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Awfully Good
My eight-year-old granddaughter came home from school and told a story using the phrase “awfully good.” Eyes rolled when I asked what do you mean by “awfully” good? We talk from time to time about words she picks up from school. You can imagine the interest she has for such talks, thus the eye roll. Awe has come…
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Just Beyond Bull
How we interpret some words matters to the when or where they are spoken. So it is with bullshit. I picked up bullshit just as I left childhood behind. A gentleman Okie, Wallace, down the road from us had a fairly colorful vocabulary. A vocabulary that my daddy would never use, but understood well. The two of them worked,…
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Named and Naming
With university student pliability they rolled out of the van. They’d come for a week of conversation with valley ranchers, spiritual guides, farmers, and Tribal politicians. Our work today was to talk about the valley’s history, politics, religion, spirit, hurt, joy and their landscape intersections. The morning was cool but not cold. Just after sunrise. We met at the…
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Quiet Talk
Three of them sat around the afternoon fire talking. Sometime ago he had taken a thirty-six-inch tractor rim and set it in the ground. As the two of them talked he watched the fire. Noticing that as the rim heated, the ground around it melted, softened, and turned to mud. They’re talkers. But he knew that. There were times when these…
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Sensible Theology
Theologians have long worked to develop theology to explain the unexplainable. A few have done reasonable work and made it accessible. Yet to do so is getting harder. In part, because we are losing our grounded-ness. When were we last able to describe the taste of our home place dirt? At work? At the playground? Where I practice my religion? Where I walk? As…
Chewing the Cud 