Eastern Oregon is full of Juniper trees. The berries are fragrant, and often used to make gin. I heard Kim Stafford (the new Oregon Poet Laureate) tell a story recently about a kid from eastern Oregon who went to western Oregon to go to college. He kept in his pocket a matchbox full of sage […]

Idioms are fun. My wife and I still laugh about the difficulties in sharing English idioms with our students in Hungary. “Balazs has such a BIG FACE!” You start thinking about this kids face, and it seems developmentally appropriate, and just as big as Zsolt’s face, or Gergely’s face, and then it clicks. Head. He […]

Context is important; often it’s missing (See: C is for CONTEXT #3 of 312). And when context is missing, our understanding can be patchy, incomplete, or way off (See: E is for ELEPHANT #5 of 312). This is true of everything, and certainly the Bible.

Habakkuk is a book of prophecy in the Old Testament. […]

Angela Duckworth defines grit as “passion and perseverance for long-term goals.” It wouldn’t be a waste of time to think about grit, gravel, sand, oysters, pearls, perseverance and passion. And if it feels like it is, I would say keep going until it isn’t.

Me, you, everyone. Why do we forget this? Why do we expect otherwise? Why are we surprised?

I love the story of the blind men who describe an elephant. They each describe a specific part by feeling it. One guy grabs a leg and is convinced it’s a tree, another grabs the tail, and so on with ear and tusk and nose and skin. Someone points out that they are all correct, […]

Rain, train, plane, adolescence, obedience, life. Sometimes “40 years in the desert” is figurative, symbolic, metaphor; sometimes “40 years in the desert” is a realistic timeline, a guide to set your expectations.

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Debt, dumb, doubt. The silent B is still lingering around in English words, a reminder of when we said things differently, when we put emphasis on different syllables. What sounds now are scheduled for extinction? What history will changing spellings erase?

August can be a month, a noun, an eponym, an adjective. August brings to my mind a caesar (Augustus), a theologian (Augustine), a monastic order (Gregor Mendel lived in an Augustinian abbey in Brno), and a favorite poem – “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout” by Gary Snyder.

It’s both true and not, like so […]