Category: Little Epiphanies

by Kevin Carrel Footer I am desire. Not reckless, not rambunctious, just slow, seeping desire that does not relent. My desire is like the water that springs inexplicably from a crack in the dry stone: no one knows where it comes from but they all come here to drink. I am suspended in this web.…

We are all searching for that creative space in our lives where we explode through the predictable form by which most of the world knows us and reveal the deeper current that runs through us. Writer Paul Jarvis challenged me to describe how I make that creative space in my daily life and it got…

My spiritual practice is my life (with emphasis on the word “practice”). I try my best to embrace the chaotic, contradictory, random abundance and confusion around me (and inside me) and bring it all into balance. Balance for me means not getting overly attached to any one outcome, laughing at myself regularly and learning to…

There is a certain song, an instrumental by harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite from 1967 called “Christo Redemptor” that I play in the dark hours. When it seems like the world must end, I put that CD on and I play along on my harp. The song is a long, strange meditative rant/chant that goes on…

Heading blithely down the road to our own deaths, our only triumph is to have made the universe tremble with our joy.

by Kevin Carrel Footer In the 1940s there was a woman who lived in Buenos Aires called “Tangerine.” This was not her real name but rather her nom de guerre, invented for her by a jilted admirer who wrote a poem about her on a napkin while sitting at a bar stool waiting yet again…

Across a quiet night in summer I wander. Something’s happened — something momentous — but now it is over and I am going home. I like what street lights do to the city: little halos for ordinary angels… who walked away. It is at this time — when everything has already happened — that the…

A lot of the old tangueros have pauches and I have a friend who speaks adoringly of them (both the tangueros and their beer bellies). This woman had one of those and I confess that we fit so nicely together.

I went to a gypsy fortune teller and she told me that I would end up alone and destitute. She read it in my palms, confirmed it in her crystal ball and anxiously verified it by tea leaves. As she was reaching for her tarot cards, I stopped her. Enough, I said. It’s okay, I…