Tag: Nature

• June 16, 2012

  Rain song and sun song

  Rain Song When we carried it uphill, the rain hurt our backs. When we let it run downhill, the rain brought us back. When we ran with it seaward, the rain fell on our backs. When we danced with it skyward, the rain sung to us back. When we hummed to it softly, the rain…
• May 18, 2012

  ‘Come here love…’

  Come here love: the evening itches on, like limbs inching unseen, each stretch kept under quiet wraps, his purr lending peonies, their wings rinsing the other’s dark silence.   *   *   * Now, the window thyme in morning sun. Now, the long trunk but an X-axis. Yet: a single sprig is yenning Up.…
• May 15, 2012

  Ethical life restored (VII)

  VII Silent of speech is nature’s course. Laozi, Daodejing, 23 Can we still follow nature’s course under nature’s gently guiding hand? I think so but only if we let nature return to its humble home and only after we learn again to listen to its silent speech. In early May, my love Alexandra and I spent a…
• May 8, 2012

  Acting contrary to nature or living according to nature? (I)

  I Somewhere near the passage to modernity, the philosophical tree sprouted some branches and grew dead. How many branches, pray, before it breathed its final breath? The contemporary philosopher Harry Frankfurt holds up his fingers, counts two, and then shades in a third. The first branch is epistemology which, he says, is concerned with “what…
• May 2, 2012

  A Gothic afternoon

  For two days, the morning fog has blanketed the hillside rising above the cabin. It is, she is right, a bony, smoky shade. We were standing at the lookout when she said the last. We had hiked up a red clay path on a Gothic afternoon–gray sky, abandoned ruins, blasted trees–only to stop at the…