The Dignity of Small Things
An essay about a fountain pen, a jade ring, and the never-forgotten echoes of those we loved and lost.
Journal - John Patrick Weiss
Latest posts
The Resurrected Eye
A retired police chief rediscovers his instinct for noticing through street photography, transforming an old survival skill into a new way of seeing art, empathy, and everyday human stories.
What It’s Like to Be a Police Chief at a Landscape Painting Workshop
Afraid to fly and convinced he didn't belong, a police chief attends a renowned landscape painting workshop and learns an unexpected lesson about creativity, courage, and finding strength as an outsider.
The Bears Are Winning
An essay exploring rogue AI, Lake Tahoe's burglar bears, and the enduring importance of creativity, resilience, and human agency.
The Dreams We Leave Behind Sometimes Wait for Us
An essay about literary writing, editorial cartooning, Pat Oliphant, and how the dreams we leave behind sometimes wait for our return.
The Beautiful Trap of an Immaculate Life
What happens after you finally arrive? A reflective essay on retirement, perfection, aging, and the quiet anxiety of achieving the life you always wanted.
The Long Way Home
From years spent working Fourth of July parades as a police chief to celebrating with family in retirement, this personal essay reflects on patriotism, service, freedom, and the memories that matter most.
The Quiet Choreography of Us
Sometimes the most beautiful things in life are unseen. A stranger's kindness. A familiar smile. A welcoming gesture that asks nothing in return. Through a series of black-and-white street photographs, this essay reflects on the quiet acts of grace that bind us together and reminds us that no one should be left sitting alone at life's grand ballroom.
Every Leaving Is a Loss and a Possibility
One summer afternoon, my father took me to a cemetery and shared a lesson I wouldn't fully understand until years later. Through memories of family, loss, and the example of a good man, this essay reflects on the ways grief changes us. And how every leaving carries the possibility of becoming someone new.
You Can’t Perfume a Text Message
In this age of digital screens and technological modernity, there are still vestiges of the old world. Alabaster sculptors and book lovers and people writing with fountain pens. A dwindling community holding onto the old ways.
Slowing Down to Find the Person We Forgot
An essay about personal reinvention, Carthusian monks, the movie “Pig,” and the importance of authenticity over shallow performance.
An Elegy for a Lost Life
Memories of our family’s chickens, the soul’s freedom, Mark Helprin’s novel “Elegy in Blue,” leaving Substack, childhood birthdays, and an elegy for a lost life.
To Pierce the Veil of Selfish Consciousness
A bickering couple in San Francisco, pretending to be someone else at a cartoonist convention, Iris Murdoch on our “flat, relentless egos,” Pico Iyer on monastic retreats, and the peace of becoming yourself.
Letters of Hope
A short story about residents of a small town receiving mysterious yet uplifting letters, but then they stop. The story originally appeared in John Patrick Weiss’s 2024 book of short stories, “The Morning Fox.”
The Place Where the Light Enters You
An essay about my abscessed tooth, my old dog’s dental surgery, pain and the wisdom of C. S. Lewis, Kent Haruf’s blessed McPheron brothers, the poet Rumi on pain, the suffering of Voltaire’s Candide, and a healing text from an old friend.
She Was Beautiful
Elderly women, Akiko Busch and Virginia Woolf on the invisibility of older women, and why older women glow in the dark.
The Ones Worth Suffering For
I drove to an old church in the town where I grew up, to visit an old friend whose mind was slipping into the fog of memory loss. And while he remembered me, he mostly repeated old memories. And on the drive home the thought, if we didn’t care, there’d be no sting of loss.
A Way of Keeping Yourself Alive
A dying grandmother, a train ride in the park, the importance of caring to stay alive inside, and how the time you give to others is never wasted.
A Chest Full of Stacked Asteroids
A short story about a retired English teacher who lost her husband, family choices, a student who left the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and how despite the ups and downs of relationships, love remains.
What Doesn’t Last Is More Important Than You Think
Ludwig Wittgenstein, David Jones, Simone Weil, and the practice of retreat. But not because the world has nothing to offer, but to learn how to get out of your own way.