Here, you’ll find unfortunately true tales of an accidental naturalist’s misadventures in the wild, as well as shorter, inspirational reflections of nature
I’m home watching a movie, making the regular trek back and forth from kitchen to living room to hunt down and kill icebox quarry that goes with my entertainment. I notice this giant, black spider trying to make its way up my pale wall. Now in the old days I’d have smashed the bugger on […]
On the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, there is a lodge. And in the lodge is a giant sitting room with an even gianter picture window, trying to capture the infinite in a finite frame, behind glass. To my left, open double doors lead outside onto a patio, doors as big and wide as […]
I couldn’t sleep because the man to my left and the man above me in the bunk bed were snoring, even though both of them told me they never snored. (Never believe that when people say it. How would they know?) I never sleep the first night in a strange place. And I tossed and […]
How daring life is. What chances it takes. Green bottle flies lay their unborn in shit in the middle of a highway, and chipmunks lope through the tenuous branches of trees on the edges of cliffs. And how resilient life. Apollo astronauts landing on the moon brought with them streptococci bacteria. The bacteria were accidentally […]
October Saturday night, 1999. The Chicago wind blew hard down my street, wafting dead leaves through the gutters like some millennial wind. I was warm and alone in my two-bedroom. My friend, Ken, stopped by.
“Check this out. There’s this cat that keeps following me around. I get out of my van and there he is. […]
The sun downing
One, two raccoons
Up different trees
One a kit
I see it turn on the bark and crawl down forward.
Now I know how that’s done.
A pair of does
feed along the spring path
They pay me no nevermind
Canada geese, a mated pair
The goose leading in the water
Her head sawing back and forth on her great neck
Towing five goslings […]
According to Freud, humans are energy aggregations, and the personality is a closed system of limited energy. Psychoanalytic theory holds that the amount of psychic energy within an individual personality is limited. Therefore, the parts of that personality – the id, the ego and the superego – each try to gain control of the available […]
I sometimes find myself in envy of my cats. They don’t have to worry about karma or nirvana or even showing up for work on Mondays. “Never become a person,” I warn them.
Ken Wilber, a modern-day thinker of things big and infinitely small, summarizes the great wisdom traditions of the world by writing about the […]
We cling to bodies, yet clouds don’t cling to their forms, even from moment-to-moment. Even when a cloud is, it shifts unendingly. They precipitate from the breath of the eternal in long, wet parades, to be spent in hours or even minutes.
Clouds as a class of things may exist throughout the universe of planets for […]
Death. The word had been on my mind and on my lips for days, weeks. An old friend had wasted away slowly. A newer friend committed suicide. And just a few days ago, the body of Peter, the eldest son from a family I’d come to regard as “perfect” was found in a cranberry bog […]