Original Poetry from Dietrich Balsbaugh
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“An Answer to my Brother’s Phone Calls from Manhattan”
Original Poetry from Geoffrey Ayers
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“In Gratitude to the Bees”
Original Poetry from Kate Champagne
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“Sleep Unto Death”
Original Poetry from David Ehrenman
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The Trip to Fallsburg
“Fallsburg. Calling at Fallsburg,” the announcer said as the train hissed to a standstill. I hadn’t planned to leave the city during my trip, but after elbowing through the swarm upon swarm of tourists, even a day’s escape sounded like heaven. Every town has a list of unmissable sights; however, I found delightfully little written about Fallsburg. When one of the few reviews mentioned what sounded like missing the open arms of a tourist trap, I bought my ticket.
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When I Feel Small
Maybe, though, just maybe, it’s ok to face the fear as a small Whitefoot mouse does. “The little life she had, she loved dearly, and so far she had taken excellent care of it.”
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The Film is the Holy Fool: A Conversation with Filmmaker Josh David Jordan
When we try new things, sometimes we feel like a fool. But if we are not willing to be a fool, then we will never know how to start a new thing, or how to make it better. — Fr. John
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The Courage to Let Things Be
And that’s where the heart of the matter lies—not just in how we read a story, but in how we engage the world itself. Do we approach the world to live with it—or to take it apart in order to dominate it?
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Paul Elmer More on Civilization
We are prone to forget that civilization has always been a tour de force, so to speak, a little hard-won area of order and self-subordination amidst a vast wilderness of anarchy and barbarism that are continually threatening to overrun their bounds. But that is equally no reason for over-confidence. Civilization is like a ship traversing an untamed sea. It is a more complex machine in our day, with command of greater forces, and might seem correspondingly safer than in the era of sails. But fresh catastrophes have shown that the ancient perils of navigation still confront the largest vessel, when the crew loses its discipline or the officers neglect their…
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McCarthy on the Unmaking of the World
Perhaps in the world's destruction, it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic, and coldly secular.
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Glen Hansard on a Life of Songs
I don't feel like I'm too much of a nostalgist, so it's difficult for me to get behind lyrics that I wrote all that time ago, unless I can sort of reconfigure them into my life now. That’s why certain songs have a life, and certain songs don't. A song is like a saddle: you ride it for a while, and if it's the right kind of song you can sing it for the rest of your life. And then other songs are only really important for certain periods of your life, and you move on from them and find yourself not necessarily needing to sing them anymore. I'm happy…
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Weil on the Most Precious Gifts
We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them. Man cannot discover them by his own powers, and if he sets out to seek for them he will find in their place counterfeits of which he will be unable to discern the falsity.
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Billy Collins on Counting Syllables
I count syllables not out of any allegiance to tradition but because I want the indifference and inflexibility of a seventeen-syllable limit to balance my self-expressive yearnings. With the form in place, the act of composition becomes a negotiation between one’s subjective urges and the rules of order, which in this case could not be simpler or firmer. My hope is that such fixity will keep the pulsations of the ego in check by encouraging a degree of humility in the face of the form.
