“He went to Paris, looking for answers, to questions that bothered him so.” ~ “He Went to Paris”, Jimmy Buffet A few years ago my sister was unable to get email or easy phone access and so we wrote letters to each other — most often weekly. In a letter, you have time to tell […]
“Stop, I’ve gotta go,” Sammy directed, and I pulled off the dirt track next to a deep arroyo. My Navajo assistant liked to pee off of high places, and I joined him at the edge. Off in the distance, across the sage-covered desert, a pair of small mesas shimmered in the summer heat. It wasn’t […]
Some people walk in the rain; others just get wet. ~ Roger Miller It’s easy for me to get depressed these days. Heat waves and glacial melting present as dire warnings that climate change is here and not just some far-off threat that may plague future generations. National politics have become horribly malicious, and so […]
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” ~ Margaret Attwood My father’s garden was a small area about ten-foot by ten against the south side of the house that got intense sun early in the day, but was shaded in the afternoon. He didn’t start a garden until […]
Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss. The language of hunting has a word for such mark-making: ‘foil’. A creature’s ‘foil’ is its track. The path’s sediment comprised sentiment, and to follow a path might therefore […]
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil” ― William Shakespeare, Hamlet Hamlet came across the bones of an old friend, Yorick (that some claim he knew well). In those days, in Europe and elsewhere, people […]
Imagine that when you walked in here this evening, you discovered that everybody in the room looked almost exactly the same: ageless, raceless, generically good-looking … That is the kind of creepy transformation that is taking over cities, only it applies to buildings, not people. ~ Justin Davidson Our hotel was in one of the […]
And what was even more striking to me, and what I really got hung up on, was that the world inside the screen seemed to have no physical reality of its own. ~ Andrew Blum “It was just waste. Nobody wanted it and it cost too much to recondition, so we just dumped it.” He […]
Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. ~ Arthur Ashe A few years ago I became intrigued by the concept of ‘carbon footprint’, the sum of all the greenhouse gases — like carbon dioxide — emitted by someone’s actions. Early on, the size of your footprint was represented by the […]
The creatures I met in the fields and woods around my house came to feel like a secret family, though I spent a lot of time chasing and catching them and not thinking much about how that made them feel. ~ Helen Macdonald The loud noise came from across the alley, and I was curious […]
