Category Reflections

Last Things

It is starting to sink in that this is not a drill. This is not the projection of some future possibility that one day, we would leave this place, dead or alive. This is an acceptance, almost, that one day,…

A Pocket Full of Seeds…

…is not a garden. And maybe 75 stories, essays and sylvan ramblings does not make a book. That is the judgment, I think, in the minds and profit-making needs of perhaps most publishers of books. They are used to (and…

Status: UNK

That’s not exactly right. FUTURE status UNK, but when is that not the case? Just sometimes more UNK than others. And we are in one of those times, I suppose, on Goose Creek and on Planet Earth. Where do we…

Awe and the Ordinary

Author’s Note ~ Slow Road Home: I know this from my photographer’s experience: any image I take is one of a kind. Each composition in light or in words is unique. The light will never be that color from that…

The Personal Origins of Awe

In another life, if I could pull the threads together, from beginning to end (well, not all the way to finish at which point I won’t be doing any typing) I would start and end that tapestry with AWE. I…

Old Yeller Comes Home

Part Five of Five And so in anticipation of these prolonged agonizing escaped-convict chases, we’d take two leashes, two walkie-talkies, and two containers of useless treats, knowing we might be at the task for far more time than we wanted,…

Not Exactly Bored

I am plagued or blessed–depending on the way I squint my eyes when I reflect on the things that fill my vision at various moments on any day of the week–with a lot of interests. I guess I just don’t…

April 16, 2007 and the Problem of Pain

This is a far more weighty subject than anyone should jump into casually. So forgive me for doing just that, in a way, with a brief morning post. For so many families, the sting of this day remains sharp and…

Gandy, Going, Gone

Gandy is gone as of an hour ago, after seven years and four months. That’s a lot of dog years, and they were good ones. She had an enchanted life on Goose Creek after being a rescue puppy that could…

It’s a Wonder-Full Life

I am happy to be often stopped in my tracks by wonder, but I wonder what exactly that is. I know it when I feel it (or mostly when I have felt it, too immersed in the object of that…

Saturday Shorts

â–ºI often thought, when looking up at a crop of walnuts, that it would hurt mightily to be hit by one of those things. I was right. A glancing blow and no permanent damage done, but this time of year,…

February Snow 2005

At midnight  silence beckoned. It told that snow had fallen. I rose to stand listening, fingertips pressed together at a windowsill alter. Creeks flow, hushed and reverent. In a vast forest the size of cities, she and I are the only human…