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 […]
I ran a little later this morning, though I was done well before sunrise. Still, light was growing in the east, and I was treated to the first early-morning round of robin-song I’ve heard this late-winter, early-spring. One bird was perched on a low retaining wall, singing as it watched me go by, a scene that repeats itself every year, and which always remains new. I’ve run every day now […]
One neighbor on hospice, another confused. Sun finds its way through the woods. ~ [ 2077 ]
It rained a little during the night — not much, but enough to lighten, maybe even leaven the air, as if the clouds, instead of moving in from the west, arrived from the yeast. Either way, the crust has been dampened, and life is more than a cabaret, it’s a boulangerie. In all but two bedrooms, I dusted and mopped our new floor, which, save for a speck here and […]
Whatever the conditions, where a tree sprouts is where it must live its life. Out of this grows its patience and wisdom. Trees know how to wait, to bide their time, to conserve their energy and use it to their best, most joyful advantage; this in turn becomes their gift to the world. As I have aged, my bark has grown shaggy; knots have formed where my trunk and limbs […]
Ah, for those precious moments alone, with every dream, every hope, and each imagined failing. As if for the first time, you see your house on the edge of the moor, suppertime done, the dim lamps burning; it’s almost on a hill. You close your eyes, and hug the gnarled trunk: your father, the wind in his hair. How young he once was! How old he is now! And your […]
It gives me a good feeling to revisit such a positive, personal, universal poem. Though it was written more than eight years ago and I am indisputably that much older, I still feel, in contemplating the thoughts and images called forth, that a beautiful harvest is in. And I still feel gratitude, and call it a blessing and a symphony. Whatever your age, if you have yet to explore the […]
What they suffered, they suffered together. Material wealth was never their concern, their poverty being the inherited kind. Yet kindness is their inheritance. It’s been said that they died the same day, within hours of each other, their shared dream having run its course. There were children, one of whom, we are told, made these sketches of her parents when they were both very old, using a piece of charcoal […]
Very well, then — if I am an underground man, the least I can do is be frank and open about it. Seven years after writing Window Thoughts, I find myself much changed on the surface: less hair, grayer hair, a longer, grayer beard, and more wrinkles, especially on my age-spotted forehead, with a deepening crease plunging downward towards my nose past my left eyebrow. At the same time, I […]
Not long ago, in a letter, I told a friend that, these days, The blog kettle is on low, on the back burner…. pending a time when I find I have something to say that I haven’t said already many times before…. Since then, I’ve been thinking about that, and what it might truly signify. For one thing, over the years, upon beginning any new piece of writing, it has […]
William Michaelian 