Something about Christmas mixes emotion and memory like no other time. This is the hinge of the year, the liminal space where we could step one way or another way, where we can and can’t see what’s coming. Where we cannot avoid thinking about our relationship to time and how we perceive the world as […]
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 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 moreYour native town, and the world.
“Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.” – Victor Frankenstein to Robert Walton, Frankenstein; […]
Read moreCommon ground: politics, water, and life.
Checking my email on what is going to be my last full morning in Alabama for a while, I found some very troubling news: fracking may be coming to our beautiful little corner of northeast Iowa. You might say it’s technically not fracking, since the proposed mine in Allamakee County would be for what’s called […]
Read moreWhat is this “little extra” – really?
Summer is here, with its higher level of activity — and time for me to take two yoga classes a week instead of just one. Among yoga’s many benefits is a higher level of awareness of your body, what it is really asking you for when you eat or drink, what all that stress is […]
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 moreRoots.
This 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 more“No pleasure but meanness.”
Near the end of Flannery O’Connor’s classic short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” an old woman gets drawn into bargaining for her life with a killer. The Misfit, as he’s known, is escaped from prison and rampaging, wounded, through the world. In his own mind, he’s been wounded by God: he can’t […]
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 more