The clay is soft today. A companion to Dust, Carried and Borrowed. I have spent my whole life in a workshop. I know the smell of one. I know how the dust settles on every surface by evening, how the light comes through in the morning and lands across the wheel, how a room like […]
The three houses of the soul, and the one I am standing in now. Before the tears, before anything else, something in my chest sat straight up and said, I knew it. And a moment later came the heavier thing, the thing that has kept me awake since, because I did know it, and the
The one you buried answers the first night, and tells you where they truly were. A companion to Dust. You came to me the day after I died, and before anything else I need you to know that I heard you. I heard every word. I heard the hundred things you had saved to tell
The last letter of a man who stayed. I do not have long. My hand will not hold the pen the way it once did, and my breath is coming shorter now, but I have to set this down before I go, for whoever finds it, in a drawer or a box or the pocket
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Seven answers to one question, and why what a thing is depends on the depth of the one who beholds it. Ask a hundred people what light is, and you will hear a hundred different answers, and every one of them will be true, and not one of them will be complete. I have come
What I kept of you, when I could not keep you. You did not leave much behind. You never were a person who held tightly to things. Whatever you owned and did not use, you gave away while you still lived, pressing it into the hands of anyone who needed it more than you did,
Everything I came to say to you, before I could finally leave. I came the day after you died. I came before the earth over you had even settled, while it was still dark and turned and raw, and I stood there in the cold with a hundred things in my mouth that I had
A reflection on the orphan who is not made by death, the ache of being unseen, and the hands that shape a soul. Inspired by a line often traced to the scholar al-Shafi’i. Ask most people who an orphan is, and they will tell you the same thing. An orphan is a child whose mother
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On the lower self that pulls you toward the easy road, and the watcher within who can set you free. Have you ever noticed your own mind working against you? You know the right thing to do. It is clear as day. And yet a voice inside you begins pulling the other way, whispering stay
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A reflection for the one who does right and still suffers, while the careless seem to prosper. Inspired by a passage of scripture, a reading from the Quran. There is a question that has troubled good people for as long as people have prayed. You try to live right. You are honest, you are kind,
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