follow myriad routes of varying lengths past aspens beeches cedars and larches it’s not required or conducive to spiritual reflection but how else would you see a hellbender or red eft or be attentive to the gentle sounds around you: breezes whipping through pine boughs birds chattering and choking on negativism the incessant buzz of overhead drones tides crashing on the shipwrecks of fortune the glug of rocky shores glutted in oil and red tide or the rhythmic tap-tap-tap of a child buried in rubble
take the path least trod for a change
What I’m Reading:
“No matter how many people take to the streets in massive marches or in targeted direct actions, they cannot put their hands on the real flows of power, because they do not help produce it. They only consume.”
— Roy Scranton / Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
i did my good deed— rescued a painted turtle out of the roadway
i meddled with nature’s way— terrapin lives one more day
What I’m Reading:
“New German research data makes clear that cycling doesn’t just clear the air, it improves the society; if you bike, you start finding yourself more oriented to ‘the common good’”
— Harald Shuster, Jolanda van der Noll & Anette Rahmann via Bill McKibben / “Orientation towards the common good in cities: The role of individual urban mobility behavior” / Journal of Environmental Psychology
I am a 10-year veteran of disaster remediation. There is no reliable data for this operation. The operation has to be planned from scratch. Speak only in the most general terms. Reaveal nothing of value. This is so secret I can’t call my wife for 8 weeks. I face an even more dire situation than my predecessor. My steps squelch in this effluent. I crave a footfall that squishes. I want dynamic action and patriotic sacrifice. I loathe a fretful denouement. I fear the consequences. I remain determined … Yet undecided.
What I’m Reading:
“… the young man who refused police a description of the car that fired and sped away. As if to protect someone. As if his shooter were more a community than the police our country fashioned of itself.”
“Lord, I say, I am shaken; This mattress of dirt won’t bounce a bug. I used to sleep on ripples. Now I nap Where I drop in a pasture of odds and ends.”
“… even a good man was more deadly than the worst of bears…”
— Lauren Groff / The Vaster Wilds
“Glück’s death marks a line break, but not a full stop, to a timeless voice in the art of poetry. It’s a voice that resonates with the wonder and grief of ancients like Sappho and moderns like Dickinson—in other words, like Louise Glück.”
— Srikanth Reddy / “In Remembrance of Louise Glück” / The Paris Review
“For what woman has not, walking in the dark of the street or along a path deep in the countryside, sensed the brutal imaginings of a man watching her from his hidden place, and felt the same chills chasing over her skin, and quickened her steps to get away?”
— Lauren Groff / The Vaster Wilds
“You’re not a creature in a body. You exist as the stars exist, participating in their stillness, their immensity … … You see again how far away each thing is from every other thing.”
— Louise Glück / “Telescope”
“To be alone and surviving is not the same as being alive, she understood. And if she could in fact rouse herself to healing, if she could chase away the vulture of death, she would not choose this life that was shown to her, though the beauties of the world were without limit and the grace given to encounter more of them would have been an astonishing gift. Though there was satisfaction in the work of her body and her hands, though mere survival was a triumph, she understood now that the long loneliness of such a life she would never choose for herself.”
— Lauren Groff / The Vaster Wilds
“Concerning death, one might observe that those with authority to speak remain silent”
— Louise Glück / “Bats”
“It is a moral failure to miss the profound beauty of the world…”
— Lauren Groff / The Vaster Wilds
What I’m Listening To:
“I can dig it, he can dig it, she can dig it, we can dig it
They can dig it, you can dig it, oh, let’s dig it, come on, dig it for me, baby?”
Get thee behind me, New Hampshire— I’m back in my home state. You stand before me Massachusetts— I’m not a native son but happy adoptee. Bring the magic: flare— into your autumnal finery. I’ve earned a day off the bike— And a night (or two?) in my own bed.
What I’m Reading:
“living once again with all my joyous regrets for all I’ve done right or wrong, for all I am now, that is enough, yet not enough, for who I wanted to be once”
— Richard Blanco / “Once upon a Time: Surfside, Miami”
“However, the most intense of all problems for the human race is that we are too many on this planet: nine billion or eight billion is too much. So we have to procreate responsibly.”
— Werner Herzog / “‘I am not that much in pursuit of happiness’: Werner Herzog on beer, yoga and what he would ask God” / The Guardian
thee istsfor manity reader 