Born in Nashville and having lived there for several years, I’ve been following the recent bombing very closely. The two blocks that were bombed look more like a street in downtown Aleppo than music city. Some of our family as far south as Murfreesboro could not make contact during Christmas and for forty-eight hours afterward […]
Tag: Syria
Quarantine, Day 12
I woke up at 3:00 am choking and sweating and generally in a state of panic. I got out of bed and went straight to the bathroom feeling like I might vomit, repeatedly whispering to myself, “It’s just anxiety, it’s just anxiety, it’s just anxiety.“ The operative word, of course, is “just,” as if anxiety […]
Reflections on Holy Week
Someone told me today this is “Holy Week,” that Easter is this Sunday, and it caught me off-guard. There was a time very recently when, not only would that have been incredibly pertinent to my life, but my work would have revolved around the whole week in some way or another. Nowadays, it couldn’t be […]
Making Sacred Space Where There is None
There’s this moment during a misty rain in New York City where if you look up to the skyline, the familiarity of the buildings you’ve grown accustomed to seeing in the sunshine is lost to the low-hanging clouds. If you squint, you can see one of the taller towers just peering through the fog but […]
Lead Us Not Into Penn Station
I’m not sure why, but lately, I’m hypersensitive to all the sounds that surround me. Maybe it’s because I’m used to a more rural environment that the sounds of the City are just that jarring to me. Maybe it’s because I’m living just next to the Garden State Parkway, which leaves in its wake a […]
