I can eat with gratitude and reverence, or I can thoughtlessly shovel it in. Either way, how I eat is how I live. If I eat thoughtlessly, my body will respond accordingly; we two will become coarse and crude, and be both cause and mirror of hunger and strife in the world. If I eat mindfully, and consume only what I need, the good food I eat will bring joy […]
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 […]
If our yard weren’t overwhelmed by the neighbor’s fir trees, and used as a playground for squirrels, raccoons, skunks, opossums, and owls, I wouldn’t mind at all having goats and chickens again. But this is not to be. We do have ants, though, which invade the house each winter; we have flickers and crows, juncos, sparrows, scrub-jays, finches, towhees, robins, wrens, and red-tailed hawks; and only a few days ago, […]
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 […]
While this society we have created is teeming with distractions, and is noisome and unsettling at every turn, we must not allow ourselves, in our hunger for relief, to be mere seekers of entertainment. Entertainment for entertainment’s sake is more distraction. We cannot thrive unless we are engaged. Even if it is something as simple as watching the rain and listening to the sound it makes on the roof, being […]
Winter or summer, wherever you may be, I hope this finds you well. Upon resuming publication, my thought is to take things slowly, and to add to these pages on an occasional, irregular basis, making each new entry a kind of letter from home, a hodge-podge from this side of the moon, taken from notes and observations made along the way. These “letters,” as I’m calling them, will be collected […]
A very humid atmosphere, heavy with mold. Stand still long enough and mushrooms will sprout on your arms. Yes, those are your arms, the ones you keep covered far too much of the time for fear of just such an outcome. Embarrassing, you say, to walk through the grocery store with mushrooms on your arms. And I say, balderdash, let them erupt, and see if they’re not admired by the […]
Well, I’ll put them somewhere. Then I’ll move about among them, admire them as I pass, and take them every now and then from their shelf or stack. I’ll read a few lines at random; I’ll marvel at how they’re made, and feel their weight in my hands. For now, though, they’re still on my desk. Melville, as it turns out, is rather perfumey — something I didn’t notice at […]
While out running yesterday morning before dawn, and then again an hour or so later while doing some bending, stretching, and breathing exercises, I thought about what I was really doing. I was, in some small degree, lessening the distance between the life I’m living and the life I would have lived as a primitive, wandering, foraging human whose activities were devoted almost entirely to survival, a life in which […]
Negativity is a poison as dangerous and addictive as any drug. It darkens our outlook and skews our view of the world. Given time, it ruins our health, our digestion, our facial expression, our posture, and our body language, and has a profound affect on those around us. Negativity breeds more negativity. It chases away positive people and attracts others who are negative. There’s no such thing as a positive […]
William Michaelian 