Beauty for Ordinary Days

Why We Need Great Art Close to Home

Claude Monet spent years painting water lilies floating quietly on the pond at Giverny. Vincent van Gogh looked into the darkness and gave us a night sky swirling with stars. Georgia O’Keeffe brought flowers so close that we could no longer hurry past them. Johannes Vermeer found holiness in ordinary rooms, in a woman standing beside a window or pouring milk. Mark Rothko created great fields of color that seem to invite us to become still and simply feel. Each, in a different way, asks us to slow down and pay attention.

We are accustomed to thinking that great works of art belong in great museums: Monet’s water lilies at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, Van Gogh’s The Starry Night at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, O’Keeffe and Rothko in galleries around the world. And of course, these treasures need to be protected and preserved. But sometimes I wonder if museums are the only places where we need them.

Perhaps we need Monet’s water lilies most when the world feels too hurried and noisy. Perhaps we need Van Gogh’s swirling stars when we wake at three in the morning unable to sleep. Perhaps we need O’Keeffe’s flowers when we have forgotten how astonishing something as ordinary as a blossom can be. Perhaps we need Vermeer’s quiet rooms when our own lives feel unsettled, and Rothko’s luminous colors when words have simply stopped being enough.

Maybe great art belongs not only in galleries, but beside the places where we actually live our lives—above the kitchen table where the bills are paid, near the chair where we drink our morning coffee, in the hallway we pass through a dozen times a day without noticing, beside the bed where we lie awake worrying about someone we love.

Art does not have to solve anything. It does not need to give advice or explain why life sometimes hurts. Sometimes it simply sits with us. It keeps us company. It slows us down long enough to notice color and light again, to remember that there is more to this life than what frightens us, exhausts us, or demands our attention.

Perhaps that is one of art’s quiet gifts: it returns us to ourselves. It invites us to look again, to breathe, to wonder. It reminds us that even in a world filled with noise, grief, deadlines, dishes in the sink, unanswered emails, difficult conversations, and all our ordinary human worries, there are still lilies floating on water, stars swirling overhead, flowers opening toward the light, and sunlight spilling through windows.

Beauty has not disappeared. Sometimes we simply need to bring a little of it home and place it where we can see it.

The Spirit, after all, is not housebroken

Reflections on Wisdom, Wonder, and Learning to See

My own journey has been shaped by three lifelong companions: the visual arts, theology, and philosophy. Each has taught me to see the world differently. Each has invited me to pay closer attention. Together, they have convinced me that the spiritual life is less about collecting certainty than about learning to see with greater clarity, compassion, and wonder.

More than twenty-five centuries ago, Siddhartha Gautama offered these words:

Don't believe anything simply because someone else tells you. Don't believe it because it is written in ancient books, because everyone says it is true, or because a teacher proclaims it. Instead, discover for yourself what leads to compassion, wisdom, and the well-being of yourself and others. Let your own experience become your guide.

That may seem like an unusual quotation coming from a Christian minister. But then again, Scripture tells us that Spirit blows wherever it chooses. The Hebrew word ruach means both wind and Spirit. Jesus' words remind us that the Spirit cannot be possessed, managed, or controlled. Wisdom has always had a habit of arriving from unexpected places. The Holy Spirit is wonderfully unconcerned with our categories.

One of the great temptations in religion is to assume that someone else will do our seeing for us—that if we simply listen carefully enough, someone in a pulpit will eventually hand us the truth we've been searching for. I suspect many churches unintentionally encourage that expectation. Yet I wonder if Jesus had something far more interesting in mind.

Again and again, Jesus invited people not merely to believe, but to see. To pay attention. To discern. To notice where love was already taking root. To discover the Beloved Community already emerging in their midst. 

I don't believe Jesus wanted disciples who simply repeated what they had been told. I believe he wanted people whose hearts had awakened—people who learned to trust the quiet movement of God's Spirit within them and who accepted responsibility for their own lives, their own choices, and their own spiritual growth. Faith, at its best, is not passive agreement. It is an active, lifelong practice of paying attention.

That kind of awakening finds nourishment not only on Sunday morning, but also in poetry and pastels, in music and pottery, in friendship and grief, in forests after the rain, in the laughter of children, and in the astonishing beauty of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond. The world itself becomes a sanctuary. Every encounter becomes a potential teacher.

Have you ever watched a very young child discover something utterly ordinary? A patch of sunlight spilling across the kitchen floor. A tiny insect making its way through the grass. The graceful curve of a spoon. They point. They laugh. They giggle. They are completely captivated.

Children are born contemplatives.  They haven't yet learned to overlook the ordinary. They don't divide the world into sacred and secular. Everything is worthy of their attention.

Somewhere along the way, many of us lose that capacity. Our vision narrows. We become consumed by deadlines, responsibilities, opinions, and glowing screens. We hurry past the very moments that might have healed us. We stop noticing the quiet miracles unfolding all around us.

Perhaps one of the deepest spiritual practices is simply learning to reclaim a childlike curiosity.

As clergy, we can sometimes be tempted to speak as though we've already digested all the wisdom there is to know. Yet every sermon worth preaching should leave room for mystery, and every teacher should remain a student. The moment we imagine we've captured God completely is probably the moment we've stopped paying attention.

The wisdom of the Christian tradition has shaped my life profoundly, and I treasure it. The life and teachings of Jesus continue to orient my own understanding of reality. But I have also found echoes of God's truth far beyond the walls of the church.  I hear it in the Hebrew prophets.  I hear it in the compassion of the Buddha and the wisdom of Lao Tzu.  I hear it in the poetry of Mary Oliver and Rumi. I hear it in artists, musicians, scientists, rabbis, imams, monks, neighbors, children, and people who may never set foot inside a church.  And I see it in the photography of Sally Mann and Carrie Mae Weems.

Whenever I encounter something that leads toward greater love, deeper compassion, wider justice, deeper joy, and fuller life, I find myself paying attention. Because, in my experience, that is what the Good News always does.  It makes us kinder.  More humble.  More fearless.  More awake.  More deeply alive.

And every now and then, it catches me completely by surprise.  Like that child pointing toward a beam of morning light.  It makes me smile.  Sometimes it even makes me giggle.

If every church or catheral on earth disappeared tomorrow, I believe ruach—the breath of God—would still move through every human heart, whisper through every forest, dance across every ocean, sing through every mountain valley, and shimmer among the stars.

The Holy One has never been confined to our buildings, our doctrines, or our denominations.  The Spirit, after all, is not housebroken.  It refuses to stay where we put it.  It slips through stained-glass windows and wanders into art studios, libraries,  hospitals, classrooms, forests, kitchens, and seashores.  It laughs with children.  It whispers through poets and scientists.  It surprises artists.  It comforts the grieving.  It unsettles the comfortable.  It speaks through strangers.  It has always been gloriously free.

Our task, then, is not to cage the Spirit but to recognize its movement. To become people who pay attention. To become people who cultivate wonder. To become people who trust that God is still speaking—not only through Scripture and the Church, precious as they are, but through the whole astonishing, beautiful, broken world.

May we become the kind of people who are willing to point, smile, and perhaps even giggle when grace unexpectedly appears.  We simply keep learning new ways to notice.  And that, to me, is good news at its very best.

Learning to See in the Dark

What Ad Reinhardt's black paintings teach us about fear, presence, and possibility.

For the last decade of his life, Ad Reinhardt painted almost nothing but large black canvases. At first glance they seem empty—just black squares. Many viewers wonder what all the fuss is about.

But Reinhardt wasn't painting black. He was painting the experience of learning to see.

Stand before one of his paintings for a few moments and very little happens. Stay longer, and the darkness begins to open. Black gives way to hints of crimson, blue, and green. Shapes emerge where there seemed to be none. The painting hasn't changed. Your seeing has.

I wonder if life works the same way.  We spend so much energy trying to escape the dark—or imagining everything that might go wrong—that we rarely stay still long enough for our eyes to adjust. We rehearse worst-case scenarios about our health, our children, our communities, and the future. Our minds are wonderfully creative, but they are unreliable fortune tellers.

What if we asked a different question?  What if something beautiful is quietly taking shape? What if this uncertainty is making room for wisdom, this grief deepening our capacity to love, this darkness holding colors we simply cannot see yet?

Reinhardt's paintings never deny suffering. They simply refuse to believe that darkness is empty. Hidden within it is the quiet possibility of grace—revealed only to those willing to remain present.

Perhaps that is the invitation: not to live captive to imagined futures, but to inhabit this moment with patience, courage, and curiosity. We cannot know what tomorrow will bring, but we can choose whether fear or hope will shape the way we see.

Maybe Reinhardt wasn't painting darkness at all. Maybe he was asking whether we have the patience to discover what the darkness has been holding all along.

The psalmist may have said it best: "Even the darkness is not dark to you." Perhaps the darkness has never been the problem. Perhaps our seeing is still unfolding. And if we linger a little longer, we may discover that what first appeared black has been quietly shimmering with color all along.

In the Beginning, God Created

Reflections on Art, Wonder, and Spirituality

I've been thinking a great deal lately about the relationship between art and spirituality.  The question keeps finding its way into conversations with photographers, writers, musicians, potters, gardeners, woodworkers, teachers, and people who wouldn't call themselves artists at all. It seems we all sense, at some level, that creativity is about more than making beautiful things. It touches something ancient within us.

Which leads me to wonder:  What is art for? The answer, I believe, has been there from the very beginning.  "In the beginning, God created."

Creation is not simply something God once did. It is what God is always doing. Step into your backyard tonight and look up at the Milky Way. Watch tomatoes ripening on the vine. Listen to the evening chorus of cicadas. Notice the way light lingers on the edge of a mountain or a child's laughter echoes across a neighborhood. Every moment bears the fingerprints of a Creator who delights in beauty.

God is a storyteller. What else are our sacred texts but the unfolding story of divine love meeting human longing? God gives us clay that becomes pottery, wood that becomes banjos and tables, wool and cotton that becomes quilts and garments, vegetables that become nourishing meals, words that become stories, stone that becomes sculpture, and pigments that become paintings. Creation is God's first gift; creativity is our grateful response.

Art is one of the ways God teaches us to carry what words alone cannot bear. Sometimes a poem speaks the grief we cannot name. Sometimes a photograph catches the loneliness we have hidden even from ourselves. A melody gives voice to longing. A quilt stitched together over many evenings becomes an act of healing.

Through creativity we wrestle with fear, loneliness, exclusion, rage, self-contempt, and the quiet ache of realizing how often we have misunderstood ourselves, one another, and even our spiritual mentors.

But art also makes room for joy, gratitude, tenderness, delight, wonder, and awe. It slows us down long enough to notice what our hurried lives so often pass by: the curve of a leaf, the laughter of children, an aging face illuminated by afternoon light, or the holy silence that lingers after the birds have finished singing.

Art gives birth to hope—not only when it reveals extraordinary beauty, but also when it has the courage to honor ordinary sorrow. A rainy afternoon. A weathered porch swing. A pair of muddy boots by the back door. Our partner quietly weeping at the kitchen table. The empty chair that reminds us of someone we still miss. Art whispers that none of these moments are wasted. Beauty and sorrow have always walked hand in hand. And somehow, in the mysterious economy of grace, each gives depth to the other.

Perhaps this is why every culture, in every age, has made music, told stories, danced around fires, carved wood, woven cloth, shaped clay, painted walls, baked bread, and planted gardens. We create because we were created by One who creates. Whether we realize it or not, every authentic act of creativity becomes a quiet conversation with the Creator.

Our spiritual ancestors understood this well. Art was never primarily about impressing critics or collectors. It was about giving thanks to a Creator who continues creating through human hands. Music, dance, poetry, painting, photography, woodworking, quilting, pottery, storytelling, and literature have always helped us pray when prayers would not come. They console us, challenge us, heal us, and sometimes even rescue us.

In a world that often trades wonder for efficiency and beauty for productivity, art quietly reminds us that another way is possible. Art is an antidote to hopelessness. Alongside meaningful conversation, lifelong friendships, shared meals, laughter, and perhaps even the world's best chocolate chip cookie, creativity nourishes our tired souls and helps us remember who we are.

And remember who Jesus was. Before he was known as a teacher, he was known as the son of a woodworker. He grew up in a home where rough lumber became tables, doors, yokes, and shelters through patient, loving hands. Perhaps that is no accident. Perhaps the spirituality of Jesus was shaped not only in the synagogue but also in the workshop, where imagination met craftsmanship and ordinary materials became something life-giving.

May we rediscover what Jesus surely learned in the woodworker's shop: that creating is itself a spiritual practice, and that every act of making something beautiful is, in its own quiet way, an act of communion with the Creator. So pick up a paintbrush, a camera, a mixing bowl, a guitar, a quilting needle, a block of wood, a pen, or a handful of clay. Add creativity to your spiritual toolbox, and you just may discover that God has been waiting to meet you there all along.

Confessions of a Twelve-Year-Old Boy Scout

A Lesson in Good Intentions and Unintended Consequences

My mother, Lois, grew up in Erwin, Tennessee, in Unicoi County. Erwin sits beside the Cherokee National Forest and is just a short walk from both the Appalachian Trail and the Nolichucky River. My mother’s maiden name was Erwin, and she came from a large family. When the Erwin clan gathered for a reunion, my grandparents’ little house would fill with aunts, uncles, and more cousins than anyone could possibly count.

Before the story gets out of hand, I should probably mention one small detail. Because my grandfather was an engineer on the Clinchfield Railroad, all of us grandchildren knew him simply as “Choo Choo Daddy.” He also happened to serve as an assistant sheriff. Trust me. You’ll want to remember that.

I was about twelve years old when this particular family reunion took place. The Erwin relatives arrived in force. They were wonderful, salt-of-the-earth mountain people who seemed very different from the suburban North Carolina world where I had grown up.

It was one of those beautiful fall afternoons in the Southern Appalachians that you never forget. My grandparents’ modest home was overflowing with people. Every available surface held fried chicken, homemade biscuits, casseroles, banana pudding, or some other family recipes that probably added five years to your life simply by making you happy. The children had complete freedom to roam, which naturally meant we spent most of the afternoon searching for secret hiding places where we could spy on our unsuspecting relatives.

There was, however, one small problem that seemed to require immediate attention. Nearly every adult in the house was happily puffing away on Camels or Lucky Strikes. Before long, a visible haze had settled over every room. Now, I grew up in a household of healthcare providers, and from a very young age I had been thoroughly educated about the dangers of cigarettes, snuff, and chewing tobacco. Apparently, that particular public health campaign had not yet crossed the mountains into Unicoi County. 

Being an eager Boy Scout who was always looking for an opportunity to do a good deed, I decided to solve the problem myself. The obvious solution, at least to a twelve-year-old Boy Scout, was to find an aerosol air freshener and generously freshen every room in the house. Lavender would have been especially nice.

I searched cabinet after cabinet but came up empty. Surely someone owned a can of Lysol. Finally, I wandered into my grandfather’s bedroom and spotted exactly what I was looking for. Sitting on his nightstand was an unlabeled aerosol can. It struck me as a little odd that there wasn’t a label on it, but I assumed it had simply worn off over time. Besides, what else could an aerosol can possibly contain except something wonderfully fragrant?

I gave the can a vigorous shake and began moving systematically from room to room, generously spraying every corner of the house. I was feeling quite pleased with myself. Surely everyone would appreciate my thoughtfulness.

Within seconds, however, something unexpected happened. People began rubbing their eyes. Then came the coughing. Then the shouting. Adults grabbed children. Children grabbed one another. The entire family stampeded toward the front yard in what can only be described as an evacuation of biblical proportions.

What in God’s name was happening?

I honestly had no idea. In Unicoi County, that wasn’t just an expression. It was an honest theological question. Whatever was happening certainly hadn’t been covered in the Boy Scout Handbook. Besides, if you’d asked anyone in town, they probably would have assumed I meant the Baptist version of God. At twelve years old, I wasn’t about to argue theology. I was just trying to breathe.

By now I was beginning to experience the same mysterious symptoms. My eyes burned. Tears streamed down my face. My nose was running as if it had somewhere more important to be. Within moments I found myself standing beneath the old crabapple tree in the front yard beside my Uncle R.T., short for Raymond Tilson.

R.T. was my favorite relative on my mother’s side of the family. Childhood polio had limited his mobility, which meant he often stayed close by while everyone else bustled around. For a curious twelve-year-old boy, that made him wonderfully accessible. He was quiet, kind, patient, and genuinely interested in whatever interested me.

The two of us simply stood there watching the chaos unfold. After what felt like a very long silence, R.T. looked over at me and quietly asked, “Are you responsible for that?”

“I think so,” I answered. He nodded thoughtfully before saying, “I think that was your grandfather’s pepper spray from his days at the sheriff’s office.”

Well. That certainly explained a few things.

After another long silence, R.T. offered one final piece of wisdom. “It’s probably better to apologize now than later.” That has proven to be remarkably good advice, whether you’re accidentally pepper-spraying half your family or navigating life in general. He didn’t yell. He didn’t shame me. He didn’t launch into a lecture about judgment or common sense. He was simply present.

We all make mistakes. We all occasionally discharge something into the atmosphere that affects everyone around us. The real test of character isn’t whether we get everything right. It’s whether we’re willing to admit we’ve caused harm, say we’re sorry, and try to make things right.

Besides, I can report that the Erwin family eventually recovered. The banana pudding survived. So did the fried chicken. And remarkably, they even invited me back to future reunions. Looking back, I suspect my grandfather eventually found a much better place to store his pepper spray.

Every time I see police officers or ICE agents using pepper spray to disperse protesters or teen takeovers, I think back to that family reunion in East Tennessee. But even more than that, I remember my Uncle R.T.’s quiet wisdom. “It’s probably better to apologize now than later.”

It strikes me that our public life could use a little more of that humble willingness to admit when we’ve caused harm, and a little less determination to pretend we haven’t. Then again, maybe we should all spend a little less time reaching for the pepper spray and a little more time passing the banana pudding.

Advanced Porch Sitting

A Gentle Rebellion Against the Cult of Productivity

As a recent retiree, one of my favorite pastimes is sitting on my front porch in a rocking chair, watching the phenomenal world quietly unfold. I have nowhere to be. Nothing to accomplish. No problem to solve. Nothing to fix. The rocking chair sways. The breeze wanders through the trees. A wren lands on the railing. Shadows slowly migrate across the yard as if time itself has decided to loosen its grip.

Mostly I’m daydreaming—that curious state where the eyes remain open but the mind begins to drift inward. My gaze rests gently on the neighborhood without becoming attached to it, while somewhere beneath awareness another landscape slowly reveals itself.

When I was working full-time, I often reproached myself for sitting on the porch. Surely I should be doing something productive. In a culture that measures our worth by our output, porch sitting can appear to be the very definition of wasted time.

But the purpose of porch sitting isn’t really to discover what’s happening in the neighborhood. It’s to discover what’s happening in me.

It is surprisingly easy to spend a lifetime overidentifying with our thoughts while rarely making space to truly listen to them. So much of who we are circulates beneath the surface—old joys and quiet griefs, forgotten hopes, unanswered questions, intuitions waiting patiently to be welcomed. Even after sixty-eight years, I continue to discover unexplored rooms within myself. The deeper life doesn’t usually emerge under interrogation. It prefers an invitation.

If I do this porch-sitting thing well, the gentle rhythm of rocking back and forth becomes its own form of listening. So much happens in a single day—even in retirement—that I never fully digest. Conversations linger. Memories resurface. Gratitude arrives unexpectedly. On the porch, life slowly settles like snow in a glass globe, and what was once swirling begins to come into focus.

Perhaps there is a reason rocking has accompanied human life for millennia. Parents instinctively rock their infants long before they understand language. We sway when we sing. In Jewish tradition, many worshipers gently sway while praying or studying Torah, allowing the body to participate in attention. In other contemplative traditions, rhythmic walking, bowing, or chanting serves a similar purpose—not because these practices are identical, but because they share an ancient intuition: the body can help quiet the mind, and gentle movement can become a doorway to presence.

Many of my better insights—I use “better” intentionally—seem to appear only after I’ve stopped chasing them. Apparently, they don’t like being pursued.

They emerge when I surrender the need to be purposeful and instead trust the quiet creativity of simply being here. Porch sitting has become a small act of resistance against a culture of relentless productivity and a gentle vote in favor of paying attention. For me, it is not an escape from life. It is one of the ways I learn to inhabit it more fully.

Of course, if anyone asks what I’m doing out there for an hour every afternoon, I’ll simply tell them I’m engaged in advanced porch sitting—an ancient contemplative practice. It sounds much more respectable than admitting I’m mostly watching squirrels negotiate real estate disputes while my rocking chair quietly rocks me back to myself.

Where Love Gets Dirty

What One Monk Taught Me About Love

Shortly after graduating from divinity school, I spent two weeks at Holy Savior Priory, an Anglican Benedictine monastery just outside Charleston, South Carolina. It was a place where life moved at a different pace. The day was measured not by appointments or deadlines, but by bells calling the community to prayer. Even the ordinary work seemed to carry the quiet dignity of worship.

One afternoon I was working in the barn when I realized my college class ring had slipped from my finger. Earlier, I had been hauling wheelbarrow loads of straw, manure, grass clippings, and kitchen scraps to the compost pile behind the guest house. If the ring had fallen anywhere, it was there.

The afternoon light was beginning to soften, and before long the bell would ring for Vespers. Frustrated, I climbed into the compost pile and began searching through layers of damp grass, vegetable peelings, eggshells, and yesterday's forgotten meal, hoping to catch the glint of gold.

What I didn't know was that Father Gill, one of the older monks, had been watching quietly from the kitchen window. A few moments later he walked over, smiled gently, and said, "It appears you have lost something." I explained what had happened. Without another word, he removed his white hooded habit, folded it neatly to one side, stepped into the compost beside me, and began searching.

For the next half hour we sifted through the pile together. We searched patiently, turning over handful after handful of what everyone else had thrown away. Neither of us said very much. There was only the quiet companionship of two people sharing the same search.

We never found my class ring. But over the years I've come to realize that perhaps I wasn't the one who had lost something that day. Father Gill wasn't helping me recover a ring. He was teaching me how to love.

Until then, I imagined love as saying the right words, offering wise advice, or solving another person's problems. Father Gill revealed another way.

Love steps into another person's compost pile.

Love doesn't remain safely at the edge, offering instructions about the mess. It enters it. It gets its hands dirty. It chooses presence over solutions, companionship over explanations. It is willing to stand in the places that smell of disappointment, grief, fear, failure, and uncertainty simply because someone else should not have to stand there alone.

I've long since forgotten what that class ring looked like.

But I have never forgotten the sight of an elderly monk quietly removing his white habit, stepping into the compost beside me, and searching as though my loss had become his own.

I have come to believe that this is where love does its finest work. Not from a safe distance.

But in the messy, complicated places where human lives are lived.

The Myth of Other People’s Lives

As we grow older, there is one aspect of life about which we remain surprisingly uninformed: how our inner lives compare with the lives we imagine everyone else is living.

Our frustrations, disappointments, regrets, and grief become heavier because we tend to imagine that we carry more of them than most people do. We quietly assume that everyone else has somehow figured life out while we alone are still stumbling through it. We suffer not only because life is difficult, but because we mistakenly believe our difficulties are unusual.

In the middle of the night, the mind becomes a terrible statistician. We convince ourselves that no one could have made as many bone-headed decisions as we have, that few families have endured as much misunderstanding or conflict, that no sensible person could have mishandled money quite so spectacularly, or found themselves wondering if they have somehow fallen behind everyone else.

My electric utility company sends me a monthly neighbor comparison report. It compares my home’s energy use with that of “efficient neighbors” living nearby. In theory, it’s a helpful feature. In practice, my household almost always comes up short. Then I wave politely to the people across the street as they roll their recycling bins to the curb, secretly convinced they are judging both my carbon footprint and my character. Their imagined smugness is almost comical.

It has made me wonder what other comparison reports I wish existed.

What if, once a month, we received a confidential report showing how our lives compared with those of our neighbors—not their carefully edited public lives, but their real ones? We might discover that our doubts, our disappointments, our strained relationships, our financial worries, our lingering grief, and our unanswered questions fall almost exactly within the expected range of ordinary human experience.

We spend so much of our lives longing to be “normal,” by which we usually mean happier, more successful, more financially secure, more emotionally together. Yet perhaps normality is not the absence of sorrow but its quiet companionship. Perhaps what is most ordinary is not confidence but uncertainty, not perfection but regret, not certainty but the daily work of beginning again.

Our lives are wonderfully beautiful and undeniably messy. We need not add to our burdens by imagining that our struggles are unique. Behind nearly every front door—and certainly behind every Facebook profile—is a story of hidden courage, private heartbreak, and unfinished healing.

The sadder truths of our neighbors surround us on every side, though we rarely speak of them.

In the end, perhaps the most ordinary thing about us is not our success, but our shared longing to be seen, understood, and loved despite the beautiful mess of our lives.

The Shore Beyond the Mist

At sixty-eight, I imagined the horizon would be easier to read. I thought age would bring a certain clarity, that the distant shore would finally come into focus. Instead, much of it remains veiled in mist. The future is still there—I can sense its outline—but its details remain hidden from view. The final chapters of my life remain shrouded in mystery. I also assumed that by now I would be wiser—more settled, more emotionally mature, more at peace with myself.

Yet wisdom, I have discovered, is not a destination one reaches. It is something one returns to, again and again, often after wandering far from home.

Not so much in matters of contemplative practice or photography. I know most of what I need to know there. The deeper lessons are older, simpler, and infinitely harder to live. They concern forgiveness and fearlessness, the willingness to be broken open by beauty, and the courage to keep saying yes to life despite its griefs and cruelties. They concern making room for silence, paying attention, and finding grace in the ordinary gifts that surround us—a perfect peach, a ripe avocado on the kitchen counter, sunlight pooling on a wooden floor, the face of someone we love. None of these teachings are particularly complicated. The challenge is remembering them.

The challenge is allowing them to sink beneath the intellect and become part of the body, part of the breath, part of the way we move through the world.

Great photographs continue to remind me of this. The work of Sally Mann and Carrie Mae Weems, among so many others, returns me to truths I am forever forgetting: that love is worth the risk, that wonder often waits close to home, that joy is not frivolous but essential, that cynicism is a poverty of imagination, and that our lives become smaller when we spend them seeking the approval of others. The photographs that linger with me do not merely show the world; they invite me back into it. They remind me that magic is rarely found elsewhere. More often, it is waiting in our own backyard, our own neighborhood, our own kitchen, patiently hoping we will notice.

With whatever time remains, I find myself wanting to take another look at the world. I want to stand before it with fewer assumptions and greater tenderness. I want to photograph everything that catches the light of my attention. I want to tell my friends how deeply I love them. I want to throw my arms around my beautiful family so often that they eventually laugh and tell me I’ve made my point. I want to linger a little longer over conversations, sunsets, poems, and ordinary afternoons. I want to become more available to astonishment.

Death, I know, is somewhere in the neighborhood. It always has been. My balance is uncertain. I cannot hear out of my left ear. Osteoarthritis has taken up residence in my body. I have accumulated a lifetime’s worth of mistakes. I have been stubborn when I should have been flexible, guarded when I should have been open, and I have carried certain hurts longer than they deserved.

Yet something bright remains. Something curious. Something unbroken. Each morning my body reminds me of its limitations, but each morning the world continues to offer itself—the call of a bird before dawn, the slant of light through a window, the kindness of a friend, clouds gathering over distant hills. The invitation to live has not been withdrawn.

And so I find myself wanting to begin again—not from the beginning, but from here. To walk more slowly. To notice more carefully. To love more extravagantly. To live more gratefully. There is still beauty here. There is still mystery. There is still time. Not forever, of course, but enough. Enough for one more conversation, one more photograph, one more act of kindness, one more season of astonishment.

Across the water, the far shore remains hidden in mist. For now, it is enough to stand here in wonder, grateful for the light, the water, and the mystery between.

Thank You, Sam

Tomorrow morning, Heidi and I will accompany our beloved dog, Sam, to the edge of this life and say goodbye.

For months, cancer has been quietly reshaping her world. We have watched her body grow tired and her steps become uncertain. Yet through it all, she has remained herself—gentle, faithful, and full of love.

One of the sorrows of loving an animal is that, sooner or later, we may be asked to make a decision that breaks our own hearts. It is easy to wonder if we are doing the right thing.

But when I sit quietly with that question, I come back to this: this decision is not about control. It is about compassion. If I were carrying the pain that Sam now carries, I would hope someone loved me enough to let me rest.

Today, we are practicing gratitude.

Gratitude for muddy paws, morning walks, quiet companionship, and the countless ordinary moments that became precious because she was there. Tomorrow our hearts will ache. But beneath the grief is a deep thankfulness for having been entrusted with this remarkable soul for a little while.

Thank you, Sam. You have been one of the great blessings of our lives.

May your suffering be at an end. May you know only peace.

Playing Among the Rubble

Many works of art begin with a wound.

They invite us into rooms filled with loneliness, anxiety, estrangement, and loss. They ask us to linger beside what is broken, both in the world and within ourselves. We have become so accustomed to this way of seeing that it can feel almost like the artist’s sacred duty: to uncover the hidden sorrow beneath the surface of things.

And perhaps this is necessary. Suffering deserves a witness. Grief deserves a language. The shadows deserve their share of attention.

But not every truth lives in the shadows.

I have spent years admiring photographers such as Martine Franck, Fred Herzog, William Eggleston, Minor White, and Thomas Merton. Much of their celebrated work—with perhaps the exception of Merton—probes the loneliness, anxiety, ambiguity, and quiet dislocation woven through everyday life. Their images remind us that beneath the surface of ordinary existence lies a deeper, often more complicated story.

Yet when I created this photograph at the Malik Ghat Flower Market in Kolkata, India, I found myself drawn toward something else.

Three little boys were playing among piles of rubble, only a few feet from the colorful, intoxicating, bewildering chaos of the market itself—a world overflowing with tuberoses, roses, and marigolds destined not for dining room tables, but for temple offerings. Around them was noise, commerce, devotion, beauty, and disorder. Yet in the midst of it all, they were simply playing.

When I pressed the shutter, I wasn’t trying to expose a hidden wound. I was trying to preserve a glimpse of something easily overlooked: joy surviving in unlikely places, innocence persisting amid complexity, tenderness emerging from apparent disorder.

This image will never hang in a museum. It will never be offered for sale. In some ways, it is a shy self-portrait—an indirect attempt to say that the most bewildering aspects of my personality, those that so often occupy center stage, are not the whole story.

I seriously doubt that most of my friends suffer from having too rosy a view of themselves or of others. Most of us have little difficulty recognizing our shortcomings, our failures, our fears, or the ways we have fallen short of our own hopes. The more urgent task, it seems to me, is rescuing the smaller and more fragile parts of ourselves: the hidden capacities for tenderness, kindness, wonder, generosity, and simple decency.

We long for others to see those parts of us. We long for them to be known and cherished. Yet they are easily bruised, and so we often keep them tucked away from view.

Which is why there is something quietly liberating about this photograph.

It reminds me that beneath the rubble—beneath the anxieties, uncertainties, ambitions, disappointments, and carefully constructed identities—there remains a small child who still wants to play. And perhaps that is true for all of us.

Somewhere beneath the noise and confusion of our lives, something small and tender is still at play.

The Quiet Beauty of Ordinary Life

In the contemplative photography classes I teach, we often explore how beauty quietly manifests in the ordinary, mundane, and everyday world. As children, we knew this instinctively. With childlike curiosity, we expected to be surprised by color, light and shadow, texture, shapes and forms, and patterns. The world felt alive with discovery simply because we were fully present to it.

Many of my students initially arrive with a strong interest in the technical aspects of photography — cameras, lenses, composition, exposure, sharpness, and editing. And while these things certainly matter, something beautiful often begins to happen over time. They gradually discover that contemplative seeing itself is what allows us to truly connect with the beauty around us.

Instead of constantly hunting for images or worrying about technical perfection, we begin learning the ancient art of receiving what has always been there. We slow down enough for the world to reveal itself. In contemplative photography, the universe is not inert or lifeless. It has agency. It is continually offering us moments of surprise, wonder, tenderness, and presence — if only we are quiet enough to notice.

As we grow older, however, we begin to assume that our particular ideas about beauty are fixed and universal, when in fact they are fluid, cultural, and constantly changing. At any given moment, there are far more varieties of beauty in the world than a particular culture or period of history is willing to recognize. There is beauty in steam rising from a morning cup of coffee, in a beam of light slipping through the curtains at dawn, and in Black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace lining a quiet rural road. And yet we often move past these moments without truly seeing them.

Part of the difficulty is that many of us lose contact with the phenomenal world — the world received directly through the senses — unless someone helps reveal it to us again. Art has always served this purpose. Throughout history, artists have used attention, skill, and imagination to help others notice forms of beauty that might otherwise have been overlooked or dismissed.

Perhaps this is one of the quiet gifts of contemplative practice: it gently returns us to a state of openness and curiosity. It reminds us that beauty is not reserved for the spectacular or extraordinary. Much of it lives quietly around us — and within us — waiting to be noticed.

The image I chose for this post was created in Agra, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. There is beauty here in the ordinary dignity of a human life quietly being lived. The beauty is not dramatic or ornamental. It lives in the stillness of the moment — an elderly man seated in a worn doorway, absorbed in reading the newspaper. Nothing appears staged. Nothing is trying to impress us. And yet the image carries a deep sense of presence, tenderness, and humanity.

As I continue learning how to slow down and pay attention, I find myself more and more expecting beauty to appear in ordinary places — and surprisingly, it almost always does. I hope you’ll join me in looking a little more carefully at the world around you this week. In anxious and restless times such as these, learning to notice and document beauty may be one of the quiet ways we begin to heal our hearts and reconnect with a sense of child-like curiosity and wonder.

What Rayond and Lucy Knew

Most of my strategies for remaining calm and serene once depended upon reassuring myself—and others—that the worst-case scenarios would never come to pass. But lived experience has taught me something different. Contentment is not found in denying the possibility of storms, but in learning to trust that we can endure them.

I have learned this slowly, through trial and error, and by making my own fair share of mistakes over the course of my life—mistakes whose consequences can still make me shiver when I think about them too long. And yet, even those failures have become teachers. Over time, I have come to see that some of our deepest disappointments are not interruptions of the journey, but part of the journey itself. With support, honesty, and compassion, even wounded places can soften into sources of wisdom.

Perhaps wisdom lies not in pretending storms will never come, but in quietly preparing for them. When the winds begin to howl and the rain comes sideways, fear can narrow the horizon and convince us that everything is falling apart. But fear is not always a trustworthy narrator.

I often think of my grandparents on my mother’s side, Raymond and Lucy, who lived in the Southern Appalachians, survived the Great Depression, and later sent sons off to war with no guarantee they would ever return home. Like so many families across Appalachia and throughout the United States during those years, they lived through severe poverty, uncertainty, food insecurity, and economic hardship. They understood instability in ways many of us have been spared. And yet they continued forward—working, loving, grieving, praying, and caring for those around them as best they could.

When I remember Lucy and Raymond, I am reminded that human beings are far more resilient than fear would have us believe. We forget how much strength has already been placed within us through sorrow, friendship, resilience, and the care of those who have walked beside us. And we forget the simplest truth of all: after even the longest night, dawn still comes.

There is usually far more courage within us than we can remember in difficult seasons. Perhaps we should hold more lightly the expectation of a smooth and untroubled life. There will be detours. There will be losses. We may need to stop along the way and steady ourselves before continuing on. But this is not failure. It is part of being human.

At this stage of my life, I would not say that I have mastered the art of living. But perhaps I have learned something quieter and more forgiving: how to limp my way, with a little more wisdom and tenderness, into the next chapter of my life.

What the Heart No Longer Wishes to Carry

For as long as I can remember,
I have carried a great weight
without fully noticing
what it was doing to me.

I moved through the years
shouldering invisible burdens—
anger,
resentment,
old disappointments,
small humiliations,
regrets that replayed themselves
long after their season had passed.

At first, each thing seemed light enough.
A slight.
A grievance.
A hardened memory tucked quietly away.

But over time,
the mind became a kind of overfilled suitcase,
stuffed with psychological odds and ends—
nothing heavy by itself,
yet together
like walking the Appalachian Trail
with a backpack full of stones.

And now,
standing at the threshold of older age,
I find myself wanting
something simpler.

The years ahead
do not ask me to carry more.
They ask me to travel lighter.

So I am learning, slowly,
the ancient art
of laying things down.

Not denying what has happened.
Not pretending the wounds were unreal.
But loosening my grip
on all that no longer serves life.

Lao Tzu whispers of water and yielding.
Thomas Merton reminds me that the rush and burden of life can obscure the heart.
Mary Oliver keeps pointing toward astonishment and attention.
And Ryōkan, with empty pockets and a quiet smile,
seems to ask:

Why carry what can be released?

Perhaps there comes a time
when we empty the suitcase completely
and keep only what is essential:

compassion,
love,
presence,
fearlessness—

and enough openness
to walk gently
through whatever days remain.

The World Needs Your Wisdom

Where are you in this moment?

Can you sit quietly for a little while and let your gaze rest gently upon the world?

Perhaps allow the edges of things to soften around you.

For a few brief moments, set down your longings, your fears, your endless becoming— and simply be here.

Can you feel a deeper truth inside, just beneath the surface?

The world is aching for the wisdom you carry.

Domestic Life in an Age of Spectacle

I have to confess that there are days when my greatest pleasure in life is simply staying home and looking carefully at the life we’ve created within these walls. I sometimes wonder what it is in me that prefers my own front porch, or the rocking chair where most of my reading takes place, to galas, movies, museums, or wine tastings. And yet, I see nothing wrong with turning my photographic gaze toward my own home above all other places.

There was once a time when I imagined a different kind of fulfillment. I wanted to become known for something, to be considered an expert in a particular field, to possess unlimited financial freedom, or to earn the admiration of my peers. But ambitions like these are inherently fragile, forever vulnerable to disappointment, changing circumstances, and the unpredictable turns of life.

What I have discovered instead is that the ordinary rhythms of domestic life steady me when the wider world feels hostile, chaotic, or beyond my control. I find genuine meaning in emptying the dishwasher, watering our plants, refilling the bird feeder, or lingering over the beautiful images in the latest issue of Leica Fotografie International. These simple rhythms of home do not feel insignificant to me. They remind me that much of what gives life meaning is quietly woven into the ordinary fabric of our days.

And I do not believe this inwardness is a retreat from reality. If anything, my photographs have become quietly political in their own way. They attempt to articulate what is precious in ordinary life — the very things worth protecting from corruption, cruelty, greed, and indifference. In their own quiet language, they push back against compromised politicians, oligarchs, power-hungry tech-bros, and the machinery of endless domination and spectacle.

Rallies and marches matter. Public witness matters. But increasingly, I suspect many of the most consequential struggles unfold elsewhere — in courtrooms, committee rooms, subcommittees, schools, libraries, local communities, and around kitchen tables where people quietly choose decency again and again.

And yes, there are days when I choose to stay home, do some reading, watch something on Netflix, repair the copier, and feel deeply grateful that there are brilliant and courageous people in the world fighting important battles on behalf of all of us.

Domestic life reminds me daily what is truly at stake. And in its own modest way, it continues to call me toward contributing — however imperfectly, however quietly — to the making of a more humane and civil society.

In Praise of the Ordinary

The environment I grew up in continually suggested that it was within my power to achieve an extraordinary life. Whatever the hurdles, I was taught that through hard work, discipline, and moral seriousness, I could overcome nearly anything and carve out an exemplary and honorable path.

I could excel in the classroom, become an Eagle Scout, contribute meaningfully to society, find a suitable life partner, and earn the respect of my peers. Most importantly, I was determined not to disappear into the anonymity of an ordinary existence. Through a deep commitment to the Protestant work ethic—discipline, perseverance, self-denial, and moral uprightness—I could somehow avoid disappearing into the blur of ordinary life. I was asked to believe that—whatever obstacles stood before me—I was destined for an exceptional life.

What no one ever told me, however, was that despite our unique ways of moving through the world, most of us are destined to live fairly ordinary lives.

And perhaps there is a quiet dignity in that.

My life, in most respects, is fairly ordinary: modest means, a small circle of friendships, an unremarkable face, and abilities that do not particularly set me apart. I once read that only a tiny fraction of humanity will ever truly distinguish itself in the eyes of the world. The rest of us will live quieter lives—lives marked less by greatness than by small fidelities, ordinary responsibilities, modest joys, private griefs, and fleeting moments of beauty.

Yet we live in a culture that struggles to acknowledge this truth. Instead, we are continually told that relentless effort, ambition, and a nose-to-the-grindstone mentality will eventually check every box. The message is subtle but persistent: if we are not exceptional, perhaps we simply have not tried hard enough.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve begun to suspect that some of the expectations I carried for my life were shaped as much by fantasy as by reality. I say this cautiously because I do not want to discourage hope or aspiration. But there are times when our culture’s insistence that anyone can become extraordinary through enough effort begins to feel less encouraging than quietly unforgiving.

For many years, I struggled against the actual contours of my life. I measured myself against impossible standards and found myself lacking. I compared my life to those who seemed exceptional in obvious ways, all the while overlooking the quieter truths of my own existence—my capacities and limitations, my gifts and blind spots, the small but meaningful ways I had learned to love, endure, create, and remain present.

But perhaps there is freedom in finally laying all of that down.

Perhaps an ordinary life is not something to escape, but something to inhabit fully.

So the next time our paths cross—either in this life or the next—ask me about all the things I’m mediocre at.

It’s actually a pretty impressive list.

How We Hold This Moment

We live in a chaotic, unsettling world—
a world of 24/7 headlines
and breaking stories
that erode our sense of stability,
casting long shadows
over the future our children will inherit.

And so—
the question becomes
how we are to hold all of this,
as the ground keeps shifting beneath us,
when the old reference points no longer hold.

Perhaps we begin here—
consider holding yourself
as you would a newborn,
with kind hands,
with patience.

Be gentle in how you speak to yourself—
the spirit startles easily.

Do not drive yourself—
the body keeps the score.

Instead—
laugh when you can,
make something—anything—
with your hands.

Art is your birthright.

Let it be small,
let it be imperfect,
let it be yours.

In the act of creating,
a deeper wisdom finds expression.

Forgive yourself.
Not halfway.
Not later.
Now.

There is a strength
in radical honesty.
And there is a healing
each time we lay down our armor
and allow
the softness of our hearts
to be seen.

Remember—
you belong here.
Not because you are flawless,
but because you are.

Do not fasten your future
to the tight fist of the past.
There are still wonders
waiting to be noticed.

So walk—
simply—
one step,
then another.

No great aspirations.
No one to impress.

Let the old fears
soften, then dissolve.

Greet the morning
with expectancy and wonder.

And when you fail—
and you will fail gloriously—
welcome it.
Failure is a faithful companion,
a brilliant teacher.

You don’t have to harden yourself
for what may come next.

Let the future arrive
as an old friend—
met with gentleness,
with kind resolve,
and with the wide, unguarded
curiosity of a child.

Tired, Open, Real

In a small, dimly lit New York apartment, the photographer Nan Goldin turned her camera toward herself. She was young, a new mother, trying—as so many do—to make sense of a life that did not easily hold together. There was no studio lighting, no careful staging—just the quiet persistence of a camera and a woman determined not to look away. Again and again, she photographed herself: tired, undone, present. Not to create an image, but to remain in contact with something real. The camera became a witness, perhaps even a companion. In those self-portraits, there is no performance—only the unmistakable trace of a life being lived from the inside, with all its confusion, tenderness, and strain.

And it is here, perhaps, that we begin to recognize something of our own story. Our longing for love begins, in the simplest of desires: to hear, and to be heard. And because life so often resists ease—because it confuses, wounds, and unsettles—it follows that many of us, myself included, are drawn not to those who move through the world untouched, but to those who feel its weight as we do. Those who are puzzled by it, those who are undone by it—the ones who retreat to their beds in the middle of the day, who lose themselves in the soft glow of a screen, who send late-night messages to a therapist because something unnamed has surfaced again. The ones who have known the quiet chemistry of antidepressants, who carry the imprint of earlier wounds, who find themselves, at times, standing just this side of tears for reasons both known and not.

There is, in all of this, a strange and tender recognition: we are not drawn to perfection, but to familiarity—to those who speak a language we did not know we knew.

And yet, we live in a world that rushes to diagnose such sadness, to tidy it up, to render it manageable. A world where beauty has become increasingly curated, polished into something bright and untroubled, where our social feeds glow with the seamless illusion of perfect families, perfect bodies, perfect days.

But life, as it is actually lived, rarely arranges itself so neatly.

The image I have chosen for this post—a neighborhood coffee shop seen through a window—holds everything at once. Light, reflection, movement, distraction. All the details are there, but they refuse to settle into order. They overlap, blur, interrupt one another. There have been days in my own life when experience arrives in just this way—fragmented, disordered, difficult to make sense of.

And yet, even here—within the blur and disorder—something is being revealed.

If we do not turn away.

Perhaps this is what gets lost in all the brightness:
the insistence on clarity, on polish, on things appearing as they should.

Because there is another kind of beauty—rarer, quieter, and far more difficult to hold—that emerges in the unguarded moment when the face releases its practiced expressions, when the mask falls away and something true, if fragile, is allowed to be seen.

Under a Witnessing Sky

The cloth is tired—
not broken,
but worn thin.

Edges frayed
like trust,
handled too roughly,
too often.

Stars still hold—
echoes of a distant galaxy bearing witness.

We wade through an uncertain future—
prices at the pump rising,
prescriptions slipping out of reach,
and voting rights under assault.

It would be easier
to turn away—
to armor up,
to self-medicate,
to go numb.

And yet,
something primordial,
imperfect,
and sacred
still remains— even as we lick our wounds
and debate next steps.

So we go on—
grieving, but not in despair,
finding our footing,
finding our voice,
as our children watch,
learning what courage looks like,
what fearlessness requires,
and what sacrifice asks of us.