Essays

I read your letter more times than I will admit. Now I need your answer, not your story. I found your letter, and I have read it more times than I will admit to you. I want to begin by thanking you, because a man who opens his whole life at the end of it […]

Everything I know about love, and the one thing it took me a lifetime to learn. If you sat with me now, near the end of a long life, and asked me for the one thing I know for certain, I would not tell you about work, or money, or even about God directly, though

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

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