The Act of Creation
“It was during the Renaissance that creativity was first seen, not as a conduit for the divine, but from the abilities of “great men.” –wikipedia So I was riffing on this notion that creativity was not even a word until…
Category Reflections
Stories About Stories or Not
Thirteen years ago this week I had been blogging for three months, and instant publishing was all fresh and enlivening. My HERE and my WHO were unknown but apparently of some interest to others who would become regular Fragments readers.…
One Man’s Junk: Info-Hoarding
I confess to being a hoarder. My wife would say that my desk offers ample piled-higher-and-deeper evidence of that claim, but I actually need just so much disordered STUFF around me to make my mind seem like a relatively organized…
The Worms Crawl In: The Marvel of Death Part One
Walking back to the house from where the bear had left his calling card (in yesterday’s post), we noticed a commotion on the ground near the bridge over the branch. The ground seemed to be boiling with eyeballs–the dark spots…
Our Martins
The tall pole for three years held up an empty two-story penthouse that could have sheltered up to a dozen pairs of purple martins and their young. Until this spring, those little hotel rooms were empty, and only once before–early…
Thoughts About Place
It started out as an assignment, sort of, for Tommy Bailey’s book, Floyd Folks. Which, btw, if purchased in town (say, at the Floyd Community Market) will send proceeds to support the market. The version of my little part of…
Cat Does Not Have Blogger’s Tongue
While it does not register even the tiniest twitch on the digital Richter Scale, it’s kind of a big deal on my personal storyline (circa 2002) when there are few words and pixels here at Fragments for much of May…
Seeing the End: What Would You Say?
After a night on the futon to distance my contagion from the wife, I’ve admitted at the end of four days of symptom creep that I probably have a cold–nothing more than that, most likely. It has been a couple…
Bless the Beasts and the Children
You may remember the lyrics from the song made popular by the Carpenters. The lyrics come to mind, painfully to an aging BoZo (part botanist, part zoologist) as I witness the winking out in my lifetime the extinction of life…
Longing: The South West Coast Trail
Totally opposed to my notion, nay my resolution–to use my time more wisely in the mornings, I once again found myself browsing at random by way of Google Earth. This is a lens on the planet through which I could…
Three Dog Night
By all rights we should not have had a very small puppy in a wire crate next to our bed on the morning of December 19, three years ago. When Tsuga died suddenly on December 5, we vowed we’d live…
Committees. Commitment. Community: Common Unity.
We just celebrated, at Thanksgiving, our fifteenth year of living in the Floyd County outback. We are isolated, sequestered, cloistered in this deep valley and there is good in that separation and solitude. Humans need and seek out just this…
Wind and Whimsy
It’s an ominous symptom from a blogging-post point of view. I look at a list of potential topics I have been exploring–some of which are supported by a list of a few pertinent links. Some, like “synthetic biology” and “transhuman…
Blogging Under a Bushel
“Hide it under a bushel NO: I’m gonna let it shine.” For some reason, an ancient memory rose to the surface this snow-blanketed week, the combination of thought-bits and ponderings and a snatch of melody out of the ethers. And…