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 […]
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 […]
Each time they met, they bowed to one another and uttered not a word. They were old by then. When one of them died, they went on bowing just the same. And somehow when the other died, their bowing remained. Cane in hand, I thought, I’ve known men who were just like trees. . [ 1794 ]
Silence isn’t “one of those things.” It’s always present, and it never ends. What ends is our attention. Fortunately, silence is always there when we return. I wouldn’t say it’s waiting, but, then again, who knows, it might be. We can say all sorts of things about silence. We can say it pours like honey, Or that it melts like chocolate. We might liken it to the depths of the […]
We sat in rows in classrooms. We laughed and squirmed and raised our hands. Pretty girls, awkward boys. Pretty boys, boyish girls. Dervish whirls and eyes. Teacher, teacher, tell us true. You have seen us, bright and blue. We were meek and we were wise. You taught us, and we taught you. Some were lies, some were true. Teacher, teacher. Teacher, teacher, teacher. * I don’t resolve, but I do […]
My heartbeat, the wind in the trees, the sounds of the squirrels and birds, the sigh of traffic on Interstate 5, the ringing in my ears, the kettle on to boil, the flushing of the toilet, voices in the street — these, along with every whisper within and beyond, are the music of my life. They’re my silence, too. How easily, effortlessly, they will end. . [ 1634 ]
What do they mean? Do you ever ask the words themselves? Or do you expect them to do as you tell them? If they were your children, would you demand their rigid compliance, or would you give them the freedom and space they need to blossom? Your answer reveals the kind if writer, speaker, thinker, dreamer you are. If you’re sure the words you use are at your command, then […]
William Michaelian 