Issue 27: Glimpses

the RUMINATE blog

The Bright Light of Shipwreck

The Bright Light of Shipwreck

I‘ve never put out to sea, but I have a notion or two as what it might be like…out on a watertight (most of the time) vessel. The anticipation of the journey to start, stars and determination in the eyes of the captain and crew. Nights and days blur together. Infighting, mutiny, tense relations in close quarters. Read More »

A Different Kind of Lent

A Different Kind of Lent

This year, I had planned on spending Easter in the hospital – my second child, a boy, was due a couple days before that. On January 24, a Thursday nine weeks before Easter, I woke up at 4 a.m. to feel a low tick-tick-tick inside the bowl of my pelvis bone, the same ticking I felt before my water broke Read More »

On Faith and Writing: Words as Worship

On Faith and Writing: Words as Worship

Poetry is about creation, about making something real from nothing, or very little—something that sings and dances from a grave deep within—a stone rolling away. It’s about speaking a world into existence. It is—as is said of the life of Christ— Read More »

An Old Coyote Makes Poetry

An Old Coyote Makes Poetry

Review of Everything Barren Will Be Blessed, by Don Thompson (Pinyon Publishing, 2012)

The title Everything Barren Will Be Blessed is an effective entry into poet Don Thompson’s world: the dichotomous landscape of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Once a carpet of wildflowers that Read More »

Exert Yourself

Exert Yourself

Confessions of a Reluctant Jane Austen Reader

In college I regarded Jane Austen as less than literary. From the indirect knowledge I had gathered, she wrote about dancing and marriage. Boring to a girl who was more interested in reading Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky or pretending to understand Faulkner. Read More »

Contorting the World Beautiful

Contorting the World Beautiful

Contorting the World Beautiful—this is the work of artists

“My favorite two words are these: LOVE, and NOW!”

-Tim Rollins

I sat in the Lucas Theatre, located in the historic district of Savannah, Georgia. Read More »