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Category: perspective

Blank Slate

Blank Slate

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.”

A Night at the Office

A Night at the Office

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It was a late day at the office. Which didn’t mean I was there until the wee hours, only an hour and a half later than usual, just long enough to label, transfer and prune some MP3 files that had been filling up my voice recorder.

My attention had been riveted by the screen for a couple hours, that and my inner ear, where voices from interviews I conducted months ago replayed through an earphone. It’s a strange thing, listening to voices heard only once and trying to figure out who they are. It was an interior exercise, a journey into memory, aided by last year’s day planner and typed notes.

But back to the matter at hand, which was the long day, the tedious task, and then, finally, completion. I clicked off my computer, packed up my things — and only when I stood up to grab my coat did I look out the window.

And there, spread out before me, was a magical sight. Offices that are drab brown and inscrutable in daylight were all lit up at night. What was normally invisible was suddenly seen. I marveled at the lights and the reflections. I marveled also at the comfort they brought. And that’s when it occurred to me, something I know but too often forget — that we’re never alone in our toil. Even when we think we are, there are countless others who are close by, working along beside us.

On Veteran’s Day

On Veteran’s Day

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It’s impossible not to think of my favorite veteran on Veteran’s Day, so Dad will be much on my mind today. And, because it is a federal holiday, I’ll be able to drive into the office and back, creating a more “flow” commute than usual. Beyond these realities, what’s on my mind this Veteran’s Day is that this dear country, which so many have fought and died for, needs us in ways it never has before.

When my son-in-law took the oath of citizenship last August, he pledged to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Those of us lucky enough to be born here never take such an oath, unless we serve in the military or other public service. But I think many of us would go to great lengths to make this nation a less divisive place.

So what can we do? Maybe something that’s not very complicated. Something that doesn’t require signing up or shipping out. Something like this: that we try every day to understand those on the other side of the political divide.

Our Only World

Our Only World

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In his essay collection Our Only World, Wendell Berry writes of the “deserted country” that results from farmers displaced by progress, whether it be Big Coal or industrial machinery and chemicals.

The result is an emptiness most modern people think normal because they’ve never known it any other way. But Berry, who is 85, remembers a richer, fuller, more peopled countryside. A countryside that included farmers who “walk don’t run,” Berry writes.

“The gait most congenial to agrarian thought and sensibility is walking. It is the gait best suited to paying attention, most conservative of land and equipment, and most permissive of stopping to look or think. Machines, companies, and politicians ‘run.’ Farmers studying their fields travel at a walk.”

It’s one of the reasons I walk, too, because it is the gait “best suited to paying attention.” And though the remnants of a once-rich countryside lie ruined all around me, suburban neighborhoods named for the farms they’ve displaced, there is a point to walking even here.

Because when we walk, we feel just a little more like we belong. And when we feel just a little more like we belong … we care a lot more about the place we live.

Charged by Change

Charged by Change

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Night before last, our temperature dropped 40 degrees in a few hours. This morning it was 25 degrees when I woke up. Winter blew in right on time for the first winter month and the big light change this weekend.

I went out for a walk with three layers on … and it wasn’t enough. Time to break out the down jacket and turn on the heat, which has been off since April.

Though in the depths of winter I might fantasize about living in a place where it’s always warm, I never get too far. As much as I grumble about the cold, I like seasonal change, am charged up by it.

So today, on the coldest morning of the season, I will try to concentrate on the difference … and not the deficit.

A Change of Day

A Change of Day

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Yesterday began with a deluge, a rainstorm that settled in over the region and sent me into a reflective, closet-cleaning mood. Not that I actually cleaned any closets — though I did do some straightening up and pruning of old clothes in the basement.

But I had no sooner hunkered down for a day of inside work when, about noon, the rain stopped and the sun peeked out. I soon abandoned the basement chores for a walk and some outside tasks — such as cleaning up a pumpkin that was apparently mauled by hungry deer (that’s a first!).

Days with dramatic weather changes can throw off one’s rhythm and to-do list. But they can also foil the routine thinking that sends me into auto-pilot. By mid-afternoon, I decided that the best thing I could do would be to sit on the deck in the rocking chair, bask in the 70-degree temps and describe the scene in my journal.

“The low sun bends behind the big tree in the back of the yard, the one that will probably have to come down soon since half of it is already dead and the other half sports two large lifeless limbs. … Ah, but it’s lovely sitting here on the deck in the warm wind, a few clouds scudding by above, as the oaks flash yellow against the blue.”