Gods
When my older sister, Ellen, was 4 or 5, she and a neighbor girl were playing in the front yard of our Berkeley house. The friend, who lived across the street, was the daughter of a…
Category: Essays
Adored
This weekend, I did not lift my emotional or mental eyes to Washington D.C. To the unfathomable horror—the selfishness, the cruelty, the venality, the chaos being legitimized there. Dante’s exact nine circles of hell made manifest…
Falling
Yesterday, I watched a trio of middle-schoolers leaping down the street. Full blown leaping. Launching up beyond a jump, hovering in mid-air, and coming down in a beautiful curve. They seemed to possess utter confidence in body…
Blest Be the Tie that Binds
Blessed be the tie that binds Our hearts in Christian love; The fellowship of kindred mindsIs like that to that above. Before our Father’s throne We pour our ardent prayers;Our fears, our hopes, our aims are one Our comforts…
Whatever is Lovely . . .
“Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything is worthy of praise, dwell…
Cottonwood Elegy
Just outside the little hamlet of Simms, I passed two sets of farm buildings defined by L-shaped rows of gigantic old cottonwoods. Splintered, raggedy, surrounded by tumbles of fallen branches. But trying their best to…
Time Machine
I drove the Grizzly Gulch-Unionville loop last weekend on a day so perfect, so clean and blue and radiant I couldn’t stay inside. 44 years ago, soon after my arrival in Montana, colleagues at the…
Naive Art
I love art: old masters, sculptures, cartoons, line drawings, wood-cuts, assemblages, pictographs, color-drenched quilts, rich abstracts, the sweet simple studies of a face or a body or a cat. We worshipped Mother’s stormy sea painting…
Heat
I adore these sun-scorched days. Days I begin by tucking up the house to capture the night’s cool. And end when I open the windows, crank up the fans, and revel in the downward slide…
More–More
Six weeks ago I “enjoyed” a bout of malaise—ultimately tamed by art that spoke of grace, of acceptance. I was fresh off a winter of recovering from knee surgery—and for good measure—kidney stones and bronchitis….