Gathering, surrounded by, story writers, story tellers and story readers is like bathing in lavender salts — lingering into contentment, absorbing a lifestyle, humming.
Apr 232013
Apr 052013
Once upon a time there was a little town by a big ocean. It was a wise little town. Long ago it had looked at its dunes and beaches, its big trees, its marsh where the red-wing blackbirds sang, its little streets and little grey shingle shops and houses, and said: This is all good.
Mar 302013
“Our little house is a wonderful, quiet place to work. Also a very good house for dreams, many people who’ve slept there have told me that. Dreams and the kind of writing I do have some connection. One morning when I was waking up in our Cannon Beach bedroom, the whole idea of one of the “Earthsea” books came to me as the light grew. When I got up, it was daylight and I had a novel to write.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
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Feb 222013
As a final patriotic attempt by my dad to make the Germans run screaming from all remaining thoughts of invading Britain -or even seeking asylum there- and Scotland in particular, he had the RAF drop my first baby photos over anything that was left standing in Berlin and Dresden Germany.
Feb 162013
The era of the brilliant Nabokovs is over. Dmitri died 22 February 2012. He was my age, born in Berlin in 1934 half a year before me. One day when I asked his father about his taste in music, he said he had none; all the musical talents went to his son, Dmitri. The father was very proud of his son and justifiably so.
Jan 192013
Burns was a man of the soil and a loyal and often visionary populist, disdainful of the upper and especially royalty-fawning classes which he observed caustically in many poems and prose-writings, and the church with it’s ever-shifting double standards of what was holy and what was not and came from peasant stock but was educated by his fairly benign –for the times- landowner factor who took an interest in his precocious intelligence. [Read More]
Dec 042012
wonder if
raccoons wander the beach after dusk and leave pawprints in the ebb tide
wonder if
it’s sacred to step through the curled & looping mystic symbols left by children in the sand
Sep 042012
The quiet life is about listening and attending to your existence and to that of the universe and spirit around you. It is about stilling the noise enough that you can hear. What you hear will depend on your singular vocation, your calling.
Aug 282012
Where others strolled with their buckets of shells, we were dragging leaf bags along, combing the wrack zone, that line of debris where the tide recedes; where all manner of incongruent sea life coalesces. Steve and I shared a passion we never would with anyone else. Steve knew much about how to work kelp and take advantage of its ability to become as leather when wet, and wooden when dried. I followed through with finished products in my own style. [Read More]
Jun 222012
In 1984 a bioacoustic researcher was studying whale songs on the west coast. She heard news that four baby elephants were born at the Oregon Zoo, and went to see them. While there she sensed a vibration near the elephant cages. It turned out the animals were using low-frequency sounds to send messages back and forth across the zoo grounds. [More]