May 16, 2023. I kneel beside a small hole in the earth. Today is our daughter Maggy’s fortieth birthday and we have given her, according to her wish, a weeping willow to mark the occasion. Since, in a fit of spring madness, I have just planted over forty trees and bushes around our home, I […]
creation
Spring Fever
Spring, the most yearned-for season, is also the most crazy-making. If you have a back yard or a garden, a kind of obsession can take over. You go to a nursery and imagine this in that little empty corner of the front garden, and that in the bed beside the potting shed. You don’t have […]
Tired of All the Noise?
We expect monks and mystics to tell us how important silence is. Gordon Hempton is neither of those. He is an acoustic ecologist, someone who studies the sound of the natural world and seeks to preserve it. In his book, One Square Inch of Silence, Hempton says there are less than a dozen places left […]
Raids on the Unspeakable
One of the gifts of vacation is to change up one’s prayer ritual. Normally, Pam and I sit for prayer in a corner of our bedroom. There are two chairs, a small table for an oil lamp, a few sacred books, and a timer that sounds a Tibetan prayer bell when our orison is over. […]
A Gardener’s Theology of Weeds
When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands. -Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo would […]