Tagged: wonderfulworld

adapted from The Star Thrower by Loren Eiseley (1907 – 1977) Once upon a time, there was a wise man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work. One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so, he walked faster to catch up. As he got closer, he noticed that the figure...

Dizzy with the perfume of the lilacs, each time I pass a tree or a bush of them, I incline my head and take a great walloping sniff and say AAAAH. I can’t always smell them (thanks, allergies!) but it’s fun to try, and when I DO get a whiff it lasts for a really long time, long after the fact, long after I am gone away from them. It’s the memory of scent and the memory of green and of new and of BURGEONING that gets me through the winters here. All the long dark dreary winter days I...

Despite the crazy busyness at work and the crazy busyness at home and the fact that I can’t seem to stop eating every freaking thing in sight, preferably with mayonnaise, I seem to be on an upsurge of quiet happiness this week. It’s despite the fact that Anders isn’t here. It’s in spite of the rain that invariably makes an appearance every day at some point. It’s not because of the long-desired out-of-print books I ordered the other day. It’s not because I am trying to make an effort to write here more frequently than I’ve been managing. I think...

I walk in sunshine and promise, limbs lengthening and loosening. This is what I see: the tight beginnings of anemone-purple guelder-rose blossoms, the fine and furled celadon fingernails of new lilac leaves, sharp burgundy shoots of peonies thrust above the soil. Tiny clustered peridot pearls along the whip-thin branches of spirea, a fat white-bellied magpie high in a tree; another bouncing over the lawn. A hedge blushing green, speckled here and there with the plump grey-balled bodies of chickadees cheerily chirping. A conclave of crocuses, communing. Rounded cabochon leaves covering the bank of the creek; water shimmering as it slides...

It’s never really quiet outside even in the hush of early morning when a whisper-thin coating of diamond dust ice sparkles everywhere. The morning dawning glazed orange and pink showcases the silhouette of a church tower across the fields in the distance. Bobbing daisy chains of geese flung across the sky, heading southwest (wrong direction again). Driving up the hill to Öderslöv, ahead of me is a many-armed monster, freshly killed, being hauled on the back of a huge tractor trailer – drawing near, it resolves into the huge twisted gnarly limbs of a recently downed ancient tree. I’ve been...

Yesterday, it was so clear you could see forever, and when you’re 15,000 feet up in an airplane on a clear day, you very nearly can. It was overcast in Frankfurt when we took off but as we headed north the clouds dispersed until we were flying over Denmark: lots and lots of very flat land surrounded by lots and lots of water. What struck me most about the sun-slathered landscapes was how foreign the land looked. It didn’t look as if it was LAND. It didn’t look, by the edges of the shorelines, as if it continued down into...