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 […]
There’s nothing like exercise married to a needful purpose — Carrying water, chopping wood, pruning a vineyard, digging a grave, Building a house, hanging clothes on the line, painting a mural, Running to the next village with an important message — I could go on — but not as far as writing a poem. What about singing one? I don’t know. I wonder. Yes, yes — perhaps. . [ 1846 […]
Standing between the hot, vibrating fender and the seat, there was just room enough for me to ride beside my father on the tractor. At three miles an hour, we went up and down the vineyard rows, transported by the mellow, acoustic hum of the gas engine as dozens of blackbirds crowded behind us to hunt for worms and bugs in the newly turned soil. This, too, was paradise. There […]
The mailman shines his light in our box, late again for his supper. . [ 1605 ]
Between what I can do and what I can’t, Is a lifetime of what I did and what I didn’t, when I could. Now I do this, without wondering if I should, if it’s bad, or if it’s good. I do this, tho’ the doing’s hardly doing, and the done is never done. I do this, ’cause the doer’s here to do it, Tho’ ’times it seems he’s gone. . […]
Today I started removing our last big swath of ivy, which looked something like a green glacier flowing down from the wide, mounded base of the fir tree in the southeast corner of the backyard — the leafy “ice” being about two and a half feet deep and matted with summer spider webs, twigs, needles, and cones, twenty feet long, and six feet wide. When I’m done, there will be […]
There’s a young robin building a nest on top of a light fixture under the eaves next to the little door that leads from the garage into the backyard. She worked at it Sunday for about eleven hours, having great difficulty at first due to the slippery metal, but by evening she’d managed to form what looked like a relatively secure base. Fluffy and determined, she resumed work yesterday morning […]
You ask what happens when we die, I say the weather’s fine and the soil’s warming nicely. You ask how to make good garden compost, I say yes, that’s it exactly. What’s it? you want to know. I say the dirt between your toes, the ever changing clouds. You say you hate to leave it all behind. I say try this shovel, it’s the one my father used. . [ […]
One thing to remember when you’re eating a seed, be it sunflower, flax, or chia, is that it holds the potential of perpetuating, even saving, its kind, as well as the species which are drawn by its beauty and which depend on it for sustenance. If you think of it only as flavorful, or as food for your health, you miss a vital dimension of living and eating. It is […]
Yesterday morning while I was watching the birds finding things to eat on the frosty ground, I was struck again at how crippled by convenience I am, in the sense that, for much of the year, I am cut off from the activity of getting food. The time spent in direct contact with the earth, the energy used, and the attention and involvement required in an endeavor that yields varying […]
William Michaelian 