Grace

The anniversary week of George Floyd’s murder is a good time to revisit this post, which first appeared June 10, 2020. We still have so far to go, in the United States.

Spring rain

First snowmelt, and a month of dry, but the rain finally comes, and everything is flowers, for a time.

All of the scissors in my apartment

The other day I started counting scissors. Why? Because there’s a pandemic. That should be reason enough. But if you need more, it’s because, spending all this time at home, I got started thinking about how many tools I have that do more or less the same thing. The stand mixer, the hand mixer, the […]

Puddleglyphs

Sometimesin the springout walkingI get the feelthat the earth itself is speaking,that it has its own language,written in ice

Alternative Realities at the NRO

We begin, as we so often do, with a tweet. Jonathan McDowell @planet4589: Interesting that the NROL-44 patch description makes explicit reference to FVEY, the ‘Five Eyes’ spy alliance of US/UK/Aus/Can/NZ. Brief explainer: Jonathan McDowell is a certified Harvard x-ray astronomer who also keeps an eye on satellites in space. NROL stands for National Reconnaissance […]

The Shape of a Horse

My mother is an artist, and when she was a kid in New Mexico she’d draw horses in a Southwestern style, jaunty spring in their step and delicately curved, a bit like the art of Navajo, Acoma, or Zuni, all of which could have influenced her. The other day, I came across a couple of […]

Landscape painting

This post originally appeared in May of 2020. A few days ago, I was walking idly along a mountainside near my house when I noticed the lower branches of a ponderosa pine, heavy with bullet-sized pollen cones. Intrigued by their purplish color, I plucked one, piercing it with my thumbnail. The juice came out magenta […]