The very old man sits up in his bed and turns his face toward his bedroom window, eastward to where the sun will come up if it ever comes. Only a gritty swash at the soul of the horizon suggests morning. The days bring a little trouble and good God knows what else.
The very old man gets out of bed and snatches a hefty cedar stick – bone white in the darkness of his bedroom. He dips the tip of it into a clay pot of oil by the door to the outer twilight. He then tips the stick into the little lamp by his door and starts a good torch fire. This, he thinks, will be the only light in the whole of the world this morning.
Rolling from the door to his house is a dusty path that peels out to the absolute of the horizon. If the sun rises, it issues from the vanishing point of the road itself. It is this road that the very old man walks now, one hand warmed by his torch, the other tucked into the rough folds of his robes to keep from freezing. The wind tosses about dust and sand and stones and ash and it tosses his great grey beard like tongues of flame.
From behind, a voice calls, “Father, it’s early.”
The very old man keeps walking and says nothing.
“Come back and sleep, Father. I’ll walk you there myself when it’s dawn.”
But the very old man has not slept in many months.
“He’ll not be there,” the boy mutters as the very old man strives away from the house out into the cold and the morning. (more…)
At the shelter, the phone rings.
The moon is all amber and grim, like the meat of a poisonous peach. It drips honeyed sweat through space to the earth and I lick it up. I gargle it. I paint stripes of it under my eyes. My, oh my, the moon says to me, your fury is shaking the whole planet. And you ain’t seen nothing yet. This ought to be good. Yeah, it will. 
When I was young, I amused myself on car trips by picking the tiniest detail from the oncoming scenery and focusing all my attention on it – an askew shaft of pussywillow or a sprightly sprig of grass. It thrilled me to think that no one had ever done just this before, had never given such rapt attention to this single, particular nook of creation. We’d drive by it at seventy miles an hour, and my eyes fastened on the twig as if hooked by a line, and I smiled. 
I admire trees. 
The Chicago homeless shelter I worked for was not technically a homeless shelter – it only felt like one. It was actually a church. It was “planted” (when churches are “started” they are said to be “planted” for some odd reason) some years ago,and was scraping by off a congregation that rarely topped twenty members on a Sunday morning. Even the ones who came had a difficult time expressing why they kept showing. As individuals, they seemed much like the church itself: tired.
the unbearable lightness of huckabeing 
