Category Archives: The Other Village

Sugar season: when one of my old Listening Post essays can be boiled down into 31 syllables, it tastes sweeter. Spring Morning One daffodil in a vase on the kitchen table in a pool of sunlight.Coffee in shirtsleevesbefore an open window.

Photo: Maliz Ong, released to public domain There is a qualitative difference between grace and its near relative, luck. Luck, for good or for ill, is bestowed randomly by an indifferent universe. Grace feels like a personal gift from one … Continue reading →

Just ran across a draft of this written back when I was doing an April poem-a-s-day challenge. I think it cleans up nicely. Fluid Dynamics The whirlpool behind Sugar Island damwhere snowmelt drops to the penstocksends ripples back across the … Continue reading →

I once read Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time.” Heavy sledding, but there was this one bright moment when it all became perfectly clear. My hair stood on end for about five seconds, and then it all fell apart … Continue reading →

Photo: stuart anthony, Creative Commons, some rights reserved Being cold a lot is good for the ingenuity. There a lot of ways to get warm, both literally and figuratively. Ignore the folks from more blessed climes who try to tell … Continue reading →

While I have sufficient opinions on the management of every aspect of life, I’m afraid I will never get the opportunity to run the world according to my designs because I am always discombobulated by the coming of morning. While … Continue reading →

As a young reader I was strongly bitten by poems such as “We Are Those People” by Robinson Jeffers, and novels like “The Man in the High Castle” by Phillip Dick. The darkness and chaos of the last few years … Continue reading →

The geese and the leaves, the last few weeks before winter conquers all have always been tinged with melancholy for me. Veterans Day commemorations conflate in my mind with the autumn Moratorium days during the Vietnam War when we marched … Continue reading →

In the last few years, objective circumstances have not been particularly joyful, and yet joy breaks through regardless. That is because joy has nothing to do with circumstance. Looking at Light Pain carves deep so the body might survive. Clear … Continue reading →

My night vision is getting too poor to enjoy this form of meditation from the driver’s seat, but there is a special form of peace to be had running down a smooth empty highway in the middle of the night. … Continue reading →