Life
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Missing in action. That’s how I’ve felt, creatively (and emotionally), for the past two months. Little time to pay attention. Little time to be astonished. Little time to tell about it. I’ve failed to live by Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life. Fall has always been a season brimming with activity: school starts, I…
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As summer’s curtain drops and the stage resets for another academic year, I return to my only camping excursion in late June with my second youngest son. We gathered with a group of friends and fathers to camp and kayak. The food and fellowship were wonderful and our time on the Allegheny River, including stops…
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I’ve come back to Mary Oliver after she popped up in the book I’m reading for enjoyment between preparing for school and repairing our fleet of cars! The book is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (I know: enjoyment?), and Mary Oliver shows up on page 104. Of course, this sent…
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For the first time in nearly ten years, I’ll be back in local coffeehouses playing music with my sons — except now it’s the next generation! Shortly after I released At the In Between in 2012, I began “touring” with my two eldest sons. We played wineries, coffee shops, and farmer’s markets and made many…
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Having not posted anything by Mary Oliver in awhile, I wondered if she had any poetry related to Independence Day. A quick online search led me to a post on “Improvised Life: A Treasury of Inspiring Ideas.” Allegedly, a poem my wife has loved for years, first read in Mary Oliver’s Why I Wake Early,…
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The end approaches. We’ve moved past counting the days; now we’re counting the hours. Another school year, my twenty-fifth to be exact, comes to a close. In the heat of wrapping up the year and managing life outside of the classroom, my wife (at my son, Theo’s leading) sent me the following poem. Balancing the…
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Amid the blurring pace of life racing towards the finish line of another school year, I came upon this unpublished The Guardian Photo of the Day poem I composed back in 2019. I agree with T. S. Eliot: “April is the cruellest month,” with weekly timed essays to grade in AP English, final speeches to…
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I have been living, savoring the moments of married children home for weddings, holiday celebrations, late night games and talks, traveling and staying put, eating, loving, caring for the sick, pushing off the extraneous, the many emails pilling up like leaves in my inbox, and fronting “only the essential facts of life,” as Thoreau so…
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Tonight, in the search for my copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, serendipity led me to my copy of Philip Terman’s Our Portion: New and Selected Poems published in 2015. Sometimes we forget the gifts we have sitting on our shelves or within miles of our home. Years ago, I invited Philip Terman to speak to…
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Flipping through my copy of Wendell Berry’s This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems, I found myself drawn to the poems that conclude the volume, echoes of the Mad Farmer filling the pages. Try as I might to find a softer piece for this post, I kept returning to this poem and the haunting refrain,…
the deepening ground 