The Fungus Among Us
THE FUNGUS AMONG US Before he died of AIDS in1992, the botanist Jim Hickman and I loved to wander in the redwoods around the Northern California coast, searching for fungi emerging from old trees and forest duff and for trilliums blooming in early Spring. Jim was a...
Candle in the Night
I must have wrenched my arm yesterday, because I woke up in pain this morning wondering if my body was letting me know that it was time to watch for signs of the inevitable breakdown of aging. Actually, it wasn't anything more than a pinched nerve from carrying an...
Staying Warm
It is Christmas Day, and here I am living in a former Catholic Priory with a small community of folks who identify themselves as “Christian Mystics,” and though I'm not a Christian, I suppose I am a 'mystic' which means that willy-nilly, I feel at home here. In any...
Lakshmi
In the late 1960s when our three children were young, we spent a year in Northern India where Herb was teaching at a new Institute on the Ganges Plain—IIT Kanpur. The same night we arrived all the electricity went out—not an uncommon occurrence, we were soon to...
FIRST FROST
This piece is also in audio—read for you on Carolyn North Out Loud. Enjoy.Yesterday, we harvested the last of the beets and the carrots here on the farm, and this morning dawned cold, a dusting of frost over the fields, the golden technicolor trees of autumn making a...
Clear Cut Twice
Yesterday the moon was full and the sky poured rain all night. The woods are mulchey and green with yellow leaves spinning lazily off tall trees, and the air is fragrant and clean as a whistle. Last night Saroj called from California to say they'd been broiling under...
MIST RISING FROM GRASS
for Deb and Kathy On my morning walk through quiet woods today, I came to an emerald clearing swathed with rising mist. Instinctively, I saw it as smoke from burning grasses as if I were in the place in California I have just come from, but in fact it was dew on grass...
IN VERMONT
IN VERMONT for Deb, Leon and James I awoke this morning to the soft silence of green shade in the room where my brother lived and died, on the farm where Deb and I will harvest early potatoes today and where—except for the beauty of this place and the blessed quiet I...
Freeflow Stories
Today I have exciting news! My upcoming book, Freeflow Stories, the newest edition of Musings on the Passing Scene, will be coming out THIS SUMMER, 2022. I wish it to be the perfect balm for these weird times. Little humorous essays about real life, perfectly true,...
My Family History
I am still steeped in my recollections of the past, my own and the world's, and trying to hold fear at bay as fire season in the West comes closer, with wildfires already burning in the Southwest—and it is only May! My friends in Santa Fe have been manning the...
