Writing is Remembering
"Orchid" by Andrey Grinkevich on Unsplash. Sometimes I become so focussed on achieving a particular goal that I miss the significance and beauty of other things, of other people, even the reason I had the goal in the first place. When my son was in elementary school, learning the multiplication tables, he found them challenging. … Continue reading One Times One Is One
Pedro Figari - El gaucho Candioti. In his essay, “Circles,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, the 19th-century American lecturer, poet, and philosopher, wrote: “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” that is to say, without intense, eager, enjoyment or passion. Enthusiasm is unplanned. Indeed, one can’t plan for it. But it is an always-welcome guest in our lives. … Continue reading A Strongly-Marked Picture
Plate 106 Black Vulture or Carrion Crow, John James Audubon. In Chapter 3 of The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin describes his work identifying the carrion-feeding hawks of South America. He writes the following about two of them—Carranchas and Chimangos. These false eagles most rarely kill any living bird or animal; and their vulture-like, … Continue reading A Token for His Protection
Palm Trees and Boulders in the Bay of Rio, Brazil. Marianne North. Date: 1873. One of the distinct pleasures of travel is the opportunity to eat and to drink in new places, to partake of local things, in situ: to dine on Neapolitan pizza cooked in wood-fueled ovens in the bustling port of Naples, for … Continue reading Anything You Choose, Sir!
A Bank of Quaresma and Trumpet Trees, Brazil. Marianne North, Date: 1873. This past weekend, I visited, for the first time, a tropical rainforest, one near San Salvador, Brazil. I had the absolute best of guides, a young Englishman, only twenty-three years old. His enthusiasm about nature was infectious. I was in the company of … Continue reading In a Tropical Rainforest
Ophelia, John Everett Millais, 1852. I was eleven years old when my mother enrolled me in the Boy Scouts of America. There was a Troop at my elementary school, and eleven was the minimum age to become a Tenderfoot Scout, the beginning rank in the Scouts at the time I joined. I don’t recall asking … Continue reading The Readiness Is All
Perspective: Madame Recamier by David. René Magritte, 1949. Once, after accompanying my wife to the train station, I got lost walking home. Fortunately, I had my phone with me; unfortunately, it was not a smartphone. I called my wife. “I’m lost,” I said. “Where are you standing?” she asked. I told her that I was … Continue reading Where Are You Standing?
