Browsed by
Category: perspective

A Clutch of Keys

A Clutch of Keys

Comments 0 Comment

From a neighbor, we’ve received a windfall of dubious utility and uncertain origin: a clutch of keys — if that’s the best collective noun to use for them.

Some are for doors, some are for clocks. All are antiques. They hail from an era when keys were king. No plastic card, no fob, no key code. These are the real thing, known as bit or barrel keys, Wikipedia informs me. They’re the kind of keys that belong on a big ring, the kind of keys zealously guarded by housekeepers or superintendents.

Before I began this blog I would not have photographed these keys sitting on the counter. They would have been just another pile of stuff. But now I see the illustrative potential of things, find myself stopping to admire the kooky wall art in the lobby of my building (see yesterday’s illustration) or to snap picture of leaf shadows on siding.

It’s a new way of seeing … and yesterday, I saw these keys.

Virtual Vacation

Virtual Vacation

Comments 0 Comment

Time for a virtual vacation. Today I’m heading to Florida, where I go every summer to walk the beach, inhale the sea air, and watch dune grass swaying in the breeze.

I’m thinking about how sultry it is there, and how I always intend to do more writing than I actually do — but how it works out anyway. Because the trip is always an inspiration and a restorative, much longed for, much appreciated.

It’s still months away but already I can feel a warm breeze on my face and the fine white sand between my toes. One of the best things about a virtual vacation is that it can happen whenever you want it to! And for me, it’s happening … right … now.

Lasting Impressions

Lasting Impressions

Comments 0 Comment

Remembering where I was this time last year, zooming through the streets of Phnom Penh in a tuk-tuk, about to leave for the eastern part of the country, where I would have a strange and unforgettable experience with bats.

The trips I’ve taken the last few years will never leave me. Though the reporting I’ve done has long since been turned into articles, the impressions it left will always be part of my writing.

They come in especially handy when I need to remind myself that the world is much larger than my little corner of it. The last few days I’ve been remembering a woman who seemed the incarnation of sadness. She had been trafficked, beaten and abused. Through a series of remarkable occurrences she found her way back home. But the poverty she returned to was so severe — her kids ate rice and roasted rat because that’s all they had — that it wouldn’t surprise me to learn she’d once again taken her chances with a job offer abroad.

She was a beautiful woman whose children hugged her tenderly. They seemed to know what she had done for them. How could they not?

Shades of Gray

Shades of Gray

Comments 0 Comment

Never fear, dear readers, this blog isn’t taking a more salacious turn in its second decade. This post is not about the erotic novel and film “50 Shades of Gray.”  It’s about what color to paint the bathroom.

The weekend remodeling project is proceeding apace, and by next weekend, we’ll need paint. Will it be Abalone or Barren Plain? London Fog or Seattle Mist? Wind’s Breath or Cedar Key?

This remains to be seen. I want a warm gray to match the swirls of color in the marble-like porcelain floor and shower tile. But I don’t want to ignore the marble vanity top, which is a bit cooler in tone.

Ah, dear, the problems of affluence — in which we are freed from the daily tedium of black and white (what will we eat? where will we sleep?) to contemplate … the shades of gray.

Walking Tall

Walking Tall

Comments 0 Comment

It was an aha moment made possible by a liberal arts education, and it happened in the biology lab. While dissecting the brain of a fetal pig I came across the pineal gland, located between the two hemispheres and thought by some (including Descartes) to be the seat of the soul. I had just been reading Descartes in my philosophy class, and the fact that I was now seeing that very gland (albeit a tiny porcine version of it) made my heart skip a beat.

I still pay attention to things like this, strange connections and coincidences when the fates seem to be saying, listen up … this is important.

What I’ve been noting lately — both from Becca, the physical therapist I’ve been seeing, and reading in Sarah Kaufamn’s The Art of Grace (more later about this fine book) — is the importance of good posture.

Posture is a foundation for moving gracefully, Kaufman writes, and good posture provides an uplifting feeling. This was seconded by Becca, who tells me that in the process of tightening my core I should concentrate on being pulled up, that this will counteract a tendency to collapse in the midsection that can irritate the spine and cause sciatic flare-ups.

“If you watch people walk,” Kaufman writes, “most of us sink into our hips. … There should be a comfortable tension in the torso, lifting the abdomen and hips against gravity while helping relax and easing shoulders down slightly.”

The fates have spoken  — and I’m trying to walk tall.

Blank Slate

Blank Slate

Comments 0 Comment

I’ve started off the new year with almost as much clutter as before — with one notable exception: I cleared off one counter in the kitchen. I banished the bread box, moved the canisters and corralled the papers. Which means I begin 2020 with one clean sweep of vintage Formica.

I’m not sure why I did this, but there must be a deep-seated need to begin the year with a blank slate, to clear the way for 12 more months of experiences … and stuff.

Nature abhors a vacuum, of course, especially in this house, and things are constantly piling up on the counter: newspapers, mail, glasses, crumbs. But so far nothing I can’t dispatch quickly to its intended spot or to the recycling bin.

This won’t last long, I know. The house in general is full to bursting. There’s a warren of boxes in the basement, and a vanity and bathtub in the garage … but here in my kitchen, at this very moment, there is a lovely open countertop. And I’m going to keep it that way as long as I can.

Everyday Epiphanies

Everyday Epiphanies

Comments 0 Comment

This year the feast of the Epiphany falls on the first back-to-work-and-school day. For some, it may even delay the first back-to-work day. For me, back-to-the-office cannot be postponed … so I’ll just have to be astonished by the daily grind.

Maybe this is not such a bad thing. Maybe we need to take our epiphanies where we find them, not just in the grand celebrations of life but in the everyday moments — hopping on Metro, settling into the office, getting a glass of water at the kitchen sink.

It’s difficult to find wonder in the everyday, but it is, I think, what we were born for.

Bounding into the Future

Bounding into the Future

Comments 0 Comment

Copper and I reached the gate at the top of our deck stairs this morning at exactly the same moment that a four-point buck landed in our yard. He had jumped over the fence, trotted down the slight slope and paused in his foraging, as if listening to a faraway call.

I’ve become quite inured to the deer around here. They eat the day lilies and even the impatiens, if there’s nothing else. They cause auto accidents and are responsible for several dents in our cars through the years.

But seeing the buck this morning, so young and strong, stopped me in my tracks. I stared at him, mesmerized, and he stared back. He was beautiful, a messenger from a wild world. And indeed, in some cultures deer are sacred, a symbol of death and rebirth on account of their antlers, which they shed and regrow.

How perfect to see the deer on this day, which is itself a passageway to another world, another decade. I took the fellow as a good omen. And he — since he disappeared with a flash of his white tail — is not around to correct me on this.


(The stag I saw wasn’t white, but he was noble. Photo: Wikipedia)

Malawi Memories

Malawi Memories

Comments 0 Comment

This time last year I was catching my first glimpse of Africa’s Great Rift Valley. In Malawi for work, I was bouncing around the countryside in a car full of colleagues, exploring small villages and learning what they were doing to help fight child labor.

Some villages built homes for teachers, tidy brick structures that provided a fresh start for an instructor and his family. Others started commercial enterprises — a grain mill or a dormitory for older students — and the money they made from these was used for school fees or uniforms.

It was a quick trip but a wonderful introduction to the vast plains and awesome peaks of this beautiful and warm-hearted country. And this week I’m reliving it, seeing it again in memory, marveling that somehow, improbably, but in actual fact … I was there.

On Looking

On Looking

Comments 0 Comment

In her book On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, Alexandra Horowitz asks us to look at the world with the wonder of a child and the expertise of geologist, entomologist, illustrator or other professional observer.

Horowitz’s simple and elegant argument: that we cease to really see the world we inhabit because we become so accustomed to it. Through a series of strolls with those trained to see what we do not, Horowitz urges us to “look, look!”

In one of my favorites so far, she ambles with the typographer Paul Shaw. He points out the text on a manhole cover, ghost writing on the sides of buildings, and always and everywhere, the type itself: the thickness of a serif, the placement of a crossbar, and the humanistic qualities of the letters, a “long-legged” R and a”high-waisted” S. After a few hours of this, Horowitz realizes she “had been blithely walking by undiagnosed lettering disasters my whole life.”

But after her stroll with Shaw, she sees not just the words but the letters that compose them. “Walking back to the subway, I glanced down at my feet as I crossed the street. Look was painted on the sidewalk where I stood. I will — but I feel sure that now, my vision changed, the letters will find me.”