My father carved in wood. When the slope of a cheek came out a quarter inch wrong, he set aside six weeks of work and went out for a new log — because you cannot paint over wood. Jim on writing as a daily examen, on the sentence that costs you something, and on naming out loud that there is an AI in his process — and exactly where its usefulness ends.
Silence is not the absence of something — it is a presence with its own work to do. On what the research says silence does to the body, why we rush to fill it, the season I had no words at all, and why the most important thing a person says is usually their second sentence. Includes two practices you can try today.
“I didn’t mean it that way” is usually true, and it almost never helps. Two ordinary biases guarantee a gap between what we intend and what lands — and the research on apologies shows the element we lean on hardest is the one that repairs least. On sarcasm that drew tears, an apology that softened something hard, and the three questions restorative justice asks instead.
Most of us were handed a quiet assumption: that the spiritual life is the part of life that is not physical. Brother Lawrence, decades in a monastery kitchen, said otherwise — “I turn my little omelet in the pan for the love of God.” A companion to Thin Places, on dishwater and dough and the road under your feet, a book found on my father’s kitchen island, and why matter does not become prayer — we do.
The Celts called it a thin place — where the distance between heaven and earth narrows almost to nothing. We attach the phrase to far-off islands, but their own prayers blessed the kindling of the morning fire and the making of the bed. Jim and Lynette bring thin places all the way home: a back porch in the snow, a bedside, your own body, and the person sitting across from you.
Three people, one hard problem, three kinds of frustration — and they are not actually disagreeing. They are speaking three first languages. Part Two of two: why most personality conflicts are really translation problems, what each center is truly asking, and why restorative justice — who was harmed, what do they need, whose obligation is it to repair — turns out to be three-centered justice.
Walk into a room and one person reads the feeling in it, another analyzes what’s happening, a third simply senses whether to move toward or away. The Enneagram calls these the three Centers of Intelligence — Head, Heart, and Body — and we carry all three, even as we lean hard on one. Part One of two: the intelligences you already have, and the practice of making connections between them.
What if the life you’re working so hard to keep up isn’t entirely yours? From engineered desire to the American Dream to the phone in your pocket, much of what we call “just the way things are” was handed to us. A contemplative look at the script running in the background — and how we begin to wake up.
I have taken to musing with a machine. I should say it plainly, because a year ago I would have found the sentence absurd. But there is no truer word for it. Late in the evening, house quiet, coffee going cold at my elbow, I have been thinking out loud with an artificial intelligence — […]
On loving people, you deeply disagree with — and staying whole at the table. Every family has a table, and every table has a moment. It might arrive over a holiday meal, or in a text thread that turns suddenly ugly, or in the silence after someone finally says “the thing”, they’ve been holding back. […]
