and a kind of public stillness that feels morally serious. And in the end, that is why I chose the work: it gives visible form to one of the poem’s deepest convictions—not simply to slow down, but to stay.

Further, it made steadfastness legible. It reminded me that faithful work is often weathered, patient, and willing to remain in public long enough to be shaped by the world it hopes to serve.

This is the season
when joy and grief do not wait
their turn.

They sit down together.
They share the same air.
They look at one another
across the same table.

And Christ is there too—
not above it,
not hurrying us through it,
not asking us to call sorrow something smaller
than sorrow.

He is there
where betrayal is remembered by name,
where abandonment is not edited,
where the lash, the thorn, the thirst,
the pierced side,
the cry in the dark
are allowed to remain
long enough
to become prayer.

I am learning
that bearing is not only carrying weight.

It is enduring
without hardening.

It is remaining present
without pretending.

It is love refusing
to become efficient.

I have felt this
in ordinary holy ways:

in the nearness
of a life still opening,

in the joy
|of news that enlarges love,

in the tender ache
that comes
when one beautiful chapter
begins to close
so another can begin.

This is what I am trying to learn:

that grief and gladness
are not enemies.

That the faithful life
is not lived by escaping either one.

That Christ does not redeem by avoidance
but by entering.

By kneeling inside the wound.
By taking up the weight.
By carrying through.

And so I ask for this—
not release from all sorrow,
but the grace to bear it well.

To stay.
To bless.
To love without flinching.

To become,
in some small way,
a person whose life
does not turn away
when love grows costly.

March 2026

Accompanying Note & Art

This poem came to me in a season when joy and grief have not been arriving in neat sequence. They have been sharing the same room.

That feels true to Lent. And it feels true as well to the kind of work many of us are trying to learn how to do. In our monthly gathering of friends engaged in redemptive work, one of the practices I most value is the telling of stories that do not tidy themselves too quickly. We are trying to become the kind of people who can speak honestly of griefs and longings in the same breath. Not as an exercise in sentiment. Not as a way of curating vulnerability. But as a quiet act of truth-telling before God and one another. What is breaking our hearts? What are we hoping for? What have we not yet resolved? Where are we being asked to remain present rather than merely move on?

The prayer behind this poem helps me because it refuses evasion. It remembers, one line at a time, the sorrow of Christ: betrayal, abandonment, scourging, thirst, piercing, forsakenness. In the poem’s opening movement, I wanted those realities to remain on the page long enough to become prayer. Free verse allowed me to say that more openly and with the cadence of lived speech rather than the tighter architecture of the sonnet.

Yet the poem still turns as a Petrarchan sonnet does. The turn comes here: “I am learning / that bearing is not only carrying weight.” This is where I shifted from naming suffering to reflecting on what suffering asks of me, and then toward prayer.

That is also why “Bearing” feels like the right title. The word gathers several currents at once. Christ bears the wound, the thorn, the abandonment, the full weight that love alone would choose to carry. But the poem is also asking that his way of bearing might school my own life — that I might become a person who does not glance at sorrow and move on, but one who stays, carries on, and loves with greater steadiness.

Lately, I have been feeling that in ordinary holy ways: in the nearness of a life still opening, in the joy of news that enlarges love, and in the tender ache that comes when one beautiful chapter begins to close so another can begin.

So this poem is, in part, my work to pray from within that landscape. To kneel where sorrow is remembered truthfully, and then to turn — not away from grief, but through it — toward the kind of mercy that stays, bears, and carries through. That too, it seems to me, is part of redemptive life.

Stations of the Cross 13: Pietà, Gib Singleton, 2009, Santa Fe, NM. Part of Singleton’s larger Stations of the Crosscycle.

What draws me to this work is that it does not try to make sorrow prettier than it is. It was designed and created in 2009 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and it stands as the thirteenth station in his larger Stations of the Cross cycle. The Museum of the Bible describes it as the moment when the body of Jesus has been taken down from the cross and laid across Mary’s lap, rendered in Singleton’s distinctive language of what he called “emotional realism.”

I have been drawn to Gib’s work for more than twenty years now. We already have two of his pieces in our collection, and this is a third I long to add. I also had the gift of meeting him through a friend not long before his death in 2014, which only deepened an affection that had already been with me for a long while.

Part of what makes this piece even more compelling to me is knowing more about the arc of his work. He did not leave Western art behind so much as carry both streams at once. Even as Santa Fe and the West helped shape the cowboy and frontier pieces for which he became widely known, he also retained a deep commitment to biblical and devotional themes. In his own words, there was never a divide between the two. But by his own account, the death of his daughter — followed by being told in hospice that he had only six days to live — marked a deepening. “Something shifted,” he said; he came to understand more of “life and death and redemption and resurrection” and finally felt able to render it in his work. That shift leads directly to the final burst of major devotional pieces, including the Stations of the Cross and my personal favorite, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

That is why this sculpture feels so closely joined to the poem and note. It inhabits that same estuarial place where grief and love share one frame, and where Christ does not bypass sorrow but enters it fully and carries it through.

I bring what I carry—unrevised,
no careful phrasing, no obedient spin.
This burden has a name; I breathe it in
and set it down where mercy has eyes.
Not lifetime maps—give grace for today’s rise;
not perfect plans—one faithful step to begin.
And let me choose to need: invite a friend
to lift one corner, share the strain’s widening weight.

Then school my questions: not why this, but now—
what love requires, what repair I can make.
Lead me to mercy’s smallest door and bow,
for joy keeps company with steps we take.
This weight is “light” beside the glory—how?
Beauty for ashes; praise where spirits ache.

March 2026

Accompanying Note & Art

I wrote this sonnet after a simple question from a friend—also a founder—who looked at me with the kind of care you don’t have to earn and asked, “How are you doing?” It wasn’t diagnostic; it was an invitation. And I felt how quickly I reached for a performance: the shallow summary, the optimistic headline, the polished update that keeps the other person at a safe distance and preserves calm. But the honest answer was less tidy. I’m carrying something heavy. Could I actually name what was real?

Not the dramatic kind of heavy that makes for a clean story arc—the quieter kind. The kind that spreads out over time and becomes a widening weight: responsibility that doesn’t lift at the close of the day, decisions that don’t resolve cleanly, relationships that need to be stewarded well, and the ache of watching people you care about live inside real constraints. Living fully alive as a redemptive investor is so much more than capital allocation. It’s a long obedience with other people’s lives in view. It’s choosing formation over frenzy while still showing up with seriousness and courage. That posture is beautiful, but it is not light—hence the title, Weight?!

I’ve come to love the interrobang, and if you’ve been following for a while you’ll recognize it as a defining mark of this season of my writing. An interrobang fuses a question mark and an exclamation point into one symbol: ‽. It’s for moments that are both question and exclamation at the same time—surprise, wonder, urgency, even delight. If a question mark says, “I don’t know,” and an exclamation point says, “I know!”, the interrobang names the posture I’m trying to inhabit: awake, honest, and still listening—“I’m here; tell me what’s next.” It doesn’t shut down thinking, and it holds conviction without shutting down relationship.

My personal playbook has a line that keeps returning to me in moments like this: name what’s real, and then take the next faithful step. That’s the first turn of the sonnet. No editing. No spin. No pretending I’m above the human experience of strain. I’m learning that truth-telling isn’t a lack of faith; it’s often the beginning of it. So the poem opens with a practice: breathe the burden in, name it, and set it down—if only for a moment—where mercy can meet it.

The middle of the sonnet is my resistance and my remedy. I want a lifetime solution. I want clarity that arrives like a spreadsheet. I want the burden “handled” so I can get back to being productive. But the invitation is smaller and more humane: ask for today’s grace, not a ten-year plan. Look for the next faithful step, not the perfect one. The burden may not move yet, but I can.

And then there’s the line I needed to write because I don’t naturally live it: “choose to need.” Needing help can feel like a threat to competence, but isolation is where burdens become cruel. One of the most practical mercies available to me is simply to tell one person the truth and let them carry a corner—not because they can fix it, but because shared weight becomes bearable weight. It turns suffering from a private room into a shared table.

The second turn—“Then school my questions”—is where the poem shifts from explanation to formation. I can get trapped in “why,” and sometimes “why” is a real question. But it can also become a loop that keeps me stuck. “What now?” is often the doorway back into agency: obedience, repair, love. What does faithfulness look like in the next hour? What apology needs to be made? What act of repair is mine? What small mercy can I do, even if the larger situation remains unresolved?

And this is where joy becomes possible—not the bright, unburdened version, but the truer kind. Joy as companionship. Joy that often arrives after movement: one small act of mercy, one practiced gratitude, one exchange Isaiah 61 names—beauty for ashes, praise for heaviness. Not because the ashes weren’t real, but because mercy is real too‽

Dancing Girl (aka Budva Ballerina), Gradimir Aleksić, Morgren Beach, Budva Montenegro, 1965

Perched on a sea rock along the footpath that curves from Budva’s Old Town toward Mogren Beach in Montenegro, this work embodies the tension this sonnet is trying to hold: weight, and a posture that refuses to be braced by it. The bronze figure isn’t performing for a stage. She’s practicing steadiness at the edge—open, exposed to wind and salt, balancing in a stance that looks like grace but is clearly strength.

In my view, this is Weight?! in metal. Not denial. Not drama. The quieter, widening load—carried in public—without the need to tidy the story. And it struck me as matching the invitation of both the poem and the note: name what is real, then take the next faithful step.

Her “next step” is not progress as spectacle; it’s endurance as faithfulness. You can almost see the line, “choose to need,” because the path is communal—tourists and locals pass by, witness, pause, and remember that bearing weight was never meant to be solitary. The statue becomes a small, coastal interrobang: tenderness held in tension, fully awake, still listening—‽

The myth of progress lingers,
an echo in the hum of machines,
a practiced assumption in boardrooms,
telling us growth is inevitable,
that tomorrow’s more will surely be better.

Yet, under the fluorescent lights,
hands build futures on fragile ground.
Prosperity rises, and so do walls—
walls of exploitation, walls of exclusion—
their weight pressing down where no one is looking.

In the marketplace, where numbers reign,
money becomes both master and measure,
and lives are reduced to lines on a ledger,
as if worth could be distilled to profit margins,
as if a person could be priced and proved.

But somewhere beyond the screens,
beyond the sharp click of transactions,
a redemptive vision breathes—
a call not to take, but to restore,
to create anew through sacrifice.

We walk, not driven by gain,
but by a love that lays itself down,
a faith that surrenders ambition,
inviting us to release our grip,
to rebuild what was broken with open hands.

The world aches for restoration,
in every exploited corner,
in every handshake that binds more than a deal,
in every soul bent under the weight of production.
And in that ache, we see the image of God,
calling us to reimagine work—
not as a race to the top,
but a journey to serve.

This is the dream of the redemptive:
hands that build also bless,
every dollar earned a seed for healing,
a stitch in the fabric of repair.

In the end, it is not the progress we claim,
but the lives we restore,
the communities we knit back together,
that will tell the true story
of what we built,
and who we became.

March 2026

Accompanying Note & Art

It’s unusual for me to write in free verse. I’m drawn to the creative restraints of my preferred Petrarchan sonnet form—the way meter and rhyme create a kind of trellis that forces attention, precision, and honest economy. Here, though, I chose free verse to allow more room for expression and movement.

In free verse there is no fixed meter; line lengths and stresses vary. There is no set rhyme scheme. Structurally, I arranged the poem in two larger “paragraph-stanzas”—two grouped sections of lines separated by a break. Each section works like a prose paragraph: one sustained thought, one sustained tone, but written in lines so the pacing and emphasis can breathe. The movement is carried less by form and more by rhetorical progression: diagnosis → exposure → turn toward a redemptive vision → invitation → closing moral accounting. I was curious if I could write it as a lyric-argument—lyrical in imagery, with no compromise in its moral arc.

Those of you who follow my work know I don’t write this way often. And that’s part of the point. I chose free verse here because it gives me a different kind of constraint—one that lets my mind and my longing speak together. It lets me name what I’m thinking and what I’m feeling simultaneously, in time, without forcing the tension to resolve too quickly.

This poem came out of a joy-filled stretch of weeks in which I had the privilege of shepherding a conversation about redemptive business. We kept returning to a simple, weighty question: what does a redemptive business bring with it? We didn’t stay in slogans for long. We pressed into the lived realities of building—real constraints, real tradeoffs, real people—and slowly an answer surfaced with clarity and conviction: creative restoration through sacrifice (h/t Praxis). Not restoration as sentiment. Restoration as a way of working that costs something. Creativity not as novelty, but as the courage to imagine a better path when the obvious path would demand someone else’s diminishment.

The poem follows the same movement I experienced in that room.

First, the diagnosis: the assumption that progress is inevitable and growth is the moral direction of the universe. I don’t always notice how much that assumption guides my instincts. It can feel like gravity—present, constant, unquestioned—so that “more” becomes the default answer before I’ve even asked what the situation requires.

Then, exposure: “under the fluorescent lights” and “where numbers reign.” Those lines are there because that is where formation actually happens for me—in ordinary rooms, under ordinary pressures. It’s where we can build futures on fragile ground without realizing it, and where the ledger can slowly become more than a tool. I love clarity and measurement, but I’ve watched how quickly a spreadsheet can start to decide what matters. When numbers reign, people can become abstractions. Worth can get reduced to what can be tracked. And walls—exploitation, exclusion—can rise right alongside prosperity, not always through malice, but through unexamined momentum.

Then, the turn: the conviction that we are not trapped inside the myth or the metrics. A redemptive vision breathes beyond the screens. It calls us back to the image of God in the people closest to the work—customers, employees, suppliers, neighbors—and invites a different posture: love that sacrifices, faith that loosens its grip on control.

And finally, invitation and accounting: shepherding those conversations has become one of my deepest delights because I get to be in the room where that turn happens—together. The discussion moves from ideas to formation, from aspiration to action—into pricing, hiring, vendor terms, ownership structures, exit paths, and the treatment of the least powerful person in the value chain. The poem ends with the only measure that finally matters: not the progress we claim, but the lives restored and the communities knit back together. That is the true story of what we built—and who we became.

Father Hesburgh and Father Joyce, Lou Cella, University of Notre Dame, outside the Hesburgh Library, 2005

I chose this sculpture to accompany the poem because it interrupts the “numbers reign” world with a different kind of authority: two leaders in conversation. Lou Cella cast this larger-than-life bronze to portray Fathers Ted Hesburgh and Ned Joyce mid-dialogue. Their words are literally grounded in stone, with a quote from each of them set into the granite base.

That posture mirrors the arc of both the poem and the accompanying note. When we’re “under the fluorescent lights,” the rule of “more” can start to feel like gravity. It’s just there, unquestioned, shaping the room. This sculpture quietly insists on another way of being formed: presence, relationship, and moral imagination over time. It’s a visual of the work I most enjoy shepherding—leaders willing to slow down, to wrestle with what redemptive business actually brings with it, and to let the conversation do its patient work toward creative restoration through sacrifice.

This ash-marked week, I felt two currents meet—
A founder’s bright-eyed charts, his faithful care,
And Lent’s soft sentence lingering in the air:
Remember you are dust—receive the weight.
So I spoke plain: not less, not more, but enough—
Sufficiency, no frantic upward stare;
To tend what is, to mend what we must bear,
To keep the vessel whole, and not burn out.

For “growth” can turn to hunger, thinly veiled,
Where rising lines feel righteous, clean, and true;
Yet roofs still leak, and every shine grows pale—
The world wears down; love counts the after too.
So let restraint be chosen, not bewailed:
What remains—once kept and paid—is gift made new.

February 2026

Accompanying Note & Art

This week, the idea didn’t arrive in isolation. It arrived as a juxtaposition—two happenings colliding in time. The first was Ash Wednesday: that quiet smudge of truth and the sentence I never seem to outgrow, Remember that you are dust. The second was a conversation with a young founder—bright, earnest, prepared—walking me through his strategy and financials with real excellence. I was deeply encouraged by him. And then, as he wrapped it up, he asked a simple, searching question: “How do you think about our venture?”

Ash on my forehead, numbers on the page—those two moments sat beside each other in my mind like flint and steel. Dust and depreciation. Vision and upkeep. Desire and restraint. I felt, almost with startled clarity, that the question was larger than a business model. It was an anthropology question: what do we worship when we worship “growth”? What remains when we stop calling expansion a virtue and start asking whether sufficiency might be its own kind of strength? In that collision, I wondered if this was a call to poetry. I knew the answer was yes. This is often how a sonnet begins to form in me: two events that should be connected, suddenly connected—actions and feelings meeting in the same hour and insisting on a shared language.

I should also say this plainly: I deeply respect and honor this young founder. His focus is building a redemptive venture, and he embraces the hard work it takes to do that in a part of the globe that is widely—and correctly—experienced as exploitative. He is not naïve about the realities of power, corruption, extraction, or the quiet ways systems train people to accept less than dignity. He is trying, with real sobriety, to build something that does not merely “work,” but heals—something that treats persons as ends, not means, and refuses to confuse profitability with permission.

When I shared where my mind was going—toward Lent, toward limits, toward the strange possibility that spiritual formation might have something to say about venture formation—he paused and said, in essence, that he didn’t expect to hear that. He came in prepared for strategy talk and financial review, not for the suggestion that Lent might be a lens through which to consider his venture. I understood that. Most rooms don’t bring ash and spreadsheets to the same table. But that was precisely the juxtaposition I couldn’t ignore. If the world is as it is—if, in a fallen world, exploitation is the default condition we are born into and trained by, the baseline against which we labor (and, as a Christ-follower, I believe it is)—then surely we must be open to practices that train our desires as much as our tactics.

One quick caveat: many who read this are not finance people. Neither am I, at least not in the way the phrase usually means. But I do walk in a financial world—one with its own dialect and reflexes—and I’ve learned that sometimes the quickest way to name a spiritual temptation is to translate it into the language it most often hides behind. So I’ll keep the terms simple and the point human.

Here is the claim I’m making, said as plainly as I know how: I’m not trying to build a venture that must get bigger every year to prove it is alive. I’m trying to build—and to counsel others toward building—something that can remain healthy, durable, and whole without being addicted to constant expansion. In my world, there’s a simple way to say that: my goal is zero growth in what’s left over after we pay the real costs of keeping the venture healthy.

Those “real costs” are the unglamorous ones. Not just the day-to-day bills, but the costs that show up over time: replacing what wears out, reinvesting so quality doesn’t slip, repairing what breaks, paying down what you owe, tending culture so it doesn’t fray. Put differently: I’m less interested in how a venture looks in a clean snapshot and more interested in whether it can endure without cannibalizing its future.

This is where the financial world often reaches for tidy “before” numbers—metrics that are genuinely useful, but also easy to romanticize. EBITDA is one of those. It’s a common measure of operating performance, and it has its place. But it is, by design, a “before” measure. It tells you how the engine is running before you account for certain real-world weights—like the cost of money, taxes, and the long, slow wearing-down of assets. It can make a business look strong while quietly moving the costs of endurance offstage. It can make expansion feel inevitable simply because the full cost of staying whole isn’t being stared in the face.

Ash Wednesday does not let me live in “before.” It hands me a more honest anthropology: Remember that you are dust.Everything we build lives inside that sentence. Things wear down. Bodies age. Attention scatters. Communities strain. Entropy is not pessimism; it is simply the name of the world we inhabit. And Lent, in its mercy, trains us not to deny that reality but to live wisely within it.

Lent is not collapse. It is restraint embraced on purpose. And repentance, as Lent tutors us in it, is not self-loathing; it is re-orientation—a quiet turning, again and again, from loves that have slipped out of order back toward love that is true. We fast not because food is evil, but because appetite can quietly master us. We relinquish not because creation is bad, but because our desires so easily drift. We step back not to diminish life, but to see it clearly again.

Growth is not evil. It can be beautiful, generative, necessary. But escalation—the reflexive insistence that more is always better—can become its own kind of appetite. The rising line can start to substitute for discernment. “Bigger” can begin to masquerade as “better.” And in that subtle shift, the venture can begin to outrun its soul.

So to speak of “zero growth” in what remains after endurance has been paid for is not to renounce excellence. It is to renounce illusion. It is to ask: what if optimal size is a moral category? What if sufficiency is strength? What if the venture does not need to expand to be faithful?

In this light, what I’m reaching for is less a strategy and more a posture—an economic fast, a commitment to remain whole. The world will keep offering the seduction of spectacle and the shortcut of “more,” but Lent keeps tutoring me in a different kind of strength: restraint without fear, faithfulness without applause, endurance without extraction. And perhaps that steadiness—quiet, unspectacular, durable—is its own small resurrection: not endless ascent, but a life rooted in love, trusting that what remains is enough.

Coin Stack 2, Sean Scully, Schneeberg, Germany, 2024
photo source: Purple Path

Another piece I’ve not yet seen in person, but the photograph captured exactly what I was trying to portray in the sonnet. A stack is not a sprint; it’s an accumulation that only happens through time, gravity, and restraint. Each “coin” is a quiet yes to limits: you can only add what you actually have, you can only build what can bear weight, and you ignore the laws of load and balance at your peril. That is the sonnet’s posture—not less, not more, but enough—made visible.

It also carries the “after” logic without needing any jargon. A stack implies real costs: friction, pressure, settling. It reminds me that endurance isn’t the glamorous part of building, but it is the truthful part. In a world of charts that always want to rise, the stack doesn’t preach; it simply stands there and says: steadiness is a form of strength. What remains—layered, tended, and paid for—can be enough.

Not every alone is absence, or a cost;
Some silences are rooms where truth can hear,
Where what we are—unarmored—comes across,
And tenderness arrives, unforced, unseer.
We learn the shape of being held while here:
So loneliness turns threshold, not a loss.

February 2026

Accompanying Note & Art

One caveat before you read on: I’m sharing a bit of my mental workshop—more of the false starts, the small revisions, and the choices that felt necessary along the way. Please consider this an invitation into my messy mind—not because the mess is the point, but because the making is part of the gift of poetry as I experience it: the path to a sonnet is itself a kind of witness.

Why does loneliness feel like something so peculiarly “of our time”? We talk about it as an epidemic, as if it’s a new disease born of modern life. And in a sense, of course it is timely: our lives have been reorganized around mobility, optimization, and the thin efficiencies of screens. We can be “connected” all day and still feel untouched. We can have a calendar full of people and a heart that feels un-met.

But I’m increasingly unconvinced that loneliness is as new as we think. What may be new is its visibility—how exposed it has become as some of the older patterns that held us have thinned. In early drafts of this sonnet, I used the language of those patterns being “rewired,” and I still think that’s true. Yet as I lived with the poem longer, “rewired” began to sound too clinical, too headline-ish, like I was summarizing a think-piece. What I was trying to name was more tactile: the sense that vows, village, page—those steady forms of belonging—can feel less available, less thick, less durable. Not gone entirely. Just… thinned.

That’s why the poem now says, “Have thinned to threads; we scroll, but feel the toll.” It’s a small line, but it carried a lot of the revision for me. It lets the poem be contemporary without turning it into commentary. It admits: yes, the phone is in the room. But it refuses to make the phone the villain. The deeper thing is the ache that precedes the phone, the ache that will outlast it—an old hunger of the soul.

Two long-time friends have helped me see this with greater clarity.

John often reminds me that solitude and stillness were once things people sought, not feared. He likes to say that silence isn’t emptiness—it’s a kind of presence. That sentence has stayed with me. And it keeps pressing on a distinction I’ve learned to hold with more care: being alone and being lonely are not the same river. They may run near one another, and our age loves to confuse their waters, but they are not the same—and we muddle them at our peril. One can be a spacious room; the other can feel like a locked door. In an earlier version of the poem I wrote, “A presence waiting in our hidden cage.” It wasn’t wrong, exactly—but “cage” began to feel too sealed, too predetermined. The more honest word wasn’t “cage.” It was “hiding.”

So the line became: “To draw us out of hiding into gaze.”

That shift matters. A cage is something done to you. Hiding is something you can do for you—sometimes for good reasons, sometimes because you’ve forgotten how to come out. And “gaze” is a relational word. It implies a face. It implies attention. It implies the possibility that what we most want is not simply escape from loneliness, but encounter—being looked upon without being reduced, being seen without being consumed.

Then there’s my friend Curt, who has taught me that what we really ache for isn’t just company—it’s to be known and still loved. That’s what heals loneliness: not a “cure” in the medical sense, but connection of a particular kind—being seen, named, and held with steadiness. Curt helped me stop treating loneliness as a pathology to eliminate and begin receiving it as a signal to interpret. Longing, he has shown me, can be redemptive—not because longing feels good, but because it can draw us toward creativity, beauty, and community. Loneliness may be, in part, the soul’s refusal to settle for thin substitutes.

That is why the sonnet’s turn (the volta) matters so much. In a Petrarchan sonnet, the turn is not just a structural requirement—it’s a kind of spiritual discipline. It forces the poem to admit complexity: to name what is true and then to widen the frame.

In this poem, the turn comes with a refusal: “Not every alone is absence, or a cost.” I wanted the sestet to do the work John and Curt have helped me do—hold the tension between loneliness as ache and solitude as gift. A key revision for me was to stop over-naming the destination. In one version, the ending spoke explicitly of “communion’s fold.” I love that phrase, and I believe it, but it began to feel too specific for what the poem itself was trying to offer. The accompanying note can carry more theological weight; the poem can remain hospitable—ecumenical, even—while still resonant with the deeper reality I’m reaching toward.

So the language in the sestet became more implicit:

“Some silences are rooms where truth can hear,

Where what we are—unarmored—comes across,

And tenderness arrives, unforced…”

That phrase—tenderness arrives—was important to me. It keeps the poem from becoming a self-help exercise (“go be alone and fix yourself”) and instead points to gift. Not achievement. Not technique. Arrival. The best forms of healing do not feel manufactured; they feel received. And often they do not come through crowd noise or constant motion, but through the quieter, steadier practices that make real presence possible: stillness, honesty, attention, friendship, prayer, a walk, a meal, a shared silence that doesn’t demand performance.

This is also why the ending moved away from “teacher” and toward “threshold”:

“So loneliness turns threshold, not a loss.”

A teacher can sound moralizing, even when you don’t mean it that way—like loneliness is a lesson you should be able to master. Threshold feels truer. A threshold is not an answer; it is an opening. It doesn’t deny the ache; it re-situates it. A threshold says: you are not stuck. You are being invited. Something is possible from here.

So perhaps the deeper lesson isn’t to fix loneliness at all. Maybe it’s to befriend it—to let it teach us what it’s trying to teach without letting it define us. Loneliness, at its best, is not an illness but an invitation: a quiet reminder that we were made for belonging. Not the thin connection of screens or schedules, but the kind that grows slowly through presence, patience, and love.

And maybe, if we’re honest, the ache itself is a kind of mercy. It refuses to let us call substitutes “enough.” It keeps pointing past distraction toward the truer desire: to be seen without armor, to be welcomed without performance, to be held—by God, by others, by a community sturdy enough to make room for our becoming.

That is the hope beneath this sonnet. Not that loneliness will vanish, but that it will be transfigured—less a verdict, more a doorway. Less a sentence, more a summons into deeper presence, thicker friendship, and a more human kind of life.

Draped Reclining Figure, Henry Moore, circa 1957, Perry Green, Much Hadham
Hertfordshire, England

What draws me to Moore’s work is the way it holds solitude without apology. There is no shrinking here, no sense of being cast off. The figure rests—unhurried, unembarrassed—as if stillness were not a deficiency but a form of strength. It feels strangely familiar to me, like a place I’ve been before: that thin, tender middle ground that is not quite loneliness and not yet communion, but something in between—an antechamber of the heart.

The drapery, to my eye, reads like grace. Not armor. Not concealment. Not the anxious covering we pull over ourselves when we fear being seen. It is a weight that doesn’t crush, a veil that doesn’t erase—a kind of permission for the form to simply be. When I sit with it, I hear again the distinction I keep learning to honor: being alone and being lonely are not the same river. They can run close enough that their waters sound alike, especially in our age, and we confuse them at our peril. But Moore’s figure helps me feel the difference in my body. This is aloneness as room, not loneliness as locked door.

And in that room, something quiet becomes possible. The sculpture doesn’t hustle toward resolution. It doesn’t try to fix the ache by filling space. It listens. It keeps faith with the pause. That listening is what I find myself longing for—not a cure for longing, but a way of holding it without panic. To be met, known, and held without performing my way into belonging. To let tenderness arrive unforced, like light finding its way through a curtain.

There is also something Esther-like here—though the heroism is almost invisible. The figure isn’t doing anything. It’s simply present. Waiting. Holding its place with a kind of quiet courage. And I recognize myself in that posture: seasons when God has met me not in the noise of achievement but in the hidden rooms of solitude, where purpose whispers rather than shouts, where the soul is re-taught its own name.

In that sense, this piece feels like the poem made visible: the gentle turn from loneliness-as-fear toward loneliness-as-threshold. Not an ending, not an answer—an opening. A fold in the day where communion doesn’t get forced, but begins to take root.

I paused when shame was named a cleansing tide—
a force to scour the channels of our trade;
not blind to wreckage history has made,
nor deaf to cries that will not be denied.
Yet shame arrives—like flood against the side—
undoing banks where patient paths were laid.
It says not this has failed—but you have failed—
and fear moves in where courage once abided.

Where mixed waters meet—another truth
insists that faults embedded in the ground
are healed in persons—face to honest face.
Truth spoken gently widens moral youth—
a call to stand, to answer, to be found:
repair made possible—where blame gives place.

February 2026

Accompanying Note & Art

Recently, a conversation unfolded in a small, trusted circle of redemptive investors—friends and fellow travelers—responding to a New York Times opinion essay on financialization. A dear friend in the group shared the piece with a note of gratitude, appreciative of its clarity and moral force. That word—grateful—caught my attention. Not because the article lacked insight, but because it seemed to signal a quiet endorsement of the posture the essay implied for addressing the harms it named.

The essay itself made a stark and necessary claim: that much of modern capitalism, particularly in its financialized expressions, has drifted from value creation into extraction. Capital, untethered from productive ends, increasingly serves itself. Workers, communities, and even entire industries are hollowed out in the process. This is exploitative work, and naming it as such felt both accurate and overdue.

Where I paused was not at the diagnosis, but at the remedy the article advanced. Having identified financialization as exploitative, the author reached for shame as the primary lever for reform—public exposure, moral pressure, reputational harm. Regulation might restrain behavior, the essay suggested, but shame is what will finally force change.

That move felt incongruous to me.

Shame, too, is an extractive force. It draws energy through fear rather than courage, through humiliation rather than responsibility. It does not say this practice has failed so much as you have failed—and in doing so, it quietly shifts moral judgment from action to person. Once that shift takes hold, concealment replaces confession, defensiveness replaces agency, and the moral imagination required for genuine renewal is crowded out. To confront exploitative systems with exploitative tactics feels like answering fire with fire—dramatic, perhaps effective in the short term, but rarely restorative.

A redemptive posture presses further—upward, outward, and inward. It insists that industries are not abstractions, but communities of persons. Even when harm is structural, formation remains personal and relational. Redemptive work confronts wrongdoing without contempt. It does not excuse failure; it insists on it—but in a way that keeps agency intact and repair imaginable. It speaks truth without stripping dignity and calls people forward into responsibility, rather than shaming them into retreat.

What made this more than a theoretical concern was a subsequent exchange with a dear friend from that circle. We were not divided on the harms being named. We were discerning, together, what kind of work actually leads to transformation. Through correspondence—careful, public, and honest—we slowed the conversation, named how words landed, and clarified intention without erasing impact.

In the end, the correspondence itself became instructive. If we want renewal rather than mere compliance, the means must already carry the ends we seek. In estuary spaces—where currents meet and mix—I’ve learned this much: what we draw from shapes what we become. Naming exploitation truthfully while practicing redemption faithfully is slower, less theatrical work. But it is the kind of work that heals rather than merely exposes—and leaves room for repair to rise.

Wave Field, Maya Lin, Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York, 2009

Jayne Ann and I encountered Wave Field during a visit to Storm King Art Center, a place that feels nothing short of magical. Walking the grounds, the scale and quiet intentionality of the landscape slow you down almost immediately. It emerges not as an object to be viewed, but as terrain to be entered.

Standing there, it became clear why this work belongs with the sonnet and the note. Nothing is exposed or shamed into correction. The land is formed patiently, through repeated shaping that changes how you move, how you attend, how you linger. Storm King itself amplifies this posture—inviting reflection rather than spectacle, participation rather than judgment.

Encountering this work made tangible what I’ve been trying to name in words: that genuine transformation—of land, of systems, of people—comes not through force or humiliation, but through care, time, and the slow work of learning how to walk differently.

I gathered books that learned the art of age,
Their covers shaped by hands I’ll never meet;
A date stamp keeps its slender, faithful beat—
August. March. Another life’s engagement.
Those narrow columns drew me: inked and plain,
A hush of readers waiting in a line,
Each lending time, then leaving me a sign
Of what they noticed, what they could not name.

Some reader traced a line beneath a phrase—
Not to declare it true, but to remain.
What weight or wonder asked them there to stay?

We grow regardless; unattended, bent.
So reading gives a trellis to our days,
A net for time, where meaning finds us—lent.

January 2026

Accompanying Note

I’ve always loved exploring and purchasing old books. There’s a quiet satisfaction in finding volumes that have already lived a life, and I’ve developed a simple rule over time: a book should be somewhere close to fifty years old before it comes home with me. Many of these were once part of library collections. You can usually tell. The bindings are softened, the pages carry a faint patience, and inside the front cover there’s often that familiar column of stamped dates—August 1987. March 1994. Evidence that this book once mattered enough to be taken home, lived with for a while, then returned—only to be chosen again.

I’ve always loved those stamps. They make reading feel less like a private act and more like participation in a quiet procession. A line of strangers, separated by years and circumstance, yet briefly joined by the same words. You’re never the first reader. You’re never the last. You are simply next.

What draws me most, though, are the markings. An underlined sentence. A bracket in the margin. Sometimes just a single word, emphasized and left unexplained. These gestures feel less like assertions and more like pauses—moments when someone stopped long enough to notice that something carried weight. I find myself wondering what desire or ache slowed them there, whether the act of underlining was, in its own quiet way, a form of prayer.

We are shaped less by what we decide in the abstract and more by what we return to—by the small practices that train our attention and quietly aim our loves. Old books make this visible. Their wear tells a story of formation through repetition rather than novelty, of lives shaped slowly over time.

There is a way of reading that treats study not as acquisition, but as attention—truth received before it is explained. That posture seems to linger in these pages. I don’t feel pressed to master the text, only to remain with it long enough to be changed.

There is a particular beauty in old books that stands in gentle contrast to new ones. Reading them slows me down. It shifts my posture from consumption to reception. If left unattended, we still grow—but often misshapen. Reading, practiced patiently, becomes a counter-habit: a trellis for time, where what has endured is allowed to speak again.

“Taking Flight”, Jason Klimoski of STUDIOKCA, 2025, At the roundabout directly in front of the Carmel Clay Public Library, Carmel, Indiana.

I go out of my way to pass the flying books at the roundabout in front of the Carmel Clay Public Library. There are faster routes. Easier ones. But I choose this one because it reliably returns me to myself. The sculpture has become a kind of regular marker—not something I stop to study, but something I let reorient me as I move.

What it reminds me of is simple and difficult: meaning is not static. These books aren’t shelved or secured; they’re caught mid-motion, lifted and released at the same time. That feels true to the way I want to live and read. I don’t come to books to conquer them or extract insight. I come to receive—to stand where others have stood, to let what has endured meet me where I am, and then to carry it onward, changed.

I’ve learned that formation doesn’t happen accidentally. Left unattended, my days fill themselves. So I began to place myself, intentionally, in pathways of beauty—where attention is invited rather than demanded. This roundabout is one of those places. An embodied pause. A reminder that I am always passing through, never arriving alone.

That’s also why I’m drawn to public sculpture. It doesn’t wait for permission. It meets you in motion—on foot, in a car, between appointments. It asks nothing, yet offers presence. Like the best books, it shapes you not by force, but by return. And each time I pass those flying pages, I remember: my task is not to hold tightly, but to stay open—long enough for what is good and true to keep moving through me.

I paused where questions sharpen into flame,
A mark half-curved, half-struck—‽—caught my eye;
Not doubt alone, nor certainty held high,
But awe that dares to ask and still proclaim.
I’d grown tired of the meekness words became,
Or answers hurled too fast to truly try;
Here was a hinge where asking could rely
On weight, on care, on wonder without shame.

So it came to me while walking, slow and sure:
A sign for lives lived open, yet awake—
For faith that kneels, then stands, resolved and pure.
Between the not-yet-known and vows we make,
The interrobang keeps the heart secure:
Still questioning—yet burning for the sake.

January 2026

Accompanying Note & Art

This sonnet closes a small sequence I’ve come to call the interrobang series. It is also the quiet confession at its center: this poem was written first. Only later did I realize it had already done its work on me.

The interrobang—‽—arrived not as a clever typographic flourish but as a recognition. I had been living in the space it names long before I noticed the mark itself. A life of faith, of building, of friendship, of investment, of walking attentively through places and seasons—rarely grants the luxury of clean answers or cost-free questions. What it asks for instead is a posture: curiosity with weight; conviction without haste.

This final sonnet gave language to that posture. Once written, it began to pull other poems into being—Vertigo‽, Poise‽, Imagine‽—each circling a different human response to uncertainty. Disorientation. Steadiness. Creative faithfulness. All of them orbit the same gravitational center first named here.

Along the way, almost as an aside, I wrote a haiku about the interrobang—a small sketch, an exploration in miniature. It felt less like an argument and more like a breath, so I include it here simply for the joy of it:

A question leans in—
breath held between awe and fire:
wonder, not shouting.

I’ve grown wary of questions that perform intelligence without demanding responsibility, and equally wary of declarations that rush past wonder toward control. The interrobang resists both. It slows the reader—and the writer—just enough to say: this is a real question, and it matters.

This poem stands at the end of the series not because it resolves anything, but because it names the stance I hope to keep inhabiting: still questioning—still burning.

Angel of the North, Antony Gormley, Gateshead, just south of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1998

This is among the most arresting works I’ve encountered over the years. I don’t recall when I first came upon it, but I do remember how I met it—not as an answer, but as a stance.

It stands where the wind is unapologetic, where weather tells the truth. Its arms are extended not in conquest, but in availability. From a distance, it can read as declarative—steel certainty cut against the sky. Yet the longer I stay with it, the more it reveals itself as a question that has learned how to stand its ground.

That is the posture the interrobang names for me.

A question that leans forward.
Conviction that resists hurry.
Attention that refuses both cynicism and control.

This sculpture does not resolve the tension between knowing and not knowing. It abides there. It holds the charged space between awe and fire without flinching. In that way, it mirrors the work I find myself called to—walking, building, investing, loving—without pretending that clarity comes cheaply or early.

If the interrobang were given a body, I imagine it would look something like this: grounded, exposed, listening intently, and quietly burning.

I learned how easily I mistake the flow
Of things that form without a guiding breath—
Where motion crowns itself with borrowed depth
And speed names meaning simply because so.
What worked grew loud; what asked grew faint and slow.
No crisis came—just fewer ways to press
The still, small voice that interrupts success,
That bids me stay when outcomes cease to glow.

So imagination taught me how to see:
Not flee the work, nor sanctify its gain,
But linger where attention feels the strain.
Held fast by friends who tell the truth to me,
I learn faith’s work is not resolve or sight,
But presence kept, attentive, through the night.

January 2026

Accompanying Note & Art

This sonnet did not arise from a lack of meaning or from work gone thin. Life and calling have long been full—marked by real responsibility, genuine joy, and a steady sense of momentum. Things were not breaking down. They were, in many ways, working. And yet, over time, I began to sense that the language I relied on most—strategy, leadership, outcomes, even prayer as I had learned to practice it—was no longer sufficient to name what I was experiencing beneath the surface. Within the abundance itself, something essential was growing harder to hear. Not because it had vanished, but because fluency had taken its place. Direction felt assumed. Decisions came easily. And I found myself longing for a different register—one capable of holding complexity without rushing to resolve it, and presence without immediately explaining it.

As this new year began, that awareness sharpened. January arrived with intention and forward motion, and then—almost immediately—was interrupted. Or so it seemed. The first weeks were claimed by matters that demanded attention rather than progress. At first, I experienced them as disruption. With time, I began to wonder whether they were not interruptions at all, but an invitation—a call to imagination. Not an invitation to escape what had been given, but to notice it again. To ask what faithfulness might require when momentum pauses and attention is asked for instead.

Looking back, I can see how this season has been quietly shaped by friendship. The trajectory bent not through strategy, but through people—through conversations that slowed me down, questions that unsettled certainty, and companions willing to stay close enough to speak truth without urgency. Imagination, I am learning, does not mature in isolation. It requires proximity. Correction. Time. It needs others who will help us tell the difference between direction and mere motion.

That shaping did not begin recently. Nearly two decades ago, when I first encountered the work and friendship of Makoto Fujimura, I was offered a simple, disarming sentence: you are a creative. At the time, I had no idea what to do with those words. But they were water on wood that had grown stiff—softening what had become rigid, making me amenable to being re-formed.

Imagination, as this poem suggests, is not ornament or escape. It is the patient practice of staying present—together—long enough to notice what God may yet be bringing forth.

Horizon Field, Antony Gormley, Tyrol, Austria, 2008-2012

I never saw this work in person, nor will I ever as it was temporary by design. I know it only through photographs—partial glimpses of a work that resists being gathered into a single frame. Created between 2008 and 2010 and installed across the Tyrolean Alps in 2010, the work placed one hundred life-sized cast-iron figures across a wide alpine terrain, where they remained until 2012. The figures were encountered slowly, almost incidentally, by those already moving through the landscape.

I wish I had experienced it firsthand. And the irony is not lost on me: to engage this work at all, I must rely on imagination—the very capacity this poem is attempting to name. Even through images alone, the work refuses haste. It does not announce itself or hurry the viewer toward meaning. It asks for attention.

What draws me is how presence is re-tuned. Each figure stands alone, yet only makes sense within a wider field. That feels true to my own life: faithful presence is not clarity achieved, but attentiveness sustained.

What forms when pride is crossed by quiet will?
How grievance hardens into edict, sealed and sent?
When power nods and conscience stays unbent,
Who weighs the cost of standing, silent still?
What keeps the heart from rushing to fulfill
Its fear with noise, its haste with false consent?
How do we tell what rises heaven-meant
From thoughts that flatter, promise, and then kill?

I learn to wait where hands must let go first,
To trust the unseen work in timed restraint;
This cut, this pause, not theft but faithful gain.
I choose obedience over being nursed
By certainty—receiving, weak and faint,
A mercy ordered deeper than my pain.

December 2025

Accompanying Note & Art

This poem was preceded by Vertigo!?, which emerged from a season when the ground felt unreliable—when faith was less a settled posture and more a practiced balance. It named that inner dizziness that appears when conviction remains but the supports you’ve leaned on quietly fall away. Not doubt exactly, but the experience of standing between what you know and what you cannot manage. Hope chosen not because it feels sturdy, but because there is nowhere else faithful to stand.

Poise!? followed, written from that same interior weather, though something in me had shifted. The opening leans hard into questions—not as a literary device, but as a form of attention. I’m increasingly aware that my faith has been shaped as much by curiosity as by certainty. Questions slow me down. They keep me from collapsing too quickly into answers that soothe but easily bypass truth. Over time, that slowing has become a learned attentiveness—a way of listening for what is actually being asked of me rather than reacting to what feels urgent.

That is part of why I keep returning, with real joy, to the Petrarchan sonnet. The form itself tutors me. The octave insists on pressure—naming tension, contradiction, unresolved desire. It will not let me rush to resolution. Then, only after the weight has been fully borne, the turn arrives. Not a solution, but a reorientation. The sestet doesn’t fix the problem; it changes how I stand within it. Writing in this form feels like a small act of obedience—submitting my impulse to sprawl or explain to a structure that rewards patience, restraint, and timing.

Under pressure, I am tempted to confuse urgency with faithfulness, decisiveness with obedience. The sonnet resists that temptation. It forces me to dwell long enough with the questions for fear to lose its authority. It exposes whose voice is speaking, what fear is trying to protect, and whether my impulse to move is really an attempt to escape discomfort rather than inhabit calling. There is a discipline here I didn’t set out to learn but now recognize with gratitude.

Where Vertigo!? lingered in midair, Poise!? leans into consent—waiting, receiving, letting hands unclench. I wrote it while facing something that could not be managed by competence, clarity, or effort. That mattered. When outcomes are unavailable, faith is stripped of performance. What remains is practiced trust: stillness, patience, and the humility to receive.

Together, these poems trace a movement I’m learning to honor: from reacting to attending, from grasping to receiving, from managing outcomes to trusting an order I cannot see but have learned not to resist—even when the floor still tilts beneath me. There’s an irony here that keeps opening rather than closing. Vertigo!? names the dizziness. Poise!? does not remove it. It suggests, instead, that what follows disorientation is not certainty, but a learned way of standing. I suspect there is more ahead—other names still waiting for the body to catch up with what the heart is already practicing.

Storm King Wall, Andy Goldworth, 1998, Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY USA

The beautiful `work by Andy Goldsworthy has been in place for more than thirty-five years now. In 2021, we walked Storm King and encountered it slowly, on foot. It didn’t ask to be admired from a distance. It asked to be followed. The wall curved, disappeared, and returned, leaving an impression that stayed with me long before I had language for it.

My first sense was this: though it is a wall, it doesn’t arrive with an argument. It comes by listening. It follows the land the way a careful life follows grace—bending where the ground bends, pausing at water, yielding to trees without protest. Stone by stone, it holds together without mortar, not by force, but by learning how each piece belongs to the next. That posture sits quietly at the heart of Poise!?

Years later, while writing Poise!?, this work came back to me—not as source, but as resonance. The poem gave words to something I had already begun to carry: restraint without rigidity, movement shaped by attention, trust formed one stone at a time. The remembering ran backward—from word to image, from poem to path.

Two things from that remembered walk now stand out. First, restraint. The wall never insists. It accepts interruption and delay, much like the sonnet allows questions to bear weight before the turn arrives. Second, trust in an unseen order. Each stone rests because another has made room for it.

The wall does not conclude. It continues. And in that unfinished line, the poem senses what may come next—not resolution, but a faithful going on.

The ground gives way; your questions tilt and spin,
A vertigo of thought you cannot still.
What once felt firm now slides against your will,
And certainties grow thin beneath your skin.
You reach for proof; it loosens where you lean,
The air itself feels restless, sharp, and wide.
You name your fear; it will not step aside,
Yet neither will it claim the final scene.

Still—here you stand. You choose, not drift, not flee.
Hope sets its jaw, a stubborn, quiet art,
Not born of ease but practiced day by day.
And underneath the noise, your truer plea:
Not louder faith, but one with steadier heart,
A trust that stays, though doubts still have their say.

December 2025

Accompanying Note & Art

This sonnet came to life in a way that now feels familiar. January is just a few short days away, and with it comes a situation I did not choose—one that has quietly claimed more mental and physical space than I would have planned. It is not the first time. In fact, it is the fourth January in the last seven shaped this way. At first, each instance felt separate. Over time, a pattern began to reveal itself—not dramatically, but through repetition. What once felt disruptive has come to feel formative.

From the outside, these moments can appear dramatic. They carry the possibility of being life-altering, and people understandably respond with urgency. From the inside, they unfold differently. There is little drama. Instead, there is duration. Days claim more attention than expected. Weeks ask for a slower pace. The work is less about resolution and more about staying present—learning how to live faithfully inside what does not resolve on command.

At first, that duration felt like weight alone. Something to manage. Something to endure. But over time, another posture began to take shape.

What has brought genuine joy is the discovery that anxiety is not what dominates these seasons. Curiosity and attentiveness are. I notice what draws my energy and what quietly drains it. I notice how my body often registers uncertainty before my mind gives it language. I notice how life continues in ordinary, faithful ways—meals shared, conversations held, small acts of care offered—even while something significant lingers just offstage. Attending to this curiosity has proven not to be passive, but a way of consenting to reality without being ruled by it.

That curiosity is rarely about a problem to solve. It arrives more as longing—persistent, weighty, and directed beyond itself. I have come to see that its heaviness is not a flaw, but a signal that something meaningful is at stake. What matters here is not achievement or recognition, but the hope of being known and welcomed. Seen this way, the weight of these Januaries no longer feels like something to escape, but something to receive with care.

And if so much of reality remains unseen and unexplained, perhaps faith does not depend on full illumination to remain faithful. Perhaps steadiness is found instead in love practiced under real conditions—attention given where we actually stand, not where we wish we were.

The sonnet holds that turn deliberately. It names disorientation without letting it take over. Hope is chosen—not because everything is clear, but because choosing hope has become a practiced way of living.

Four Januaries in seven years have taught me this: some seasons are not meant to be conquered. They are meant to be inhabited—with care, curiosity, and attention—and with a quiet joy that trusts formation is happening, detail by detail, even as the story remains unfinished.

“The Garden of the Morning Calm”, photo by Helen (Life Outside of Texas.com), 2018, 432 Sumogwon-ro, Sang-myeon, Gapyeong-gun, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea

This place has captured my imagination through photographs like this one. I’ve known of it for years—never visited, yet it has joined the landscapes I carry as possible futures. In that sense, it already belongs to me, not as a destination reached, but as an orientation held.

The image offers a visual grammar for the poem and its accompanying note: a path that curves forward without insistence. You cannot see where it ends from where you stand, and yet the way is clearly tended—evidence of care already given. What draws me further is how the scene holds scale and intimacy together. The landscape is expansive without overwhelming, meeting the walker at a human pace. Nothing asks to be conquered. Everything asks to be noticed. In that way, it mirrors what these seasons have been teaching me—that faith can move forward, even joyfully, without demanding clarity, by learning to walk with care through what is still becoming.

We’ve learned to live by distance, not by care,
To thin the soil with wit and practiced doubt;
A raised brow keeps belief safely locked out,
While irony patrols what love once dared.
We prize the clever cut, the self-aware,
Mistake detachment for a deeper sight.
What once required belonging now invites
A careful stance where nothing’s asked or shared.

Yet life still gathers where the work is whole:
Not stars, but parts that answer to their place.
Each gift finds depth by keeping to its register,
Its limits named as grace, not loss of role.
Joy gains its weight when trust restores the seam—
The courage to belong, and still to mean.

December 2025

Accompanying Note & Art

I’ve loved White Christmas for as long as I can remember. It’s familiar and comforting, the kind of movie that feels generous rather than demanding. I return to it easily, almost instinctively. This time, though, something quietly shifted. Beneath the charm and the music, the film revealed something I deeply treasure as an ecosystem builder—not a technique or a strategy, but a way of being together that makes durable work possible. Four central figures bring themselves fully to a shared situation, each arriving with something distinct, none trying to carry more than their share. That recognition felt personal, and unexpectedly clarifying.

Trying to name what was happening there became its own kind of work. There is a joyful struggle in finding language spacious enough to hold both the breadth and depth of the relationships on display. Words like role, talent, or chemistry felt too thin. They described function, but not posture; performance, but not presence. I eventually settled on the word register, not because it is perfect, but because it allows for difference without hierarchy. Register speaks to range—voice, movement, timing, emotional tone, restraint—without forcing comparison. It honors distinctiveness while preserving coherence.

What became visible was not performance alone, but posture. Each person occupies a different register. No one collapses into another’s part. Motion is balanced by stillness. Humor never undermines sincerity; sincerity is protected by craft. What looks effortless is, in fact, carefully held. The delight emerges not from individual brilliance, but from right placement. It is not star power on display, but an ecosystem at work—dynamic, ordered, generous.

That realization reframed the pleasure of the film. What draws me back is not simply melody or memory, but the way four people inhabit a common work with trust. Each brings a gift. Each accepts a limit. The whole becomes more than the sum because no one tries to dominate it. Watching this surfaced a pattern that translates far beyond the screen: ecosystems thrive when contribution and constraint are held together.

The octave, that is the first 8 verses of the sonnet, names the contrast. Much of contemporary life is shaped by distance and self-protection. Cleverness is prized. Detachment is mistaken for maturity. Irony becomes a guardrail, keeping belief safely at arm’s length, just in case it asks something costly. In such conditions, the soil thins. Systems fragment not through malice, but through refusal—refusal to belong, to risk earnestness, to be shaped by shared responsibility.

The turn matters. The sestet, the last 6 verses, gestures toward something quieter and more demanding: the possibility that life still gathers where the work is whole. This is seen when ecosystems function well—not because someone dominates, but because someone stays. Because gifts are offered without overreach. Because limits are honored as grace rather than constraint. Because trust restores the seams that allow motion without fracture.

This is true in creative work, in civic life, and in the way things actually get done in my city when they go right. Durable outcomes emerge not from charisma or control, but from attention, patience, and shared responsibility. Joy gains weight when it is carried together. Meaning returns not through cleverness, but through the courage to belong—and still to mean what is said.

That, perhaps, is what the film has been offering all along—and why it continues, quietly, to give more than expected.

Image of an original theatrical promotional poster for White Christmas. Paramount Pictures, 1954, Library of Congress Archives

At first glance, the image reads as classic Hollywood: bold color, confident posture, an invitation to delight. But lingering with it reveals something quieter and more instructive. The composition is not centered on a single figure. Instead, four individuals are held together in a shared frame—distinct, recognizable, and yet clearly interdependent.

Each figure occupies a different register. No one overwhelms the image. Movement is balanced by stillness; confidence is tempered by attentiveness. What the artwork quietly communicates is not dominance, but coordination. The joy promised by the image does not arise from any one person carrying the weight, but from mutual support—each person fully present, each staying within the integrity of their role.

This visual logic mirrors the sonnet’s ecosystem language. The poem names what happens when systems thin under irony and self-protection, and then turns toward the possibility of ordered life restored through belonging. The artwork embodies that turn. It shows what it looks like when individuals bring their whole selves to a shared task without overreach.

From my perspective, the image is a witness—quietly affirming that joy gains weight when it is carried together, and that meaning emerges when people support one another well.

I learned how easily I mistake the flow
Of things that form without a guiding breath,
And name as purpose what has gathered heft,
Calling mere motion truth I think I know.
The world arranges much on its own slow—
Markets and streets and names that outlive flesh;
They shine like ends, yet often they confess
No voice, no call, no love they mean to show.

Attend to what we did not start:
A future whispered, not by will, but grace,
That meets His plans and gently proves them veiled.
We stay where Spirit tutors mind and heart,
Let holy feedback reshape time and place,
And learn faith’s work begins with listening in.

December 2025

Accompanying Note & Art

This sonnet emerged from a slow reading of Purpose From First Principles, an essay marked by its restraint. What drew me in was not a new definition of purpose so much as a refusal to rush toward one. The essay resists the modern impulse to baptize momentum with meaning. It insists, instead, that purpose is not something we narrate after the fact, but something that must be held, tested, and corrected over time.

A central distinction in the essay proved especially clarifying: the difference between patterns that emerge on their own and purposes that are deliberately chosen. Many things in the world organize, grow, and even flourish without intent. Markets do this. Neighborhoods do this. Institutions do this. Value accrues, reputations form, and outcomes compound through repetition and feedback alone. These systems often look purposeful. They may even feel inevitable. But emergence is not the same thing as direction, and order is not the same thing as redemption.

Purpose only appears when someone imagines a future not yet present and then remains accountable to the feedback that follows action. That accountability—being willing to adjust, to be corrected, to stay in relationship with reality—is what keeps intention from hardening into ideology or drifting into sentiment. Purpose is not clarity once achieved, but posture sustained.

That framing lands close to home for me. Much of what I care about—investing, building, mentoring, staying put long enough to matter—depends less on declaring noble aims and more on remaining interruptible. Much of what passes for “purpose-driven” work today feels like narration layered on top of momentum. Growth becomes destiny. Outcomes are mistaken for goals. We bless what is happening rather than asking where we are actually trying to go. The essay’s insistence on feedback feels like a quiet rebuke to that habit.

Redemptive work, if it deserves the name, is not defined by its aspirations but by its posture toward correction. It begins when someone intervenes in an existing flow with care, imagination, and responsibility—when the question shifts from what is happening to what ought to happen, and when one stays present long enough to listen as reality pushes back.

This sonnet sits in that tension. It does not celebrate purpose as triumph or certainty, but as faithfulness under constraint. It does not resolve the distance between what is and what ought to be. It stands within it, attentive to the slow work of correction, and to the possibility that purpose, rightly held, is less about control and more about remaining interruptible by the good we claim to seek.

Flamenco, Ruth Aizuss Migdal, 2010, Columbus, IN
Restored 2023 and relocated to Mill Race Park Gateway

When I first encountered Flamenco in Columbus nearly 10 years ago, I was struck less by its color or scale than by what it surfaced in me. Standing before it, I was reminded of a tension I continually wrestle with—the difference between momentum and meaning. The sculpture is unmistakably kinetic, alive with implied motion, yet it is forged from fixed steel. It does not move, and yet it dances. That paradox exposed something familiar.

Much of the world organizes itself. Systems accrue energy, patterns emerge, outcomes compound. Momentum can look purposeful, even inevitable. But as I stood with Flamenco, I sensed again how easily motion is mistaken for direction. The dance I saw was not the result of force or speed, but of form held attentively—shaped, constrained, and responsive.

That recognition echoes the deeper work I care about. Purpose, unlike momentum, is not seized or engineered. It is received, tested, and refined through feedback—through listening, correction, and staying present long enough for meaning to disclose itself. Flamenco reminded me that what is most alive is often what has learned to listen, and that true direction emerges not from movement alone, but from attentiveness to what animates it.