Poets and monks... We're both sort of peripheral to the world.

Acedia is a danger to anyone whose work requires great concentration and discipline yet is considered by many to be of little practical value. The world doesn't care if I write another word, and if I am to care, I have to summon all my interior motivation and strength.

Wariness about change is a kind of prairie wisdom.

True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person. Henri Nouwen has described it as receiving the stranger on his own terms, and asserts that it can be offered only by those who 'have found the center of their lives in their own hearts'.

We can't give our children the future, strive though we may to make it secure. But we can give them the present.

The High Plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act as a crucible for those who inhabit them.

Traversing a slow page, to come upon a lode of the pure shining metal is to exult inwardly for greedy hours.