The glory of God’s created world—the birds and beasts, flowers and trees—glistens as one of my favorite story motifs. Along with the sea and sky, I’m enchanted by mountains, meadows, and woodland marvels. As the hymnwriter Maltbie Babcock told his wife when heading for a walk along the Niagara Escarpment and Lake Ontario, l just…
Are you ever afraid of the dark? Darkness can fill us with anxiety and even terror if we think of it as the abode of demons and bogeymen, but we should realize that it’s also the dwelling place of God, His pavilion. God stores many treasures in the darkness that He only displays at special…
Sometimes it feels as if we live in a permanent disaster zone. Earthquake! Tsunami! Drought! Flash floods, forest fires…and now a pandemic. In Chile, we tend to live on the ragged edge, always semi-prepared for when disaster strikes. Among the subplot threads of many of my Seaglass Books is woven the background motif of some…
Today we’re putting out to sea. Not only are we “off to ‘sea’ the world, off to find our dreams”—as Alvin and the Chipmunks sang, anybody with me here?—we literally live in a sea world. Especially in Chile, our world revolves around the sea. That’s not the only reason, of course, that almost all my…
Chile doesn’t have any real tropical jungles, but the concrete and linguistic ones offer sufficient challenge to navigate. Life here in the Chilean jungle has always been complicated—my (very Chilean) daughter says it’s “against the law” for anything to be too simple! However, these days the jungle of the past looks like a stroll in…
