Every winter, I think about rearranging the more than three thousand books and two dozen bookshelves in this room. But other than minor changes — a stack here, a stack there — it ends up staying the way it is: familiar, visually pleasing, organized according to no specific plan other than a theme or author here and there, or a type of binding. If I’m counting correctly, I acquired forty-two […]
Not far into this morning’s run, from about two houses away, I startled a pair of coyotes, which saw me before I saw them and dashed off through a neighbor’s front yard and around the corner out of sight. Had they come my way instead, they would have been immediately upon me, and I could have told them that I wasn’t one of those setting off fireworks most of the […]
As funny as it seems, I was once a chubby cherub, a 1950s Raphael, who weighed thirty pounds at a year. There’s a picture in our sitting room that proves it, a smiling baby of nine months propped up by his own sweet girth, rolls at his wrists, and a twinkling smile. No wings — they never quite developed. There was only a minor scapular deformity, or perhaps conformity, to […]
Thus far it’s a warm winter, the coldest temperatures only flirting with frost. This is why I’m waiting to rake out the debris behind our little shed. The two times I’ve tried, several weeks ago, I was stung by a hornet, once on the left eyelid, once on my wrist just above the edge of my glove. It seems there must be a nest buried in the fir needles against […]
Early this morning, ‛neath hazy starshine, in a temperature of thirty-seven degrees, through fresh, clean air, I ran for the twenty-second consecutive day, as always with my feet bare in the flat, thin sandals I’ve long since come to rely on, live in, and love. In the vegetable section of the little organic grocery store we visit every Sunday morning, a woman perhaps in her late-seventies looked at my bare […]
Little by little, Christmas trees are disappearing from neighborhood windows, as well as lights along the eaves. Here and there a giant inflated Santa or Grinch still stands, lit from within and swollen from eating too much during the holidays. Rain-battered, wind-tattered, thought-scattered, sweet butter rum. Tethered to their post, these ghosts of Christmas past seem as haunted as Dickens, while inside, children wonder why Christmas must end. They remain […]
I could, of course, resume my habit of daily writing. All it takes is a simple decision. Yet I don’t recall having decided not to write every day. Rather, I fell out of the habit, as one falls out of the habit of any form of daily exercise, such as walking, running, stretching, lifting weights, and so on. Writing, looked at one way, is also a form of exercise, and […]
For a great many years, I thought I’d never fall out of the habit of daily writing. But here I am, days, weeks, and sometimes months between pieces, with just as few handwritten notes in between. Other than what I’ve already published, one would think I’m not a writer at all, at least by any outward sign, other than the use of playful, colorful language to address the odd experience […]
I can eat with gratitude and reverence, or I can thoughtlessly shovel it in. Either way, how I eat is how I live. If I eat thoughtlessly, my body will respond accordingly; we two will become coarse and crude, and be both cause and mirror of hunger and strife in the world. If I eat mindfully, and consume only what I need, the good food I eat will bring joy […]
If whatever I write, or draw, or make, or do, is to be fresh and new, and not simply more of the same, however pleasant and comfortable that same may seem, must I not make sure that I am myself fresh and new? Must I not be my own peaceful revolution, and free of my usual thought pattern, with all its familiar repetition and redundancy? Must I not be willing […]
William Michaelian 