Bone 1. Understand, I am always trying to figure out what the soul is, and where hidden, and what shape – and so, last week, when I found on the beach the ear bone of a pilot whale that may have died hundreds of years ago, I thought maybe I was close to discovering something [...]
My father’s brother, Jonathan, died in the 80s at the age of 36. I don’t remember very much about his service (I was 8 or 9) but I do remember my father, brown-haired and glossy-eyed, wearing a dark suit, standing at the pulpit of the church and reading High Flight by John Magee. His voice [...]
I mean, by such flightiness, something that feels unsatisfied at the center of my life – that makes me shaky, fickle, inquisitive, and hungry. I could call it a longing for home and not be far wrong. Or I could call it a longing for whatever supersedes, if it cannot pass through, understanding. Other words [...]
All through our gliding journey, on this day as on so many others, a little song runs in through my mind. I say a song because it passes musically, but it is really just words, a thought that is neither strange nor complex. In fact, how strange it would be not to think it – [...]
Emily (softly, more in wonder than in grief): I can’t bear it. They’re so young and beautiful. Why did they ever have to get old? Mama, I’m here. I’m grown up. I love you all, everything. – I can’t look at everything hard enough. …. Emily (in a loud voice to the Stage Manager): I [...]
There is no way for me to adequately convey my admiration, respect – hell, sheer hero-worship of – for Anne Lamott. This essay could have been crafted from my own thoughts. Admittedly, she took my fractured, ugly, disjointed thoughts and fashioned them into beautiful whole cloth. But what else is new. She also cites something [...]
There is, all around us, this country of original fire. You know what I mean. The sky, after all, stops at nothing, so something has to be holding our bodies in its rich and timeless stables or else we would fly away. *** Off Stellwagen off the Cape, the humpbacks rise. Carrying their tonnage of [...]
Last year, I read a book about a man named Wilson Bentley, who coined the phrase “No two snowflakes are alike.” He is the one who discovered the actual reality that no two snowflakes are geometrically the same. Bentley was a New England farmer who fell in love with the beauty and individuality of snowflakes…. [...]
THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron [...]
“What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers [...]
