Dearest ones, I went to a lecture last week. Ilya Kaminsky, a famous Ukrainian poet, began by asking “How is life on this shiny planet?” I did not know how to answer him. He taped pictures by Diego Rivera to the wall and read from Calvino’s Invisible Cities. He spoke of how our work is …
Category Archives: Special Report
Being Against the Eternal Now
I have been coming to Oaxaca for 16 years now. I come for weeks or even months at a time, and yet I am so far unable to master the language. In spite of all the time I’ve spent going to dinner, riding in taxis, and attempting to decipher the labels in the galleries and museums. …
Paying Attention
There are things in the woods. Paying attention is one of the fundamental tasks of being human being. Paying attention to what’s around us is a survival skill. Paying attention keeps us from being eaten by lions, helps us to find nuts and berries, and keeps track of our mates. But it is more, it is …
It’s Still a Big Damn Country
Recently I was looking for this picture of an artfully rusted steam engine that I took during a cross-country trip in 2009. Rather than dig through the many thousands of photographs on the back-up server, I searched through the series of blog entries titled It’s a Big Dam Country that I wrote while on that road …
Nuke and Pave…
… is an old computer term for removing all of the software from the hardware and starting over again. Back when we could rm ‑rf we would occasionally find that a system had got itself into a non-recoverable state and need to be rebuilt from the ground up in order to function again. Or on …