“There is freedom waiting for you,On the breezes of the sky,And you ask ‘What if I fall?’Oh but my darling,What if you fly?” – Erin Hanson Salto mortale, means the dangerous or potentially lethal leap. Mortale is the potentially bad outcome. Salto is the tricky part: the leap. We humans tend to dwell so much…
“Opinions are like nails: the stronger you hit them, the deeper inside they go.” – Decimus Junius Juvenalis Or maybe in 2020 it’s “the more you express them the more your friends mute you on Facebook”. Or look at you funny when you see them in public. The lesson, I suppose, is to stop hammering…
Sunday restlessness prompted a short road trip up to an apple orchard for some apples and pumpkins. This proved to be too brief, so it seemed a good day to revisit the Robert Frost Farm. Maybe it was his poem October that inspired me, or maybe the beautiful fall day, but either way he whispered…
This form, this face, this life Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken, The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships. What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers And woodthrush calling through the fog My…
“Ashes denote that fire was;Respect the grayest pileFor the departed creature’s sakeThat hovered there awhile.Fire exists the first in light,And then consolidates, —Only the chemist can discloseInto what carbonates.” – Emily Dickinson, Fire I once climbed into a cave deep in the Grand Canyon and observed the soot accumulated on the ceiling from fires generations…
“Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled— to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.” – Mary Oliver, The Ponds Maybe it’s the dulling effect of years staring at screens, where every moment is designed to dazzle you…
“Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising through the mellow shade,Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.”– Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall Orion and Taurus, the hunter and the hunted, have a long-standing adversarial relationship in the skies above us. If the Hyades are the face of Taurus turned towards Orion,…
“You lack a foot to travel?Then journey into yourself!”– Rumi, If A Tree Could Wander For all my talk of moving and travel, I found myself digging deeply into the rocky soil at home, rooting myself to the land with labor and that most valuable commodity of all; time. For this weekend was the allocated…
“This is the earnest work. Each of us is given only so many mornings to do it— to look around and love the oily fur of our lives, the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle. Days I don’t do this I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn’t just an idea.”–…
“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,…
