Digging and Reading
Friday morning Earth hands me a hoe. Today we will till the garden, he tells me in Thai—which I don’t understand. But I understand the hoe. Up the hill, we go to the plot where the seed bank I work for...
View ArticleSo God Made a Farmer
Picture a farmer. No, not one from the “God Made a Farmer” Super Bowl ad. Someone you actually know or at least have seen in person. If you’re from an urban area you are likely not imagining a face...
View ArticleLike See-Through Birds
Five times that I can remember I’ve fallen for a novel so hard I’ve inadvertently prayed for its characters. The first was T.H. White’s sprawling, maudlin Arthurian epic The Once and Future King. The...
View ArticleWhat it’s Like to be Tajik
Shamsiddin makes rock candy. Each week he receives a shipment of sugar in tall plastic sacks. He melts it with water in a cauldron as wide as my arm-span and boils it all day. Then he pours it off into...
View Article“A Bow From My Shadow”
I began reading A Bow From My Shadow—a new collection of poetry by Luke Irwin and Alex Miller Jr., available from Ecco Qua Press—in a car wash. The thud-slap-thud of the rotary brushes rumbled around...
View ArticleDay In, Day Out
If there is an Oscar for the category, “best glorification of the life of the mind” then Hannah Arendt deserves it. Rarely have the classroom and the writing desk glowed with more fervor on-screen than...
View Article19 Notes on 6 Languages
In Thai, one word (tam), suffices for both “make” and “do.” The same is true for the Tajik kardan and the Spanish hacer. English is the only language I’ve yet learned that separates the idea of action...
View ArticleHunting Complexity
“The scaling down is unlimited. Like the tiny diatom shells whose markings, however magnified, change almost indefinitely into new patterns, so each particle of matter, ever smaller and smaller, under...
View ArticleThe Barbershop
They killed the dogs last night. Gunshots and panicked yelps then—for the first time in two months—silence. Now I’m walking two blocks toward the river on the way to the barbershop and there are...
View ArticleAnother Hemisphere’s Stars
Growing up my heroes were martial. Flying aces, squadron commanders, generals, fighter pilots. Sergeant York, General Patton, Ulysses S. Grant, Hannibal of Carthage, Sun Tzu. The ones I dreamed about...
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