I was watching the fifth or sixth version of Beth Hart’s “Leave the Light On” the other night when I realized my hand had been on my heart since somewhere through the first version I’d heard. I must have placed it there when I began to realize what the song was about and had become fully absorbed in its pathos. The link to the full lyrics is here, but these four lines in the second stanza got my immediate attention, and Hart’s fine elocution and dramatic rendering do the remaining work: Little girl hiding underneath the bedWas it something I…
-
-
Our recent sightseeing-hiking excursion to the west coast began in slack-jawed wonder while beholding yet again the stunning northern California redwoods, which are ever so old, but simply never get old. We proceeded from there to a deservedly renowned Japanese Garden in Portland, Oregon, after which we piled another tall trees experience onto the trip through the conifer forests surrounding Olympia, Washington. It was not till the last of those, while picking my way through an impossibly tangled old forest with giant happy evergreens, downed trees at every conceivable angle and stage of decay, and hip-high ferns sprawling over each…
-
My friend Sally and I were chatting one day a year or two back and she suddenly noted, somewhat brightly, “Andrew! It seems every time we meet we wind up talking about death!” Upon the briefest reflection, I had to admit she was right, which begat what felt to me like a most natural response: “And the problem is???” Death, of course, grins in at the banquet table of life with increasing frequency and just-plain-reality as one traverses the sixth and seventh decades of one’s life, all the more so after getting a good running start on one’s eighth. The transition…
-
They are just so huge and enduring, and I am so small and mortal. That’s the long and the short, the big and the small of it for the millions of people who have trod these roads and trails over the centuries, beholding the majestic, domineering, stubborn redwoods that are native to the remarkably unpopulated far northern California coast as it morphs toward the Oregon border. Yes, human beings endure tangled relationships with humility. But to stand beneath a California redwood tree is to know that the matter was settled a few thousand years ago, leaving us no real choice…