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Scattered Pictures

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  I’ve stopped straightening the pictures on my walls. I used to try. Every few days I’d walk through the house, nudging frames back into alignment, restoring some sense of order. But living at the intersection of three faults means the earth has its own opinions. With nearly a small earthquake every day, the walls shift, the nails tilt, and the pictures lean again — each at its own angle, as if hung by a distracted curator. Eventually I surrendered. My walls are a gallery of slightly crooked memories, always in motion. On Sunday I noticed the same thing at the Mission. The Stations of the Cross — high up, heavy, and reverent — are also hanging at their own quiet angles. Not wildly askew, just… unsettled. A degree here, a tilt there. The kind of thing you only notice if you’ve lived long enough in a place where the ground never fully rests. No one bothers to straighten them. Why would they? The next tremor will undo the effort. The earth will have the last word. And somehow, t...
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Interwoven: What Lived Coexistence Looks Like When No One Is the Majority

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  If parity is the demographic story, interweaving is the human one. “Interwoven” does not mean blended. It does not mean syncretic. It does not mean that Christianity and Islam will merge into some hybrid faith. What it means is far more ordinary and far more consequential: shared life . By 2050, Christians and Muslims will increasingly inhabit the same neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and public institutions. Not because of ideology, but because of math. Demographic parity creates a world where neither tradition can retreat into the assumption of dominance. Instead, they meet each other in the places where life actually happens. Interweaving looks like: A Christian nurse and a Muslim doctor working the same night shift. A school board debating holiday calendars that must now accommodate multiple traditions. A city council balancing zoning requests for churches and mosques in the same district. Interfaith coalitions forming around climate resilience, refugee support, or pov...
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Cancer Diary: The Tongue as an Early‑Warning System

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  Most people don’t think of the tongue as a place where cancer hides. We’re trained to watch moles, breasts, prostates, lymph nodes. But the tongue—this small, muscular, constantly moving piece of us—is one of the most information‑dense organs in the body. It changes color with oxygenation, it swells with allergies, it cracks with dehydration, it trembles with neurological disease. And sometimes, it develops cancer. Tongue cancer is real, and it’s more common than most people realize. It’s also one of the cancers that can be missed , especially when it grows in the back of the tongue where no one is looking. Understanding what’s normal, what’s suspicious, and what’s urgent is part of reclaiming agency over our bodies—one of the core themes of this diary. Two Tongues, Two Different Cancers The medical world divides the tongue into two zones, and each behaves differently: 1. The Oral Tongue (front two‑thirds) This is the part you can stick out at the doctor. Cancers here ten...
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