When I was a kid, I loved cowboy movies. In a frequent motif, the handsome sheriff, wounded in a duel with a nasty desperado, whom he had killed, limped into the town’s saloon and wincingly asked the tipsy doctor, “How bad is it, Doc?” A pretty woman of sketchy repute, who worked in the saloon […]
We like balance, fairness in everything we do. A square deal. Our financial lives are based on the notion of equivalency—getting what we pay for. Equivalence is used as the basis for settling a score—He did it first! It’s the central tenet of physics—for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Ethical equivalencies, […]
Author’s note: I wrote this piece when I was painting John Brown’s portrait back in 2012. It was my attempt to sort out the complex aspects of his character and clarify my attraction to legacy, my admiration for his fierce courage and commitment despite his darker reputation. Once the portrait was completed, I set these […]
The justification for erasing America’s historic injustices, claiming that knowing them causes kids to feel guilt or shame, is a high priority for our current right wing government. Trump and his ilk make this sound like a noble cause—protecting kids from carrying the factual and emotional burdens of history. Think how much more uncomplicated and […]
“. . . an act of cruelty . . . was the ancient irresistible rejoicing of power over weakness.” – Tony Hoagland “You cannot follow both Christ and the cruelty of kings. A leader who mocks the weak, exalts himself, and preys on the innocent is not sent by God. He is sent to test […]
I intended to write about immigrants. About our government’s demonization of immigrants. About the reasons people flee their homes, abandon their extended families and communities, take enormous risks and suffer humiliating hardships to get to some safer and healthier place. I wanted to talk about some of the people in this portrait collection who are from immigrant families—like Dr. […]
Some people use a recording of rain’s soothing white noise to put themselves to sleep. I like to be woken up by the real thing. My house is surrounded by old red oaks and on a warm, quiet night—the windows wide—a sudden downpour startles me happily awake, the oak leaves twitching and twittering like a million […]
Yesterday afternoon, from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m., 17 men and women dressed all in black, stood in a line on the street in the little village of Blue Hill, Maine. Each of us held an empty pot, open end toward the road, and a wooden spoon. We were bearing witness to the starvation in Gaza enforced by […]
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all crueltyto know what occurs but not recognize the fact. – William Stafford, from A Ritual to Read to Each Other I don’t want to be writing this. Probably there are better things for me to be doing. Especially because the massacre in Gaza has been […]
A friend asked me to write a little essay about being astonished. Astonished? . . . My first thought was a glass of cool water. Drinking it. The mysterious and momentary sublimity of that. Its sensuous, animal satisfaction, its poetic wonder. And then, water itself. A miracle. What is the direct line from the Big Bang to […]