Writing recently about the Perseid meteor shower of August reminded me of one of the most vigorous showers I have witnessed, the one I wrote about in the first chapter of “Honey From Stone.”
Nature
Photo by Will Li on Unsplash
The Brontë Sisters, Anne, Emily, and Charlotte, painted by their brother Branwell (c. 1834)
Vile bodies, immortal souls
On the 29th of December, 1836, Charlotte Brontë, twenty years old, posted some of her poems to the Poet Laureate of England Robert Southey, hoping for encouragement. Three months later, the great man replied, putting the “flighty” girl in her place.
Walden Pond • Photo by Pablo Sanchez Martin (CC BY 2.0)
The little green book
In 1992, Shambhala Publications issued an abridged edition of Thoreau’s Walden in their Pocket Classics series.
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A sense of place: a conversation
It would be hard to find two writers more different than Eudora Welty and Edward Abbey.
Photo by Simon Wilkes on Unsplash
O, never, never! And yet — and yet—
Childhood has two seasons: anticipation and summer.
Photo by Kent Pilcher on Unsplash
Like shining from shook foil
During his lifetime, the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins was known to only a few close friends. The first collection of his poems did not appear until 29 years after his death. Today he is one of the best loved poets in the English language.
Photo by Jonas Weckschmied on Unsplash
In the morning of the world
We knew the morning was special when we saw the blue meadow.
Wooly aphid • Photo by Melissa McMasters (CC BY 2.0)
Including all for the long haul
“It is not easy to live in that continuous awareness of things which alone is true living,” the naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch wrote in “The Voice of the Desert.” Krutch was a middle-aged New York City drama critic and literature professor in the late 1940s when he re-read Thoreau’s Walden, became a born-again nature writer, and moved to the Arizona desert to live with cacti and tarantulas.
Photo by Simon Wilkes on Unsplash
Value of jet lag dawning on us
Returning to the States from a summer in Ireland, I’m jet-lagged for several weeks. I wake up at 4 a.m. no matter how late I try to stay awake at night. There’s nothing to be done but get up, shower, dress, toss my laptop into my backpack, and walk to work.
The summit of Mount Brandon • Photo © Jodi Raymo
Our shifting senses on nature
Climbed Mount Brandon the other day. Ireland’s second-highest mountain. Named after Saint Brendan who had a hermitage on the summit in the 6th century.