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The Natural World
The Hurricane
I write this at my parents’ home in Brooklyn as Hurricane Irene is approaching. Citizens are flocking to stores, buying out shelves of food. The mayor and the governor are issuing stern warnings. The television is talking nonstop, calling it a “monster storm,” measuring its winds at 105 miles per hour. This may be the “Storm of the Century.”
May 2012
Reading The Water
For the last seven years, my father and I have kayaked a thirty-six-mile portion of Oregon’s Rogue River each August. We run the river in an inflatable kayak, him reading the water and me providing the manpower to paddle the boat through world-class rapids.
April 2012
The Butterfly Effect
Julia Butterfly Hill On Activism, Tax Resistance, And What She Learned From A Thousand-Year-Old Redwood
Yet I remind people that what’s referred to as a single tree-sitting action was, for me, 738 separate days: twenty-four hours in a day; sixty minutes in an hour; sixty seconds in a minute. It was the moment-by-moment process that transformed me.
April 2012
White Lady Of Once A Week
The child lolls half-asleep in the front seat. / “Why do it start and then stop?” The rain, she means. / “The clouds are banging into each other,” I tell her, / which is what someone told me when I was her age, seven.
March 2012After the e-mail saying you forgave me
It was about the time the first / poplar leaves turn yellow. / The cottonmouth, thick as a muscular arm, / slid into the water at my feet.
March 2012Snowstorm
Heavy, wet snow all morning, then by noon / the clouds wrung dry, whipped away, / the sky so brilliant after the viewing / and graveside service for our youngest
January 2012excerpted from
The Sense Of Wonder
If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength. . . .
January 2012Contemplation On Rain And Religion
I always feel more religious in the sunshine, / especially if it’s not hot and the place is pretty / and most people can’t afford to get there or just / don’t bother. Morning has broken and all that.
December 2011Pirate With A Cause
Paul Watson’s Crusade To Protect Marine Wildlife
A few minutes later the harpoon flew over our bow and just missed our boat. It rammed into the back of one of the female whales in the pod in front of us. She screamed, and it sounded like a woman screaming. It was really quite shocking. Then she rolled over on her side in a fountain of blood, dying.
October 2011
excerpted from
The Lives Of A Cell
Notes Of A Biology Watcher
We have become, in a painful, unwished-for way, nature itself. We have grown into everywhere, spreading like a new growth over the entire surface, touching and affecting every other kind of life, incorporating ourselves.
September 2011
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