“The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world. It is even a trivial place. The waves forever rolling to the land are too far-travelled and untamable to be familiar. Creeping along the endless beach amid the sun-squall and the foam, it occurs to us that…
The dense fog presses up against the glass, tapping on the window lightly, wanting to come inside. Or calling me outside. I listen and layer up for a walk to the bay. I know it’s out there, if only from memory. And walk slowly to the water. The fog comeson little cat feet.It sits lookingover…
See with every turning day,how each season wants to make a childof you again, wants you to becomea seeker after rainfall and birdsong,watch now, how it weathers you to a testingin the tried and true, tells youwith each falling leaf, to leave and slip away,even from that branch that held you,to go when you need…
“One of the many ways we have made ourselves lonely without gaining the deeper nourishment and intimacies of true aloneness, is the way we have lost the greater supporting circle of friendship available to us in the created, natural world: to be friends with the sky, the rain, the changing light of a given day…
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing The soul’s sap quivers.– T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding There are more famous lines from this poem, but this is the time of sap buckets and lines run between maple trees in New England, so forgive me for straying from the popular. For these are…
Nobody owns the sky or the trees.Nobody owns the hearts of birds.Still, being human and partial therefore to my own successes—though not resentful of others fashioning theirs— I’ll come tomorrow, I believe, quite early.– Mary Oliver, Winter and the Nuthatch Oliver writes of building trust with a nuthatch that eventually learns to eat out of…
“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” – Marcel Proust Spring in New England is a tricky thing. We pivot from beautiful warm days to snow squalls and bitter wind, often within a few minutes of each other. But the days grow…
There’s something uniquely foreign about the experience, akin to visiting an ice palace in a fantasy movie. Humans aren’t supposed to be in such places. At least that’s what we tell ourselves when we look at a waterfall from the front. And when it’s frozen in winter? Well, there’s something chillingly locked away in… there….
What good is livin’ a life you’ve been givenIf all you do is stand in one place – Lord Huron, Ends of the Earth If snow transforms the landscape, then a walk in that snowy terrain transforms the winter walker. Add a new path and suddenly you’re seeing the world entirely differently than you had…
A flurry of texts over the work week from two directions with questions about hiking led to a decision to join forces for a hike of Cannon Mountain. On the one hand were the Perry’s, increasingly famous in the White Mountains for years of summiting mountains and red-lining trails. I don’t recall a hike in…
