Fourteen weeks of daily early-morning running: suddenly it sounds ridiculous — about as ridiculous as publishing daily blog entries — as if I really have that much to say, or there’s that much that truly needs to be said, and which might not be better and more fully expressed by silence — or by walking across the street and shaking my neighbor’s hand for no special reason, other than the […]
Yes, I love writing without words — but I love your face even more. ~ [ 2106 ]
If you were to ask me what I really do, I wouldn’t know what to answer, except that it appears to be very little. I write decently, and say some decent things, but I’m probably at my best when I’m not writing, and even better when I’m not saying anything at all. Sometimes I think that if I were to remain silent long enough, the meaning of my lifetime of […]
So many ways of publishing — I would gladly step away from it all And be a bird singing from a treetop, or a wise man silent on the roof. ~ [ 2070 ]
Once upon a time, there was always something to say. Now, saying it seems a transgression against the silence we so desperately need. Silence can heal or cure anything; especially the silence of the grave. To write from that kind of silence, without breaking that silence; to make ourselves felt and known from Hamlet’s undiscovered country — is that not the only writing there is left for us to do? […]
If you lived nearby, I might let you borrow a book. Or, even better, you could stay and browse and read a while. You could sit or stand; you could kneel or crouch. You could wonder at the strange figure sitting at this desk. Is he real? That would be for you to decide, although I think the answer might vary from one moment to the next. Are you real? […]
I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers. — Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam. . Ideally we will hold no opinion, and therefore have none to defend. For what’s an opinion but one more way of living in, and clinging to, the past? We may believe nothing has changed since we arrived at the […]
Stars and low-racing clouds. A spirit at the switch, grinning fall. My eldest brother is alive again. He’s forgotten to bring his driver’s license. Standing beside our mother’s old car, I tell him I’d better drive, though we have no particular destination in mind. With the arrival of rain and cooler temperatures, I’m reminded that the easiest way to adjust to seasonal weather changes is to spend as much time […]
The rise and fall. Doomed to fail are nations founded on the belief that people can take what they want, and sell what doesn’t belong to them. Likewise, individual lives. Throw it away. Out of sight, out of mind? Or, out of sight, out of our minds? Thoreau’s journal, February 19, 1854. Many college text-books which were a weariness and a stumbling-block when studied, I have since read a little […]
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 […]
William Michaelian 
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