Christmas Snuggles

St. Elizabeth & John the Baptist

We tell the stories we need. Not deliberately, and not always consciously, but persistently. Stories endure not because they preserve events with precision, but because they continue to speak to recurring human conditions. The stories that survive are the ones that remain usable—capable of being reshaped without losing coherence, softened without losing gravity, and retold without exhausting their meaning. When a story no longer answers the pressures of a given moment, it recedes. When it continues to answer them, it is carried forward.

Christmas survives for this reason.

As a religious but not spiritual person, I approach Christmas not as a test of belief, but as a story whose endurance invites understanding. To ask how the Christmas story formed, why it took the shape it did, and what needs it addressed is not to diminish it. It is to take it seriously. An honest relationship to the season requires intellectual clarity as much as emotional attentiveness. Understanding origins does not empty a story of meaning; it clarifies what kind of meaning it carries.

The anchor image for this reflection is a Madonna and Child, but not the familiar one. The pair that orients this entry is Elizabeth and John the Baptist. This is the earlier pairing, the one shaped by preparation rather than arrival, by inheritance rather than fulfillment. It is the story that stands behind Christmas, giving it narrative depth before it acquires seasonal warmth.

Elizabeth and John belong to an older scriptural pattern. Their story echoes the Hebrew tradition of delayed birth, long waiting, and restored possibility. John is not born into ease or resolution. He is born into expectation. His life is oriented toward responsibility from the beginning, shaped by urgency and demand rather than reassurance. Elizabeth does not present her child as a solution to the world’s problems, but as a response to something already out of alignment. This is a story about readiness, not rescue.

Historically and literarily, John stands before Jesus. He is not a marginal figure awaiting replacement, but an independent prophetic presence with his own movement, authority, and following. The earliest Christian Gospel, Gospel of Mark, begins not with a birth, but at the river. Jesus enters the story already framed by John’s work. He submits to John’s baptism, an act that later traditions struggle to explain away precisely because it suggests subordination rather than supremacy. From a historical perspective, this discomfort is revealing. Traditions tend to preserve what they cannot easily erase.

My working assumption is that Jesus began his public life as a follower, perhaps even a disciple, of John, shaped by John’s message of urgency, repentance, and imminent change. After John’s arrest and execution, Jesus continues a closely related proclamation, carrying forward its core demands while gradually reframing its tone. This reads less like rupture than succession. Jesus does not replace John so much as inherit and extend his work.

The problem arises later, after Jesus’ own execution. John was widely known and feared by authorities; Jesus was executed as a marginal figure. For Jesus’ followers, succession alone was not enough to sustain the movement. Authority needed to be secured more deeply, anchored not only in proclamation or continuation, but in origin itself. This is where narrative adaptation becomes visible.

The birth stories appear late in the tradition. Mark contains none. It is only in later texts, especially the Gospel of Luke, that full infancy narratives emerge, and when they do, they arrive doubled. John’s conception and birth are narrated first, in language deeply rooted in Israel’s past. Jesus’ birth follows the same narrative grammar: annunciation mirrors annunciation, song answers song, movement responds to movement. The structure suggests adaptation rather than independent memory. John’s story establishes the pattern; Jesus’ story inherits it.

Read this way, the Jesus nativity is not an original beginning, but a relocation of authority. What had once been grounded in preparation and succession is transferred backward into origin. This is not deception. It is how religious traditions stabilize meaning under pressure. When urgency alone becomes unsustainable, stories shift. They do not abandon what came before; they absorb it.

This is why the Madonna and Child image widens rather than narrows when read carefully. Mary and Jesus are not a replacement for Elizabeth and John, but an adaptation of their story. The earlier pair speaks the language of preparation and demand; the later pair speaks the language of orientation and care. Together they form a single narrative arc capable of endurance. The story softens not because it has weakened, but because it must carry itself longer.

Christmas, then, is not a denial of John’s urgency. It is a response to it. Where preparation confronts, Christmas holds. Where repentance demands action, Christmas invites attention. The shift is not theological sleight of hand; it is narrative necessity. Communities cannot live indefinitely under pressure. Eventually, they require a story that teaches how to remain human when certainty is thin and the future unclear.

This is what the Christmas story continues to do. It tells us something about beginnings when endings feel heavy. It offers orientation when resolution is unavailable. Its power lies not in its immunity from history, but in its formation within it. The story survives because it learned how to speak differently when speaking the same way was no longer enough.

For me, this understanding deepens rather than diminishes the season. To approach Christmas religiously, without spiritual claims, is to listen for how the story was shaped and why it endured. Elizabeth and John restore gravity to the narrative. Mary and Jesus extend it. Together they reveal Christmas not as a miracle dropped into history, but as a human story adapted with care.

We tell the stories we need. The ones we need most are the ones that survive. Christmas survives because it continues to say something worth hearing. It says something about preparation and care, urgency and holding, and the ways meaning is carried forward when belief alone is not enough.

Merry Christmas, 2025. 

A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Story

Merry Christmas 🎄

Marty Supreme

Rosemary’s Baby

Clue

Upper Truckee Gambol (2011)

Upper Truckee Gambol by Phyllis Shafer has become the image through which I am learning how to rest. Not rest as withdrawal, or as the absence of responsibility, but rest as a way of inhabiting time without resistance. The water moves steadily through the frame, layered and rhythmic, neither hurried nor stalled. It does not stop in order to be calm. It is calm because it flows.

When I look at the water, I feel its motion in my breath. The eye follows the curve of the river, and the body responds instinctively. Inhale. Exhale. Flowing. Breathing. The painting does not ask to be decoded so much as synchronized with. The longer I sit with it, the more my breathing softens, rounding itself to match the cadence of the current. Stillness arrives not by holding anything in place, but by yielding to what is already moving.

This has mattered deeply during Christmas break, a time that carries the cultural expectation of rest but rarely teaches us how to achieve it. Grief does not pause for holidays. Time does not suspend itself out of courtesy. Even in moments meant to be quiet, the body often remains vigilant. I felt this recently while shopping for grocerues, an ordinary errand with its fluorescent lights and familiar aisles. Without warning, pressure rose behind my eyes and spread through my body, a tightening that had no immediate cause. Nothing was wrong in the moment, and yet everything in me reacted as if it might be.

That experience clarified something essential: what we carry surfaces where we least expect it. The body does not wait for meaningful places. It responds when capacity is exceeded, when vigilance has gone on too long without interruption. In that sense, the river in Shafer’s painting feels honest. It does not pretend that movement can be avoided. It does not dramatize strain. It simply continues, shaped by time rather than broken by it.

Self-care, I am learning, lives precisely in this distinction. Much of what passes for self-care emphasizes indulgence or distraction. It emphasizes gestures that may soothe briefly but rarely address the deeper tension underneath. What the water suggests instead is regulation rather than relief. The river does not escape motion; it finds balance within it. Care, then, is not about adding something new, but about removing unnecessary resistance.

My practice of zazen has become an expression of this understanding. To sit is not to empty the mind or resolve grief. It is to remain upright and still while everything else continues to move. Breath flows in and out. Sensations arise and pass. Thoughts drift through awareness like ripples across water. Nothing is chased away. Nothing is held too tightly. Stillness and movement coexist, each giving shape to the other.

This coexistence is what makes meditation feel like rest rather than effort. The body remains stable while the interior landscape shifts continuously. The practice teaches me how to stay present without bracing. It teaches me how to be still in the present while flowing in the current of time. Like the river, I am not asked to stop. I am asked to flow. 

Shafer’s landscape reinforces this lesson visually. The surrounding land does not resist the river’s passage; it bends subtly toward it, shaped by long familiarity with flow. There is no rupture here, no struggle for dominance. Everything participates in the same rhythm. In that integration, I recognize a model for care that does not isolate or harden, but adapts over time.

Breaks, understood this way, are not pauses in living. They are pauses in bracing. They interrupt the low-grade vigilance that grief and responsibility cultivate. Sitting with this painting, or sitting on my cushion in meditation, I feel that interruption occur quietly. Breathing deepens. Attention widens. The pressure eases not because anything has been solved, but because nothing is being demanded.

Stillness, as the water shows me, is not fragile. It does not shatter at the first sign of movement. It is durable precisely because it flows. The river carries memory, weight, and continuity without becoming rigid. It adapts without panic. That adaptability is what I am practicing now. It is not mastery over time, but trust within it.

Flowing.

Breathing.

Still in the present, carried forward all the same.

In Upper Truckee Gambol, and in my own sitting, I find the same quiet instruction: healing does not require stopping the current. It requires learning how to remain within it without fear.

Acorns and Orb Weaver w/color

New Lights

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III

Morning Coffee

Fallout: Season 2

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze

The Tools My Grandfather Left Me

Dear journal,

Today would have been my grandpa Chuck’s birthday. He died in 2019, and with his death the material evidence of our relationship narrowed quickly. What remains is not much by conventional measure: a Fourteenth Degree Masonic ring that once belonged to his uncle Paul, and a small forget-me-not pin that I keep on one of my hats. Yet these objects persist with a density of meaning that far exceeds their size. They are not mementos in the sentimental sense. They are tools. They are symbols that continue to work upon me.

My grandpa was a Freemason. His uncle was before him. None of Chuck's children are Freemasons and I am the only member of my generation to have entered the Craft, and when I was raised to the degree of Master Mason in 2014, it became one of the few experiences that belonged exclusively to him and me. It was not something we discussed openly or often. Freemasonry does not require constant articulation. It works differently. It operates through silence, repetition, and the slow internalization of symbol. When my grandpa later gave me the ring, he did not explain it. He did not need to. As one Masonic writer observed, “The initiate is not told what to think, but shown how to think.”

That distinction matters. Freemasonry does not function as a belief system in the conventional sense. It does not offer propositions to be accepted or rejected. Instead, it constructs a mental architecture. It constructs a framework within which reflection becomes habitual. In this way, the Craft builds the mind much as operative masonry builds a structure: by establishing proportion, alignment, and restraint before ornamentation is ever considered.

My relationship with my grandfather was complicated. He was capable of great loyalty and affection, but also of cruelty, particularly toward those closest to him. Love and severity were not opposites in his character; they coexisted. I do not seek to resolve that tension in memory. Freemasonry has taught me that not all contradictions require closure. Some require bearing.

The working tools of a Freemason provide a language for that bearing. They are not decorative symbols. They are instruments of moral cognition. They are ways of organizing thought, attention, and judgment.

The first of these tools is the common gavel. Its work is subtractive. It removes excrescences and superfluities, preparing the rough material for refinement. In daily life, the gavel appears as restraint. It shows up when I choose not to respond defensively, not to assert authority reflexively, not to confuse volume with leadership. As Albert Mackey wrote, “The gavel is the symbol of conscience, awakening the sleeping thoughts of the soul.” That awakening is rarely gentle.

My grandfather did not always use this tool carefully. He could strike too hard, mistaking force for clarity. The gavel he left me, then, is both inheritance and caution. It reminds me that self-correction requires patience as much as resolve.

The twenty-four-inch gauge introduces the discipline of measure. Its divisions remind the Mason that time is finite and therefore morally charged. How one spends time is how one reveals value. Reflection, within this framework, is not indulgence. It is stewardship. To pause and examine one’s conduct is not to retreat from action, but to prepare it. As the ritual language suggests, Masonry teaches the “proper division of time,” a phrase that quietly insists that misuse of time is not merely inefficient, but unethical.

Here, Freemasonry begins to show its pedagogical power. It does not teach through argument alone, but through repetition of symbol until the symbol becomes habit of mind. Over time, one begins to measure instinctively.

The tools of the Fellow Craft deepen this interior construction. The plumb demands uprightness. Not public righteousness, but internal alignment. It asks whether belief and behavior correspond. The level introduces one of Masonry’s most radical ethical commitments: equality of moral worth. In the lodge, distinctions of wealth, profession, and status are intentionally erased. As the old charge reminds us, “Masonry regards no man for his worldly wealth or honors.”

This principle has profoundly shaped my understanding of leadership. Authority, within the Masonic framework, is functional rather than ontological. One holds office, not superiority. My grandfather lived in tension with this idea. He commanded loyalty, but did not always temper power with humility. Carrying his ring, I still feel the weight of that unfinished lesson daily.

The square governs conduct in relation to others. To act on the square is to submit one’s behavior to standards beyond convenience or self-interest. It demands fairness, honesty, and proportion. This is where Freemasonry’s moral architecture becomes most demanding. It is easy to admire virtue symbolically. It is harder to practice it when doing so costs something. Yet, as Aristotle noted long before Masonry gave the idea a tool, virtue exists only in action.

The Master Mason’s tools extend the work outward. The trowel reframes virtue as communal. It spreads the cement that binds individuals into something larger than themselves. William Preston described this as the “bond of sincere affection,” a phrase that resists sentimentality by emphasizing durability rather than feeling. Leadership, seen through this lens, is not domination but cohesion. Leadership is creating conditions under which others may stand upright as well.

The compasses, perhaps the most psychologically demanding of the tools, insist upon restraint. They teach that freedom without bounds dissolves into chaos, and discipline without compassion hardens into cruelty. The compasses draw limits not to diminish possibility, but to give it shape. In this sense, Freemasonry aligns with the classical insight that form enables meaning.

The forget-me-not pin operates on a quieter register. Emerging from a history marked by erasure and violence, it signifies memory, fidelity, and moral persistence. It does not announce itself. It simply remains. That quality mirrors how Freemasonry has shaped my life. Not as a public identity, but as a persistent internal structure. Not as doctrine, but as disciplined reflection.

I am aware that I now carry this tradition forward largely alone within my generation. That reality gives the ring a particular gravity. It is not a relic to be preserved untouched, nor a badge to be displayed. It is a working object, meant to accompany someone engaged in the ongoing labor of becoming. As Claudy observed, Masonry “takes good men and helps them become better.” It does this not through instruction alone, but through the slow work of self-examination.

On my grandfather’s birthday, I do not attempt to reconcile the contradictions of our relationship. Instead, I acknowledge them through the work itself: by measuring carefully, by removing what does not serve the work of building, by standing upright even when it would be easier to lean, and by remembering, deliberately and without sentimentality, what has been placed in my care.

Always,

Dave

The Institute

December: The Residue of a Life

Theme

Legacy

Quote

“The mirrour sheweth us not what we would leave behind, but what we have been.” The Mirrour Which Flatters Not

The Myth of Legacy

“The desire for immortality is the desire for the survival of a name.”  George Santayana

Legacy is a word I approach with skepticism, and that skepticism has been trained into me rather than merely felt. As a student and teacher of history, I have learned to be wary of stories that arrive already polished. Of narratives that present themselves as coherent, intentional, and morally resolved. Legacy, as it is most often invoked, is precisely that kind of story. It presumes scale. It assumes durability. It suggests that a life can be rendered legible to history in a way that resists erosion. The mirror, when placed before such claims, disrupts them almost immediately.

If the mirror has taught me anything this year, it is that legacy may be the most persistent form of self-deception left once other illusions have fallen away.

The mirror restores proportion. It does not enlarge the self, nor does it diminish it out of cynicism. It simply reveals scale. And scale, once seen clearly, becomes an ethical corrective. Most lives do not register historically. Most actions leave no archival trace. Most intentions dissolve long before they are remembered. The mirror does not treat this as tragedy. It treats it as truth.

I was reminded of this years ago when someone gave me a copy of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. For the person who handed it to me, the book was not merely influential, it was formative. It had given them direction, a vocabulary for success, and a framework through which they understood both effort and reward. In that sense, the book “worked.” Yet as I read it, I felt an unease I could not immediately name. The claims felt too smooth, the authority too conveniently borrowed. It took little investigation to uncover what historians have long known: Hill never met Andrew Carnegie, despite building his entire mythology around that supposed mentorship. His ideas bore little resemblance to Carnegie’s own reflections on wealth, philanthropy, and responsibility.

My initial reaction was frustration at the deception itself. Frustration with the way Hill appropriated the success of others to fabricate a legacy for himself. But that reaction did not hold for long. What followed was something more complicated. This, after all, is how myths are made. The historian in me rejects such fabrication outright. The teacher in me, however, recognizes how stories, true or not, can orient behavior and provide coherence. And the part of me that understands religion as a human art form rather than a metaphysical system recognizes this pattern immediately. Humans have always told stories not simply to record facts, but to communicate meaning.

Not all myths are equal: some orient us toward responsibility, while others anesthetize us against it.

The mirror does not resolve this tension between truth and usefulness. It exposes it. It asks not whether a story inspires, but what it conceals. It does not deny that myths can shape lives; it questions who benefits from their circulation and at what cost. Legacy narratives often function not as moral reflections, but as instruments of anxiety management, particularly for those with power enough to worry about how history will judge them.

This becomes especially visible in religious contexts shaped by prosperity theology. Growing up, I encountered countless interpretive maneuvers designed to reconcile wealth with divine favor. Material success was framed as evidence of God’s blessing. Financial abundance became a proxy for righteousness. Legacy, in this framework, was measured in endowments, buildings, and estate plans. It was measured in the visible assurances that one’s life would continue to exert influence after death. The church itself became both beneficiary and validator of this narrative.

Yet the religious texts most often cited in these traditions resist such certainty. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24, New Revised Standard Version). The sheer number of explanations offered to soften that statement, to render it metaphorical, symbolic, or contextually obsolete, reveals how uncomfortable we are with relinquishing control over judgment. Legacy, in this sense, becomes transactional. Wealth is exchanged for reassurance. Narrative is substituted for reckoning.

The mirror is unmoved by such transactions. It does not negotiate with intention. It does not reward generosity if generosity is deployed as insulation against judgment. It simply reflects. And what it reflects is uncomfortable: that legacy, as it is commonly imagined, is less about influence than about control. Control over how one is remembered, and more fundamentally, control over how one hopes to be judged.

When I turn the mirror toward myself, I am not spared this realization. The mirror resists my own attempts at narrative control just as firmly. It shows me as I am: incomplete, flawed, and fundamentally incapable of governing how others see me. Despite my efforts to write, to reflect, and to articulate meaning through this project and others like it, I cannot determine how I will be understood. I cannot curate my memory. I cannot secure my reputation. This is true now, while I am alive, and it will be even more so when there is no one left who remembers the living version of me at all.

In some small and honest way, this work, this sustained self-examination, this careful articulation, is itself an attempt at control. Not an attempt at legacy in the monumental sense, but a quieter hope that meaning might be stabilized long enough to be recognized. The mirror does not condemn that impulse. It simply refuses to flatter it. As Ecclesiastes reminds us, “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Ecclesiastes 12:12). Reflection does not grant permanence. It grants clarity.

Legacy, when stripped of myth, monument, and anxiety, becomes something less grand but more truthful. It is not a story we write about ourselves. It is a residue we leave behind: unintended, untraceable, and ultimately beyond our control. If this is what the mirror reveals about legacy, then what remains is not how large a life appears, but how it moves within the current of others.

Pebbles, Rivers, and the Ethics of Smallness

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” Harry S. Truman

There is comfort in smallness. I do not experience that comfort as resignation or defeat, but as release. To see oneself as a pebble in the river of time rather than a boulder lodged against it is to be freed from a particular burden. The burden of needing to matter in ways that are publicly legible, competitively measured, or historically durable. The mirror does not diminish me by revealing my smallness; it steadies me by removing expectations I was never meant to carry.

Smallness, understood this way, is not the absence of ambition. It is the refusal of distortion.

When I no longer feel compelled to be “important,” I am released from comparison. Life ceases to be a contest in which meaning is awarded to the most visible, the most productive, or the most praised. I am no longer required to surveil myself constantly, measuring each decision against how it might read later be that on a résumé, in a biography, or in the imagined summary of a life. The mirror interrupts that internal accounting. It reminds me that a résumé is not a life, and that an obituary, especially one written in advance, often functions less as reflection than as performance.

This freedom allows a different kind of honesty to emerge. Radical honesty does not mean confession for its own sake. It means the ability to admit limits without apology, to acknowledge uncertainty without shame, and to live without the low-grade anxiety of recognition. I still have ambition. I still care about doing meaningful work. But I am no longer compelled to orient myself toward unrealistic milestones designed to justify my existence to an imagined audience. I do not need my life to read well at a distance.

The mirror, by restoring scale, makes that possible.

I saw this distinction clearly through a friend who was dying of cancer. Near the end of his life, he chose to write his own obituary. It was long, detailed, and expansive. It was an accounting of accomplishments, affiliations, and milestones. It read as a deliberate attempt to secure significance, to stabilize how he would be remembered. There was nothing dishonest in it, but there was something strained. It felt performative, shaped by the same pressures that had governed much of his public life.

After his death, something else happened. His friends went back through years of his Facebook posts—small, daily reflections, observations, jokes, frustrations, and moments of insight—and compiled them into a book, a daily devotional. It was not grand. It was not comprehensive. But it was unmistakably him. The voice was intact. The humor survived. The thoughtfulness remained. What emerged was not a monument, but a presence.

Placed side by side, the difference was striking. How he wanted to be remembered and how he was remembered were not the same thing. The obituary aimed at control. The book revealed continuity. One was intentional. The other was preserved by accident.

This is where the river matters.

The river of time does not honor intention. It does not preserve what we labor to stabilize. Instead, it weathers. It erodes. It smooths the sharp edges of performance and allows what is repeated, habitual, and unguarded to endure. What survives is not what we announce, but what we enact without thinking. The river keeps what fits its current.

The mirror prepares us for this truth by loosening our grip on authorship. It teaches that meaning disperses faster than we expect, and that this dispersal is not loss but transformation. To be a pebble is not to disappear; it is to be carried. Influence travels not because it is designed to, but because it is caught up in motion larger than itself.

Seen this way, smallness becomes an ethical stance. It resists the temptation to curate a life for later consumption. It privileges presence over projection, honesty over performance, and responsibility over recognition. It allows a person to act without constantly asking how those actions will be interpreted once the actor is gone.

The mirror does not ask me to abandon ambition. It asks me to abandon preoccupation with credit. Like Truman’s observation suggests, much becomes possible once the question of recognition is set aside. Work can be done for its own sake. Care can be extended without calculation. Words can be spoken without rehearsing how they might echo later.

In the end, the pebble does not decide where the river flows. It does not determine how long it will be carried or where it will come to rest. Its ethical task is simpler and more demanding: to be shaped honestly by the current it inhabits, and to allow that shaping to occur without resistance.

If legacy dissolves under the mirror’s gaze, smallness remains. It remains not as insignificance, but as fidelity to the scale at which life is actually lived.

Continuity Without Monuments

“What we give away is what we keep.” St. Francis of Assisi

When I think of my grandmother now, what rises first is not conflict, nor even grief. It is care. Ordinary, repeated, unremarkable care. I remember how she looked after a friend’s mother. I remember how she visited elderly, often widowed women from her church bringing them newspapers, taking them out for ice cream, washing and trimming their hair at her own home. These were not grand gestures. They were small human comforts, offered without fanfare, that kept people engaged with life and preserved their dignity.

The mirror teaches me to attend to this distinction. Continuity does not announce itself. It does not arrive as virtue or legacy. It forms quietly, through acts that seem too small to matter at the time they are given.

What my grandmother understood, long before I had language for it, was that near the end of life, people often want nothing more complicated than to be seen. Not evaluated. Not rescued. Simply remembered as still present in the world. When I would stop by her house unannounced with a pizza for us to share, I could tell that meant more to her than any gift I might have brought. Me showing up was the gift. Me sitting with her was the gift. Time, offered without agenda, carried more weight than anything wrapped or purchased.

She taught me this long before I was able to return it. And when it became my turn to care for her, to show up, to sit, to remain present without fixing, I did. Only now, looking back through the mirror, can I see how quietly important those moments were. They did not feel consequential at the time. They were simply what love looked like when stripped of performance.

The mirror clarifies how continuity actually forms. It does not move forward toward remembrance; it moves sideways through repetition. Influence travels not because it is intended to, but because it is enacted again and again until it becomes invisible. What my grandmother gave to others, she gave without thinking of how it would be remembered. And what I gave back to her emerged not as obligation, but as recognition. As recognition shaped by years of watching how care is practiced.

This becomes especially clear as I move through the practical work of executing her will and distributing her possessions. The material remnants of her life, few and modest as they are, are valued differently by the people who receive them. When I see a cup from the dollar store that I know she used every day, I do not see its monetary worth. I see the imprint of her life. I see mornings, routines, habits so consistent they left a mark deeper than ornament ever could.

As executor, I have been struck by how time spent with her alters how people assign value. Objects do not carry meaning evenly. They absorb it through proximity. Through use. Through presence. The mirror reveals that continuity is not housed in things themselves, but in the relationships that once gathered around them.

One moment, in particular, stays with me. While inventorying her china hutch, I found a rock and a piece of red glass. Around the rock was a small slip of paper from her sister. It read, simply: “Remember how we used to play house with rocks and glass.” These were the toys of her childhood. She had grown up in extreme poverty on a farm outside a small community in southwest Missouri. What she had was imagination and a dozen mostly older siblings. Nothing more.

That she kept these objects, not displayed, not explained, but quietly stored, tells me everything I need to know about continuity. They were not relics. They were reminders. Not of deprivation, but of resilience. Not of hardship, but of the capacity to make a life out of what is given. The mirror does not elevate these objects into symbols. It lets them remain what they are: evidence of a way of living that never required monuments.

What surprises me most in all of this is not sorrow, but gratitude. A quiet gratitude for the life she lived and the scale at which she lived it. Gratitude for care that did not seek recognition. For presence that did not demand return. For dignity preserved in others without ever being named as such.

Continuity, I am learning, does not depend on memory alone. Memory fades. Stories shift. What endures is valuation: the way time spent together reshapes how we see the world, how we treat others, how we show up without keeping score. The mirror reveals that this kind of influence does not belong to history. It belongs to life as it is actually lived.

There is no monument to this form of care. No inscription. No guarantee it will be remembered beyond those it touched directly. And yet, it moves forward all the same passed on not as legacy, but as practice. As showing up. As seeing. As small human comforts offered at precisely the scale where they matter most.

Religion as Mirror, Not a Promise

“Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.” Alfred North Whitehead

I grew up hearing a single refrain repeated whenever death entered the room: absence from the body is presence with the Lord. It was offered as comfort, as certainty, and often as closure. I do not believe in a literal heaven, nor in an afterlife beyond memory and influence. And yet that phrase has stayed with me. Not because I believe it to be true, but because I have come to understand what it was doing.

Religion, at its most functional, does not answer unanswerable questions. It supplies orientation. It gives people language when language fails. It offers forms—phrases, rituals, images—that allow grief to be held communally rather than privately endured. The mirror helps me see this clearly. It does not ask whether the promise is real. It asks what work the promise performs.

For many, that refrain transformed death into something to be celebrated rather than grieved. It replaced uncertainty with assurance and finality with reunion. I understand the appeal of that move. But for me, believing in something I experience as untrue, even when it is comforting, pulls attention away from the present and relocates meaning elsewhere. It risks orienting people toward a future they imagine rather than toward the life they are still living. In that sense, certainty becomes a kind of anesthetic. It dulls the demand of the moment.

The mirror resists this displacement. It does not forbid religious language, but it constrains its claims. When I think of religion as art, as an accumulated human response to suffering, wonder, and loss, it becomes most honest when it helps us understand how to live, not what comes next. Or, at the very least, when it helps us approach death with dignity rather than denial.

This distinction mattered deeply to me as my grandmother weakened. Near the end of her life, she began to see individuals: her sister, a young boy, and a young girl. I find the phenomenon itself fascinating. Do I believe their spirits literally appeared to her? No. That would require belief in a soul in a way I do not hold. But I do believe the experience was real to her, and that the comfort it provided was real as well.

The mirror allowed me to affirm that truth without translating it into belief.

What those visions revealed was not metaphysical reality, but relational reality. Her sister had held a place in her heart that no one else could occupy. That she appeared in my grandmother’s most vulnerable moments tells me everything about how her life had been oriented: toward connection, toward memory, toward care. The children, to my mind, functioned as angels in her symbolic world. That is, not as beings with wings, but as figures of gentleness, innocence, and protection. They were not evidence of heaven. They were expressions of how she made sense of comfort.

Religion, seen through the mirror, reflects the architecture of a person’s inner life. It shows us what they love, what they fear, and what they need in order to rest. It does not require assent in order to be honored. Meaning does not become false simply because it is symbolic.

This understanding has shaped how I chose to show up for her. When there was nothing I could say that would not feel either hollow or dishonest, what I had to offer was presence. Being there without judgment. Without expectation. Without translation. I could not share her language of faith, but I could share my time. I could show her that she mattered by spending time with her, by arriving unannounced with pizza or an ice cream cone, by sitting quietly, by listening, and by holding her hand until the end. 

And when it came to her rituals, I honored them not as beliefs I shared, but as practices that ordered her life. Every Sunday at eleven, sharing a meal as a family mattered to her. So I gave up my Sundays. I gave them as an act of fidelity. Presence, in that moment, meant entering her world without insisting it become mine.

The mirror clarifies this ethic. It asks me not to choose between truth and comfort, but to be faithful to presence. Truth without presence becomes cruelty. Comfort without presence becomes abstraction. Presence holds both without forcing resolution. It is what remains when belief falls silent and certainty proves inadequate.

Religion, at its best, does not promise what it cannot deliver. It reflects who we are when we are most alone. It offers forms sturdy enough to hold grief without pretending to explain it away. In that sense, religion as mirror does not lead us out of the world. It returns us to it. It returns us more attentive, more humane, and more willing to show up when meaning cannot be spoken.

A Year in the Mirror

“We do not learn from experience; we learn from reflecting on experience.” John Dewey

I began this year with an old maxim—Know thyself—and with a book that refused to flatter me. In January, the mirror felt confrontational. It promised exposure rather than insight, judgment rather than clarity. Even as I committed myself to sustained reflection, I suspected that what awaited me was mostly dissection: an inventory of flaws, habits, and failures laid bare under an unforgiving light. I worried that looking honestly would mean discovering only what was lacking, misshapen, or compromised.

That fear proved unfounded.

What the year revealed instead was not ease, but proportion. The mirror did not absolve me, but neither did it reduce me to my worst moments. Month by month, as I turned toward parts of my past I would have preferred to leave unexamined, I discovered something quieter and more enduring than judgment: understanding. There are still things I have not said and truths that remain too raw or too complex to set down in language. But I can see them now. The darker, hidden nooks are no longer amorphous or unnamed. They are visible for what they are. And that alone has altered my relationship to them.

Over time, my understanding of the mirror itself changed. I had assumed its purpose was exposure, to show me how ugly I might be if I looked closely enough. What I found instead was recognition. The mirror did not flatter me, but it also did not lie by omission. Alongside regret and responsibility, it reflected patience, care, resilience, and an ability to change. Looking honestly allowed me to see that I am not all bad after all. There are parts of me that are worth celebrating, not because they redeem the rest, but because they coexist with it.

There was a moment when this shift became unmistakable. When I publicly acknowledged my DWI, something fundamental changed. That experience had long ruled me through fear. Through fear of how others would see me, fear of what it said about my character, fear of being reduced to a single failure. Naming it did not erase its consequences, nor should it have. But it altered the relationship I had with it. I could see my actions clearly. I could take responsibility for them. And I could also see how I had changed in response. In that moment, the mirror ceased to be something I held at arm’s length. I stepped into it.

That is when reflection stopped being an exercise and became a posture.

Looking back across the year now, I can see how this practice carried me through moments I could not have anticipated. How it carried me through grief, through loss, through the slow and disorienting work of sorting what remains when a life ends. The mirror did not provide answers. It provided steadiness. It reminded me that understanding unfolds over time, that meaning emerges through attention, and that self-knowledge is less about resolution than about willingness to remain present with what is unresolved.

This is how my New Year’s resolution was fulfilled, not through completion, but through integration. Even if I am no longer writing under the banner of a formal resolution, this practice will stay with me. Reflection has become a primary way I experience the world. It always was, in some measure, but this year made it intentional. Disciplined. Honest. That change will endure.

The mirror places no grand demand on me going forward. It does not insist on continual confession or endless self-scrutiny. Its obligation is quieter and more exacting: to remain honest without becoming cruel, to resist both self-deception and self-erasure, and to continue attending to my life as it is actually lived. If there is growth to be had, it will come not from spectacle or self-judgment, but from fidelity to this practice: an ongoing commitment to character, to public and private virtue, and to presence in the world I inhabit.

I began this year wondering whether the mirror could ever show the whole truth. I end it knowing that it does not need to. It has shown me enough: enough to live more attentively, enough to carry forward what matters, and enough to set it down without regret.

The mirror no longer needs to be held.

It has already done its work.

Adolescence (2025)

Today was a day I have been dreading. The phone call itself was unremarkable, practical in tone, but its meaning arrived whole: it was time to pick up my grandmother’s ashes. Holding the box was harder than I expected. It was light, so very light, and that smallness carried its own violence. This was all that remained of her physical body, the last material trace of a life that once filled rooms, shaped habits, and anchored a family. The reduction was startling, not because it felt disrespectful, but because it was so honest. There was no illusion left to negotiate with.

Cremation has a particular clarity. The body is not preserved, not aestheticized, not softened into symbol. It is dismantled. Nothing of her remains organically intact. What is left is carbon, ash, dust. Strangely, this knowledge did not hollow the moment; it steadied it. I found myself leaning into an understanding of religion not as belief, but as art, as a language humans developed to speak accurately about experiences too large to manage otherwise. “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19, KJV) is not a threat or a punishment so much as a recognition of what is. It names reality without flinching.

Here, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” ceases to be a promise of transcendence and becomes a poetic articulation of material truth. Matter does not vanish. It changes. Death does not interrupt life; it feeds it. Carbon recycles itself endlessly as the basic architecture of living things. Soil becomes leaf. Leaf becomes body. Body becomes ash. The cycle closes and opens again without spectacle or permission. As Ecclesiastes observes with unsentimental precision, “All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again” (Ecclesiastes 3:20, KJV). The verse does not console, but it coheres.

This understanding shifts death from negation to participation. Life is not sustained despite death, but because of it. What we call decay is not failure; it is function. Meaning does not require escape from finitude, only attention to continuity. In this sense, religious language survives belief because it is often truer than belief. It is closer to observation than doctrine.

The Buddha’s image of roses growing from rubbish names the same truth from another cultural grammar. Growth does not require purity; it requires conditions. Decay is not the opposite of life; it is its ground. When I think of my grandmother now, I do not imagine her elsewhere. I imagine her redistributed. I imagine her matter returning to the system that once sustained her, her influence persisting not as presence but as condition.

Wiwi Schroeder’s Adolescence gives visual form to this understanding. A young girl sits in profile, her face obscured by a potted rose bush held close to her body. The longer I sit with the painting, the clearer it becomes that the girl and the rose are not separate subjects placed in relation to one another. They form a single system. The plant depends on the girl for support; the girl’s identity is overtaken by growth. Her face is not erased, but replaced. What defines her is not expression, but care.

The eye moves through the painting in a loop: from her bowed head into the blossoms, down the stems, into the soil, and back through her arms and posture. There is no exit point. This closed visual cycle mirrors the one now occupying my thoughts. Matter changes form. Identity shifts location. Nothing disappears; it reorganizes itself. Adolescence, here, is not a stage one passes through and leaves behind, but a condition of becoming: unfinished, provisional, and relational.

What strikes me most is the way the girl holds the rose. There is no display, no offering outward. Her posture is protective, inward, almost reverent. This gesture echoes my own experience of carrying the box of ashes. Both acts involve holding something that no longer gives anything back. Care persists without reciprocity. Responsibility remains even when relationship has changed irreversibly. Grief, then, is not clinging to what is gone, but acknowledging continued participation in a system shaped by that loss.

The obscured face in the painting introduces another truth that religious imagery has long understood: not everything meaningful is meant to be seen clearly. The sacred is often veiled. Moses hides his face. The cloud fills the tabernacle. Even Paul reaches for agricultural metaphor rather than explanation: “That which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die” (1 Corinthians 15:36, KJV). The verse is often read eschatologically, but its power lies in its material insight. What returns is not the same form, but the same substance, rearranged.

My grandmother’s absence now feels similar. She is no longer accessible in the way she once was, yet her absence is not empty. It has shape. It has weight. It has consequence. Like the hidden face in the painting, what has withdrawn remains real.

In both the ritual of collecting her ashes and the quiet logic of Adolescence, I am confronted with the same truth: life and death are not opposites. They are co-constitutive. The rose grows because something else has already returned to the soil. Adolescence unfolds because childhood dissolves into it. Carbon circulates. Meaning circulates. Endings are rarely endings; they are redistributions within a closed system.

Religion, art, and philosophy converge here not as competing explanations, but as layered ways of bearing witness. Science tells me how matter changes. Philosophy helps me understand what it means to live inside that change. Religion, understood as art, gives me images sturdy enough to hold it without denial. Together, they allow me to say something simple without it being small: life is life. It changes form. It asks not for belief, but for attention.

Holding my grandmother’s ashes, looking again at the girl and the rose, I do not feel the need for resolution. I feel the weight of continuity. She has taken the next step in the cycle, and I remain within it. Matter is neither created nor destroyed. It changes. And in that change, meaning does not vanish, but rearranges itself, quietly insisting on care. 

Dust in the Wind

Dust in the Wind

By Kerry Livgren

I close my eyes

Only for a moment and the moment's gone

All my dreams

Pass before my eyes with curiosity

Dust in the wind

All they are is dust in the wind

Same old song

Just a drop of water in an endless sea

All we do

Crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see

Dust in the wind

All we are is dust in the wind

Oh, oh

Now don't hang on

Nothin' lasts forever but the earth and sky

It slips away

And all your money won't another minute buy

Dust in the wind

All we are is dust in the wind

(All we are is dust in the wind)

Dust in the wind

(Everything is dust in the wind)

Everything is dust in the wind

(In the wind)

The Balcony Room (1845)

Adolph von Menzel’s The Balcony Room was painted in 1845, at a moment when German interior painting was expected to reassure. Domestic spaces in the Biedermeier tradition affirmed stability, order, and bourgeois continuity. They were filled with people, or at least with the promise of them. Menzel’s room refuses that promise. It is orderly but unsettled, intact but emptied. Most importantly, it is animated not by human presence but by light.

This is not incidental. The painting is, at its core, a study of light as condition rather than illumination. The daylight does not dramatize the space or reveal a narrative truth. It enters quietly, at an angle, filtered through thin curtains that neither block nor welcome it. The light seems almost indifferent to whether the room is occupied. It arrives because it must. In this way, Menzel shifts the subject of the painting away from domestic life and toward perception itself. What matters is not who is here, but what continues after they are gone.

This quality has begun to feel painfully familiar as I move through my grandmother’s house. Like Menzel’s room, it is still receiving light. Sunlight still falls across furniture she chose, floors she walked across thousands of times. The physical continuity of the space stands in stark contrast to the rupture of her absence. The light has not altered its habits. It does not pause out of respect. It reveals without remembering.

There are several kinds of death, and the first is the easiest to locate. The body fails. Breath stops. The organism ends. This death, while devastating, is finite. It belongs to the order of nature. In The Balcony Room, that death has already occurred before the viewer arrives. The body is not shown because it is no longer the question. The chair is empty not because someone has stood up, but because the body has exited the world entirely. The painting begins where physical death has already been settled.

The second death, however, is the one enacted within the room itself. This death is spatial, procedural, and slow. It unfolds not in hospitals or rituals, but in the deliberate dismantling of a life through objects. As I clean my grandmother’s house, her life is not ending again; it is being translated into categories. Each item must be evaluated not for what it meant to her, but for what it can mean now financially, sentimentally, practically. This death happens room by room.

Menzel’s painting captures this condition with unsettling precision. Everything remains in place, yet nothing is functioning as it once did. The chair still offers rest, but to no one. The mirror reflects only furniture, doubling absence. The room is preserved, but its relational meaning has collapsed. Historically, this restraint was radical. In 1845, to paint an interior stripped of anecdote was to deny the viewer emotional instruction. Menzel does not tell us how to feel. He shows us a room that has outlived its purpose and allows the discomfort to surface on its own.

The light intensifies this unease. It does not sanctify the space or sentimentalize it. It simply continues. This is what makes the second death so disorienting. Surrounded by my grandmother’s possessions, I feel increasingly detached from her physical self. Not because love has faded, but because objects cannot sustain relationship on their own. They persist materially while the person who animated them is gone. The light reveals this imbalance mercilessly. It exposes objects without restoring connection.

Letting go of these objects has been the most difficult part, because each act of release feels like a step toward the third death, the death of memory. This death has not yet occurred, but it is implied everywhere. It will not arrive when the house is emptied, but when those who remember her are gone as well. Objects feel like bulwarks against that future erasure. To discard them feels like consenting to forgetting.

And yet, The Balcony Room offers no illusion that memory lives safely in things. The room is immaculate, flooded with light, and entirely mute. Memory does not reside here. It requires a remembering subject. Historically, this is where Menzel anticipates modernity. His painting quietly rejects the notion that permanence of space guarantees permanence of meaning. The room endures, but memory does not automatically survive with it.

This realization reframes my role in this second death. I am not dismantling her life; I am bearing witness to its transformation. The responsibility is not to preserve every object, but to carry forward what cannot be boxed or sold. Memory survives not through accumulation, but through narration. Writing becomes an act of translation moving meaning from room to language, from object to story.

Menzel’s light does not console, but it does clarify. It shows what remains after bodies leave: space, form, continuity, and the quiet demand that we decide what to do with them. The room still holds. The light still enters. The condition has changed. I stand within that change now, between the second and third deaths, learning that memory, like light, cannot be contained, only carried.

Baking Cookies at School

The Thin Man

The Artist's Door (2004)

There is a particular gravity to this moment that the language of The Dark Tower names more accurately than any other vocabulary I know. King gives us ka not as fate in the abstract, but as the force that arranges meetings, convergences, and obligations that feel both inevitable and intimate. Standing before this door, my grandmother’s front door, now unmistakably no longer hers, I recognize that ka has done its quiet work. It has drawn us together again: my brother and me, my parents, my cousins. Not for celebration, not for crisis, but for something heavier and more enduring. It has drawn us for the shared labor of meaning.

This house has always been more than a structure. It has been a formative geography. My father and aunt's childhoods unfolded within these walls. My mother crossed into adulthood here, learning the rhythms of family life that would later shape my own. My brother and I absorbed its atmosphere long before we understood its significance, storing memories the way walls store heat. My cousins, too, were shaped by its gravity, even when they were absent from it for long stretches of time. The house did not require constant presence to exert its pull. It simply held.

My grandmother was the axis around which all of this turned. Like the Tower itself, she was less an object than a principle: steadiness, continuity, orientation. With her death, that stabilizing force has diminished, and the system has begun to loosen. This is not collapse, but drift. The work before us—sorting, inventorying, dividing—is the visible sign that gravity is changing. Ka has brought us here not to preserve the house intact, but to shepherd its meaning as it disperses.

In King’s cosmology, a ka-tet is never formed for comfort alone. It exists for a purpose, and that purpose often carries loss within it. What strikes me now is how closely this maps onto our present reality. We have been gathered not because we chose one another anew, but because history insists upon it. We are bound by blood, memory, and obligation, walking a shared stretch of road that none of us could avoid and none of us should walk alone. The house becomes our clearing, our threshold, our temporary camp before the path forks again.

There is an ache in knowing that all ka-tets eventually break. King never allows us the illusion of permanence. Companions fall away. Paths diverge. Stories end. And yet, there is dignity in the walking we do together. What matters is not the duration of the bond, but the fidelity with which it is honored while it holds. In this season, our task is not heroic. It is careful. We are to recognize which objects carry the imprint of shared life, which stories must be spoken aloud before they are scattered, and which silences deserve respect rather than explanation.

The door, then, functions exactly as Whelan renders it: not an invitation, but a demand. To open it is to accept responsibility for what lies beyond. Each room is a chapter. Each object is a sentence written by many hands. As executor, I occupy a role that is at once administrative and deeply moral. I am asked to translate a lived life into distributions and decisions without reducing it to mere property. This is where the language of ka steadies me. These tasks are not random burdens; they are the shape this moment must take.

Walking this path together does not erase our individual griefs. My loss is not identical to my brother’s, nor to my parents’, nor to my cousins’. But ka has aligned them long enough for us to recognize one another as companions again, shaped by the same house, the same grandparents, the same absences. For now, that is enough. For now, the ka-tet holds.

And when it breaks—as all ka-tets do—it will not be because we failed it, but because its work was complete. The house will empty. The objects will scatter. The door will close behind us for the last time. Yet what has been formed here will continue, carried forward in memory, habit, and the quiet knowledge that we walked this stretch of the road together, faithfully, until ka released us to whatever comes next.

Wake Up Dead Man

Sam's Club Hotdog Hack

Pizza Dog

Congratulations Brother, Master of Education

When you find the perfect hat.

Haven Coffee and Goods

Station 3 Coffee Shop

Flood Waters (1898)

I did not wake from the dream gradually. I surfaced from it the way one breaks the surface of water. Too quickly, lungs still burning, heart already ahead of thought. My brother was there one moment, solid and familiar, and then he was not. The river had taken him with a calm indifference that felt more unsettling than violence. I jumped in without hesitation, my body acting before deliberation could assert itself, and found myself fighting a current that did not respond to effort or intention. I was not saving him. I was simply being pulled alongside him. I was being pulled under with him. That was the moment I woke.

For several seconds I remained suspended between states, unsure which reality carried more authority. The fear lingered in my body even as my cognitive mind began its familiar work of correction: I am home. I am safe. He is not in danger. Yet the reassurance arrived too late to fully dislodge the sensation. Stress, I am learning, does not reside primarily in thought. It inhabits muscle, breath, and reflex. I turned toward Cricket, asleep beside me, and rested my hand on her back. She responded with a small, involuntary sound. It was not affection exactly, but acknowledgment. It was enough. My breathing slowed. The current loosened its grip. I slept again.

When I returned to the dream later, in writing, I noticed that it resisted interpretation in the traditional sense. It did not behave like a message encoded in symbols waiting to be decoded. Instead, it presented itself as a mode of consciousness, a particular way my mind had organized experience under pressure. Dreams, in this light, are not stories the psyche tells itself so much as states the psyche enters. They are consciousness stripped of its executive oversight, perception ungoverned by the rules of waking coherence. The dream did not explain my stress; it enacted it.

This is where Monet’s Flood Waters becomes more than an illustrative parallel. Like the dream, the painting does not narrate an event; it renders a condition. The flood has already happened. The viewer arrives after causality has given way to consequence. Trees stand where they always have, yet their relationship to the land has been fundamentally altered. Their reflections blur into their bodies, and the ground itself refuses to assert clear boundaries. Orientation becomes provisional. One must look slowly, attentively, without the expectation of resolution.

In cognitive terms, dreams may be understood as consciousness operating without its usual metacognitive scaffolding. During waking life, I monitor, evaluate, and contextualize my experience continuously. I know what matters, what can wait, what belongs to the past. In the dream, that hierarchy collapses. Emotional salience replaces logical priority. My brother matters. Water moves. Action follows immediately from affect. This is not irrationality so much as pre-rational coherence. It is the mind organized around survival, attachment, and urgency rather than explanation.

Several waking threads converge here. Conversations with a friend in the Northwest about the atmospheric river flooding his region. The anticipation of traveling with my brother to his graduation at Northwest Missouri State, an event weighted with pride, logistics, and the subtle pressure of showing up fully. And beneath all of it, the sustained stress of my grandmother’s death and the responsibilities that followed: grief braided tightly with duty, memory entangled with administration. None of these experiences are catastrophic in isolation. Together, they saturate consciousness.

The dream absorbs these impressions and renders them as water. Renders them as a force without malice, as movement without intention. That quality matters. The river is not an antagonist. It does not pursue or punish. It simply pulls. This distinguishes stress from fear. Fear has an object. Stress has a condition. The dream, like Monet’s painting, captures that distinction with precision.

What becomes especially important, then, is the act of reflection itself. Writing the dream is not merely a record; it is a shift in consciousness. In psychological terms, this is metacognition. It is the mind observing its own processes. By returning to the dream deliberately, I reintroduce the executive functions absent during sleep. I name, contextualize, and relate. I do not explain the dream away, but I situate it. In doing so, I regain a form of agency not by controlling the current, but by understanding how I am being carried by it.

This reflective act mirrors the viewer’s position before Flood Waters. Monet does not resolve the flood, but he frames it. He slows perception. He invites sustained attention. Likewise, journaling allows me to hold the dream at a distance sufficient for insight without demanding mastery. The dream becomes neither prophecy nor pathology, but data: subjective, affective, and meaningful precisely because it resists simplification.

What remains most grounding is still the waking moment: the tactile certainty of fur beneath my hand, the soft sound of a living body responding. That moment represents a return not just to wakefulness, but to regulated consciousness. If the dream is immersion, reflection is shoreline. Not a denial of depth, but a place to stand.

In this way, the dream does not require belief in any grand theory of dream symbolism to matter. Its value lies in how it reveals the shape of my current consciousness. In what surfaces when control relaxes and impressions reorganize themselves freely. Like Monet’s flooded landscape, it shows me not what has happened, but how I am inhabiting what has happened. Writing it down does not still the water or slow the current, but it allows me to see where I am standing within it and maybe where it might be pulling me.