Walking. I’m lost. I’m lost. I’m lost.

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It’s 6:15 a.m, 61° F with light rain, on a dreary Friday morning.

61° F (!) in August, after several weeks of blistering heat, imagine that. I lift my face to the sky, and let the cool morning breeze and light rain work themselves into my bones.

I cracked open a new book last night, Linn Ullmann’s “Girl, 1983.” Hypnotic scenes drift in and out as I walk.

But sometimes there’s a blessed respite – like a sudden breath of cool wind from an open window…I shook the duvets and smoothed the sheets, tidied the bedside table, opened the window wide and flung the curtains apart. I wanted air and light to stream in to where I lay in the white linen – and sounds that told of a city that was awake. (Linn Ullmann)

It’s been 1,914 consecutive (almost) days on this morning walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.

And even though I’ve been walking in this same park, on the same track for 1,914 consecutive days (like 5.25 years now), I’ve stepped foot in the Cove Island Park Wildlife Sanctuary, maybe 10x. This small refuge is less than 1000 feet from where I park my car at the entrance of Cove Island Park.

Continue reading “Walking. I’m lost. I’m lost. I’m lost.” →

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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There was a time when I believed that the two most powerful sentences in the English language were “I love you” and “I’m sorry.” I now know that those words can wound, deeply, when they’re contradicted by our actions. “I’m sorry” can even insult our intelligence if regret never leads to repentance. […]

That’s what “The Bear” is really about: How do we live together when someone always seems to be going too far? The answer we ultimately get is that we can’t. We can’t sustain a community when the pain grows too great. […]

In Season 3, we can clearly see the damage Carmy has done. He has made something great, but each person in the restaurant — each person in his family — is still under terrible strain. Something has to give.

No, more precisely, someone has to give, and that someone is Carmy.

This terrible tension and pain can make “The Bear” difficult to watch. Relationships are splintering across America. It’s hard enough to live in a community — we are all inherently flawed, after all. Normal human failings create persistent frictions, and unless we learn to deal with and ameliorate that friction, even the best of friendships can sometimes fade.

But we’re living through something else, a furious anger in which it seems people actually want to end friendships, where they want to inflict pain with their words. It’s one way to demonstrate your commitment, your great and high ideological or religious or political calling. The cause demands it, and you serve the cause. […]

I’m such a fallen person that when I saw that scene, I admit that my first thought was of the people who needed to repent to me. But thankfully that moment passed. Instead, I came to feel a profound sense of conviction. I asked myself, “Who have I harmed?” and — more important — “How can I change?”

At a time of extraordinary fury, we all live in a degree of pain. We all live with regrets. But hope can come from unexpected places — and perhaps a show that features scallops, pastries and Chicago beef can also teach us that only repentance can heal our broken hearts.

— David French, The Raw Power of Repentance (NY Times, July 27, 2025)

Notes:

If we lose reading, we lose…

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…These are darkening days for those of us who love books. But we needn’t drift apathetically into a horror story. The English philosopher Roger Scruton wrote of beauty that it is “vanishing from our world because we live as if it doesn’t matter.” Well, that’s true of reading. It is vanishing from our world because we live as if it doesn’t matter. We are on our phones.

Like characters in a scary story, we need to see that we are drifting toward disaster and save ourselves, before it’s too late. Each of us has the power to show that reading does matter. We can do it by reading—and being seen reading—with dedication, bravado and a bit of countercultural aggression. Be the person on the train who pulls out a paperback rather than a phone. Be the parent in the pediatrician’s waiting room who reads a story rather than letting your child zone out on a tablet. Be the spouse who chooses a novel after dinner over the television. Be the teacher who transfixes the class with a live reading rather than a canned video. Revive the old social norms by setting them yourself…

Poetry and literature are art forms that can lift a person from blinkered individual existence to sublime and broadened understanding. Books form a great reverberating conversation across the centuries, joining the minds of men and women long dead with those alive today. If we lose reading, we lose the connection, and we consign future generations to a kind of witless groping around in cultural obscurity. It is vital, though, to recognize where we are now. English majors are struggling to read Dickens. If we let this slide, in a decade we’ll be lucky if graduate students can parse “Fun with Dick and Jane.”

— Meghan Cox Gurdon, from “Put Down the Phone and Pull Out a Book, Revel in words and writing. Let the world see you doing it.” (wsj.com, July 22, 2025)

Guess.What.Day.It.Is?

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Notes:

Don’t be so afraid of losing life that you forget to live it.

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Poet Andrea Gibson died on July 14, 2025 at the age of 49 from Ovarian cancer. Here’s some excerpts from an essay written by her friend and fellow poet Amber Tamblyn from a NY Times article titled: “A Poet Who Advocated Radical Tenderness“.

“Andrea had a unique ability to offer their readers and listeners a way of living, to show us how much we need tenderness, and how to be tender as a radical act. One of the last poems they wrote, “Love Letter From the Afterlife,” was written…for a fractured world. It asks us to do what might feel impossible right now: Soften toward, not away from, one another, even at such a heightened time of vitriol and hate. It was written by a poet who lived their brief life with a consciousness of something bigger than themselves — a collective belief, whether we are aware of it or not, that all of us long to feel less alone. […]

In a poem titled, “How The Worst Day of My Life Became the Best,” Andrea wrote:

When I realized the storm
was inevitable, I made it
my medicine.

Took two snowflakes
on the tongue in the morning,
two snowflakes on the tongue
by noon.

There were no side effects.
Only sound effects. Reverb
added to my lifespan,
an echo that asked—

What part of your life’s record is skipping?
What wound is on repeat?
Have you done everything you can
to break out of that groove?

[…} In 2023, a video Andrea made on lessons they learned after learning their cancer was now incurable, went viral. On a drive, they said, they had done the bravest thing they had ever done. “I picked my head up and I loved the world that I knew wouldn’t always be mine.” They went on, “I think many of us are doing it almost all the time; we are not allowing ourselves joy or love or peace because we are afraid to lose it. Don’t be so afraid of losing life that you forget to live it.” […]

Photo: AP Photo/Chris Pizzello