Browse Topics
The Natural World
Wanting Things To Be Different
A relapse of Lyme disease: / fever and chills, flickers of pain. / I want to sleep all the time, and my arms ache. / I lie on the steel grate that juts over the stream.
June 2021Lucky Pick
At the library / you can ask for a “lucky pick,” / meaning the librarian will choose / a novel for you based on what you tell her, / like blind dating or a toy / buried deep in the bottom of a box / of cereal, because there are still things / in life that might surprise us.
May 2021Backyard Mercy
A fruit fly fell in my fine crystal glass / half full of five-dollar wine. / Annoyed, I almost flung the final sips / behind a rosebush.
May 2021Small Animals
A few times a year, especially in spring, one of my cats clambers through the flap in the door carrying some fresh dilemma for me.
May 2021Sunbeams
May 2021What has been an ancient spiritual truth is now increasingly verified by science: We are all indivisibly part of one another. We share a common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on earth. The air we breathe contains atoms that have passed through the lungs of ancestors long dead. Our bodies are composed of the same elements created deep inside the furnaces of long-dead stars. We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say — as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact: You are a part of me I do not yet know.
On Nature And The Environment
Can you have a feeling for a tree, look at it, see the beauty of it, listen to the sound it makes; be sensitive to the little plant, to the little weed, to that creeper that is growing up the wall, to the light on the leaves and the many shadows?
May 2021Things To Do In Buffalo, Wyoming, While Waiting Out The Coronavirus
Chop wood, shovel snow, bake bread, / make dinner, and after take the compost / to the bin, nearly full though only half / decomposed.
May 2021The Chicken Equation
To say that the Trump years have taken their toll on our already strained relationship would fall woefully short. It’s like a natural disaster has hit, and I have to keep updating my homeowner’s-insurance claim every time I find more damage.
May 2021Hidden Worlds
Merlin Sheldrake On The Unseen Life Around Us
Fungi are decentralized. They’re able to coordinate their behavior without anything resembling a brain. They can connect perception and action without having a special place to do so. The coordination somehow takes place everywhere at once, and also nowhere in particular.
May 2021Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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