“I want you to keep your dignity,” I say. You look at me. I see the confusion, the blank stare, the quiver of panic that lingers at the edge of your eyes and in the taut skin below your jaw. “I know,” you say. But you don’t say anything else. I can barely control what happens inside me, […]
When I walk along the street, the imagery is vital and immediate. A strong jaw. Her lips make deep creases when they purse. He’s got his shoulders thrown back like he’s been congratulated about something that he didn’t do. Her forehead is pressed forward as if she’s looking into life through a plate glass window. That […]
How do you know that? Have you been there to see? And if you had been there to see, and had seen none, that would not prove that there were none … And no one has a right to say that no water babies exist till they have seen no water babies existing, which is […]
Each place you go, don’t look for the thing that is different. Look for the thing that is the same. That is your starting point, the anchor. I can share the experience. We aren’t alone. But we can’t find each other inside all the noise. We have to look out into the quiet, strip the […]
Her name was Arline. She was my father’s mother. She died in 1949 when my father was 16. We knew very little about her growing up. In the early 1980’s, after my grandfather died, a letter arrived at the house from my father’s aunt Marie who was six years younger than her sister. My parents were […]
When I still believed in fairies, I walked alone up a mountain in the west of Ireland, the bog slipping away as I pushed along a faint trail past a hidden lake and beyond a stony ridge. I believed I was someone who walked alone in the wild, but I wasn’t. I was in a fevered […]
A human being is part of a whole…[but] he experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest…This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison […]
On a trail I walk there is an old tree that has given up life but stands rooted stolidly in the ground. The trunk is thick and black. The seasons have embalmed it. The wood is so hard that the bark won’t break off in your hands. The boys pick up stray scraps that have been […]
These young men are waving goodbye as they start the 1000 mile trek from Pittsburg to New Orleans. They’ll skirt the Allegheny Mountains, pass into Tennessee and pick up the Jackson Military Road for the final 400 mile descent to the Mississippi Delta and the bayous and great swamps surrounding New Orleans. They are following […]
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. Henry David Thoreau The enemy of our soul is the experience of anonymity. Thoreau was misguided in his instinct to separate himself from the people around him and to envision their lives as empty and useless. The […]