Category: mystery

Mycelia, manuscripts, and me: 360 degrees of life.

“[We must think of fungi] not as a thing but as a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency.” – Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures       Fungi burst borders and boundaries. Of matter, of thought, of mental categories. They tendril between previously discrete things […]

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Barking at the angel.

On the top floor of the Accademia in Florence, in an overlooked panel of a medieval altarpiece, is an image that’s easy to ignore: a shepherd’s dog, barking at the angel who’s suddenly appeared to rouse the obviously startled shepherds from their sleep. There were shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks […]

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“Gaze Upon This World” is now an ORION Father’s Day feature.

Thanks to the good folks at ORION Magazine for featuring my essay about my late father, “Gaze Upon This World,” online as a Father’s Day special, with an updated introduction from me. Previously print-only, this piece (workshopped with Scott Russell Sanders at the 2016 Bread Loaf/Orion Environmental Writers Workshop) is now online. They’ve also been […]

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Touching the glacier: teaching the Romantics in a world on fire.

From the introduction-in-progress to my book-in-progress A Thing of Beauty: Reading the Romantics in a World on Fire. All photos by me. – A glittering blue day at the top of the world: Montenvers in the Alps above Chamonix, France. January 15, 2020. Elevation 6276 feet. Everything here is ice and rock and sky. Look […]

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Powering up in Kings Cross.

At first they look like sites of human sacrifice, some kind of Victorian Thunderdome-meets-Coliseum on the banks of the sweet Regents Canal with its houseboats and its ducks – round rings of iron columns, enclosing a space somehow charged, vaguely menacing. Step inside the circle and do battle! But they’re actually called gas holders, or […]

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Little bitty Christmas trees.

A rerun from 2011 that’s been on my mind. Merry Christmas, y’all. — “I’ve been a pastor for more than 15 years, and I am still amazed at folks in nursing homes, many unable to remember the majority of their own lives, who will begin to sing and nod and clap when they hear Christmas […]

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Harpooning 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 […]

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Dreams 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 […]

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