A Work Progressing

We’re strange creatures.

We walk through the world collecting impressions, and then we freeze them in language as if they were specimens. A moment becomes a sentence. A feeling becomes a fact. A passing shadow becomes a story we swear is true.

And because we can do this, we can also do the opposite.

We can write things into existence that never were.

I can say, “God lies,” and the sentence sits there, perfectly formed, perfectly false.

I can say, “This is hopeless,” and suddenly the air gets heavier. Yet hopelessness is rarely a fact. More often it is a conclusion. The future has not arrived, but we pronounce judgment on it anyway.

Much of what troubles us is not reality itself, but the stories we construct around reality. We imagine outcomes. We assume motives. We predict disasters. Then we react to those inventions with the seriousness of soldiers responding to alarms.

Discernment shouldn’t be this hard, but here we are.

So what do we do?

We build our own list. A small compass. A way to keep from creating worlds that don’t deserve to exist.

1. Every challenge hides a seed of hope.
2. Is it true, or is it just my opinion wearing a costume?
3. What evidence is actually in front of me?
4. Is this knowable, or am I borrowing someone else’s certainty?
5. Choose truth over ego.
6. Practice noticing when you’re open and when you’re closed.
7. Hold a positive posture; the world already produces enough entropy.
8. Even the immoral can choose good.
9. Don’t wait for perfection.
10. It’s not about me.
11. Learn to yield.

The list itself is not the point.

The point is to remember that words are tools, not masters. They can reveal reality, but they can also conceal it. They can clarify, distort, encourage, deceive, heal, or divide.

Before adding another sentence to the world, it may be worth asking:

Am I describing reality?

Or am I creating it?

The afternoon sun beat down upon the herd, the late summer wind had died, leaving a mist of evaporated water low to the ground. The stillness saturated the ground, the field of grass, the herd of cattle. Not even the insects made a noise.

The cattle’s skin still shivered automatically, but not because of bites. They shivered because they always had. The farmer’s teenage daughter had given names to nearly all in the herd, particularly those with unusual markings.

For the next few weeks it was the best of times. There was no awareness of the coming process. Even the daughter pushed the knowledge to the edge of knowledge. At the season’s end there was butchering.

It’s such an ugly term for something natural and important. Cattle were meant for food and leather, and the region excelled in industries that needed to be supplied. High-quality leather from Veneto was used in furniture, automobiles, and shoes.

Italian beef was popular in traditional restaurants, served with pasta and vegetables. Hundreds of unique dishes, prepared by specially trained chefs, delighted natives and tourists.

The herd made it all happen.

On one morning, near the onset of winter, something lingered. A hide had been scraped, soaked in tanning solution, and stretched on a rack. The skin had millions of cells embedded within it that had once functioned as nerve sensors. No longer active, but still there in stasis.

Perhaps in the frozen DNA there was a memory of having a name, another memory of shivering in unison, wave after wave of automatic motion. But now there was only the loss of the sun and the smell of chemistry.

The hide was removed from the frame, then cut carefully into patterned shapes. Artisans came in from the cold and damp to spend days indoors assembling shapes into new objects. Objects to extend the use of the herd. It was a season of making.

There was a shaping, a forming. A pattern was sewn together, soaked, placed on a form, and pressed into shape. More stitching, more forming. Additional material that smelled of rubber was applied, glued, and sewn.

In the end, after hours of real work, it was a shoe.

Paired with another, the shoe was placed in a box, never exposed to sunshine, then placed on racks for spring shipment to regional and international distributors. Mountain boots crafted in the shadow of the Italian Alps and made from Italian leather was the perfect marketing plan.

In Berkeley, California, there was a ski shop on University Avenue that had expanded its inventory to include hiking gear. They had a new line of Pivetta Eigers, a simple leather hiking boot.

It didn’t have special hooks or buckles. It just had holes. It didn’t have a wide welt for the sole. In fact, it had no visible welt at all. It was constructed in such a way that the foot was directly above the edge of the sole.

This meant that when the boot hit the earth it was almost perfectly the same size as the foot. It also meant that the boot was perfect for the edges encountered while climbing cliff faces. It was slightly heavy, but rigid, with great ankle protection in scree.

A veteran backpacker had finally gotten a seasonal job that allowed for some discretionary spending. The boots were an entire week’s pay.

He bought them with a shrug.

The hiker had tried the boots on in the shop, but the real test would be a short hike in North Berkeley at Indian Rock Park. This well-known free-climbing rock sat in the middle of a residential area. The rock was the size of several buildings, both high and wide. It provided difficult climbs and magnificent views of the East Bay, San Francisco, and the waters in between.

The hiker went there directly after purchasing them and laced up the boots.

The leather creaked. The laces tightened. He stood.

For the first time since the hide had left the pasture, sunlight touched it again.

The warmth spread slowly through the leather.

If anything remained, it might have remembered the sun.

Years passed. The shoe experienced cold mountain streams, snow-covered trails, and Army parade grounds. It followed the hiker, providing support and steadfastness.

One day, after years in the mountains and years in the military, the hiker was applying fresh protection to the leather.

There was nothing ceremonial about it. No audience. No speech.

He simply honored the shoe.

The ‘what’ of a shoe had become a ‘who’.

Revenge

I’ve written before about the comforting noises at night in my old house. I learned them through decades of being up late, listening to wallboard crack in response to the pressures of a moving hillside. Unsettling, literally, yet soothing in their regularity.

One night there was a difference. On the eve of the release of the movie Disclosure Day, I feel compelled to write of my personal visitation.

It wasn’t a dark and stormy night. It was a regular night with just a taste of too much noise coming from the entryway of our split-level house. A half flight of stairs down from my chair was the front door. Was it locked? Generally, it was locked when we were home and unlocked when we were away. But was it locked now?

I slowly rose from the chair, hands gripping my knees for stability, but also to help silence any joint snapping. I straightened to full height and slid my feet slowly over the carpet, careful not to cause any floorboards to creak.

I got to the banister and looked over, searching for any movement. I had my 5.5-inch folding tanto in my hands, being careful to silence the snick of the locking mechanism. I gripped the banister hard as I leaned in to see if anyone had gone down the next half flight of stairs toward the garage.

Then I heard, and saw, a crouching movement at the end of the stairs directly to my left.

Only ten feet away.

Instinctively, I shouted, “Freeze!”

And it did.

I couldn’t gather enough light to determine which direction the crouched figure faced. I could only make out what might have been the central mass. The command to freeze was apparently in full effect, which left me confused about what I should do next.

I wasn’t going to get closer, but I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the still shape, straining to detect movement. I quietly shifted the knife into a blade grip.

Seconds passed.

No change.

I didn’t want to make a sound because if I was having this much difficulty seeing, then surely it was universal.

More seconds passed.

I moved slightly, positioning myself behind part of the wall while remaining riveted on the dark mass.

I said loudly, “Stand up now and move out the door!”

I waited.

No change.

I repeated the order.

Still no change.

“This is your last warning!”

I thought something moved.

Then nothing.

Maybe nothing had moved at all.

I made a decision.

I stepped forward and threw as hard as I could at the center mass.

I heard the distinctive sound of a clean stick.

There was movement.

For several seconds it was slow. The mass never rose. It stayed close to the floor and appeared to move to the carpeted stairs, coming up one stair at a time. As it got closer I could resolve the arms of my leather jacket reaching up for the next step.

I had nothing more to throw, I was now ‘frozen’ to the image pulling itself up to where I crouched. I had missed my throw.

Halfway up the stairs I could see the empty cuffs of my jacket reaching the next step, it seemed to increase speed, or perhaps it was just time compressing.

Very soon it was upon me, covering me with an unnatural weight. The cuffs were at my neck, as if hands were choking the life out of me. I was staring at the label sewn into the collar of the jacket, ‘Authentic St. John’s Bay, Established 1984’

The lights came on, and Sherry asked, ‘It’s 2:30 am, what are you doing?’

‘Putting my jacket away!’

I’ve written before about the comforting noises at night in my old house. I learned them through decades of being up late, listening to wallboard crack in response to the pressures of a moving hillside. Unsettling, literally, yet soothing in their regularity.

One night there was a difference. On the eve of the release of the movie Disclosure Day, I feel compelled to write of my personal visitation.

It wasn’t a dark and stormy night. It was a regular night with just a taste of too much noise coming from the entryway of our split-level house. A half flight of stairs down from my chair was the front door. Was it locked? Generally, it was locked when we were home and unlocked when we were away. But was it locked now?

I slowly rose from the chair, hands gripping my knees for stability, but also to help silence any joint snapping. I straightened to full height and slid my feet slowly over the carpet, careful not to cause any floorboards to creak.

I got to the banister and looked over, searching for any movement. I had my 5.5-inch folding tanto in my hands, being careful to silence the snick of the locking mechanism. I gripped the banister hard as I leaned in to see if anyone had gone down the next half flight of stairs toward the garage.

Then I heard, and saw, a crouching movement at the end of the stairs directly to my left.

Only ten feet away.

Instinctively, I shouted, “Freeze!”

And it did.

I couldn’t gather enough light to determine which direction the crouched figure faced. I could only make out what might have been the central mass. The command to freeze was apparently in full effect, which left me confused about what I should do next.

I wasn’t going to get closer, but I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the still shape, straining to detect movement. I quietly shifted the knife into a blade grip.

Seconds passed.

No change.

I didn’t want to make a sound because if I was having this much difficulty seeing, then surely it was universal.

More seconds passed.

I moved slightly, positioning myself behind part of the wall while remaining riveted on the dark mass.

I said loudly, “Stand up now and move out the door!”

I waited.

No change.

I repeated the order.

Still no change.

“This is your last warning!”

I thought something moved.

Then nothing.

Maybe nothing had moved at all.

I made a decision.

I stepped forward and threw as hard as I could at the center mass.

I heard the distinctive sound of a clean stick.

Then silence.

And no movement.

For several minutes I waited.

Then I descended one step at a time. Each step brought more light to the scene.

Halfway down, I could see that it was my leather jacket, with an unfolded tanto blade pinning it through the back to the wooden floor below.

It was then that I learned that whoever had been wearing my jacket had instantly vaporized as soon as the blade entered the leather back.

One small hole.

No blood.

No fluid.

I never had another visitor in that home.

In the Spring of 1970

In the spring of 1970, I wrote to request a POW bracelet. It was a simple stainless steel band engraved with the name of a POW or MIA serviceman and the date of the event.

I put it on my wrist, rarely moving it from left to right, never taking it off at night, or removing it for any reason. I even refused to take it off when I was drafted, and the Army relented once they understood what it was.

I did not receive a POW bracelet. I did not get to remove it when prisoners were returned, either alive or dead. My man was listed as MIA.

For decades, I checked the databases, especially after the Internet became widely available. I learned about his family. I learned about him. And I learned that he was last seen in a country where he was not supposed to be — Cambodia.

Then, over time, I checked a little less frequently.

On Memorial Day, 2015, one of my daughters asked whether I wanted to be buried with the bracelet. I replied that I would, but then thought I would check one more time. She volunteered to wear it if I wanted. I said, ‘let me check’.

I was stunned to discover that his dog tags had been found very near the last place he had been seen wounded. Not only that, but DNA had also been recovered. He had received an official burial two years before my last search.

For the previous two years, I had not been wearing an MIA bracelet.

He had been found.

The next week, we already had a family vacation planned in Hawaii. I decided to visit the Punchbowl Cemetery.

I found the marker with his name on it.

And I placed the bracelet there.

The entire family came with me.

(An updated post from 2024)

I’ve been here before, or so it feels.

Maybe it’s the flickering neon sign of Pizza Palace casting its red glow across the parking lot. Maybe it’s the memory of sitting there night after night in sandals, jacket over my shoulder, two notebooks spread across the table like I was preparing for something important. I was nineteen. Too young for bars, too old to pretend I was still a kid.

No car. No license. Just pizza, coffee, notebooks, and people passing through.

One of them was a giant Finn named Don. At least I remember him as giant. He drank beer late into the night while his girlfriend, who somehow seemed even larger in personality and ambition, was putting herself through college. He talked about the cannery the way sailors talk about weather. Not dramatically. Just as something that eventually gets everyone wet.

He got me a job there.

The cannery sat near the water, surrounded by steam and the smell of cooked fruit. My first position was cleanup on the graveyard shift. Rubber suit. Rubber boots. Squeegee in hand, pushing peaches, pears, and fruit cocktail remains toward drains that eventually emptied into the bay. At nineteen, this somehow felt normal.

Mostly I remember the noise.

Machines banging lids into place.
Forklifts.
Steam.
Water hoses.
The constant movement of conveyors carrying fruit in various stages of acceptance or rejection.

And then there was Zeke.

Every industrial place has a Zeke. The man who knows where the pipes go.

When fruit clogged somewhere deep beneath the cannery floor, Zeke would appear and ask for a volunteer from cleanup crew. I say “ask” loosely. The new guy always went. Then Zeke would disappear below the floor with him into a maze of tunnels carrying rejected fruit, syrup, steam, and whatever else flowed beneath the building.

A few hours later Zeke would come back alone.

The volunteer usually quit by morning.

I quit before my turn came.

Still, the next summer a postcard arrived.

“Come back. Second year is easier.”

Apparently seniority existed even at the bottom of a cannery.

The second season really was easier. I moved to swing shift and eventually worked my way upward, if placing lids on cans can be called upward movement. Mostly I fed lids into a machine while trying not to jam the line. Occasionally an upside-down lid would make it through and stop production for a few minutes. Nobody died. The machine simply objected to disorder.

By the third season I landed on the fruit cocktail line.

That was where the rejected fruit found its final purpose.

Bruised peaches.
Odd pears.
Pieces too small for perfect halves.

Everything cut down, sorted, mixed together, and redistributed equally with grapes and maraschino cherries. I remember trying the cherries during breaks after hearing the dispenser make its cheerful little pop-pop-pop sound all shift long.

They were terrible.

Bright red, perfectly shaped, and almost completely without flavor. Even then it struck me that appearance and substance were not necessarily close relatives.

BTW, nine cherries per can.

My cannery career ended with a runaway barrel, a misplaced hand truck handle, and an appendix that apparently alarmed the hospital staff enough to become conversational. I was told it was one of the largest inflamed appendixes they had seen. Someone mentioned they might keep it in a jar.

I never verified that story.

But I sometimes imagine it still sitting somewhere in a dusty basement beside old medical slides and obsolete equipment. A small preserved artifact from a summer spent inside steam, noise, fruit syrup, and industrial rhythm.

Funny what survives in memory.

Not entire conversations.
Not dates.
Not wages.

Just the sound of cherry dispensers, steam rising off wet concrete floors, and the knowledge that somewhere beneath the cannery, Zeke still knew where the pipes went.

(Re-posting from 2018)

I just used the WordPress feature of tracking the access of my blog posts. It isn’t that time consuming, haha, hardly a dozen eyeballs a week find my posts. Notice I didn’t say read and comment!

Anyway, over the last few years I’ve noticed that one post usually gets several hits per month. I wrote about Abraham traveling West from Ur. I wondered about the possible storytelling around the fire. He was part of the foreign ruling culture of Ur, and he was probably literate in Sumerian, so I researched what I could about Sumerian proverbs, thinking that they might be entertaining, and appropriate campfire content.

And apparently a lot of others are interested as well. It is still the most popular post on my blog.

I started this blog about four years ago, partly in response to my retirement. I say partly because it is unclear which motive kick-started my action. While I did teach about blogging and general web activity, I didn’t really have the time to do much personal work. I was on Facebook but mostly lurking and connecting with my students.

After retiring, many people asked about the free time that I had acquired. I admit I went through several “hobby” activities. They were fun, but I approached them with “project mode,” an intensity that looked toward completion. I was “done” in a few weeks with each of them.

I was tired of listing the various activities that I had burned through, so I made up a story. “Well, I spend a certain amount of time pondering, and then writing posts to my blog.” Except that I wasn’t. So obviously I was convicted to make that a truth. I do ponder, especially when I have the time, and I did spend years thinking out loud in classrooms. So why not actually write down some thoughts and keep them in a publicly accessible archive?

I didn’t really think that one through.

Part of me really wants to make some serious edits. Not everything pondered should see the light of day. Especially years later.

So again I looked through the history of my posts, wondering where I was then, and where I am now. One of the first posts was about Ivan Illich, a thinker, author, and educator. On reading this I marveled at my undisciplined approach, wandering all over in big sweeping circles, barely keeping the focus, almost like bird or fish murmurations. Where was I going?

Yep, that’s how I think, “thought murmurations,” and who has the time to read through that?

I have now spent several hours watching YouTube murmurations. I am enthralled! I desperately want to experience this firsthand. I can remember once, while my family fished from the levee on the Sacramento River early in the morning, a dense black river of starlings going east, flying just yards above the water.

It was continuous and it must have taken an hour, with very few gaps in the cloud of feathers. They didn’t break and create spirals in the sky, they were directed and linear. They had some place to go!

The funny thing was that later in the afternoon they came back, just as dense, and just as directed. Black feathers blotting out the sky!

I remember reading stories about herds of bison that took days crossing a particular river. Then, a few short years and mountains of bones later, they were mostly gone. Murdered almost as successfully as the dodo. Hmm, man can change the environment, and he has!

Back to murmurations, I just can’t imagine how signals are communicated so quickly, and accurately.

“Wait, you want me to follow you? Where are we going? What do you mean it’s partly up to Me?”

At least to me, it feels beyond human understanding.

This image appeared in a Facebook post. A striking profile of a young woman, rendered in a style that fuses the raw psychological intensity of Egon Schiele with the ornate, mosaic-like decorative sensibility of Gustav Klimt. Her dark hair is gathered into a loose, windswept bun with rebellious curls escaping; she wears a simple white high-collared garment. Behind her rises a richly textured patchwork wall — fractured yet deliberate. The overall effect is restrained, melancholic, and quietly powerful.

The post presented the work as “The Silence of Women”; social denunciation by the Austrian painter Egon Schiele (Digital painting). Predictably, it sparked strong reactions:

1. “And the term ‘Digital Painting’ isn’t oxymoronic at all… is it?”

2. “By who? And the ‘paint’ is derived obviously from Klimt. This is all such a horrible joke.”

3. “Don’t do this… unfair to the artist you are ripping off. It’s even an insult to AI.”

4. “AI art is an insult to both intellect and creativity. Soulless.”

5. “Love it.”

The surface question is obvious: Who made it?

If the answer is simply “AI,” then we are asked to believe some digital engine spontaneously blended Schiele’s expressive distortion with Klimt’s golden ornamentation. That does not happen.

What is far more likely is that a human being used AI as a sophisticated tool — crafting a vision, writing prompts, rejecting dozens of outputs, refining language, guiding tone and composition, and ultimately selecting the final result. The image did not emerge from the digital void. Someone envisioned it. Someone asked for it. Someone shaped it.

But perhaps the more interesting question is not merely who made it, but what kind of making is this?

Does the degree of vision, judgment, refinement, and sustained labor behind the prompt fundamentally alter the nature of authorship? If a person spends hours — or days — shaping language, iterating on results, adjusting structure, steering emotional tone, and curating outcomes, is this process categorically different from other mediated forms of artmaking?

The brush does not eliminate the painter. The camera does not eliminate the photographer. The chisel does not erase the sculptor. More complex tools do not erase authorship; they complicate and expand it.

Throughout history, every new technology has provoked similar anxieties and accusations of “soullessness.” Photography was once dismissed as a mechanical cheat that could never be art. Digital illustration faced the same skepticism. Yet in each case, the real creative force remained the human intelligence directing the tool.

As our tools grow more powerful, the images they help produce can become richer, more layered, and more surprising. But greater complexity does not dissolve the creator’s role. It redefines the relationship between human intention and medium. The authorship may be distributed or mediated in new ways, yet it remains irreducibly human.

The image did not appear spontaneously.

A person made it.

Just a quick look at significant gate-keeping within my personal memory.

Biblical scholarship has long been more than a hobby for me, though less than formal academic scholarship. Still, curiosity has a way of pushing a person into deep water, so in the late 1960s I began gathering whatever material I could find.

One of the major issues then was the public release of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

It seems odd now, but soon after the scrolls were discovered, access became tightly controlled by a very small circle of scholars. The stated purpose was careful and accurate translation, which was understandable to a point. But decade after decade passed, while only fragments and selective reports reached the public.

Periodically, small articles discussed new findings, but the scrolls themselves remained largely inaccessible. More than forty years after their discovery, and even after several of the original scholars had died, much of the material was still effectively locked away.

At the time, I subscribed to Biblical Archaeology Society’s magazine, Biblical Archaeology Review, when it made the bold decision to publish unauthorized photographs of the scrolls.

It was a major rupture in the system.

Suddenly, the old structure of academic control looked far less convincing. Scholars around the world could examine the texts directly. Serious researchers checked earlier translations, debates followed, corrections were made—and civilization somehow survived the experience. All this occurred before the modern Internet made mass distribution effortless.

That did not mean gate-keeping disappeared from biblical scholarship. Far from it. There remained a deeply Euro-centric focus shaping much of the conversation.

Serious scholars certainly knew of the importance of early Ethiopian Christian scripture, but Ge’ez had not been widely translated, and in many circles Ethiopia received little more than a respectful nod before attention returned to the familiar Protestant-versus-Catholic framework. Even the Greek and Russian Orthodox traditions often sat outside the primary Western discussion.

What changed much of this was not sudden institutional humility, but the expansion of the Internet itself.

Not only did the Dead Sea Scrolls become widely available, but many other neglected religious texts also surfaced into broader public awareness. Not “lost,” exactly. More often ignored, untranslated, inaccessible, or simply left outside the dominant scholarly spotlight.

Even within the last five years, I have noticed a significant increase in serious scholarship surrounding the Ethiopian canon of 81 books. There is now far more material available than at any previous point in my lifetime.

Quite a bit of it still sits unread on my shelf.

We document our joys.

Sometimes we write about them and tuck the words away on a hard drive or in a notebook. Sometimes we capture them with a camera. Then, often years later and by happy accident, we stumble across them again and the original joy flashes back to life.

If we are lucky and disciplined, we begin this habit early and repeat it hundreds or even thousands of times across a lifetime.

Here is my random thought:

At the exact instant of a camera flash, there may also be a flash of future memory.

Imagine standing in the middle of your parents’ 50th anniversary celebration. The dog is barking, children are squabbling over toys, dishes need serving, more dishes need clearing. You’re trying to stay present but the chaos keeps pulling you away. Then someone lifts a camera.

A spontaneous pose is captured. The flash blooms and slowly fades across the cones of your retina.

And perhaps, in that single microsecond, you are quietly gifted with a preview: the knowledge of how many times in the decades ahead you will return to this one frozen moment and feel a quiet surge of joy.

I like that thought.