Water spills over the cliffs, bashing itself against the granite again and again, dropping down into plunge pools dozens of feet below. It does not die.
Water drops from highest sky, yet does not shatter.
Not imprisoned in a skeletal shape, water sculpts the bones.
Water assumes no form, and so it is every form.
Ice and cloud, storm […]
Help me! I’m in heaven and I can’t get out! I thought as I swung through the moments.
I maundered through a riparian gallery of muddied maple and soggy sycamore on the banks of the Des Plaines River. River and I threaded together under the shuddering I-294 bridge. When I turned my back to the traffic, […]
My sister, a fellow woods walker, has often admonished me about the dangers of tick infestation, particularly the eastern wood tick. Ticks seem disgusting suckers. Members of the arachnid family along with spiders, mites and a host of other eight-legged extraterrestrials, ticks seem to me disgusting little suckers. Illinois forests contain thousands of white tail […]
On the Grand Canyon’s North Rim, across gravel roads 39 miles from Jacob Lake, I arrive at Parissawampitts Point, a vista point just west of the National Park. The forecast calls for rain over several days. The rim cools down, devoid of people in its early October mien near the NPS closing point of the […]
The day before Halloween. It seems too strange to call it All Hallows Eve Eve. The road to the Colorado Overlook in Canyonlands National Park, Utah, is paved with hazardous jutting claws of rock snarling from lips of stair-step drops “which visitors may avoid by parking on the road and walking to the overlook.” And […]
It took me all day, but I arrived in the early afternoon. Headstones brooded over the flat, like the ruins of old, ceremonial crypts in which a dynasty from another geologic epoch were interred. Haunting spires erupted from the floor of an ancient sea. In a burning silence they presided, breathing and flickering through the […]
The more days I log on this planet, the less I believe in the proposition called accident. The Catholics call it miracle. The late evolutionary biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, called it contingency. Brits in the 19th century used the word Providence. Today, we use the words serendipity, synchronicity, and the term black swan event. Whatever […]
They only come out every 17 years. An annual variety – the dog day cicada – emerges each August, but they have blue eyes rather than red, and their synthetic rattle keeps me from sleep as they trill deep into the hot nights, sometimes lasting until late September.
But I’d only heard and seen the 17-year […]
I’ve read my share of mysticism, philosophy and religious history. These three bodies of knowledge, to the extent to which they agree, seem to converge on the same point, to describe the same Self. The Upanishads speak of Brahma, the Ineffable Self. The Christians describe the indwelling Christ, the Christological consciousness that resides within all […]
New strays seem to spontaneously generate on my patio, replacing the old ones as soon as me and my neighbor, Jill, find homes for them. Jill and I both feed them. Two males, a scruffy long-haired black cat and a tiger-striped American short-hair, a clone of my old male, have teamed up. But the stray […]
