Still Alive for Me
I fell in love with Georgia O’Keefe’s work at first sight, when I was about 16 years old. In the light and movement of her canvases, she captured not just her own experiences, but expressed mine, impressions and evidence and…
The Asking—and Responding
By themselves, Jane Hirshfield’s poems since her last collection—”Ledger” (2020)—would have comprised only a slim edition, but “The Asking: New and Selected Poems” (2023) is a hefty volume tracing the decades-long arc of a career; a curation benefiting from perspective; the revelations…
Living Ayurveda
Maybe it’s that I feel a particular and pressing need for nourishment of body, mind, and spirit during the darkest days of the year (and the coldest, even if here in Central Texas, “coldest” doesn’t always mean objectively “cold”), but…
Listening is an Act of Love
There’s so much deafening noise involved in conflict, violence, and destruction, anger boiling and exploding first in barrages of words and then of materiality, and in the midst of all this current fatal swirl in the world, I came across…
Weaving at Black Mountain College
When R. and I stopped recently in Asheville, North Carolina, on our way back to Austin along our 5,431-mile road trip in support of one of our sons settling into his new home, I took a few hours to visit…
Before, Now
We were a little group of three yesterday afternoon—my granddaughter, one of my sons (not my granddaughter’s father), and me—in the beautifully curated children’s section of Second Story Books in downtown Laramie, Wyoming. My granddaughter found—on her own, and to…
Back to the River Bank with My Water Rat
Although I read very few books more than once, R. and I are enjoying right now our annual spring reading of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, first published in 1908, but just as relevant now—if not more so—for…
Women Holding Things
I first found the multi-media and prolific artist Maira Kalman through her collaborations with authors that reveal other interests of mine: The Illustrated Elements of Style (with William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White) (2008) and Food Rules (2011) by Michael…
Madness, Rack, and Honey
Have you noticed that when you follow the career of an artist or thinker who’s interested in constant self-development, the advancement of the particularities of their art or craft or science more than the commercial viability of their increasingly refined…
Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light
My father-in-law’s service this past Monday—just four days ago in this weirdly long week—was a gorgeous tribute to his life, both of all that was said and sung and of all the many who were gathered to speak and listen…
Where the Charming Things Are
Three years before Maurice Sendak published his own authored-and-illustrated now-classic children’s picture book, “Where the Wild Things Are,” he provided the line drawings for Ruth Krauss’ “Open House for Butterflies,” originally copyrighted in 1960. I found the reissued slim hardcover…
Girl Power Pep Talk from an Older Sister
A treasured friend reached out to me today with a reminder of her and her daughters’ visit to our home here in Austin six months ago. Both R. and I had a hard time getting our heads around the six…
This is Not Just About Marriage
I chose to read this book because of what I know and love about other work by Ann Patchett, and for what I thought I knew about its contents, given its title. But—this is not a memoir of a marriage,…
A Grandmother’s Story
If the protagonist of a story indicates its intended audience, then Glenn Halak’s children’s book A Grandmother’s Story (Green Tiger Press, 1992) is odd—and my finding it among the free books our local library was giving away in a shelf…
Breaking the Age Code
True confessions: I haven’t yet completed reading this book—Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long & Well You Live, by Becca Levy, PhD—but (more confessions), as with all books I read, I have already skimmed…
“Every single drop of it.”
In a slim volume of just 62 poems with cover art from her painter mother, Ada Limón manages to articulate the wonders of the world and voices—especially in three specific poems—the texture and flavor of issues at the core of…
“Could Have”
As a response to grief, I understand the impulse for keening. But I’m much more likely to withdraw in silence, the pain caught in my throat, until conscious breathing loosens tears. I seek poets’ words to unmute and articulate my…
The Extended Mind—and Heart
Last weekend, I participated in the monthly intensive for my doctoral program. Zeerak Ahmed led a two-day workshop, “Critical Immaterial Art,” and she created the space and the assignments for each of us involved to produce art pieces outside our routine media.…
Cloud Cuckoo Land
One of my main requirements of the literary fiction I read is that I fall more deeply in love with life and have my own humanity expanded by the author’s text, especially the author’s perspective on the characters that populate…
“Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment.”
So, I have a mild synesthesia, where when I read aloud, my mouth fills with tastes and textures prompted by the writing. It’s not that the words convey for me the specific flavor of, say, Glazed Five-Spice Chicken (unless I’m…
“A little frog work maybe.”
Wow, I missed my granddaughter, M., during our year plus of quarantine separation. (I also longed for in-person time with her parents, my oldest son and daughter-in-law, but they hadn’t spent as many hours the previous year snuggling next to…
The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Contentment, Comfort, and Connection
You might be thinking, “Hygge?!” Yes, back on November 25, 2020, the New York Times published an article, “Danish Hygge is So Last Year. Say Hello to Swedish Mys.” And Louisa Thomsen Brits’ slim treasure of her own evocative photography,…
DEAR Day
The children’s book author and former school librarian Beverly Cleary passed away last month, on March 25, at the age of 104. Her birthday, April 12, is also National Drop Everything and Read (DEAR) Day, established years ago both to…
The Secret to the Universe!
My dad was a middle and high school science and math teacher. He liked to say, “Life is a multi-variable equation,” by way of explaining life’s complexity and also its solvability, because there were few problems by which he felt…
The Razor’s Edge
Maggie O’Farrell’s memoir—I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death—is a wonder of attention, of interest, of expression. Through the intensity of her calm and compassionate focus on the 17 events and her curiosity about their emergences and…
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
After hearing an interview on NPR with Wintering’s author, Katherine May, I listened to the audio version during my 3-mile treadmill walks. I was so enraptured by May’s emotionally and tonally wide-ranging memoir that I planned to share her little…
Creative Inspiration
In my perpetual desire to expand my understanding, taste, and skills, I’ve read hundreds of home design books; of all of them, Erica Tanov’s Design By Nature: Creating Layered, Lived-In Spaces is my current favorite. It’s a treasure trove of…
Wise Trees
Reverence and wonder are two of my favorite states of being. Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, in their gorgeous Wise Trees, elicit both conditions in their textual and photographic portraits of 50 trees around the world which/who are remarkable, not…
Breath
“I’d gotten a fair share of gasps from friends when I told them about the experiment,” James Nestor recounts, in the first chapter of his most recent book, Breath. “‘Don’t do it!’ a few yoga devotees warned,” me among them…
Delicious
Elisabeth Tova Bailey, in her treasure of a slim volume, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, recounts her fascination with a snail when she was forced by a mysterious illness into extreme isolation and stillness. She heads her Prologue…
Yin
I love learning from experts, and when they use their time and courage to write beautiful books, I’m grateful in effusive and sustained ways. Thank you to my authorial teachers and guides in the development of my yin practice: my…
Reading List
“The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.” George Eliot