“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.  Remote from universal nature, and living by a complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge, seeing thereby a feather magnified, the whole image in distortion.  We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err.  For the animal shall not be measured by man.” Continue reading

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These photographs are for dad, who cherished winter and forests and snow, and would have loved this storm. Taken with one of his beloved old Nikon lenses; I like to think that whatever I shoot with them, he will see. Continue reading

I learned only this year that when leaves change color, their essential color is emerging, revealed by a decline in chlorophyll production. There is something deeply gratifying about that. These gold-red fields, this final radiance, are gentle words from an autumn goddess: “Let go. Don’t cling, don’t worry, stop concentrating, stop trying. Let go, for a moment, and see things as they are and must be. Are they not beautiful?” Continue reading

“The Beduin of the desert, born and grown up in it, had embraced with all his soul this nakedness too harsh for volunteers, for the reason, felt but inarticulate, that there he found himself indubitably free. Continue reading