Postcard: Greetings from Maine
June 16, 2022I’m with my family in Portland, picking along the East End beach, a narrow strip of sand, seaweed, shells, and driftwood which follows the...
Postcard: Greetings from Lisbon
Note: With this post, I’m experimenting with a new format: a kind of digital postcard. Shorter, more specifically tied to an image and a momentary experience...
No. 24: Co-working with wrens
Dear Friends,This week I am co-working with wrens.A pair of house wrens have claimed a new birdhouse that I recently installed out back. (My middle kid built...
No. 23: In which I write about writing (and not writing) about travel
Travel writing feels intimidating to me.
No. 22: Middle March
The world feels like it is overflowing with humanity. Perhaps we humans are too much for the world to bear. I’ve noticed something in my daily scrollings: I...
No. 21: I walk down a rural road
A “working farm”I walked down the rural road, south of Irasburg and north of Albany, north of Craftsbury, in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom – or the NEK, as...
No. 20: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Winter berriesDear Friends,I was recently given the opportunity to write and share a brief reflection with the community at the Unitarian Church of...
No. 19: Spinning in circular time
Dear Friends,The turn to the new year already feels long past, or like it never happened. Pandemic time works like that, I guess. I didn’t mark the...
No. 18: One thing I remember from 2021
Sketchbook page, ca. January 2021Dear Friends,On the 20th of January, I spent the morning as I typically do. (Well, I assume it was typical because I don’t...
No. 17: Waiting for nothing
A hot messDear Friends,Damn. The pace, intensity, and heightened anxiety of the past few months has built up like flood waters bearing down on a beaver dam....
No. 16: How to bake cookies in reverse, etc.
Dear Friends,Today, on my 47th birthday, I offer you a gift: A list of titles (47 of course!) of helpful articles that have yet to be written, but maybe...
No. 15: Reading "Moby-Dick, or The Whale"
Dear Friends,Moby Dick is not necessarily a book one approaches on a whim. Getting through it requires patience, focus, persistence, will power. The archaic...
No. 14: We should love language
Dear Friends,Yesterday morning, walking in my usual place, I felt, and then fought, the urge to snap a photo on my phone. Cold morning, hands cracking in the...
No. 13: Typing compels me
Dear Friends,I sit down at a table in our makeshift art/music studio. Makeshift, because the studio is really just a living room that, for our family,...
No. 12: Lashing our lives to the rocks
Dear Friends,I first wrote the words shared below in early April 2020, and then revisited and reworked them over several months. They capture some part of my...
No. 11: Beavers et al
Dear Friends,This summer, the river belongs to the beavers. A colony of beavers – six, seven, or more? how many distinct families? – lives and labors in the...
No. 10: I intuit the subtleties of green things growing
Dear Friends,We left the towering stems of last summer’s sunflowers in the garden – the ones that didn’t topple over, anyway. They’ve been an anchor feature...
No. 9: How would I even ask it?
Dear Friend,Now and then, I’m going to repeat myself. I will bounce echoes of past letters off the walls of my cavernous mind and onto this digital page. I...
No. 8: “the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last”
Dear Friends,I’ve read and listened to more poems over the past year than at any other time in my life, but I don’t consider myself well read. I’m lazy when...
No. 7: Lists
Dear Friends,What lists do you make? Do you write down the things you hope to accomplish in a day? The groceries you need to buy? Do you keep a running list...