Earlier that night I had declared that we are not separate individuals. Our humanity in that crowded room was entangled by each of our divinity, and it was the many minds in each of us that blocked us from God. He may have been moved by that. But after hearing his pain, I wanted to bridle the unicorn that was my knowledge of the spirit and hold it there for him to ride, to see for himself the radiance of the mysteries of the divine. This magic was a dark one, and not for me to teach him. Certainty handed to a man in that hour would have amounted to nothing more than smoke and spitting into the wind. I decided that his gnashing of teeth was natural, and that I should revere it in the same light that I marvel at creation.

I said nothing with an internal fire that wanted to embrace his pain. Still, the voice I call God told me to be still.

There are no easy answers to why struggle happens in the life of good people. We are all good. We are all bad. We all fail in our walk by hurrying to easy answers. What I have is not an answer. It is a way of walking, and it goes like this.

Knowing, and seeing, feeling and moving, right and receiving: this is the way of the divine spark within us all. If the spirit has been omnipresent from time immemorial, then knowing it begets feeling it, and righteous relations to each other beget moving in it, and ultimately receiving it as grace. We see from our own divinity, and we move as God beckons us to go. Finally we receive His blessings in an eternal stillness. This has always been the way of the kingdom of heaven.

There are natural, mathematical forces that bind us as a people to the ground of God. You call it gravity. Some of the initiated will call it wu wei. Others may call it divine eyes. Jesus and his apostles called it the light of God, a light we all bear. But it will take practice and discipline to use it as the blessing He intended for us. It will take faithfulness. It will take obedience. But rest assured, to your dusty ground, that the same dust to which you will return was made to hold the peace of stillness. Our work and toil in it is meant to reconcile our will and freedom to exercise this vision.

The answer is being open to the source of life, and being receptive to God requires seeking. Trusting is unnatural. We are His fallen people because we do not trust an engineered experience. The finely tuned world exists because of a merciful covenant: we are given a chance to live and to choose our consecration in Him. This is the lesson of what Richard Rohr calls the universal Christ.

Our attachment to tribalisms and rigid doctrines is among the many minds we must overcome in the struggle to live as righteous heirs of His kingdom. Our attachment to intellectual questions of meaning is a philosophical impediment to stillness. When I taught at the evangelical school, a great Alabama quarterback asked the audience of children who was the greatest leader of all time. The question was perhaps too obvious for angsty teenagers to answer, so I yelled His name from the bleachers. It was a bit embarrassing in the moment that this coach-like question called the spirit out of me, but I had some Bama in it too. The rest of the sermon asked the children to be like David and find their “why.”

As a credal statement for today, I believe that life is sacred. We know it from the commandments of the Hebrew Moses. If we are blessed by this sacred gift, and the miracle of our finely tuned construction in His image, then the project of life is to ascertain how we are gifted. What is the nature of our light? Then, as the seasons of our great gift of life change, we are sometimes fortunate enough to ask scientific questions that verify the qualities and quantities of that light, and to find its rate of travel made appropriate for every situation, as God intends our life to have. You may be arguing that this is the opposite of scientific. You may say this is a spiritual notion. I would say, “Be still.”

There will be shadows for sure. But if we accept the radiance of our gifts, we can use them to fight against the darkness. This is the “spiritual warfare” we must wage in our very existence. This is the cross for all our lives.

The man in that room asked why, and I had no answer worthy of him. I still don’t. But the children were told to find theirs, and I think the two questions meet somewhere in the dark. His why may never be answered this side of the river. Mine is smaller and nearer: to use this light to help my neighbors, my brothers and sisters in the land of God, starting with the one weeping beside me. This is our why.

Amen.

Imagine a beginning: darkness, and nothing around it. You are in some nebulous space, your faculties too dull to say where or when. There is ground under your feet, so you walk, the way a body walks when no one is steering. This is not Plato’s cave. No one has chained you to the floor to stare at shadows. Moonlight begins to scatter through the branches, but there is no trail. You are in the thick of the Domain’s forest, and spider webs are your enemies now, along with the spindly limbs that whack your cold cheeks.

After a few hours, you hear deer blowing at you. That sound tells you where you are: still Sewanee, not some womb-like dream. You are a freshman at the University of the South. Voices and concert music replay in your mind like the first half of a dream. Your heels are starting to hurt, because Top-Siders were never made for a hike like this. You work backward through the evening. A Coca-Cola bottle was passed around the dorm. You hadn’t eaten. You assumed the brown liquid was bourbon, but now you hear your buddy, the one who kept handing it to you, calling it “white lightning.”

Another hour passes, and the frolic comes back: friends tackling each other, good-natured and loud. Even the tackling of a bigger woman surfaces as a picture. It looked playful in the picture. Then you hear the one you loved say, maybe you should just leave. That was when you staggered into the forest, the same woods where bootlegging was history and trails like Shakerag Hollow were part of your Sewanee geography. Nights like this had grown common since college began. You were blacking out more often. You had even driven blacked out, more than once. The town’s streets were simple, and staying under twenty miles an hour usually kept you out of trouble. Blacking out on foot was a new problem.

Kept me out of trouble. That’s what I wrote a moment ago, and I’m leaving it. The “you” was a way to stand a little way off from him. It only goes so far.

The sun begins to rise, and the fog is everywhere. You could have lain down and waited for daylight, but your restlessness wouldn’t allow it, so you press on with no light at all. This was before everyone carried a phone. When the sun finally crests the plateau, you are near the equestrian center. You pass the baseball fields, then the football field, and then you are standing before the Gothic stone of All Saints Chapel. Somewhere under the hangover, a sentence from home surfaces: Remember who you are. You think it means what it always meant. If there was ever a moment when a religious experience could have saved you twenty-two years of heartache, this was it. The bells begin to chime for the church service.

You keep walking.

You stumble into Hoffman to argue with your first love, because of course none of it was your fault. You had no idea you were drinking shine. She is pretty sore at you for embarrassing her. You decide you’ve been punished enough, and you fall asleep.

It was the beginning of the end.

Within weeks I was in a hospital for the first time, my mind lit by a messianic delusion. I had walked past a chapel and decided I didn’t need it, and now I believed I had the power of God inside me. It would take twenty-two years to untangle.

Some of the tangle was borrowed. C.S. Lewis wrote that the project of Christianity is to turn us all into “little Christs.” I was a boy raised on Joseph Campbell and Star Wars and the idea of fixing a broken world, and I decided that this was an achievable end, and that I was the one to achieve it. Adolescent foolishness was one name for it. Mania was another. It felt like a calling.

The rest of the tangle was a sentence. Remember who you are. My family said it to my siblings and me all the time, and we took it to mean that we were Agricolas, a name to be proud of in our corner of the county. I carried that name into Sewanee like a crest. I carried it into the woods.

Years later I went looking for where the phrase came from. I sat down with the Rev. Doug Carpenter, the priest I knew as a child, and he told me it was his father’s. The Right Rev. Charles Carpenter had said it, and Bishop Carpenter never meant a surname. He meant that you are a child of God, redeemed in the resurrection, with a value that no one gave you and no one can take away.

I think of the verse I have wondered about since the forest:

But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:12–13)

Not of blood. I had spent most of my life leaning on blood, and on marks I made myself.

One of them is on my forearm. Four letters, S.C.O.F., for Southern Culture on the Fly, the fishing magazine I bought and am now selling to my partners. I am chagrined to have tattooed it on myself, and I can’t take it back. So I have decided to read it differently. Saved. Consecrated. Obedient. Faithful. Not a brand I made, but a name I was given.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:5)

Today my pastor told us about a scene in The Lion King, where Simba looks into the water and sees his father, who says, “Remember who you are.” I heard a different sentence than the one I heard as a boy.

Somewhere, bells rang for Sunday service. I stayed.

Rev. Doug Carpenter Interview

For four years I have been an owner of Southern Culture on the Fly Magazine. I was proud to belong to that group of fishermen and creatives. They are gifted anglers, but they are also empathetic friends, and each is talented in his own sandbox. Again and again they gave me grace for my shortcomings as a businessman.

I liked to think, too pridefully, that my vision had brought the group together. When my addiction became too much to manage, they gave me space to figure it out. Later I no longer felt called to pit myself against fish and the environment. I kept my equity instead of selling it back to the group despite no longer feeling inspired to write about fishing for fish. I told myself I was within my rights. My legal opinion said nothing could compel me to sell, and I leaned on it. But the truth is that I was guarding what was mine. That was greed.

This morning the call came. Somehow, while paying my bills, I had used the wrong checkbook. I had written a magazine check to cover a tractor repair and a country club bill. I was first in disbelief, because I was certain I would never knowingly do such a thing. The mistake would also be obvious to them, since I am the only owner who pays dues to either. I could have made it right by repaying the money and admitting an honest mistake. Instead I felt cornered by the grace of my friends, and if they wanted me gone I felt that I owed them that much. By the end of the day I had handed over my voting stake and my equity.

I did not feel good about it. A great deal of my identity as a man came from being some kind of entrepreneurial writer, and I sat in my chair and felt that moniker leave me.

Then I reached for a Bible. I opened it to Hosea, and I admit I was grasping at straws, letting the pages fall where they would. It felt right anyway. Hosea casts God as a father and Israel as a child who has run after the idol called, Baal. Even so, God does not disown him:

I will heal their waywardness and love them freely, for my anger has turned away from them. I will be like the dew to Israel; he will blossom like a lily. Like a cedar of Lebanon he will send down his roots; his young shoots will grow. (Hosea 14:4–6)

I thought of the tattoo on my forearm, the initials S.C.O.F. I had put my company’s name on my own skin. Reading Hosea, I felt I had dishonored my heavenly Father, and my earthly one too by inking my body with a corporate name. I thought of the red fibers in the heart of the cedar trees my father planted wherever he lived, and their pungent smell when cut. Dad planted them faithfully, trusting they would take root long after he had moved on. My father’s love is the only lens through which I have ever understood God’s, and I felt that love now, steadier than my failures.

I turned next to the Gospels, and landed in Luke 12 at the parable of the Rich Fool. A man with full barns says to himself, “Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.” God answers, “You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?” (Luke 12:19–20).

I first read it as a warning not to rest on my laurels, with a flash of fear that I might die tomorrow with no fruits in my metaphorical barn to show. Then I saw I had read it backward. The Rich Fool was not a man who failed to build a legacy. He was a man who clutched what he had, and I had just spent months doing the same with my equity. Something I called mine was never mine to keep. A few verses on, Jesus says:

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Luke 12:32–34)

A thief had come near me, and it was not who I would have guessed. It was my own grip on what I owned, and the error it led me into. What I took as my identity, a stake in a hobby business, looked very small next to the friends who had forgiven me so many times. Should I harden my heart toward them now, when they need to move forward? I did not want to.

I agreed to pay the sum of the errant checks to be subtracted in my buyout. I accepted their need to continue on their path, and embraced the way my new spiritually led apprenticeship diverged from my former role as reprobate fly fisherman.

I do not want to treat today as a clean victory. I did not choose surrender cleanly, and I am still sorting out my motives. But my fear that shame would win was the voice of the accuser. In the love of Christ I am still here. Nothing I lost today was ever the foundation. My ground shook today when I stewed in my feelings, but no feeling should ever be final, and my rock is my faith in the kingdom of God.

When water flows downstream, it is easier to wade. Going upriver takes deliberate steps, because the current makes every footfall uncertain. An unseen log can catch a foot, and the force of the water can bring anyone to his knees. This week I walked in both directions. My footing did not come from mind over matter, and not every step landed the way I intended. There are things I wish I had done differently. But I can rest in knowing that I handed every effort to God.

His love carried me into the new ministries I have taken up since I felt the Spirit change me. Knowing the resurrection steadied my hand where fear would once have ruled the day. The pink cloud of my recovery is dissolving, gently, and the spiritual food I have been taking in tells me this is natural. God is sovereign. Trusting that, even when I cannot see what He is doing, is what I am called to do as a believer.

Gideon asked God for sign after sign that the Midianites would fall, and this week I understand him, because the signs have thinned for me. The cardinals that used to flutter past when I thought of my lost family come less readily now. I have been saved by grace and by the principles of my AA program, and I am called to trust without the cardinals.

In that spirit, I wrote my testimony and sent it to the mother of my child after making amends to her. There was much in it that she never knew about my struggle with addiction. The matter is not settled with the court, and yet my faith called me to be courageous and send it anyway. I read the same document aloud to an accountability group of men at a prominent church in Guntersville. When I looked up from my computer, I could see warmth and approval in their faces, and their recognition of my humanity rewarded the leap. I felt a similar peace sharing the story with a sober living house of eighteen men in Gadsden. God gave me the fire to tell my story, and the love He funneled through me like a conduit came back to me when I finished.

As the cardinals thinned, my feet began to move toward service. Maybe it started at church, helping break down the altar and the musical equipment. Maybe it was the drive to Riverview Hospital to check on a sick relative. Faith without works is dead, and with fewer signs of God at work in me, perhaps I was compelled to put my belief into action as an apprentice of Jesus. I may also have mistaken busyness for discipleship, stacking one errand on top of my service work in recovery and calling it the work of a true believer. I cannot yet tell whether this week was discipleship or only its imitation. But my spirit was more active, and I will not pretend otherwise.

And yet I still fell short of fearlessness. In a church founded by my great-great-grandfather, one I know well enough that I should have had no cause for fear, I failed at a simple social obligation. My father’s rock, best friend, and trusted bookkeeper died about a month ago. His wife cared for my ailing father for years as his health declined. She cooked many meals for him with the kind of love that only comes from knowing community is fundamentally about love. At the funeral, his best friends, men of the boomer generation, filled the front of the church. In spite of my fondness for the man, I sat in the back of the crowded chapel with my mother. When the family and friends processed out, I patted a few of the men on the shoulder as they passed, a small act that meant more to me than my genuflection to “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” When the organ played “Let It Be” and the congregation sang, I began to tear up.

When it came time to go to the church garden and offer my condolences to the family, I could not, for fear of losing control of my emotions. I fled, signing the book on the way out so they would at least know I had come.

It strikes me now that I had found the courage to hand my worst chapters to the mother of my child, to an accountability group in Guntersville, and to eighteen men in Gadsden. Telling my story asked me to stand in front of people as myself. Standing in that garden would have asked me to stand inside someone else’s grief: the grief of the woman who fed my father through his decline, and perhaps my own. I could do the first. I fled the second. Walking into the garden was the upriver step, and I let the current carry me out the door.

Reflecting on that, I see how far I still must go. If death is so frightening, what kind of faith do I really have? This man was a lifelong member of Holy Comforter. He wore the white gowns and served the Eucharist every Sunday for more than a decade. If anyone understood grace and second chances at redemption, it was he. So if I could find the parallels of my own life in Jonah, Job, and the prodigal son when I wrote my testimony, why could I not see his passing as the beginning of eternal life for such a devout member of the church?

It was my fear of being seen crying that showed me I am still learning to surrender outcomes to God. It was also the realization that his death foreshadows the eventual deaths of a whole generation of men and women I admire. I did not drop to my knees in the chapel that afternoon, though I have done so my whole life as an Episcopalian. Only now do I understand that the ritual matters. We bow before the cross and bend the knee to Jesus because his sacrifice offers a life beyond the suffering of this world, and because the body knows how to surrender before the mind agrees.

My cross is only beginning to emerge as something I can see. What I can actually worship is a God above my understanding. None of us is righteous by His standards, and that is a relief, not a defeat. His Son has already conquered death. If hell is a distance from the Trinity that we make by willful choice, then my flight from that garden was a small rehearsal of it.

If I am going to believe in a Kingdom of Heaven, I must surrender more to its unknowns. The power and glory of God mean that we will be reunited in a dimension of reality our intellect can never reach. I am meant to walk through the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil. I pray that I begin to grasp that eternal life means exactly that, and that I must surrender to never knowing for sure.

So I will let it be. It is what Mary said to the angel: “Let it be to me according to your word.”

Yesterday my sister-in-law was making a run to a pharmacy. I told her I’d move my truck that was blocking her exit. When I backed out she sat in her car for ten minutes while I waited patiently for her to leave. When I began to lose control of my still-living ego I felt restless, and my thoughts drifted to my son and how unfortunate it was that he couldn’t be with me on this family beach trip. I prayed out loud, asking God to bring me wisdom and discernment about how to move forward as a family to better love and serve his needs in the future. I asked for a sign. As I reversed so she could see I was still waiting for her Jeep to pull out, I came to a stop next to a neighbor’s beach house marked by a sign on the gate that read, “Gratitude 3:16.”

I had thirsted for a sign, and God gave me one. My father always told me that John 3:16 was the only piece of scripture I needed. On this day I felt that this sign spoke to me directly, in language that was both recovery talk and spiritual scripture at once. It was as though God intended to answer my plea. Gratitude, I have learned, is the opposite of addiction — a truth I needed to hold onto, surrounded as I was by the very lovable family of my sister, stepbrother, sister-in-law, brother-in-law, mother, and stepfather.

My stepfather and I have always had a good relationship as far as I’m concerned. He cusses a lot and is prone to taking the Lord’s name in vain when a bet goes wrong, but he is good to my mother. On the first night of the trip we watched football together, and as we got excited about the Texas–Ohio State matchup, I became aware again that this man still drank too much. I have come to view heavy drinking as a poison. He and I both lost his firstborn son to a drunk-driving accident, and later, on the other side of my family, I lost my father’s stepson to cirrhosis. So when I heard my stepfather, Matt, straining over a cracking Scotch voice, I felt a tinge of worry and compassion for him. It was he who helped me enter the hospital eight months ago, and it was his other son who convinced me to go into a rehab facility in Tennessee. It was Matt’s love for my mother over thirty-plus years that gave her the many chances she needed to grow into the person God intended her to be. I owed Matt a great debt.

But as far as I knew, he was agnostic. After the death of his son, he seemed to grimace at matters of faith. He wouldn’t pray before meals very gratefully, though he was respectful when we did. He didn’t go to church like my mother, and he drank heavily most days. He was still in a great deal of pain, though it had gradually become less visible than in the early years, when it surfaced in unexpected moments of weeping.

I sat on the back porch the following morning and listened to an old sermon my pastor had given in October. It was titled “The Offense of Repentance.” Matt came out and sat quietly, checking the NFL games he might bet on. Within the first five minutes he looked up and asked, with an innocent, unbarbed question, “Is this Joel Osteen?” I shuddered a little inside and assured him it wasn’t that kind of preaching — that this was, in fact, my new chosen pastor in Gadsden. He didn’t ask anything else as the lesson played on.

I didn’t realize it yet, but the lessons of that sermon would reverberate through my day with Matt. The crux of it was that faithful service to God will nearly always bring opposition. My pastor, Rene, framed it around why children of God love humble people rather than arrogant ones. We love people who resemble our creator, but we also, in our way, love sin — that’s the paradox. Rene was really talking about Herod, trapped by his own passivity, accepting a sinful marriage to a family member that would eventually call for the head of John the Baptist. Here was a godly man Herod admired, but in the end, just as Adam accepted the fruit Eve offered him, Herod chose sin rather than acting, rather than leading those around him. Modern American Christianity often gets reduced to being nice, as if it were the eleventh commandment. Telling a friend they need to repent feels unkind, even when their sin is killing them. But real love isn’t always nice. We love the world, and so we join God in calling the world to repent. Speaking these truths to people you love will make them angry with you, but we are meant to teach and admonish one another, holding each other accountable.

Still, the traditions of my recovery walk are less clear on this. “Slow is steady,” they say. “Our traditions are based on attraction rather than promotion,” the Big Book of AA reminds me. I also understood that I owed my elder respect. If he wanted to drink and smoke, that was none of my business.

So we went to a local oyster bar and sat at the shucking counter. Matt told me I should order a Virgin Mary. I didn’t want one, but I also knew he was going to pay for the meal, and whenever that power dynamic shifts, I feel like a child again. So I ordered the Virgin Mary, and the shucker said I couldn’t have it. “We don’t serve liquor, so we can’t make a Virgin Mary.” I’d walked right into that. I ordered a Sprite instead. The oysters were delicious, and Matt drank a few beers, talking to the local barflies. I never said a word about his drinking, or the spiritual sickness it might mean. It didn’t feel right to pray over something he’d done most of his life. If I’m honest, it wasn’t only restraint — it was cowardice, too, dressed up as respect for my elder, easier to live with than the risk of his anger.

A few hours after we got home, he and I set out for the grocery store and the liquor store. He sent me into the liquor store for a jigger of Grand Marnier. I couldn’t even pronounce it, and I resented that he wanted me to go buy him booze. I later figured he’d assumed I could also get tobacco there. When they only sold cigars, I followed him into the grocery store, more frustrated than ever, reminding myself that I should respect my elders. At checkout, an older woman was working the register. Matt barked at her and the bag boy, “No bags!” — louder than he probably intended. I saw the good-natured attendant laughing under her breath at his rudeness. By this point I was steaming a little, sick that I was too much of a coward to call him out on his bad behavior.

Then he surprised me by showing a little reflective grace. “Can you believe that woman was so old,” he said. “She was as old as your grandmother Flo.” He had the capacity to empathize after all, I thought — though his actions, when it counted, had still been bad. We crossed the street to get my tobacco and saw a homeless woman with three big bags, walking somewhere between his age and mine. “Look, a homeless person,” he said. I thought, yeah, obviously — the bags, the overburdened walk. He stayed on the subject: “You know your mother would take someone like that and buy them a hundred dollars’ worth of groceries, but if she thought they were going to buy drugs, she wouldn’t give them a dollar.” I went into the filling station for my tobacco. When I got back to the truck, he’d taken five dollars out of his billfold. He said he wanted to give it to her, so we pulled up in front of her. I held the bill out the window as she struggled to waddle up. I felt awkward, two men in a truck offering a desperate soul cash instead of help, so I asked, “Do you need help?” She said, “I need a ride.” Again I deferred to him, since it was his truck and he was presumably wiser. I got out and helped her load her bags into the bed. He asked her where she was trying to go. “The Dollar Tree, across from a hotel,” she said. Matt set his conditions: he’d take her as far as a certain intersection, and if it was farther than that, we’d let her out there. It turned out she meant a Dollar General, and we spotted a hotel on the left side of I-98. We drove slowly behind it, and I tried to comfort her, saying maybe we’d saved her a few steps. When I got out to help her down, she saw my “Gospel on the Go” shirt, bought years ago in support of an African mission trip. I felt inadequate as a Christian, given all the judgment of Matt that had preceded this moment. I thought of Christ and his transcendent power to save the world from sin, but rarely did my mind translate that into something my heart could act on. She saw the Mark 16:15 passage printed across the shirt’s face. I’d never looked into what it meant, but I told her to go with God. She seemed to sigh in relief. “Oh,” she said, “that’s what this was about.”

It wasn’t debauched pleasure we were seeking, as in Herod’s court. In that moment, God revealed himself in our action, not our words.

It wasn’t my stepfather’s shiny faith that revealed God. It was the three of us, stuck in a moment inspired by him. Had I known what the Mark passage said, I might have recited it to the weary traveler. Instead, I looked it up the next day. Slowly, I became aware of his power. When I read, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation,” I felt that God was giving me sight — sweeping away the log in my own eye with love.

[My father and the Rev. Hugh Willie, photo credit: Charlie Hart]

My father’s pre-written eulogy notes held a phrase I did not understand until I had lost him: the “shoreline of wonder.” He meant it as a theological touchstone — that with every new foot of knowledge, we inherit more of God’s Kingdom of Heaven. I did not know, when I first read those notes…

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A dog asserts itself at first very slowly, as if waking from a dream of being human. Something from the temporal world stirs the beast’s consciousness. A child screams on the other side of the window while at play. The feist’s ears perk up and she mumbles something akin to a bark that rolls out like an older man’s snore. Maybe her little feet run in pl…

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He won’t call today. He won’t call tomorrow. He’s too young, too tormented by my physical absence to know how to say it — Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I am alone on this one, with no father here on earth and a son who doesn’t have his own phone yet. I am today in continuous prayer.

A friend advised me to shovel the snow from my driveway daily, so I do not ge…

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Before methamphetamine sent a lightning storm through my brain, I had long buried the idea that I might be a spiritual reformer — a man called to account for his own soul and, perhaps in time, to speak to others about theirs. I say this with Martin Luther’s epiphany in the forefront of my mind: that man is saved by faith alone. His came under the litera…

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[Image from 2023 on an Alabama Dove Hunt Weekend]

I was on my way back from the spiciest lamb korma in the Tennessee Valley when I crested the hill on Gunter Avenue and saw the blue lights.

They weren’t subtle. They never are. They pulsed across the lake town like something biblical—judgment by LED. A checkpoint. Easter Sunday. Eleven o’clock at night.

I h…

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Industrial education pretends to value knowledge, but what it actually values is order. Not intellectual order—the kind that emerges from curiosity and cross-pollination—but procedural order: timelines, standardized sequences, pre-approved interpretations, and measurable outputs. It is a system designed less to cultivate understanding than to stabilize …

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Dave Grossman(One of the Creator-Editors of the magazine, Southern Culture on the Fly, that I helped purchase back in 2023. This was a photo my Creative Director (Hank) took when we travelled to Asheville to see how the sausage was made quite literally. I ate wild pig the whole weekend.) We were able to work a deal with Dave to purchase his creation for…

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On the Bench: Southern Yarns and Hooks

One man's dream for uncommon leisure time and fly-fishing.

By John Agricola

Historical Reason for Being:

I used this platform in 2021 when I taught school at Gadsden City High School. After I quit teaching I in effect lost interest in this as an escape.

When the Mountain Speaks

Historical Reason for Being:

This one was used as a temporary relief from the grief I experienced when my father …

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Pleased to report that I’ve entered 2026 with my health and most of my teeth intact—which, around here, still counts as a small victory.

The lady who works the register at the gas station—KJN, for those keepi…

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Today feels like the right hinge in the year—when the clocks quiet, the fields hum, and all the ghosts start listening for their own names. Before the mountain speaks outright, here’s a glimpse of the spell forming underneath it: a short animatic drawn from the first frames of When the Mountain Speaks, It Speaks in Tongues.

What you’ll see isn’t finished…

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[Title page above adapted from a William Christenberry Photograph, or postcard, of something horrifying he saw as a child in Hale County, Alabama on a set of courthouse steps.]

By Squire Carpicola

Something happened last night — a kind of possession by motion. I began creating When the Mountain Speaks not as a novel, but as an ecstatic geography, a sequen…

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This year, I fell in love with rabbit hunting. It was more than the deliciousness of the animal when fried in a skillet. It was the entire teamwork—the collaborative process of the kill—and, more deeply, my joy in rabbit hunting stemmed from the beauty of seeing evolution’s instincts, or the hereditary inheritance of a dog’s attributes for flushing, com…

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