I spent the middle of May — just after classes ended, even before turning in my grades — in a fever of garden work, reclaiming a quackgrass-infested lily bed and moving and spreading a giant pile of mulch and constructing a long-dreamed-of raised bed by hand. All of this I did by myself, in one […]
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 moreSmall is beautiful, and big: writing, opening, embarking on Lent.
“Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be ‘uneconomic,’ you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.” — E.F. Schumacher, Small Is […]
Read moreThe humility wheel.
Pottery class, day three. Clay in hair. Clay in eyelashes. Clay on neck. Clay on shirt and jeans. Clay on sandals, tracked inadvertently across studio floor. Clay deep in cuticles. Hands and arms trembling when held out to examine clay deep in cuticles; I’m still trying for less muscular effort and better touch, but kneading, […]
Read moreSomebody made this: who?
This morning, I took my first-ever pottery class, in the spacious studio in our college’s arts center, with a generous colleague, George, and a large group of students, several of whom had been in my classes before. I’m here on sabbatical, I said, to learn, just like you are. And the relief of being among […]
Read moreDiets, labels, and a local life.
Some great conversations with my yoga teacher, a nutritionist, and other good friends and advisors lately — along with traveling, walking, and experiencing a bad blood-sugar crash in foreign places — have set me one stage deeper on a path of reinvention from the inside out: in addition to biking a lot during this fall’s […]
Read moreA Cheapskate Romanticist abroad.
“Experience enlarges the space for the self to swim in.” – George Eliot, from a manuscript in “Writing Britain” at the British Library. A month of travel has left me with more than I can say, and more than I can put into words, even to myself, even as I’m settling into a fall sabbatical […]
Read moreStrawberries and sabbaticals.
“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 moreLet the garden be itself.
When 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 more