Featured Selections
From the Archives
Homage To A Sorcerer
Carlos Castaneda has died. There aren’t many to bear witness to or for him, because he didn’t allow many witnesses. One met him by invitation, usually, and even that was more fluke than not. Those invited were of all sorts. I happened to be one, for reasons that weren’t clear to me and probably aren’t important. Perhaps I was called to be a witness?
March 1999Foxglove Canyon
It rained last night, and this morning there’s a heavy mist hanging low over the Blue Ridge Mountains, like a Sunday dress over a grandmother’s sagging breasts. This is the last place I’ll work, the end of the trail, my final stop: Shady Rest Nursing Home.
February 1998Losing Gretchen
Had I known she was so large and that her leaving would create this cavernous emptiness, I would have fallen to my knees each morning and worshiped her. I would have strewn flowers at her feet, and I would have cherished every smile, every glance from her eyes, every word from her lips.
June 1996Warm Regards
Three-year-old Jersey Lem leaned forward and rested his chin on his tan, plump forearms, which bridged the handlebars of his tricycle. There was an invisible force field that ran between the last square of concrete sidewalk and the driveway of the house next door.
April 1996Call Of The Wild
Bernie Krause On The Disappearing Music Of The Natural World
Nearly 50 percent of the habitats where I’ve made recordings over the past forty-plus years have been so severely damaged that they’re now either biophonically silent or altered to the point of being unrecognizable.
September 2014
Trains, Planes, And Godhead
When I was in my teens and early twenties, I’d sometimes run out to meet the Burlington Northern trains as they made their slow progress through the Colorado town of Fort Collins.
November 1992The Desert Within
Douglas Christie On The Power Of Silence And Contemplation
There was a value placed on listening as closely as possible to the mysterious silence that supports existence, which is both the actual silence of the desert landscape and the silence of the self in contemplation.
December 2021
excerpted from
Sonny’s Blues
Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about.
March 2011
How I Went Punk
Researching the Clash’s lyrics online, I was startled to discover that they rhyme — though the words are impossible to understand! How touching, like putting on your best shirt to visit your blind aunt.
November 2010
