“The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb […]
Read more“Who Made That Clothespin?”
Read moreWhen the flash of orange caught my eye from the upstairs window a week ago, I knew what it had to be: the first orange poppy of the spring, risen from the thick tangles of sawtoothed leaves and fuzzy buds that get thicker every year. And it was. This has been a weird spring, eerily […]
Read moreThis stem of Hibiscus mutabilis, a.k.a. Confederate rose, flourishes in a Mason jar on my kitchen counter, ready for repotting. Its mother plant, originally a cutting from my parents’ yard in Alabama, is resprouting too. Last summer I planted a cutting like this in my yard to see whether, as the plant encyclopedia promised, it […]
Read morehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fbahS7VSFs&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3] Young parents laugh nervously as they film their child, whom they have placed up against the glass of a lioness’s cage in a zoo. Behind the glass, the lioness is deadly serious: she scratches and bites the barrier separating her from one good bite of food. Incredibly, the father giggles, “Say hi, kitty, kitty.” […]
Read moreBack on the bike for a big day of riding today, the first in too long a time, under a sky so blue it hurt to look at it. This was the kind of sunny, windy April day that has you taking your fleece jacket off, then putting it on again, over and over. On […]
Read moreAh, loyal readers, where to begin? So much has been happening offscreen lately. Bidding gleeful goodbyes to Rick “Torquemada” Santorum (as Bob has dubbed him.) Gearing up for some local action on May 5 (stay tuned.) Ending a Lenten Facebook fast with the desire — which I don’t see changing any time soon — to […]
Read moreIn Florida, an unarmed boy with dark brown skin, walking to a convenience store for some candy, is shot by a jittery, self-styled “neighborhood watch” vigilante. The reasoning of the white shooter and his supporters — who erupt all over the Internet and the political sphere, with astonishing malice and vindictiveness — is dismally transparent. […]
Read moreThis season of hesitant and lovely changes began with a scrim of ash that colors the skin underneath, that asks us to look and wait in the times of boredom and worry and anomie, because something more is coming. It always moves me at Lent, the sober lines of people moving from the altar back […]
Read moreYesterday I went to Minneapolis to buy some sorely needed new clothes. Just a few good pieces that I was lucky enough to find on sale. This afternoon — energized by what Marilynne Robinson in Housekeeping called the “swift, watery wind” blowing all around my neighborhood, and feeling it disarranging me in a good way, […]
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