Short Essays. The kinds of things you think about when you look at the sky and your mind wanders.
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What Practice Makes
If you do a daily mind-clearing activity, you have a practice. A yoga practice. A singing practice, a dance practice, a walking, drawing, meditation or jump-rope practice.
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Radiant Light
The post-World War II family in which I grew up marked the months and minutes of the years with the rituals and disciplines of patriarchal Irish Catholic fundamentalism.
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Bark At Nonsense
The antidote to feeling powerless is, of course, action–but what kind of action? There is one thing you can always do.
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Mankind Syndrome
Mankind. That’s everybody, right? All of humanity. Sure, there’s the controversial “man” in there, but it’s the kind of man that stands in for “people.”
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Rum Spirits
Since most people won’t squander their limited financial resources on alcohol, I’ve ended up knowing a lot of Haitians who are happy to take a drink now and again, but hardly ever do.
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Uncle Bernie
When my grandmother’s parents died, she inherited the Victorian house and the bachelor uncles, the youngest of whom, Uncle Bernie, still lived there when I was a child.
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Three Things
I was teaching math. There were 40 students. Each day we did a different hands-on activity in groups, using available materials, like pebbles, folded paper, or a string compass.
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Remember the Darts?
There’s a favorite story in my family that’s only three words long. Remember the darts?
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Reasons for Haiti
I washed a lot of laundry by hand, pressed blue gingham dresses with a charcoal iron, made peanut butter, went to the market, walked hills and trails to visit people and had bewildering conversations.
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All You Gotta Do
Quite a few years ago, in the summer of 1984, I was living the hard core back-to-the-land Idaho panhandle hippie dream. Chopping wood and carrying water was the least of it.
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Imagine the Imagination
Are all invisible things imaginary? Emotions, electromagnetism, and the whole underground part of the tree….
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Tacit Galaxy
Twice in two days I’ve heard comparisons that link the number of neural connections in the brain to the number of stars in a galaxy.
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Teaching Spanish in Haiti
One of the more absurd things I’ve done in Haiti is teach Spanish. Not that it’s absurd for Haitians to learn Spanish.
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The Best Granola
I make The Best Granola in the World. I will tell you how, and then you can make The Best Granola in the World, too.
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Our Dad
Our dad had glasses and blue eyes, smoked Taryton cigarettes, and wrote with his left hand. Like everyone’s dad, he fought in The War.
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Bananagrams Around the World
Bananagram letters clicked into place by candlelight next to tall bottles of Brakina beer, under palms on a beach over whose south-facing ocean the sun neither rises nor sets.