First Known When Lost

Please bear with me:  I have already entered autumn.  I did so a few weeks ago.  Because it is my favorite season, each year I try to hasten...

I suppose I'm just a sentimental old fool.  (Although, as I have noted here in the past, I find nothing wrong with sentimentality, and w...

Each year, a moment arrives when we say to ourselves:   Autumn is here .  That moment varies from year to year:  the angle or the color of t...

We live in a puritanical time.  The current version of puritanism, like all that have come before it, is a matter of faith.  The faith in th...

As I am wont to do, one recent sunny afternoon I stood beneath a tree (a big-leaf maple), looking upward, marveling at the infinite, ever-ch...

As I'm sure is the case with many of you, I have certain poems floating around inside me to which I return again and again: touchstones ...

This past week I spent an afternoon idyll in the emergency room of a local hospital, where I became acquainted with atrial fibrillation (als...

When all is said and done, Keats is exactly right: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all      Ye know on earth, and all ye ...

Ah, "news"!  What place should we give it in our lives?  I concede that it has some practical benefits.  For instance, it provides...

Yesterday evening, I sat listening to the birds chattering and singing outside the window, in the back garden.  There are so many worlds wit...