All smiles late yesterday afternoon, our twelve-year-old grandson told me that earlier in the day he had looked me up on the internet — I googled you were the words he used. I said, You did? That’s funny, I didn’t feel anything — at the same time realizing that from this point on I would begin to seem a little different in his eyes, as this portion of my life […]
We always think it’s someone else. But it isn’t.
O hate! O love! O death! O war!
January 8, 2020
Canvas 1,128 — January 8, 2018
[ 628 ]
It needed many years, but when I finally realized that as a writer I would not be famous or successful in a way that would pay the bills, and when I understood what a lucky thing that was, the self-imposed burden of the idea fell away, leaving me light, free, ready, and glad for whatever may come. Painful as it was, I do not regret the process; I am not […]
How quickly my life is passing — as if each day it finds new means of escape, and is even now leaking out through my hair ends and fingertips — a joyful tingling sensation, light beyond light, darkness of a depth unimaginable — new birth, a second coming of age, my honeyed childhood on fresh warm bread just as the sun goes down — voices; wings; a strange starry canvas; […]
Language is a river. Cross it, swim it, pollute it, drink from it, bathe in it, use it in rituals, float on it, ride its rapids, sit calmly at its edge. Paddle upstream. Drown, and live to tell the tale. [ 623 ]
In his journal entry for April 4, 1852, Thoreau begins: I have got to the pass with my friend that our words do not pass with each other for what they are worth. We speak in vain; there is none to hear. He finds fault with me that I walk alone, when I pine for want of a companion; that I commit my thoughts to a diary even on my […]
In my long life, have I ever really forgiven anyone? There is arrogance in yes, foolishness in no. And now I find the part of me that took offense is gone. I seem both sky and pond — and that is something to reflect upon. December 30, 2019 [ 620 ]
Is it pain, or just another useless part of myself falling away? December 29, 2019 [ 619 ]
Parallel worlds exist and interact with our world, physicists say. And the lucky old man reading smiles at the thought of his family. December 28, 2019 Everywhere and All I was stretched out on my back for a rest yesterday, when I thought, Very well, then, here I am, on a bed, in a room, in a house, on a planet circling a sun, in a solar system, in […]
We live in a house full of old furniture, old books, old photographs, old dishes, old pots and pans, and sundry heirloom antiques. Wouldn’t it be strange if we were to populate it with smart devices — a term itself meant to last no longer than what it was coined to sell? Isn’t it better to speak to each other and to ourselves than to an array of gadgets and […]
William Michaelian 