Kindred comes from a combination of kin and the Old English word ræden (“condition”), which itself comes from the verb rædan, meaning “to advise.” — Merriam-Webster Dictionary Talking to a friend about poetry, I mentioned a poem by Li-Young Lee, and paused our phone conversation while she read it, waiting for the payoff when one…
Another year already? With so much left undone?! So many good and bad days, rolled into twelve months. It’s been a great year. It’s been a horrible year. And now it’s over. And so it all begins again tomorrow. If we’ve learned anything from our stack of years, it’s that time flies, and 2023 will…
“In the eighteenth century, when educated European tourists visited the Alps, they deliberately blindfolded their eyes to shield themselves from the evidence of the earth’s horrid irregularity. It is hard to say if this was not merely affectation, for today, newborn infants, who have not yet been taught our ideas of beauty, repeatedly show in…
Colm Doherty: I just have this tremendous sense of time slipping away from me, Pádraic. And I think I need to spend the time I have left thinking and composing. Just trying not to listen to any more of the dull things that you have to say for yourself.Pádraic Súlleabhain: Are you dying?Colm Doherty: No,…
“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” — Anaïs Nin (with a nod to Marginarian) I might have said something about this process of becoming in…
Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem likeWhen he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back. When the time has passed to…
“Look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.” — Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Most every year I travel to New York City in November for work and get to experience the city just before…
“Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings.“ —…
“When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life,…
Why do we treat the dayWith so much needless fear and sorrowIt’s not in its nature to stay:Today is always gone tomorrow.— Wislawa Szymborska, Nothing Twice The autumn days are now impressionist paintings, one after another, until some day, not very long from now, the show will end. Knowing that one of these days that…