Dragonfly season here is a show of grace; color; delicacy. The insects rise and pause and land with an ethereal weightlessness we don’t associate with the much larger dragonflies of our youth in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where they stood on air and rumbled about in our classrooms at school, entering and leaving freely through the open doors and unscreened windows. During the warm months, which seemed to last most […]
Dry pavement. Thirty-four degrees. Stars, clouds, fog. I was passed by a young runner this morning whose footsteps were so loud they started a dog barking. He was on the sidewalk, I was in the middle of the road. Someday, if the young runner is lucky, he will be an old runner. If he’s even luckier, he’ll be a running elder, prized for his wisdom in all the villages around. […]
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. […]
Life, a familiar echo, a hound on the porch, the sweet pull of smoke; You say I’ve been away, and I dare must believe it; Or how, does your hand, cause the beating, of my heart? “Here Before”Recently Banned Literature, December 4, 2014 Canvas 120 December 8, 2010 . [ 1303 ]
Our recent walk through the fog near Goose Lake seems like something that happened ages ago — a lifetime, maybe more. I study the calendar: is it something I really know how to read? Upon our arrival, we met a man and a dog who had just finished their walk. Standing beside the open door of his small yellow pickup, the man was gently blotting moisture from the dog’s head. […]
Bide with your pain, your discomfort, your illness, the way a dog does. Bide with your worry, your problem, your puzzle, your fear, your mood. Lick your paw, scratch behind your ear, then settle down and sit quietly. Whether it is for a moment or for an hour, sit forever, the way a dog does. Later, when it is time to stir, do whatever it is you need to do […]
The nine-millimeter sandals are designed to keep one grounded by means of a copper plug, which makes regular contact with the earth, and a single continuous conductive lace, which hugs the foot and keeps the sandal snugly and comfortably in place for a near barefoot experience — ideal for this morning’s three-mile climb on the Perimeter Trail to Rackett Ridge and the subsequent scamper down again. The most strenuous part […]
Pen and claw — old friends scratching out their autobiographies. August 15, 2021 . You Are Here As intimate as you are with yourself as imagined by others, imagine imagining yourself as you are, when imagination itself imagines changing course — that is, imagine a river, imagining an ocean, imagining an imagined star — as intimate, as you imagine, you are. Somewhere, there is a familiar old coat on a […]
Imagine your paws on the tailgate and sudden arms that bear your weight through open fields and tender fate in clover time. Recently Banned Literature, June 11, 2014 . [ 1099 ]
William Michaelian 