Clotheslining is a big deal here in Cheapskate-Intellectual-land, so the first warm and windy day is a big deal too. As soon as I saw the sun and smelled the breeze, I knew it was time. So familiar and delightful to pull that cord across the yard and hook it up and tote the basket […]
Read moreOwnlife vs. Internet?
“…at the same time I felt so strongly the pull of another thing, a thing having to do with music, freedom, the future, individuality. This is an important reason why I became a writer, I think, for in everything I write, I am seeking freedom, which to me is a state that is inaccessible to […]
Read moreHarpooning the comet.
Struggling to absorb the wondrousness of Philae, the observatory device shot into space this week to stick to and photograph a comet, I can only fasten on the verb: harpooning. It’s a suitable invocation of an attempt to fasten ourselves to mystery, to the curved back of the large beast hurtling past our limited world […]
Read moreIf that don’t beet all…
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 moreYo, Thoreau.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived [….] Our life is frittered away by detail […] Simplify, simplify.” […]
Read moreDreams of sun.
There’s a particular kind of sleep that waits for you when you’ve been outside working all day, especially in a garden: a kind of heavy, instant falling-off that nevertheless feels light, as if your sleep-sodden body might lift and rise at any moment and crack and sprout into something you’ve never known till then you […]
Read moreThe twentysomething brain (and beyond.)
(from my manuscript-in-progress) Significantly, Buddhists call looking at an object or emotion steadily for some time and processing the emotions that arise “sustaining the gaze.” The ability to “sustain the gaze” without distraction from within or without is the ability to rest in the relative stability of a mature understanding of reality, to pay attention […]
Read moreLet there be light.
On an ordinary November afternoon I sit on a chair in my eye doctor’s dim exam room, chin in the camera-machine, straining not to blink against the stinging dilation drops leaking through my lashes. A white flash jolts straight to the back of my head. And then, there on the screen are photographs of my […]
Read moreFirst snow, new light.
The first snow of the season started coming down as I hurried to substitute for a colleague’s 8 am class this morning – Seamus Heaney-esque sleet-milt came in pats and splats against the umbrella, white rims thickening. By the time I left the building it had thickened to actual snow, soft and fast and intent […]
Read moreDarwin’s Beetle: On geeking out.
I wrote this for another “official” college blog but want to share it here. Darwin’s beetle: On geeking out October 23, 2013 Our first-year common course doesn’t fit into neat disciplinary boxes, and that’s the point. Ranging across literature, history, philosophy and science, it’s not designed to convey “expertise” in any one field but to […]
Read more