Benjamin Franklin once remarked, “Experience is a dear school, but a fool will learn in no other.” Put another way, knowledge can be expensive, but a little pain can make it stick. Put a third way, I will never again — even in the fall, no matter how busy this busy time always is — […]
Read moreDogs in the road: encountering fear.
Last Sunday I was finishing up a 2-day, 40-mile bike ride to celebrate my 40th birthday, and it took me past a house where I knew there were dogs. They’d barked at me before but never left the yard; I didn’t even see any there this time. Nevertheless I geared up and pedaled harder, just […]
Read moreEssentializing the animal: owls, war horses, and poetry.
Coming out of my office late this afternoon, I spotted a barred owl up in a tree outside the building, hunched against the trunk, squinching his eyes against the light and stoically standing off a pair of crows who were hassling him. I got concerned, especially when he was still there at dark a couple […]
Read moreCreature tracks.
What is it about a swimming animal that is just so endlessly delightful? Don’t know. But biking past the sloughs down near the river yesterday — yes, I did spend the first real sunny afternoon of spring up in the office, grading — I spotted the twin arrows of paddling-muskrat-wakes, heading away. They spotted me […]
Read morePigs among the windfalls.
September, with the smell of fall caught and blowing around in the trees as Keats inevitably rustles inside my head: season of mists and mellow fruitfulness…. One afternoon I take a break from my massive sabbatical writing project — which features among other things Keats (of course), John Cage, Marina Abramovic, yoga, gardening, pottery, snails, […]
Read moreTouching through the glass: animals, people, reality.
https://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 moreThe earth’s thin skin.
This 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 moreA vermicular update — and some home composting lessons.
A couple of posts ago, you read about my new experiment in home vermicomposting. But since then I’ve learned there’s definitely a right way and a wrong way to go about it. Basically, I now wish I’d started with one of these pictured here — a Worm Factory 360 — from the beginning rather than […]
Read moreAnimals in heaven: an addition.
If you liked my Annie-the-cat post, you will appreciate this cartoon from a friend’s Facebook wall, by New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti. Of course the dog would recognize his little boy.
Read moreGettin’ worms.
The kitchen of your mama’s house in Alabama is not the best place to announce to your family – all human and animal doctors whose lives are full of horses, cattle, and dogs — that you are about to embark on home vermiculture. Especially if you phrase it, casually, “Hey, y’all, when I get back […]
Read more