FOOLED

We could say we are looking for sea glass, but we never do. We could say we are looking for agates, which is also true, but what Gary tells people is: "Rocks." This is also true, though not completely true. This posting concerns gathering treasure from the beach, reviewing promises and lies, and a fictional …

OutHorse

https://player.vimeo.com/video/710287348?h=d04a56aad2 The best advice my mother ever gave, and these were words she said to me hundreds of times: Think how the other person feels. She meant to help me be a kind person. As a child I went to Unitarian Sunday school. Later I attended worship at many churches and temples and houses of …

COLOR

I think about color. I think about color often. Sunrise here. Sunset there. The shift and play of colors... I am sitting up in bed as I write, and before me is an abstract expressionist painting by a friend of my aunt Marcie (Marcia Smith Aron). Marked 1959 and "Floral Growth" on the back, it …

ASCOB

Hardly anyone will recognize the letters I used to title my thoughts today. "Any Solid Color Other than Black" is a class in AKC shows for American Cocker Spaniels (ASCOB is pronounced ass' cob). For the record, I have never owned or shown American Cocker Spaniels of any color, though I do have a scar …

4FUN

Several recent attempts at reading have been... depressing? discouraging? demeaning? Delight might be what I am after. I am wide awake in the middle of the night. Eight hours last night, tonight just four? I don't know, maybe it's time for some serious funny. Just now, our son Ian is making short films. (The ballet …

PLANNING ATTENTION

Attention is the beginning of devotion.—Mary Oliver Our son Alan and his daughter E.V. wearing the sweater I knit her for Christmas. I had to think hard about what happened in 2021. It was not a terrible year, not even a bad one. "Inconvenient", as a friend suggested in 2020, a year that felt much …

BEAUTY IS TRUTH

I was writing a card to Bette and realized that most things do not matter... the passage of time, the work I still miss doing, the "accomplishments" I would like to detail—none of that really matters. What matters is beauty and people. People and beauty. So here is beauty that I have seen in the …

GOOD INTENTIONS

The sky was beautifully pink yesterday morning and after a mile of walking, I ran an unofficial 5k on sand without wetting my feet. I was out of breath but not breathless at the end of my run. I felt light-headed and bent over for a couple breaths. It is not the first time I …

SUBMIT

I submitted my "Butterfly Fontanelle" novella to a literary press a couple of days ago. It has remained untouched since January. I had hopes for it when I began four years ago, but then lost faith. Today I reread the beginning of a letter responding to that novella. One of my favorite writers wrote: "I …

MISTRAL

It's been many years since I took a class from Ursula K. Le Guin and in one of them she talked about the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. She was incensed at how little work of hers was available in English. After all, Mistral was a Nobel laureate, and her work was important. Le Guin had …