The Seven Men of Eptagonia (with interjections from my grandfather) In a small town up the breast of the uppermost land mound there is a land of Seven Corners where – They do – there are seven men who like to sit on the seventh corner of the seven bendy hills – They Do! – positioning their white plastic chairs […]
Culture
Ancient Olive Trees
May a man look up from the utter hardship of his life and say: let me be like these. Hölderlin, In Lovely Blue. 1 Circa 1400 BCE. An olive tree in Vouvés, Crete. From ‘vouvismos’ meaning the whispering of the river flowing through. It wasn’t the only thing that lived then. There were many: cicadas and acanthus flowers, cacti and […]
Stone Memory
On July 23rd, 2018, I witnessed a 10’ flash flood tear past my Santa Fe home. A tsunami in a quiet valley, washing downstream animals, debris, and tumbling boulders, leaving behind a raw and reordered landscape.
In the Green
I’m not a very good nature tour guide. For one thing, I don’t know much about nature. For another, I walk very quickly; I have to keep reminding myself to slow down. Despite my shortcomings; however, two days before Halloween 2019, I take my English Composition class on a walk to a nearby greenspace, a short walk from our community college campus in Queens. Greenspace. It’s such a recent compound that Word autocorrects it into two.
Re-Memories of Warming
Memories are translations. We gather much and miss more. I originally compiled this archive in spring of 2022 for a final project in a course on environmental histories and values. I did it mostly for myself. I wanted to attend to what I had picked up throughout the pandemic — people, places, poems, photographs. These fragments are re-memories of ecosystems and relational nests.
A Visit to “The New York Earth Room”
Today’s itinerary: visit Earth Room, where a layer of soil, two feet thick, has occupied a gallery in SoHo since 1977.
Sand Mining – A Photo Essay in Koilwar, India
This is the first ever photo-essay shot on sand mining in Koilwar, Bhojpur district Bihar. The sand mining nexus in Bihar is intricate and involves influential people at distinct authoritative positions in the government, administrative circles and mafia. As a result, photos of sand mining are highly inaccessible. Though several stories have been published on the issue, photojournalists have often […]
The Apple Orchard
When we moved back to Michigan, we bought an old farmhouse on five acres. I was still married then, with three young daughters and soon two more. After we had settled in, I planted an apple orchard. The farmhouse was a white Greek Revival with four bedrooms and an old lilac out front. It stood on a barely perceptible rise […]
The Quiet Season
The days are short and cold, and it snowed last Sunday. The tree canopies, now brown, have thinned. The birds have begun migrating southwards — I hear their calls from my room, where I sip coffee — and people in puffy parkas rush to and fro along the sidewalks. Gray clouds float low in the sky. Although the December solstice […]
Beyond This Room
Sure Thing It is that with which the wind blows And the snowflakes carry from the skies The mountains echo in their deep crevasses The sky possesses in her blue, graceful expanse The child has in her smile The earth in her soil The dog in my arms. It is that with which spreads the smell of rain The mist […]
Holy Land
I lived in a small community outside Wheeling, West Virginia for seven months in 2020. New Vrindaban – a spiritual community drawing on Vaisnava Hindu tradition, current population 100 people and 70 cows – was my refuge from COVID-19; a chance to turn inward, to connect with nature. And as a native New Yorker and certified East Coast Liberal, living […]
Home | Bird and Broom
I’ve dropped my broom