“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 Edward Hoagland, American essayist and novelist, spends each summer in northern Vermont in a farmhouse without electricity. Nothing infringes on his perception of the life of forests and fields except his age. At 81, he writes everyday. He has been one of my faraway teachers since I read The Courage of Turtles in the early 1980’s and felt as if his voice were speaking directly to a thread of vital force in me, my […]
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You Can Listen Here Headier than whiskey in the blood, the hearts out here are thrumming because the wind is shaking everything alive. A flock of Field Sparrows, riding the dried spears of stalks, sing away from us as if they were smooth river stones hurled low into the tree line. The dogs have become wild. Her front legs and paws tucked under her chest, Luna flies up and out of the tall grass. Wolfie spins and […]
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You Can Listen Here Job cries out to Yahweh as a good man assailed by a fate he does not understand: “When I looked for good, then evil came unto me: and when I waited for light, there came darkness. My bowels boiled, and rested not: the days of affliction prevented me. I went mourning without the sun.”* His children have been killed by Yahweh’s permission and his body turned into a nest of […]
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You Can Listen Here A linguist told me that the word “endless” is an example of a geminate; its ending sound carries on and can be sustained as long as one has the breath to press the hiss between the teeth. Now, that is how I think of the sky, as an absence of hard stops, as a presence limitless in scope. In a canoe on a Maine lake we lifted our paddles sometimes […]
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