I collect sentences as I collected sticks and feathers when I was a boy, and then I forget them when night-time comes. How much of pain can be attributed to its original cause, and how much to the fear it will grow worse, and maybe not end? If I’m still alive at suppertime, I think I’ll set the table with the yellow dishes my parents often used when I was […]
My eldest brother has been gone a year and a half; our mother, ten years; our father, twenty-eight; our father’s mother and father, thirty-three; our mother’s father, sixty-nine; her mother, forty-two. Friends, family friends, relatives, loyal canine companions — the list is long. Teachers, schoolmates, barbers, insurance men, mechanics, storekeepers, fruit packers, janitors, farm help; doctors, dentists, accountants, farmers from the old neighborhood; grocery checkers, retired men in overalls, librarians, […]
I awoke early this morning feeling it was time to start the day. Then I read the kitchen clock — 2:58. So I stretched out on the floor again and slept for what felt like a good solid hour. The clock read 3:31. Ten minutes later, I was out in the street for a run. . A raft of lemons adrift at sea. The funny way you look at me. […]
It doesn’t take a very long sentence to say the light shining through the bars is not only beautiful, but enough. . [ 1807 ]
It must fall apart. It will fall apart. Oh, such beauty! . [ 1769 ]
The two little girls were surprised when I gave them each a sprig of lilac and asked them to smell the flowers. They were hushed, too, because in their boredom they’d torn them off, along with others and many tender leaves. And they were saddened, when I gently told them we’d given the plant to my mother many years ago, that it was her favorite, and that though she had […]
A robin is building a nest in the rhododendron just outside the window of the little bedroom at the end of the hall. I was on the floor stretched out on my back for an after-lunch rest when her movement caught my eye. If she follows through and all goes well, we’ll be able to watch as a new family of robins comes into being. The plant isn’t a dense […]
Children of the Precipice, it’s time for authenticity, not pose. * To heal a part, you must love the whole. * As a participant in this beautiful immensity, I don’t feel insignificant, I feel fortunate. With each breath, I’m as near as the apple and worm, and as far as the most distant star. We’re intimately related and uniformly blessed, part of the same miracle. . [ 1661 ]
Concord — harmony; a grape; a town; Emerson; Thoreau; all that’s forgotten, but not unknown. * Negativity: the great pandemic. Yet the cure is instantaneous, and starts with yourself. * How strange, being a member of a species smart enough to kill itself. And here is our mother, gently whispering over us, Live, and we think her voice is only the sound of the waves, the wind in the trees. […]
Kindness is everything. It’s a way of life. It’s love in the form of an action. It’s gratitude for all things, not just for those of one’s arbitrary choosing. If we’re not grateful for loss and pain and death, then we’re most certainly not equal to their perceived opposites. One of those beauties is that if we happen to forget any of this, we’re reminded by new acts of kindness. […]
William Michaelian 