“Make of yourself a light,” said the Buddha, before he died.” – Mary Oliver, The Buddha’s Last Instruction Last night I lay quietly in the backyard well past my bedtime watching bits of billion-year-old space dust streak across the sky in brilliant dying gasps of white light. The dust is debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle,…
“No doubt in Holland, when van Gogh was a boy, there were swans drifting over the green sea of the meadows, and no doubt on some warm afternoon he lay down and watched them, and almost thought: this is everything. What drove him to get up and look further is what saves this world, even…
The lingering glow of immersion in salt water quickly sweated out of me when I returned home to a yard in need of attention. Some of the attention simply needed a prompt investment in labor, like mowing the lawn and cleaning the pool. Co-existing with mature trees means picking up a collection of branches and…
“Strategically, its better to do five big things with your life than 500 half-assed things.” – Derek Sivers, The Knowledge Project podcast This statement got me thinking. I’ve done plenty of half-assed things in my life, but what are the big things, both accomplished and yet to complete? That’s the real question of a lifetime. …
“The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity.” – A. Edward Newton I have an ongoing fascination with the infinite. Maybe it’s because I’m rather finite myself, with only so many days left at the dance with life. Or maybe its the humility that comes…
I confess when I visited Greenwich my mind wasn’t on chronometers, it was on the Prime Meridian and Greenwich Mean Time. But after the obligatory pictures at 0° along the famous line that dictates so much of our modern lives I spent the duration of my time exploring the Royal Observatory Greenwich, and listened intently…
The Nauset of Cape Cod are part of the Mashpee Wampanoag and were known as the “Praying Indians” because they became converts to Christianity. They were an important ally for the colonists against tribes that rose up against the encroachment of the English settlements. Most famously they worked with Benjamin Church as guides in his…
It might say a lot about me that on a hot Monday morning on Cape Cod when I found myself with time alone I didn’t opt for the beaches, but instead made a pilgrimage to an old graveyard in the woods of Forestdale. This was a trip back for me, for I would walk in this…
“It takes many hours to make what you want to make. The hours don’t suddenly appear. You have to steal them from comfort. Whatever you were doing before was comfortable. This is not. This will be really uncomfortable.” – Derek Sivers, Where To Find The Hours To Make It Happen This phrase, stealing hours from…
“When we breathe, we expand our life force.” – James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art I finished James Nestor’s book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art in quick order. Its unnerving when someone highlights something you’ve largely done unconsciously but inefficiently for most of your life and tells you…