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At a yard sale today, I paid a dollar for a  stained, pocket-sized horoscope book with many of its pages missing.  The reason I made such an odd investment is that it had a forecast for Libra for the first part of November 2009, and this forecast  struck me as even more useful than the […]

There was a time when wetlands were considered dismal and unproductive. At best they were thought to be a waste of space, and at worst stinky breeding grounds for insect pests. For over 200 years, many marshes, bogs, and swamps were filled with dirt and transformed into places suitable for farms, houses, and recreational areas. […]

At a yard sale today, I paid a dollar for a  stained, pocket-sized horoscope book with many of its pages missing.  The reason I made such an odd investment is that it had a forecast for Libra for the first part of November 2009, and this forecast  struck me as even more useful than the […]

Nature’s rhythm is cyclical. Everything alive waxes and wanes. If you’re smart, you honor that flow by periodically letting parts of your world wither or go to sleep. If you’re not so smart, you set yourself up for needless pain by indulging in the delusion that you can enjoy uninterrupted growth. According to my reading […]

When Dante was nine years old, long before he became one of Italy’s supreme poets, he fell in love with Beatrice, an eight-year-old girl he met at a May Day party. They never had a close relationship. In the years after their initial encounter, they met infrequently, and both eventually married other people. But Beatrice […]

I would love it if you could find a sword that could cut itself. Or a fire that could burn itself. Or some water you could wash. But even if you can conjure the magic to attract an experience that simply resembles one of those marvelous paradoxes, it would set in motion a series of […]

I hope you won’t merely wander around the frontier. I hope you’ll undertake a meticulous yet expansive exploration of that virgin territory. Here are some tips on how to proceed: Formulate specific questions about what you’re looking for. Develop a hypothesis for the experiments you want to carry out. Ignore what doesn’t interest you and […]

Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) witnessed the full range of experiences that life on this planet has to offer, from war to love and everything in between. During an interview he gave in Jerusalem in 1994, he said, “I can stand on my balcony and tell my children, ‘Over there I was shelled for the […]

You may be as flooded with briny emotion as a Pisces on a meandering binge. You might be as embedded in a labyrinth of your own creation as the Geminis who verge on being too clever for their own good. You may be as cagey a listener as a Scorpio who’s searching for a hidden […]

When I did a performance in Santa Fe a few years ago, a woman in the audience came up to me after the show and made a sardonic proposal: Would I like to join her twelve-step program for writers who are overly fond of vivid adjectives and adverbs? With all the uppity mock politeness I […]