There’s a spot along the canyon trail where the river shoulders into a hard left bend—calm on the inside, turbulent on the outside, like it’s trying to make up for lost time. That outer bank takes a beating. Years ago—probably sometime between the Great Depression and...
A World Built for Walking Last weekend, I drove cattle from winter pasture to summer grazing lands. We could’ve trucked them, but the five-mile ride offered lessons that don’t come any other way. The mother cows seemed to know the rhythm of it; the calves, on the...
“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson Last week, as I walked through the Boston Public Garden, I was struck by a familiar but still startling realization: spring is a traveler, but she doesn’t move quite how we expect. A...
There’s a flowering crabapple outside my window that tells me something I can’t see—when the wind is up. No sound, just motion: spring petals and leaves shimmering all at once, an ivory-green murmur against the sky. The wind itself is invisible. But I know it’s there...
There are moments—quiet, sudden, unbidden—when the world opens. A canyon flickers in the last light of day. Snow hushes everything. A spring flower opens before your eyes. Blossoms, not there yesterday, now spill across the flowering plum in your front yard. A child’s...
Shortly after the massive explosion of industrial growth following World War II, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger warned that modern life was beginning to treat the earth only in terms of its usefulness. As he put it: “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand...
