Tool collections speak to me. You know what someone has done when they’ve got shelves full of well-used tools. If you’re observant, you can tell when they picked up a certain skill along the way too. I walked into the basement of an older gentleman I know who doesn’t get around much now to change…
“You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of…
“We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.” – John Hope Franklin “On a personal level, [the pandemic is] reminding me that, “Boy, life is short.” Life is precious. And, if you’re dreaming about…
Sometimes it takes darkness and thesweetconfinement of your alonenessto learnanything and anyonethat does not bring you alive is too small for you.– David Whyte, Sweet Darkness I woke up in the middle of the night thinking of Todd Rundgren’s Hello It’s Me and hearing it anew in my head. It’s always been a breakup song,…
“Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self.” Toby Litt “The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” – Cyril Connolly The time we spend, these…
What is preciousinside us does notcare to be knownby the mindin ways that diminishits presence.-David Whyte, The Winter of Listening A storm pivots around New England, sideways rain one minute, bright sunshine the next. Cold wind pushing the swirling mix about, demanding attention. I step outside and look for the rainbow that must be out…
If 2020 was a year of transformation forced upon all of us by a pandemic and political and social unrest, then what is 2021? A continuation of the same or something different entirely? We see the light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re still very much in the tunnel. Are we in limbo,…
“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…
Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning windowtoward the mountain presence of everything that can bewhat urgency calls you to your one love?What shape waits in the seed of youto grow and spread its branchesagainst a future sky?Is it waiting in the fertile sea?In the trees beyond the house?In the life you can…
Walking through the woods of Hampstead, New Hampshire we found an old mine quietly marking time. A modest hole in the ground, really, with scattered bits of Mica all around. To call it a mine seems a bit of a stretch when compared to the big mining operations elsewhere in the world. But it called…
