A clear, starry morning, temperature under fifty degrees. Planets visible: Venus, Uranus, Jupiter, Saturn. Earth, too, was visible. We speak of setting foot on the moon, or Mars, as if doing so would be more wonderful than setting foot on the earth, as if the earth itself is passé, and we’re bored by something we can and must do every day. But if we feel this way about the earth, […]
Having nothing to say, having no message to relate — such days are to be savored. What is sleep but the flowering of one’s life during the day? What is day but the flowering of one’s sleep? Or, to put it another way, we sleep what we sow. Cleaned the blinds on our seven tall south-facing windows, ahead of bringing in our houseplants for the winter. Read the eighth chapter […]
It’s not that nature answers all questions and problems, though it seems she does. It’s that she disposes of those not really worth asking or solving, and returns us, at least for a time, to a state of harmony with our most basic needs, and an understanding of how we’re connected to each other and all things. If you live in a city, even a single flower or plant near […]
Met with no traffic during this morning’s run through the neighborhood. Back in the house before four-thirty. A starry sky, with a bright, waning, super-blue moon. Air clean and free of wildfire smoke. Spanish. Read a page of Juan Valera’s Pepita Jiménez. Italian. Read a passage from a translation of Homer’s Iliad. How much of effort is really the reaffirmation of one’s ego-identity? Axe, muscle, gravity. But when I chop […]
Dripping maples, full birdbaths, flowers bowing their heads. Since yesterday morning, the temperature hasn’t gone up or down more than two degrees. We leave the house open. Last night, we could hear the crickets. Rain or no rain, now is their time. Thoreau’s journal, February 1854. One day, he followed the tracks of a fox in the snow over a mile. No phone, no map, no app. Strolling vs. scrolling. […]
A genuine fall rain, windless, steady, straight down. Sixty degrees. Feet and legs wet from walking at a leisurely pace through a large commercial parking lot. Sandals and puddles. Let us practice nonavoidance, and proclaim it our beliefless, faithless faith. On the front sidewalk, met with a wet, stubborn bee. Old Books. Brief prefatory note by Robert Wiedeman Barrett “Pen” Browning (here signed R.B.B.). The Letters of Robert Browning and […]
A falling star — a petal bright, from the flower. * Some books I leave open, so that during daylight hours, I can read a few lines from them in passing. Diaries, journals, letters, poetry, too — and it’s all poetry, beginning with the light coming in through the window. Or call it pollen, or honey, because the words coat the wings, and sweeten the tongue. * How many things […]
If ours isn’t a true friendship, maybe it’s because we aren’t really listening to each other. * From Emerson’s journal, 1869: In the heavy storm I heard the cathedral bells squeaking like pigs through the snout. * Time and energy given to hurt feelings is time and energy taken from feeling compassion for the person you think has hurt them — the result being, there are two feeling hurt instead […]
Several weeks ago I made three angel wing begonia cuttings from an indoor plant gone wild and put them in a small glass vase to root. This afternoon I potted them, and set them at the bottom of the front step, where I expect they will be for the rest of the summer. By late fall the plants will likely be too tall for the pot. So it goes. The […]
I go on reading things in Emerson’s journal he thought would never see print. And yet here they are, more than a century and a half later, and so here is Emerson. Almost word for word, I remember many things said by my grandparents. And so here they are. Friends, parents, relatives, animals, places, here they are, to be forgotten and remembered for however long. And here we are. Glaciers. […]
William Michaelian 