Sometimes you’re shuffling back toward bed or the couch with a second cup of coffee in the stillness of early morning when you turn the corner and there it is: a confluence of light and object as the barely risen sun pierces a window and you behold a kind of brushless painting in progress, a still life built of the earth’s slow-but-inexorable orbit made all the more precious for how fleeting it is, impermanence (and beauty) its very essence, like a meticulously rendered sand castle doomed in mere moments by the incoming tide. Could be a chair and pillow, a…
-
-
My natural inclination is toward the silver linings, buoyancy, resilience, the thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Light followed by dark followed by brighter light. The view from afar, over the long-term. Not letting our daubers down, lemonading from the lemons. First the birth, then the fall, then the grace. I used to think time was on the side of the human project, our capacious brains ultimately squeezing out a net gain for human reason, the virtues of cooperation, and the case for common decency in the face of ignorance, superstition, greed, and fear. That however ceaseless is the struggle for mere survival, humanity would…
-
We were visiting friends at a lakeside cabin in Michigan, four of us seated around a table near the water on hard steel chairs. Mary had two cushions under her tush and I had none. I asked her whether she could share one of her cushions, and she readily consented. As she sat back down, she exclaimed, “Wow, it’s amazing how much difference one cushion makes!” I replied, “Yes it is!” *** Look, I come here not to wag my finger at the basics of capitalism. I’m all in on the profit motive, the spirit of competition, and the value…
-
Gathered a few of my very best friends around me these past days, the morning sun so far south we had to strain against the far northern side of my living room window to catch it piercing the pale winter light through the trees. Thought it unseemly, especially in this time of stout resolutions on the cusp of a new year, not to share some of their reflections with you… *** “Everything passes away—suffering pain blood hunger pestilence. The sword will pass away too but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have…
-
The house adjacent to our back fence (and pictured above) was a stately old matron, the very first in our entire neighborhood, or so we have heard. I used to admire it from the street on my walks when we lived several blocks away. Its deep frontage sported the year-round, unirrigated green lawn common to this part of the world and its more or less 12-month rains that seemed another world altogether for this California-reared boy, used to that state’s annual May through September drought cycle. The home played host to a family for the first couple of years after…