Note: To operate the camera, cradle your life in such a way, standing above it, and in it, looking down, through it, and all around, from childhood to dawn, then press the button that takes the picture — and be sure not to frown, when you realize you forgot the film. . Thoreau’s journal, entries for March 2 and March 4, 1854. The First Bluebird. Golden Senecio Leaves. The Melting […]
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 […]
Today’s a good day to do very little, and to do it so slowly and thoroughly that it’s impossible for it all to be done; and to do it in a manner not of who and what, but of an absorbed, fully engaged child. Attention isn’t a spotlight, a narrowly focused beam, but a way of life, a state of being. I may focus on an ant, and indeed I […]
You’re free to join a political party, but remember, you’ll always pay for the punch. . We were enjoying a cool, quiet evening, our doors and windows open to a nice southwesterly breeze, when some neighbors upwind of us started smoking their supper in what must be one of those barrel-shaped contraptions that use chips or pellets or some such to “enhance” the flavor of whatever meat they’ve chosen to […]
My body language — the way I walk, sit, and stand — would it be the same if I had no clothes? How much of my physical attitude and self-perception is in the clothing I wear? How much of my perception of others is in the clothing they wear? When we meet, do we meet each other, or do we meet each other’s clothes? We’re born naked, wearing a uniformly […]
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 […]
How pleasantly strange, once again, to find myself running through the neighborhood at four in the morning, while no one else is out and about. And on this new day, what is the first thought I remember? How few thoughts. The others, before and after, have drifted into space. Maybe they’ll find a home out there. Maybe that is their home, except out there is also in here — this […]
A clear, starry morning, temperature under fifty degrees. Planets visible: Venus, Uranus, Jupiter, Saturn. Earth, too, was visible. We speak of setting foot on the moon, or Mars, as if doing so would be more wonderful than setting foot on the earth, as if the earth itself is passé, and we’re bored by something we can and must do every day. But if we feel this way about the earth, […]
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 […]
Dripping maples, full birdbaths, flowers bowing their heads. Since yesterday morning, the temperature hasn’t gone up or down more than two degrees. We leave the house open. Last night, we could hear the crickets. Rain or no rain, now is their time. Thoreau’s journal, February 1854. One day, he followed the tracks of a fox in the snow over a mile. No phone, no map, no app. Strolling vs. scrolling. […]
William Michaelian 
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