The word silence isn’t silence, just as love and peace aren’t love and peace. Writing them and saying them is a little like hoping the train will come. The train might arrive. It might not. No hope can bind it. What is silence? What are love and peace? How can we know, unless we surrender ourselves? How can we know, unless we are the living embodiment of each? . [ […]
Leave the leaves where they fall — yes, leave the leaves, ’til they’re not leaves at all. . [ 1616 ]
shovel deep / shovel strong / I love your forever song . [ 1584 ]
Sometimes, sitting in the warm fall sun, I feel I’m waiting for my wings to dry. . [ 1568 ]
The bees in the sunflowers don’t mind us near. And why would we curse or bother them? There’s enough anger and fear in the world. We ask instead: what else might we offer them? And their reply is sweet: if not peace now, when? . [ 1557 ]
Enchantment. A very slow run with the moon and stars and clouds. Haste not, want not. . [ 1527 ]
Star detail. Northbound clouds, lit by a sun an hour from rising. Clover detail. Leaves cool, and only slightly damp. Spider detail. A web from jade to fern. Breath detail. The boundless, timeless happening of oneself. Zen detail. Unique, like everything and everyone else. The same, in a different way. Inseparable as peace and the gentle eyes of a cow, as joy and the sound of her bell. July 30, […]
Cloudy, calm, sixty-one degrees. Twice during this morning’s run, I was met with the scent of star jasmine, and once with that of a cigarette. Then someone, perhaps unable to bear the dark and the quiet, or the idea of facing another day of meaningless, underpaid drudgery, set off a loud firework somewhere to the east. The silence, though, didn’t mind; it held the noise close until it died in […]
This year on Mother’s Day, our eldest son arrived with a large hanging flower basket he bought from someone who’d set up a display on Highway 99E a little north of the town of Corvallis. He’d been hiking and running in the woods near there and was on his way home when the display caught his eye. The man had stuffed just about every plant imaginable into his baskets — […]
Like April, and again like May, June has been a cool, cloudy, rainy month — much more so than what is considered normal, but of course normal is nothing but an average of the dry years and the wet years taken together. Last June, for a stretch of several days, we had to cover our cucumbers and dahlias with sheets to protect them from record high temperatures, which registered, at […]
William Michaelian 