Some descents invite. Down here, here below, come. To drop into a place of strange welcome, eyes adjusting to the dim, foreign syllables whispered in the hush, smell of black tea, warm candle wax, dust, a sense that the plants are listening in, unmistakable charge of potential, and water out the windows. A bookstore on a boat parked in a canal in Paris, L'Eau et Les Rêves it’s called, Water and Dreams, the title of a book by Gaston Bachelard. “The stream doesn’t have to be ours,” he writes, “the water doesn’t have to be ours. The anonymous water knows all my secrets.”   ..read more

Posters for lost cats appear in the neighborhood, now and then stapled to the telephone polls. Oreo. Sparkles. Bongo. A cat slips off, joins up with the raccoons and coyotes, makes a wild way of things. It happens. Then yesterday, in front of a grand brick apartment building across from the river on Memorial Drive, a little laminated sign hung from a low bush. “LOST: Have you seen me?” read the sign with a photograph below of a bonsai tree, delicate and elegant, gnarling out of a grey ceramic pot with what looked like tiny bay leaves spiking from the branches. Below the photo, an explanation ..read more

Sun comes up on a fresh year and everything is new and everything is the same. Sun moves through a glass of water and a shadow like an x-ray of the wingtip of ghost falls on someone else’s counter. Sun warms the bowl of a spoon made of apple wood, carved from a log got at an orchard in the western part of the state, made as a gift for someone who gives me kindness, kindness for this fresh year, an apple wood spoon in the hand. Sun shows time’s wing, moving always, same and new ..read more

I have a hard time explaining it to myself, the breathless heated feeling I get to see a bare November-December tree silhouetted against an early-evening November-December sky. Something in my body tells my brain: it turns you on, you are turned on, it is erotic. And my brain tells my body: come on, please get real, we’re talking about trees and light and sky, this is not sex. And my body says: please trust me, eros, lifeforce, the great and wild heat, the breathless thrill, the all-the-way-there feeling of aliveness and luck, it’s happening now, take it in, all your cells awake and speeded u ..read more

At dusk these early evenings, the windows glow amber. “I walk around the neighborhood this time of year and I look in the windows and I feel homesick,” a man in his seventies said to me recently. With his home — its kitchen counter and its checkered dishtowels, soft blankets on the bed he shares with his wife, old dog dreaming and atwitch on a pillow in the livingroom — just a few blocks away. Homesick for what, then? For a long-gone childhood sense of home? For a long-gone childhood? For some only-imagined sense of comfort and safety? (May we all, all of us, find it and have it.) The nights ..read more

It’s dark. I am up early enough to see the stars. The porch light on the house across the street shines bright enough to bring shadows into the room. The neighborhood is still. Frost not dew, the grass is stiff; a woman scrapes ice off her windshield and I feel it in my teeth. Mothwinged darkness opens itself widest now. Today is the shortest day of the year. What now on this longest night? What now as Holly King surrenders and Oak King takes charge? What now as the wheel of the year tips to its lightening side? What now in this season of sorrow? What now as the solstice fire opens a doorway ..read more

Quality in craftwork depends on three things, according to furniture designer David Pye. Care, judgement, and dexterity. He repeats the words over and over in The Nature and Art of Workmanship. With care, I take it to mean attention, a focused tuning in, the ultimate form of care. With judgement, I take it to mean honest discernment, an ability to look, openly, and assess, to see not what you want to see but to see what is, and in doing so, thereby see the possible routes to what you want. And with dexterity, I take it to mean, be it in carving a spoon, or in love, how intention is translate ..read more

November holds the in-between. Between warmth and cold, between light and dark, between living and dying. The eleventh month, getting darker, getting colder, echoes our own eventual winding down and gives chance to live in the richest, deepest way. “The space of nothingness is where one struggles to reach a deeper layer of self,” writes Tadao Ando. November opens a path to those deeper layers unavailable to us during the rest of the year. It’s an approximation of the expiration date stamped on our foreheads. It’s the last day of November, and in honor of the month, an essay I wrote for the P ..read more

Today the persimmons were ripe. Fingertips, a squeeze, and the flesh below the skin allowed. I sliced one into eighths and ate the slices slowly. Inside, the sunset honeyed fruit, its subtle sweetness, the tongue-smooth flesh, and cupping it all round the waxy resistance of the skin. I was deep into adulthood before I had one and felt lucky for the introduction, and feel lucky when I walk into the kitchen and see them on the counter in a bowl. They arrive in November with the pomegranates. One fruit has the sun inside it, the other, shadow rubies from the underworld. I eat them while I can ..read more

How much has to be unmade to be made? The smashed brick and snarled wires that come before a new room with smooth walls and polished floors. A bed’s sheets warmed by sleeping limbs, strewn and tangled in the morning. What has to be undone in order to do? I make: the bed, coffee, love, edits, a spoon, a room, mistakes, a decision. A sense of drift, of rubble, of standing in the ruins of one’s own making, and the spiraling climb toward what is being made. [Photograph: Renovation by Shellburne Thurber, 2002 ..read more