Category Archives: Uncategorized

Beyond Belief

To not know; to think only about the usual mixed feelings of crossing back to “real life” after a holiday, with tender feet and breathing open pores.  To be one of the ravers in the Israeli desert dancing under the starry October … Continue reading

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All the Days of Awe

The Days of Awe open on Rosh Hashanah and close on Yom Kippur. When my birthday falls on Rosh Hashanah, it gets lost in the birthday of the world; when it falls on Yom Kippur, celebrations turn sober and thin. … Continue reading

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Blasting Complacency

When the same word floats up from the most disparate-seeming characters.  My yoga teacher. My poetry mentor. A black hat rabbi. The list would be disparate enough without Baudelaire – but the dark prince poet was at the forefront in demanding … Continue reading

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Wording in the Rain

Finally it rains. Slapping and paddling the thick leaves; gliding down (d)rain pipes to be spit out onto recumbent weeds, filling puddles that I see mixed with the mesh of my screen window.  Puddles like a running woman, arms outstretched, hair … Continue reading

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Age, Relatives, Lo-Lee-Ta

My dad used to say, at age 65, I still haven’t decided what I want to be when I grow up. My daughter used to say, around age 5, I miss my childhood.  Traveling in their heads, forward, backward, time moving … Continue reading

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Slanting

Who knew, at the bend,a long slant sun would meet me, we’d eat a burst of tomatoes at night, already in shadow, a wall of sound, sonic cricketslike monks in saffron robes  lined from here to the mountains,soft, soft their silken … Continue reading

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The Past, Fellow Traveler

Sometimes the past is pressed against the present, or another present is present. While traveling in Europe you feel it like a veil of wind on your skin.  You scratch the surface, the past rises up through the transparency of summer.  Sometimes … Continue reading

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Homer texting from the islands

Cycladic villages – how is it that they never get dirty?  In Athens, age drips rustily down the walls; on a Cycladic island, the white of village houses is brighter than white, beyond pigment, beyond age. They are like sugar cubes … Continue reading

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Simone Weil: Happy Beachgoer

“The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that ships are sometimes wrecked by it.  On the contrary, this adds to its beauty,” says Simone Weil, French philosopher in a poetic mood.  She’s right: the endless surface of … Continue reading

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How to Break the Ice in Paris

People suffer and throw themselves into the Seine. The buildings have scars which grow lighter like our skins. Shop women roll their cat eyes jealously,hearing we’re American.   But what provocateurs they’d be, their loving presentation of breastset like cake batter inside a bodice,the body … Continue reading

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