Slow Tumbling

Contemplative Writings from SlowMover.org

[slowtumbling]

Pressed Petals

On Art, Obscurity, and Faithful Release I am trying to understand the pressure within me. I do not think the problem is that I want to complete things. Completion is not wrong. It is good to finish. It is good to give form to what has been stirring within me. It is good to bring a story, a song, a piece of art, a sermon, a reflection, or a book to the point into the world outside of me. I also…

View On WordPress

[slowtumbling]

Barricade

On the news yesterday morning there was a report of a man who had barricaded himself inside a store. The anchors spoke in measured voices. The camera hovered at a safe distance. Police cars flashed their blue and red prayers against the glass. Somewhere behind the locked doors, behind shelves and counters and the ordinary things people buy without thinking, there was a man afraid enough to turn…

View On WordPress

[slowtumbling]

Instruction in Simple Contemplation

Inhabiting the Word until the Word inhabits us Simple Contemplation is a way of reading Scripture not only with the mind, but with the whole person. It is especially suited to the Gospel stories of Jesus. Rather than standing outside the text as a distant observer, the reader prayerfully enters the scene, beholds Christ, listens, feels, notices, and allows the living Word to become present…

View On WordPress

[slowtumbling]

Promo Art - Concert Tonight

View On WordPress

[slowtumbling]

Salamander Sees

Salamander sees. The third letter more than one ocean many species, observation. People split three ways uneven slabs to slivers, sweet, sweat, swarm. Top down trickle tongue out up to the dribbling sky, thirsty. The beautiful ones suck the clouds dry clean wash twice, three times a day. Skin glow brillo golden gold silver green coin rain acid hot burn flesh, out tongue in quickly. Below earth…

Salamander Sees

[slowtumbling]

Two Windows

A Tanka Sequence IIn the still morningyou open the window widebeside the table.A cool breeze stirs the orchid,cooling my cup of coffee.IIAcross from your light,I open the other pane.The air grows stronger.Leaves whisper into the roomlike all the things left unsaid.IIIBelow the hillside,a woodpecker drums the trees,red crest among leaves.A car passes on the road,then fades into the morning.IVThe…

View On WordPress

[slowtumbling]

Wet Prayer (A Tanka Poem)

Author’s Note: I have written haiku for many years. Heiwa Haiku has often been a spiritual practice for me. Recently I discovered tanka, another form of Japanese poetry, which, put simply, is haiku plus two additional lines. Haiku is generally written as three lines of 5-7-5 syllables respectively. Tanka uses the same format at the beginning and then adds two additional line of 7 syllables each.…

View On WordPress

[slowtumbling]

God’s Living Experiment: A Church Guided by Word and Spirit

The church may be understood as God’s experiment in the world, not in the sense that God is uncertain about the outcome, but in the sense that the church is a living demonstration of what human community can become under the reign of God. It is not a controlled experiment carried out under ideal conditions. The church is formed from real people, with differences, wounds, gifts, failures,…

View On WordPress

[slowtumbling]

A Day for the World to Say Sorry

From Australia’s National Sorry Day Toward an International Day of Truth, Repentance, and Repair A PeaceGrooves Reflection There are words so overused that they risk becoming weightless. Sorry is one of them. We say it when we bump into someone in a hallway, when we answer an email too late, when we make an insignificant mistake. Yet there are times when sorry is not small at all. There are…

View On WordPress

[slowtumbling]

Spirit of the Living God (Fall Afresh On Me)

Accapella cantor with congregation providing harmony Pentecost May 24 2026. Spirit of the Living GodFall afresh on meSpirit of the Living God Fall afresh on me Melt meMold meFill meUse meSpirit of the Living God Fall afresh on me

View On WordPress

[slowtumbling]

The Sacred Arithmetic of My Years

A Reflection on Turning Fifty-Nine on May 24, 2026 I do not believe that numbers control my life or determine my future. I do not look to numerology as prophecy or as a replacement for faith in God. Still, I find myself drawn to the symbolic possibilities hidden within dates, names, anniversaries, and coincidences. I have always been one to look beneath the surface of things, to wonder whether…

View On WordPress

[slowtumbling]

Fifty-Nine on Pentecost: Fire, Bridges, and a Heart Still Being Warmed

A Birthday Reflection — May 24, 2026 Today, I turn fifty-nine.There is something strange about writing that number. Fifty-nine is not yet sixty, but it stands close enough to feel the gravity of that approaching threshold. It is a year poised at the edge of another decade, a number that invites a certain kind of honesty. Not the dramatic honesty that pretends everything has suddenly come into…

View On WordPress

[slowtumbling]

Joining the Pieces

I used to think inlay was about precision. Clean angles. Tight joints. Perfect symmetry. That’s what I noticed first as a boy—the geometry, the way my grandfather could look at a pile of small, unpromising pieces and already see what they would become. I thought the skill lived in his hands, or maybe in his eyes. What I understand now is that inlay begins somewhere else entirely. It begins…

View On WordPress

[slowtumbling]

Last Light of Orbit 59

TonightI am riding the dark rim of a circle,carried by a worldthat has never once stopped turningbeneath my restless feet.Somewhere behind me,the sun still touches the first hourof the day I was born—that bright door through which I came,crying, breathing,astonished into being.And now,fifty-nine journeys later,I approach that door againfrom the other side of time.Not as an infant,not innocent of…

View On WordPress

[slowtumbling]

True Vine (In Lucem)

View On WordPress

[slowtumbling]

The Yellow Menu

A grieving man returns to his hometown and finds shelter from a tornado—and his past—with the bus driver who once carried him home. Micah Lyndon had imagined Lost Gap larger than this. For twenty years it had remained within him as a country of pine shadow and red-clay driveways, of mailboxes leaning toward the roadside, of warm blacktop running away into trees, of small creeks swollen brown…

View On WordPress

[slowtumbling]

WildWords - The Shadows of Birds

Evening sun,feverish glow—what’s begunI do not know. Sky above,I below,face aflame,body blow. Light’s caress,warming flow,birds take wingacross the window. Here I lieas day burns low,between what staysand what will go.

View On WordPress