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Field Observations

An Interview With Wendell Berry

The first necessity is to teach the young. If we teach the young what we already know, we would do outlandishly better than we’re doing. Knowledge is overrated, you know. There have been cultures that did far better than we do, knowing far less than we know. We need to see that knowledge is overrated, but also that knowledge is not at all the same thing as “information.” There’s a world of difference — Wes Jackson helped me to see this — between that information to which we now presumably have access by way of computers, libraries, and the rest of it, great stockpiles of data, and the knowledge that people have in their bones by which they do good work and live good lives.

My Cockroach Diary

“Lately when I open the cupboard doors,” my wife said, “a cockroach usually falls on my head. It’s really obnoxious.” I’ve noticed it, too. Are they leaning on the doors more than they used to?

The Birds Of Silicon Valley

My job was to write computer training programs. But sometimes my mind wandered, and I turned to look out the window at the people in the parking lot, the cars on the street, and, especially from my sixth-floor cubicle, the birds that soared in the gulf of air between me and the ground.

Deep Blue Flower

Storms

A classmate remembered, a card playing grandmother, a Hurricane Andrew survivor

Storm

It was too hot to do anything except wait for the heat to end, wait for rain. Wait on the red brick porch, down at the end of our street where the road made a wide, looping turn, disappearing into a tangled mess of kudzu vines.

What The Universe Remembers

An Interview With Rupert Sheldrake

My theory is concerned with self-organizing natural systems and the cause of form. The cause of all these forms, I believe, is organizing fields, form-shaping fields, which I call morphic fields, from the Greek word for form. I’m saying that the forms of societies, ideas, crystals, and molecules all depend on the way previous ones have been organized. There’s a kind of built-in memory in the morphic fields of each thing.

The Night Crawlers

Something that seems made of earth itself, but alive like us / — but can’t be, wouldn’t be / thought of in the same sentence, purely a wriggling verb / not subject, dangling modifier / to what is left unsaid.

Swaying Slightly In Geoff’s Hammock

Lullaby