Monthly Archives: April 2026

The Contours of One’s Soul

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I like to watch the chickens when I buy their eggs from the farmer.  Even though I am placing my money in his tin, and counting back my change, I know this exchange is between me and those small birds.

Yesterday in Vermont, I bought a carton of eggs from some chickens.  The carton wouldn’t close; a tall, stately egg angled up the corner.  Inside, the orbs, with their varied hues and sizes, sat in each preformed cup, too unique to sit perfectly.  In the array of twelve, there was not one genuine, certifiable medium.  The eggs were a cosmos without uniformity, without conformity.  In the end, the lopsided, the wide, the pointy, the small, the round, and the jumbo-sized all came together to make my family’s breakfast.

A world without averages, a world without mediums, is a world without mediocrity. It is a world without boundaries, without hedges and barbed wire, a world where potential is determined by what is inside an individual, and beauty is determined by the delicate shades and contours of one’s soul.  It is a world where the greatest work of all is what is done and surrendered up for the good of others.

We have the ability to sustain and nourish each other.  The world could be a beautiful place, if we just understood that its fullness is meant for everyone. I want to be in that kind of carton.

Let Me Be Clear, -Mis

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Image by Jeremy Mann

I have made mistakes.

I have misplaced my keys.
In a moment of wild abandon,
I have misappropriated the rent money.
I have misattributed
a smart thought to myself
and mishandled important conversations.
I have missed the bus, and twice, my plane.
I have misaligned my loyalties
and the decimal in my checkbook.
I have mis-stepped and landed on my face ~
literally and figuratively.

Yet, -mis, you miscreant,
Upon one event
your language misconstrues:

I did not miscarry my baby.

Cadillac Mountain

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image by Casey Barber

Under the luminous moon 
of the equinox, I travel this 
quiet New England byway.
Behind me, a small possum sits 
in a twist of brush and bramble.

She’s praising Something 
– herself, fate, or God -
for running the gauntlet 
of my tires; how she did it
is a question for minds 
bigger than hers or mine.

Yet I’ve told her story out of turn:
First were frantic breaths
and heaving tremors
as she recalled her maze of terror:
the swirling black teeth,
the cold asphalt on her pads, 
the shocking graze of metal against
her coarse coat.
.
It's a shame that possums 
are solitary animals.  
No one was there, watching
wide-eyed and breathless;
No one was there, applauding
the blind luck and dumb moves 
that got her to the other side.

I drive on.  
North of me, at the end of another road,
a dark sentinel gazes into blackness;
where horizon meets the sea,
Cadillac Mountain waits for the sun.

I return.
It's pre-dawn, fourth of July; 
you slumber in your sleeping bag 
as I pass under festive banners 
on my way to the trail.

I stumble up the mountain
to wait for the sunrise, my soul
bounding and rebounding 
against your world’s low atmosphere.

I arrive in the final opaque moments;
others are here too:
in pairs in groups in close proximity.
We wait, and I wrap my arms  
around myself.  

There was nothing I could do
to stop that certain light; 
the urge to bolt seized like a spasm, 
and I tumbled across, blind and careless, 
careening into coldness, 
into tangle, into truth.

No one saw me when I crossed over;
the clapping I heard was not for me, 
but for the first rind of light that sent
shimmers across the waters. 

I sat, far into the new day, 
breathing the air 
and blinking at the light.  

That night, 
while everyone watched fireworks, 
I embraced Independence Day.