“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
You Can Listen Here Crow-sized, the Cooper in the small tree turns *her small head left, then straight ahead one, two, three, four twitchy times before she chooses, launches, turns a full silhouette towards me, wings extended, threading branches, cutting onto the snow, small birds scattering like shrapnel. Her talons empty — back to a worktable, to the top of a birdhouse, to the tree again. She hunts the yard and the tangled field […]
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You Can Listen Here The students I still teach sometimes tell me their stories one on one, and their trials cause me to remember all those who could never get their hair right, who laughed after the beat, who were lonely but also unbowed, who never received their certificate of cool, whose quirks knocked them away from the accepted level of ‘approval’, the ones whose laughter was too loud, who moved awkwardly, who never […]
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You Can Listen Here Aware of our failings or convinced that we have been cheated, we envy those who possess that which we do not, and we believe our lives would be less fragmented, more complete, perhaps more cheerful if only we had been favored with their wonderful talent, or if only we could own that marvelous item or were capable of this action that would render us born again. As adults, we rarely […]
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You Can Listen Here I spent my first nine years in rural Pennsylvania in the 1950’s. My earliest outdoor memories are of big apple and apricot trees, hay and corn fields, a narrow lane leading to a stream and woods. Those modest settings were the first landscapes of a myriad number that made nature a haven-life saved next to the one where I work; I was able to lose my self by degrees in […]
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