Quest Blog
Of Time and the Nebulous
2014-02-27 Someday, they say, stars will stop gelling—the hydrogen and helium gone. Someday, each star will call it a day & go to bits. Someday the day will be as dark as night, the hydrogen, the helium snuffed. Someday, in, oh, say, ten billion billion years, time will eddy & stop.…
Read MoreCompany at the Bedside
2014-03-04 On a good night these days our Little Bean (aka, Little Night Owl) will unwind herself very, very slowly towards sleep, slowly-but-steadily, mostly on her own. We have always accompanied her as she falls asleep, and it’s neat now to see her, at 1-and-a-half, sometimes able to navigate the journey herself. Keeping her company…
Read MoreNature, Nurture, Murder: The Lessons of the Eugenics Craze
2014-03-06 In the world of super heroes, it’s called an “origin story,” that trauma that led to the super hero being super. Poor little Bruce Wayne watches helplessly as his parents are murdered. Superman rockets off the planet Krypton, sent away by his father moments before the planet explodes, only to find himself in Kansas…
Read MoreWhen Plans Go Awry
2014-03-07 “There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” — Rumi If you are like me, you have The List. You know, that massive to-do list filled with family obligations, work projects, chores, and writing tasks that need to get done in the day, week, or month. I love The List. It…
Read MoreAfter the Resolutions Die
2014-01-08 OK, we’re now a week into the new year, which is about the time that people’s New Year’s resolutions generally start biting the dust. I have a theory about why this is the case, why all our good intentions dissolve so quickly. It’s my conviction that the problem with most resolutions is that we…
Read MoreThere Are Many Right Ways
2014-02-04 This week, our kid’s favorite book-to-have-read-to-her is Lift Every Voice and Sing. Illustrated by Bryan Collier, the book creates a pictorial narrative for the words of the hymn written by James Weldon Johnson in 1900. It is not the lightest bedtime reading, for me—“We have come over a way that with tears has been…
Read MoreWhat A Miracle Is
2014-01-09 Once I crossed the Sierra Madres with a bus driver named Arturo who had one arm and a stick-shift bus. Sometimes between the the shift and wheel Arturo’s good right arm would pause to make the sign of the cross toward a portrait of the Virgin that banged the windshield from a…
Read MoreApocalypse Never (and what we can do about it)
2014-02-06 I grew up in the Pentecostal church. When I was ten, I knew just how the world would end: “the fire next time.” Tribulations. Seven seals. The four horsemen. Rainstorms of blood and fire. And what was more, this was coming any day now: the present terrible state of the world had been precisely…
Read MoreA Candle in the Window
2014-01-11 As winter draws close around us here in the northern hemisphere, I find myself drawn ever more to the flame of candles. A couple of years ago, I spent the month of January in Oslo, Norway. Though the climate in Oslo is similar to my home in northern New York, the days are significantly…
Read MoreThe Coin That Wowed Me
2014-01-13 A very simple thing happened the other day. Someone bought me the 20 cent stamp I needed to mail my father’s birthday card. But it wowed me. You see, I had included in the same envelope a card from my spouse and myself and one I had made from my two-month-old daughter to her…
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