My first wife, Sue, and I had just spread our hotel towels out on the sand when he came up out of the water nearby, wearing nothing but the turned-down sailor hat that covered his bald head. He strolled by on the way to his wife — sunning equally “au natural” farther up the beach […]
Category Archives: foreign-ness
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,With conquering limbs astride from land to land;Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall standA mighty woman with a torch, whose flameIs the imprisoned lightning, and her nameMother of Exiles. From her beacon-handGlows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes commandThe air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, […]
In junior high and high school, I became interested in stories about World War Two and read dozens of books about the war. I got to know Europe and the Pacific in ways that I never learned in my classes. Of course, I had read National Geographic, Kipling, London, Burroughs and Haggard, so I was […]
“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.” ― Mahatma Gandhi I often read comments from various political conservatives about the need to mandate prayer in schools. Conservatives are also concerned that having Muslim immigrants in […]
A weed is a flower growing in the wrong place. ~ George Washington Carver The crew was clearing the Texas ranch of mesquite trees, using a bulldozer and drag chain. Then the small group of “illegals” would pile up the small trees and brush for burning. It was dirty work, and between the heavy equipment, […]
Sometimes it is a little better to travel than to arrive. ~ Robert M. Persig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I don’t watch horror movies, but a consistent plot seems to be that someone builds a new house over an old cemetery, and the evil dead rise up through the floor to terrorize […]
“Building a wall, establishing a camp, creating a new border force, stopping the boats – these are all political shorthand for decisive action. Even if they don’t amount to much in the end, they give the impression of control amid chaos, and they hold out the hope of immediate results.” ~ Anne Gallagher The migrant […]
Bright green hills hedged with vivid gold or white and dotted with scattered woolly lumps — many larger ones accompanied by one or more springy smaller ones. Springtime in the English and Scottish countryside means lambs, lots and lots of lambs. I am familiar with the cartoon lambs that leap and bound and wiggle their […]
At the same time that we’re solving for climate change, we’re going to be building cities for three billion people. That’s a doubling of the urban environment. ~Peter Calthorpe Nationalism seems to be sweeping the U.S. and Europe, but maybe it’s just a pushback against natural forces. I remember reading that R. Buckminster Fuller saw […]
One learns that it takes more than a collection of trees to make a forest, as we know it in this country. Unless they house that spirit of wildness and purity like a temple, they fail to satisfy. John Burroughs, Fresh Fields The sand around the greasewood bush on the dune was bare except for […]
Writes of Nature 