Two decommissioned robots travel from their tiny apartments in Seoul to Jeju Island. One of them wants to see fireflies again before her system shuts down. The other wants to reunite with his former owner, who is also his dearest…
Pepper and Poems
121 Articles
121
I spent last weekend at St. Joseph’s Monastery in Kentucky taking part in a silent guided retreat: no phones, no books, no words. The nuns sang psalms at the appointed hours. Birds awakened us in the morning. I became accustomed…
I’ve been watching a mourning dove on her nest. I discovered the nest while removing some dead branches from the magnolia. Rogelio and his crew got the big branches down after the ice storm. The remaining ones were smallish…
The world is broken and sparkling. My friends, displaced from their homes, tell me first about the trees – bending and breaking under the weight of their own beauty. It’s a horror show – and also magnificent – the…
I took the ornaments off the tree and put them on the glass-top table in the sunroom. I felt ineffably sad doing so. The ornaments rested on the table for several days. I felt overwhelmingly lazy and sluggish about getting…
Mary Oliver shows me the way. Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does it End? There are things you can’t reach. But you can reach out to them, and all day long. The wind, the bird flying away. The idea…
The language is not hard to understand – not difficult at all – the ground says I will catch you if you – when you – fall. The language is not hard to understand – not difficult at all –…
The poet Jane Hirshfield recently came to my attention. Imagine Mary Oliver with an edge, steel in her veins. I’m most of the way through Hirshfield’s new collection, The Asking, which draws from her work dating back to 1972 and…
His hand shook as he told the very short story of the angel who came to earth with a torch and pail. I wasn’t going to tell you this, he said, smiling, but I’ve decided to. This is what Richard…