a small paper for a small planet
“Daisy, come quick. He’s back.” The small, shaggy-bearded man danced a few steps in excitement.
A woman moved her girth sideways, through the screen door, letting it slap shut. Frizzy dark-rooted blond hair framed her splotchy sagging face. She snatched the binoculars and trained them on a distant stand of trees growing across Cape Falcon. [Read More]
Tradition says this is a time of year when matter and spirit mingle. The boundary between darkness and light becomes sheer now, at the end of harvest.
The seagulls swooped in immediately to consume our breadcrumb sins, and just like that, we were cleansed! We had just completed the Tashlikh ceremony to conclude the first Rosh Hashanah morning and afternoon service on the North Coast in 50 years, after a wonderful evening service the night before.
I met your daughter the other day,
New friend to my Willa,
At a gathering for new college students.
Our girl will be far away.
Your Farah is farther from you.
Charles Le Guin’s novel, North Coast, is a peninsula of a story. Set in the fictional community of Bridger Bay, the protagonists—Kim, the narrator, and Steve, who becomes his closest friend and briefly his lover—reach out between individuals, cultures, and elements.
I moved to the Oregon Coast ten years ago after visiting to participate in a week-long painting workshop. During that visit I fell in love with the natural beauty of this place, the kind and progressive people I met, and the air of inclusion I found in the organizations, activities and events in the area. This was quite a change from the atmosphere in the California town where I had been living. [Read More]
I’m reading a book by this title, by Steve Hagen, published in 1995. The book has recently been revised and retitled Why the World Doesn’t Seem to Make Sense, published by Sentient Publications. Hagen is a Buddhist teacher with lots of credentials. Anyway, the book so far has been pretty repetitive, basically saying that Reality (with a capital R, the real thing) is different from what we think it is.
[Read more]
From the first line, I love this book, and it’s not even the first line but the quote before the first line that jump starts the whole thing. See, it’s Flannery O’Connor.
I’m haunted by O’Connor. This southern woman with pheasants on her farm who died before forty and wrote short stories about serial killers shooting good Christian grandmas and four-year-old boys drowning themselves in baptismal rivers. [Read More]
The dead are lined up according to size and type,
as neatly arranged as clothing in a drawer,
records on a shelf,
bullets in a chamber.
A quiescent machine waits to lift them,
its steel mouth clamping one, nipping at mossy skin
and flaccid lichens.
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.
