The Last Word On Nothing

You want travel to change you. Right? But then you come back home, and it’s back to your regular life, and the smells and sounds and memories and surprises drift away, and there you are, back the way you were.

This spring, I spent nearly two months on a pilgrimage, visiting 88 temples on the Japanese island of Shikoku. I know, I keep going on about it. It was,...

I wrote this on May 7, 2018 and I have no idea why it feels like I wrote it this morning, looking out my window and wondering what I was looking for. I’ve always done this, looked out my window and wondered why I was doing that...

This post first ran in 2023

Abstract

Many years ago, some birds started breeding on an island. Several thousand of them still do. The world changes around them, but their basic needs have stayed the same. Will they be on the island much longer? We don’t know. We hope so. The signs are ambiguous.

Keywords: Seabird...

In April, the sun started rising early enough so that I started walking or running near dawn. Each time I returned, there were people gathered underneath the same cluster of eucalyptus trees in the park and I didn’t ask why. I mean, I wondered why, but people do strange things sometimes.

Then, a few weeks ago, my friend Annie asked if I’d seen the owle...

I like to run this post on Memorial Day (one version first ran May 28, 2012) because when I think about soldiers and wars and Memorial Day, I think about Uncle Bundy. He was awfully opinionated and excessively direct but I admired him greatly and listened when he talked. Not he ever talked about the war, he didn’t. But in this case, what he was talking a...