A backyard can be sublime. I confess to having no background in landscape design. Anyone potentially may pay attention, admire the form and colors of a well cared for lawn, accent shrubs, etc.. The preponderance of the work is what I call “hand-work” -weeding, pruning with a hand cutter, picking up debris, arranging fallen stems…
The Farmer’s Market does not disappoint. A weekly event, which replicates the open air commerce of many generations, universal, on every continent, – that is the Farmer’s Market. The buying and selling is integrated with the producer, with the production of many types of goods, not limited to the produce which comes from sun,…
Our first full day in Coloma Michigan. The afternoon was spent by the lake, – walking and observing the life happening at the interface of water and land, by the ancient dunes, and in the lake enjoying the inflatable kayak. Spending these days by the lake, three generations of our family is serendipitous, a…
Taking a few days for a planned family visit to St. Joseph Michigan. We rent a large house a short walk from Lake Michigan. The adults of our extended family have the luxury of conversation about current events, challenges in the work-life, and about the opportunities presented by raising young children. One of the…
…the oldest and most secret processes ofall “knowledge and cognition”:there as here,rash hypotheses, fictions,the dumb good will to “believe,”and a lack of mistrust and patience develop first– our senses learn late and never fully learnto be refined, trusty, careful organs of knowledge. Given some stimulus,our eyesfind it more convenientto reproduce an imagethat they have…
Monday. This is a week of celebration. The key event will be Thursday, the 4th of July birthday celebration for the country. It is impossible to ignore signs of America in dotage. The two candidates for the Presidency are 81 and 78. Face to face for 90 minutes of debate they traded insults, the…
I found it, I mean the Geneva Grotto. Not long ago, I was asked by a high school student while walking toward Starbucks if I knew where to find the Geneva Grotto. I’d not heard of it before, so I couldn’t help him. Curious I checked the internet. I read about a shrine built…
And what infuriated the slavesabout and against their masters was never faith itself,but rather the freedom from faith,that half-stoic and smiling nonchalancewhen it came to the seriousness of faith. Enlightenment is infuriating. Slaves want the unconditional;they understand only tyranny, even in morality.They love as they hate,without nuance, into the depths, to the point of…
From the beginning,Christian faith has been sacrifice:sacrifice of all freedom, of all pride, of all self-confidence of the spirit;it is simultaneously enslavement and self-derision, self-mutilation. There is cruelty and religious Phoenicianism in this faith,which is expected of a worn-down,many-sided, badly spoiled conscience. Its presuppositionis that the subjugation of spirit causes indescribable pain,and that the…
A spring morning is yet one more delectable indication of the natality of the world. Nothing is fixed, unmoved, but all is in motion, the exuberance of growth, a driving trajectory of maximum expression. Perhaps that sentence is nonsense. What is my basis for knowing anything? When I know, I make the claim with…
