Piha rescue: Confronting the agony and ecstasy of isolation

I drove to the beach alone, to photograph the sunset. Alone. And as the sun dipped behind the rocks and its brilliant light squeezed through the gap to illuminate the surf spray like bedroom dust on a moonbeam piercing the tiniest gap in the curtains, it was the aloneness that made the greatest impression. Not …

Making time: A poem

Once upon a time I might have written a book about space and these walls and how things look About you in your place and me in mine the clock running down crisscrossed timelines About a life in the spotlight a story, a plot me, the protagonist likely or not About vaulting my hurdles big …

Rachel Held Evans: A voice crying in my wilderness

As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, "in an age of information overload ... the last thing any of us needs is more information about God. We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual assent has turned them dry as dust ... Rachel Held Evans, Searching For SundayFor …

Love to know: A parable

So I'm sitting in this cafe and the coffee arrives and it's kinda how I like it, but not really, just slightly wrong, but that's okay because it tastes good and I'm not gonna be here for very long anyway so I can always get a better one somewhere else. The morning's barely an hour …

Immerse your soul in love: a manifesto

Immerse your soul in love, sings Thom Yorke at the end of the song Street Spirit (Fade Out). The line emerged from nowhere during a brainstorming session at Laidlaw College with Jaime Taylor 10 years ago, and subsequently adorned the brick wall of the college foyer, as the institution grappled with the idea that love …

Coffee and cigarettes: A captured moment

A kiss, but not a kiss A moment of connection, and also contempt. Those eyes, dark and foreboding, laughing with, or at, me. The casual and forceful exhalation of cigarette smoke in my direction ... towards the lens, towards my eyes, one of them closed but stung nevertheless. The ultimate act of dismissal. Or seduction. …

What’s love got to do with it: Theology and its defences against the dark arts

Towards the end of my very brief career as a theologian in a conservative, fundamentalist, NZ theological college, I had come to the sad realisation that theology, as an academic discipline, is unable — incapable rather than unwilling — to say things about love that art, even in its most popular forms, is more naturally …

Assisted suicide: a Valentine’s Day poem about love

  No need to load the bullet Or knot the rope I’m gone already If I found knowing, then what is this? What ignorance, tormented If I found life, then what is this? What else did I find? The room and the keys A vision of what will, what could Be But everyone sang In …

Red nails: a poem

Red nails: a poem I saw a woman removing  her nail polish by Doctor's orders three days out from the knife. And as the last of it was wiped away, I saw her eyes, all red and glistening. Funny how a simple swipe can remove so much.