Reading Thoreau to the ticking of one’s body clock, until a visitor, upon entering the room, is as likely to find a cricket in the chair as someone with a book in his lap — that’s how it is. Earlier this afternoon, a hummingbird kept returning to the front window to feed on her reflection. As I read the season, I see now that in the earliest chapters, many clues […]
With practice, there comes trust and confidence in one’s own footing; a rocky path and its frequently changing grades is a joy and a meditation; there is no need to survive or prove or conquer; there is only the path, and there is not the path, but a kind of spirit-communion and spirit-passing; a presence, and not a presence. The same may be said of drawing and writing, or of […]
At one of the ten falls, up a side path through leafy shade where ferns and moss and piggyback plants abound, we came upon a great blue heron standing at the pool, statue-still. Noticing us, it turned its head, and seemed somehow to become an even taller, leaner bird, as if it had pulled its feathers more tightly around itself. Sorry for our intrusion, and hoping not to frighten it, […]
We will leave early this morning for another long walk at Silver Falls. But the countryside we will drive through to get there is every bit as beautiful in its own way, and as worth walking, except that the walking would have to be done on roads. And so, that we may see one beautiful place, roads take us through other beautiful places, while keeping us apart from them. And […]
All of Herman Melville’s poetry, complete in a beautiful, one thousand-page book — the new Library of America edition, out just days ago, is already in this reader’s hands. This is another of those projects I enjoy so well, like the slow and careful reading aloud of Thoreau’s fourteen-volume journal, which I have currently under way, Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and the complete works of other writers I have […]
Canvas 1,238 — August 11, 2019
If I am what I eat, I would rather be a bowl of ripe berries than a plate of spiced beef.
If I am what I think, I would rather be a waterfall than a flag or a border.
If I am what I believe, I would rather be free than blind reason and order.
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Just enough to wake a field, beneath a cooling street. Just enough to calm her, with restless tiny feet. Summer is a penny jar, slowly being filled. Fall’s a longing child. Winter is a graveyard walk. Spring’s a flowered mile. And love is just the way they talk, and joy’s their cry, and peace their smile. August 10, 2019 [ 476 ]
On the road, the notion of time evaporates so quickly, I have to stop and think to know what day it is, and even then I’m not quite sure. A minute, mile, or hour farther on, the fact is gone again, along with its meaning and its need. We left on Monday. That much I know. But I hardly prize the information. If today is Thursday, the name is the […]
All our then and all our now, caught up in a butterfly migration. August 7, 2019 [ 473 ]
If there is a spirit world, why not this one? Late yesterday evening, the crows half-flew, half-drifted every which way on the southwest breeze, which was strong enough to make their frequent treetop landings a challenge. This one? No, this one! Here? No, over there! Haw! — and yet the grand and glorious silence was never broken. The clover was drunk on sunlight. Now it’s snoring in the dark. And […]
William Michaelian 