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Words of Zora Neale Hurston “Somebody else may have my rapturous glance at the archangels. The springing of the yellow line of the morning out of the misty deep of dawn is glory enough for me. “I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, IContinue reading ““Why fear?””

My dear friend Barbara Fisher — author of Wallace Stevens: The Intensest Rendezvous and soloist in the early days of the New York City Ballet under George Balanchine, among her many other manifestations — gave me this prayer sometime in the mid-1990s. She wanted to encourage me through a dark time. She typed it on the backContinue reading “A prayer for sabbath time”

You know dishwater that has gone cold and is no longer sudsy, but greasy and gray? That’s how my writing feels right about now. I need a break. I need to fast from my own words. I will return in a couple of weeks. Or three. Maybe four.  But I will return. Blessings in the interim —Continue reading “Hold, please….”

Vincent was too busy excavating the ruins of his ministerial calling. I’ve been reading the letters of Vincent Van Gogh. Thinking about the courage of the artist to stand against the crowd, and yet remain soft enough to be vulnerable to life, to what is. And I remembered a concert I went to during my freshmanContinue reading “Digging for Gold”

An excerpt from my memoir The Edge of All the Light You Have. My family moved to Wake Forest, North Carolina, in 1966 so that my dad could attend seminary there. The small town clustered around the campus of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. The seminary sat dead center, and what little traffic there was flowedContinue reading ““…hopes of putting down roots….””

“It’s all I have to bring today…,” Emily Dickinson once wrote. Thank you, Emily. Because I have nothing of my own to offer on this end-of-summer morning. The days are shortening. The world is spinning off its axis. I am so, so tired. I send my bucket into the well, and all that comes upContinue reading ““…go to the limits of your longing.””

He darted out of the construction site to my right into the middle of early-evening traffic. A large dog running wild. The SUV ahead of me swerved and braked, but nipped him in the back legs. The dog spun in circles, coming to rest in the middle of the left-turn lane for oncoming traffic. IContinue reading “Coyote at the Crossroads, Revisited”

My husband can take canned vegetables, like green beans or spinach, and make you swear they were fresh when he started.  While this is a skill you may never see celebrated on cooking channels, it sure enough works for us. Our plates are the orphaned lids of Tupperware containers. The cup that holds melted butterContinue reading “The Art of the Meal”

This is the seventh in a series of excerpts from my memoir, The Edge of All the Light You Have. It follows “How can we be reconciled….“ In January of 1970, a white man sat having a cup of coffee in the Baptist Building in Raleigh. He was perusing The News & Observer for articles about the shootingContinue reading ““Take my hand, precious Lord. Lead me home.””

The intersections of infamy in our Southern history astound me. When I was growing up, no one ever mentioned that there had been a lynching in Princess Anne County, right around the corner from my grandparents’ farm.  The first time I learned about Noah Cherry was in 2019, at the Legacy Museum of the EqualContinue reading “The Lynching of Noah Cherry”