So it goes, my dear butterfly. I write to tell you what you already know: I’m still glad to wake up in the morning, and my days, however seemingly ordinary, are full. I have a small cup of coffee, then go out for a walk before sunrise. This is followed by a few stretching and breathing exercises, which I do here in the library while looking out the big front […]
And if we had left the oil in the ground, and the coal, and the minerals, and the gems? If we had not cut down the trees and polluted the rivers? If we had not altered the climate and destroyed the environment? If we had not conquered our neighbors, and humbly learned from them instead? If we had not created artificial intelligence, and data centers, and guns? If we had […]
Reading Thoreau’s Walden and Percy Fitzgerald’s life of Henry Irving, while dipping at random into many related and unrelated volumes. Encyclopedia Britannica entries: Oliver Cromwell; Thomas Cromwell; Thomas More. Books by and about famous stage actors: Sothern; Jefferson; Garrick; and that guy some people still talk about and others quote without knowing, Shakespeare. I was on the roof yesterday, taking care of some mossy spots before last night’s rain. Not […]
Says my childhood sitting in the sun, what are these later years but a penny you found and couldn’t resist picking up? ~ [ 2130 ]
No need for explanation long, said bumblebee to sun; my purpose is as yours: not to cease ’til I am done. ~ [ 2129 ]
It may sound childish, but I marvel at how many things are happening all at once, and that, somehow, they become one thing — a single grand movement, which may or may not have meaning or direction, but, rather, the quality of blossoming, or unfolding, seemingly in my presence. My own body, with its wondrous workings, is an immediate example; it’s also a symbol, because in it there are battles […]
Ah, the old aunts and uncles. Not only were they wonderful conversationalists and storytellers, they were surrounded with eager and willing listeners — we who never tired of their tales, and who prized their humor, and held joint stock in their memories, experience, and observations. The fire crackling, the coffee perking, the ashtrays full — this was all a feast for the younger folk, and it claimed our full attention. […]
Sometimes I look into my old books as a dying man looks into the sunset and easily finds himself there. Other times, I turn their pages as might a man with dreams and plans with time and energy enough to realize them. A few moments ago, reading the introduction of a small hardcover published in 1893, a book I read in its entirety several years ago, I felt almost as […]
We met Thoreau yesterday, in the company of his faithful dog, Ruby, whose joyful presence inspires the world around her to reveal its secrets. Immediately after greeting us on the trail, he told us, beaming with delight, that he’d discovered a very tall dogwood in bloom, which he said is a Pacific dogwood. The tree, the tallest of its kind we’ve ever seen, is just visible from the main path, […]
What to say, that might do justice to the experience of being alive? To notice, perhaps, that the well worn and oft-misused word, justice, is just ice, and that those two words more accurately represent the meaning of the one as we are likely to encounter it? Or that law is a word that signifies less a universal moral code than something to be feared, and which is wielded by […]
William Michaelian 