Writing is Remembering
Photo by Chris Child, unsplash.com. It was lovely out in the country. Summer had come; the wheat in the fields was golden, the oats were still green, and the new-mown hay had been built into haystacks in the meadow, where the storks walked around on their long red legs talking to each other in Egyptian.The … Continue reading He Had Grown into a Swan
Passamaquoddy Bay, New Brunswick, Canada. Photo by the author, 2019. For more than thirty years, I spent at least part of almost every summer in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. I would stay at a log cabin overlooking Passamaquoddy Bay, about ten miles from the town of St. Andrews. When I was still at … Continue reading Three Things There Are
The Water Garden, by Childe Hassam, 1909. It is the rainy season in Beersheba, Israel, where I live. After the long, hot, dry summer, I relish now the time of rain. Jewish liturgy notes the change in the “Amidah,” the “Standing Prayer.” The summer words in the second blessing—“He causes the dew to descend”—change to … Continue reading Lightning for a Pen
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
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
