On the road, the notion of time evaporates so quickly, I have to stop and think to know what day it is, and even then I’m not quite sure. A minute, mile, or hour farther on, the fact is gone again, along with its meaning and its need. We left on Monday. That much I know. But I hardly prize the information. If today is Thursday, the name is the […]
If there is a spirit world, why not this one? Late yesterday evening, the crows half-flew, half-drifted every which way on the southwest breeze, which was strong enough to make their frequent treetop landings a challenge. This one? No, this one! Here? No, over there! Haw! — and yet the grand and glorious silence was never broken. The clover was drunk on sunlight. Now it’s snoring in the dark. And […]
In his journal, Emerson writes of walking with Hawthorne, talking with Thoreau, Carlyle’s latest book, and Tennyson’s new poems. In mine, I write of you, in terms of my own plain self. And this is our wealth: that we are each a funny blend of science and superstition, of pain, nerve, and luck. And this is our grief — the loss of dear Waldo, Emerson’s five-year-old son. August 4, 2019 […]
When one lives a simple life, is there a need to impose order? Doesn’t disorder arise from wanting what isn’t needed, and by following what’s traditionally accepted as the right way of doing things — doing what we are expected to do, buying what we are expected to buy, believing what we are expected to believe — without examining their wide-ranging, murderous implications? Observe an angry, disordered household, and see […]
Time? How can I define it if I don’t know what or where it is? And yet all my life, I’ve casually and confidently used the word itself. Very well — but I must never make it my defense or my excuse. Little children — all of the rocks in the avalanche have names. Their meanings will come, by and by, brought by butterflies and babbling brooks. August 2, 2019 […]
Goose Lake is still choked with lilies, but here and there a small patch of water is now visible. The muck slowly recedes, but there’s no shore, no place to put in a canoe, or to cast a line. By all signs, it won’t be that kind of summer. A fallen cottonwood branch lies across the part of the path that leads to the only other place of easy access […]
How beautiful, and how strange, the sense of continuity, harmony, and balance that keeps a lifetime of writing and reading suspended, as it were, or meaningfully afloat — such is memory — and as I hold my glass up to the light, I am surprised to find it still full. Ross Freeman He went to the window and closed the drapes. His typewriter on the table looked like an […]
I have had my taste of country life, and of city life too. I have begged on my knees at the well, and my poor numb feet have known the pavement grain by grain. In each kind of life I have found an intimacy that gladdens every curse, and thwarts the common misconceptions. Each helps explain the other. The old graveyard that is surrounded by houses now, once stood alone […]
Politics is a filthy sponge. Do you want it in your sink? Do you want it in your mind? Yesterday evening, after two warm days, a cleansing ocean wind rushed into the valley once again. This morning the air is sweet and still. And I sense something else, which makes me say these words aloud: autumnal understanding. If I do not return your wave, is the loss not mine? For […]
How long has it been since I felt offended? I wonder. I really don’t know. Who, or what, is there to offend? Is there a noble concept of myself in danger of being toppled? Do I have a religious or philosophical point to argue, or a political position to defend? No. I am just a child in an old man’s body, up, in the morning, once again; up, to see […]
William Michaelian 
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