the signature of the heart

the signature of the heart

“For one person to love another, this is the most difficult of all our tasks.” Rilke Over the weekend I was feeling unmotivated and uninspired after a burst of writing several magazine articles and working on my memoir about moving to France. I had come to a difficult...

suchness

“It is no more possible to live in the future, than it is to live in the past. If life is not now, it is never.” Wendell Berry We were invited to a birthday party for our neighbor, Jeanette Ducourneau, who was born on December 31, 1937. A group of fifty friends and...

spiritual hospitality

“On winter’s margin, see the small birds now With half-forged memories come flocking home To gardens famous for their charity. The green globe’s broken; vines like tangled veins Hang at the entrance to the silent wood. With half a loaf, I am the prince of crumbs; By...

souvenir de voyage

“I have walked through many lives some of them my own, and I am not who I was, through some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray…” The Layers by Stanley Kunitz I recently returned to France from a trip to the United States...

the next adventure

Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason, you sing. For no reason, you accept the way of being lost, cutting loose from all else and electing a world where you go where you want to. Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder that a steady center is holding all else. If you...

it’s never too late…

One ship sails East, And another West, By the self-same winds that blow, ‘Tis the set of the sails And not the gales, That tells the way we go. Like the winds of the sea Are the waves of time, As we journey along through life, ‘Tis the set of the soul,...