Irises and Dreams The tomato plants are growing like weeds in the rain. This morning I walked in a dense, heavy mist. The robins were out. Some starlings. A towhee. Silence emanated from coy-hidden crows. Crow silence. Black-ink silence. The atmosphere, it seemed, was deep into the process of paper-making. A calligrapher’s dream. A mark here, a mark there, and thus a new language is born, and is off […]
After a cloudburst, comes a jeweled heaven in the juniper tree. April 25, 2020 [ 730 ]
Yesterday’s birds: towhees, chickadees, robins, starlings, scrub-jays, downy woodpeckers, flickers, doves, geese, hummingbirds, crows — and, late in the evening, with my throat feeling a bit dry, two timely swallows. Yesterday’s planting: twenty-one dahlias — twelve in the main garden, three in the “test plot,” and three under the kitchen window where our daughter’s little boys used to dig for treasure. Yesterday’s walk: barefoot in the grass in front of […]
Bare feet on the tile floor — the sensation of cold traveling instantly from soles and toes through limbs and on through the top of the head — or was it something I thought, or lost, or said? This morning’s nigh-full setting moon, illuminating great towering clouds. To be illuminated just so, and blessed to never know. And after even the heaviest of rains, the air remains. Need I look […]
Said moss to stone feeling wise one day, Hurry brings us closer to our final, fatal end. And stone replied, Dumb as I am, I agree, my friend, just as daylight died. And just as daylight died, The rain began. [ 650 ]
“It’s foolish to walk in the rain,” they say, and I come in dripping just to tell them, “It’s foolish to wait for spring.” [ 647 ]
This afternoon I finished reading the third volume of Thoreau’s journal — the third of fourteen, as published in 1906 by Houghton Mifflin and Company. And I am set to begin The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, after reading the introduction for the fourth or fifth time early this morning. As with Whitman, I continue my habit of reading aloud — except in the case of The Letters of Henry […]
Back to the falls — but not the same falls, no; never have we seen the water rushing so madly; never have we heard it thundering so loudly on the rocks below; the creek in torrent, fed by laughing streams dancing across the path on one side, and spilling over ferns, moss, rocks, and downed branches on the other; a dusting of snow all around; the temperature about thirty-five degrees; […]
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 […]
A light rain . . . tiny bird high in the branches of the western juniper . . . they are as joyfully necessary to each other as they are to me . . . and perhaps, just perhaps, as I am to them . . . including the rain. It’s easy to hug someone you love. But did you know that if you hug someone you don’t love, love […]
William Michaelian 