The wind—cooler wind, how great is that?—is up and the evening has barely begun. Wind chimes welcom me home and my cat lazing with a feather bungee toy on the kitchen braided rug. What a joy to return to the smells, the sights, the cooler air of western Oregon…
The wind up, the tenor Gregorian chant wind chime is making its music. The temperature The temperature drops but only slightly, and I hear the horn of inbound (particle board, paper bags, pallets) Willamette & Pacific train…
I will never cease to be amazed how memory, well my memory, works. Yesterday, getting ready for the dinner gathering we were hosting, I was cleaning this and that in the refrigerator. The glass pan of pasta that was our leftover dinner a few nights back was ready to find a new home…
Without opening your door, you can know the whole world, says the Tao te Ching. And I want to believe that, this Monday, 3rd anniversary of the horror-show we wrought in Iraq. I sit in quiet, in stillness; there isn’t even wind in the trees…
I was reminded of this, written last year, after walking at dusk today: My Four Seasons I. In spring, after it stops raining, the sun …
The snow that, this time of year should be rain, tumbles in vertical lines from the sky, pretty and enchanting, more than compatible with the …
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Since last week, this phrase, almost like an excavated mantra, has been echoing in my head. Something with the sense of time running out, or the preciousness of days, with this turning 50 and daring to be realistic and not pretend I’m not likely more than halfway there, my life halfway gone.
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While most of Saturday was consumed by periodic searches for the missing car key—I’d driven myself and the car home on Thursday, it had to be here somewhere—I made time to whip up a batch of Moosewood’s Cream of Broccoli soup, updated by Mollie K.
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A friend turned me on to the four-book series of poetry collected by Roger Housden. Seems the first volume, Ten Poems to Change Your Life came out in the middle of 2001, with the others, Ten Poems to Open Your Heart and Ten Poems to Set You Free, following close behind…
Words to buoy the soul on a sunny February day of snow slowly melting from the winter-green grass and the drip-drip accompaniment from rain gutter eaves:
Walt Whitman in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass—
“Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men—go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers or families—re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.”…
