My car plays music. Not just Sirius XM and its 70s on 7, Jim Croce and Jethro Tull. Or Taylor Swift on the Moose with ads for beds from Leon’s. No, my car is an orchestra. The tud-bump of tires over a break in the asphalt. The inhale of the engine as it attacks a…

First there’s the big, bold sunset, so spectacular put-on-a-show. Then tiny sparrow, piping the same – soon familiar – tune. Next comes the wind, rushing southward, playing the leaves in waves. And later the gift of rain: pummeling, drizzling, spotting, gone. And before long, I’m in love with my heavy knife, that firm apple, this…

Gas in the car – up 10 centsGarbage to the dump – damn bag split3 two-by-fours – no red paintSquirrel on the road – get outta wayDriver going 40 – what’s wrong with you?All these problems faced by me‘Cuz I’m in the world, not of it

Are we ever there if we’re not aware? If we’re in the woods and fail to notice the creak of the maples? Or if the musical rhythm of the lake’s waves laps us by? Can we say we’ve been somewhere if we don’t see the shades of the rocks and the shadows through the leaves?…

I’m sitting on a bench outside my house. It’s four feet wide – enough for two, if that’s your thing. I’m waiting for nothing. Stillness, you see, is my superpower: Birds surprise my ears, a squirrel shoots between my legs. The boy deer is back, nibbling at the oaks I newly planted. A baby raccoon…

For Freddie – the goodest dog in the world – everything old is also new. On that same maple with the broken branch chats a cheeky squirrel, too far to leap. There’s a raccoon been under the dusty brush pile. But when? But how? What’s with the mushroom that wasn’t on the lawn? Where did…

Ten minutes by bike (all downhill) from the house I grew up in was Bobbits Lane. And down Bobbits Lane was a wheat field, a meadow, some allotments and the sewage works. To the right was Spring Wood, which was ancient and ended abruptly at the A14. I would bike down here, on my own,…

Tiny seeds that flirt with the sun and fall like sparks. The hummingbird, so hurrying bird for that next frantic hit. This turpentine pine cone, warm and gluey. Two dead grasshoppers in the screened-in porch. Got in. Trapped. Thin. Shiny grass. Surprising breezes. Loam. All these small things, so easy to love. And the big…

I don’t want to go skydiving or rock climbing. I won’t jump between rooftops or race Highway 401. Instead, I’ll sit here, feeling mortal and adoring the scent of the forest.

I’m surrounded by birds. I can hear their beating wings, their squawking and tweeting, pecking, drumming. Flocks of birds. Birds I haven’t seen before, black and white birds, birds that creep up trees, birds that peck at gutters, yellow-headed birds. I have no idea what they’re all called. And that’s OK because once I name…

I’m getting accustomed to the whole Covid thing. But from time to time, I see a familiar place turned apocalyptic, with the masks and the distancing and such. That sends a chill up my body, like the time I was a kid and I realized for the first time I too would die one day.…

I got two bush cords of firewood delivered this week; truckloads tipped with the sound of thunder. There are round logs and square logs, wedge logs and deformed logs. Wood with latticy fungus or a cancery burl. And when its stacked (and it will be, soon), all that is littered is scraps and splints and…

One day in – I don’t know – 2002, I found myself in the Catalan seaside town of Sitges. I was stress-working in Amsterdam, flew to visit a friend in Barcelona and…well… I just needed a break alone. So I took the train past the airport, got off in Sitges – and found a cafe…

I’m from England, where it rains from time to time. I remember as a kid in the back of the car, following the drops on the windows as they jigged and jagged earthward, absorbing and engorging with brakes-failed momentum. Or the November puddles on the black roads, which slobbered a wobbly red under the traffic…

Where do we go when we’re asleep? Are we like the bee on the thistle? Fuzzy yellow on spiky purple, a color wheel contrast in stillness? Are we like the barbecue spider? An eight-legged cast that no fly might wake? Are we like caterpillar goo? Denatured? Deconstructed? Dissolved? DNA? Or are we like me? Snoring…

I was sitting on my couch the other day, looking out the window and thinking about this and that. Along came a flock of tiny birds, into the frame from left to right. Fluttering so gently from branch to branch. I watched them pass. Into the frame, out of the frame. How fascinating they were!…

We have a woodchuck that lives with us. Well, not in the house (we have no wood to chuck) but around and about, on the sandy bank and the weedy septic. It has a condo in the rock face crack, with a roof terrace and eighth floor balcony. That’s the kind of real estate you…

That patch of light. You see? The one that’s making the leaves of the raspberry bush shine so white? That patch of light, whose photons journeyed 93 million miles to bounce off the leaves of the raspberry bush and make them shine so white? That patch of light, which is forcing a squint as the…

The secret to viewing shooting stars, as I discovered while I lay on the gently rocking dock, with the crickets buzzing behind me and the Milky Way misting across the blackness, is not to look for them. Instead, it’s to wait… and then see. Meteors punish effort. Seek in the north-west, or at Perseus, or…

Of all the world’s inhabitants I’ve fallen in love with recently, I fell hardest for the song sparrow. Its melody relieved the early days of Covid, and it kept singing until the dry days of August parched its tiny voice. It built a nest in the giant heap of cut-down branches. Quite the fortress, you’d…

I was at the dump today. With seagulls and eagles (and maybe a bear). Cans and bottles and scrubbed out jars. Boxes, more boxes and (oops!) legal files. Dead TVs in a metallic morgue, awaiting postmortem by hammer and torch. Chicken bones and Barbies with hair all tangled. Melon rind, headlamp from a 1990s Ford.…

Dead daisies are beautiful and I don’t care. Look at them, with their crusty petals and hollow seeds. So brown and so defiant. But they’re dead! they say. They’re deceased, they’re passed, and they’re done. A dead daisy is over and I have no use for such a thing. But look! I say back. Those…

I fell in love with my saucepan this morning. We’re not getting married or anything. But I noticed a deep affection – a warm swelling in my chest. It was early, you see. Time to put the cooled pot of curry in the fridge. The pan was so heavy and so stained; hard and metally…

Love says ‘I am everything.’

Wisdom says ‘I am nothing.’

Between the two, my life flows

One of the (shush!) side benefits of the whole Covid thing was that my 2020 sales goals went for crap. In January, we’d set targets that were higher than last year. But when March came along, we were like, “we’ll do what we can.” And as the spring dragged on, I started thinking, why the…

The birds here are singing just as loudly although it’s raining. Yet we as humans tend to think of the rain as “bad”. Interesting.

More=Better=Addiction (h/t @lynne_twist)

Driving down the highway, going somewhere different, I noticed the trees, like a wall. Sometimes, I would steal a look to the right and see what was through the forest, but I never could. Then at 1pm, I needed to pee, so I pulled over and stomped into the undergrowth, to a secret, hidden world.…

The other week, my nephew found a flower, shyly living in the jungly green. “Look at its colours,” he said. “The purple that fades to pink. It’s so amazing.” I asked him if he knew what it was called – but he wasn’t interested. So I told him anyway. “It’s a twinflower,” I said. “I…

Childhood holidays were a five-hour hot slog up the motorway – with a stop for tuna sandwiches on the way – to camp in a field in Yorkshire or Cumbria or Dorset. They were the best vacations a child could ask for. But without fail on arrival, I would have a tantrum: An unquenchable meltdown…

When I was a child, I would lie in the bathtub so my feet could turn on the taps. Then I would block one of the spouts with my big toe. Sometimes, I would dip my head under the water and hear the phlock as my ears filled and my senses deadened. I squeaked my…

I thought I was going to die as I drove into the moose; that moment as control is compressed into brakes and steering-wheel knuckles when there’s nothing to do except stamp down and wait. When we stopped, I got out of the car. I was cheerfully alive and I didn’t look back at the moose…

In February, which seems three decades ago not three months, I was in Lisbon. The Portuguese capital, famous for salted cod and custard tarts, is also known for its hills. The steepest and tallest of these sit facing each other, the flat plain of the commercial district in the middle. The Barrio Alto, the wealthy…

I was a teenager in the 1980s. The era of big hair. I was no exception. I let my locks storm upwards and outwards, a hormone-powered thicket of bouncy wire. At the age of 17, I wrote an article for a computer magazine called 8000 Plus. They published my picture next to it. I was…

The night train from Madrid to Murcia had the type of carriages where passengers sit in compartments: a row of 3 facing a row of 3, for eight upright hours through darkness. At the age of 20, I decided to study for a year in Spain. I didn’t speak Spanish. I’d never travelled abroad alone.…

The autumn term (as they called the first semester of the school year back in England) started bronzed and enthusiastic in September, and ended tinseled and over-excited at Christmas, passing through conkers (put them in vinegar and they get hard), bonfire night (sparklers and disappointing back garden displays), before sliding into evenings that closed in…

One day I thought I saw a falling satellite but it was probably just a seagull. When I was very little, legend has it I looked up at the sky and informed my mother there were stars but no moon, so she should buy one in the shops. My brother (because he was younger and…

About 45 minutes from where I grew up, in sniffing distance of the River Alde, is the Snape Maltings concert hall. Inside the varnished room are taught strings and shiny brass, outside a reedy forest, oozy mud and ducks. Concert-goers in jackets and dresses sip interval wine with herons and frogs. It’s known for its…

When I was about three, I was terrified of collapsing sandcastles. It was the kind of terror that infiltrates every cell. It was visceral and it was total. Even now, I remember my utter revulsion when I saw the structure crack. I don’t know if it was the destruction or the denaturing that bothered me…

A friend once told me that the way to walk busy city streets was to fix your gaze ahead, focused on exactly where you wanted to go. With such an eagle-stare, sidewalk pedestrians would part to create a path. I tried it and it works. You just have to imagine you’re the only one there…

At the age of 11, I started high school, two bus rides away into another world. I was a fish scooped from his cozy bowl, poured into the ocean with its sharks and eels, currents and waves. None of this was friendly. I was Nemo lost. Each day, I was trapped there from 8 until…

When I was eight years old, I went on a school trip to the British county of Derbyshire. Our youth hostel was in spitting distance of the village of Eyam, which in 1665 quarantined itself to stop the Bubonic plague spreading elsewhere. But let’s gloss over that for now. It was one of my first…

At the age of 16, I was sent to see a career counselor. She made me fill in a form and then the computer spat out a list of suitable careers on a dot-matrix printer with the holey edges you had to tear off. I was to be an accountant or a librarian. There wasn’t…

My last silent meditation retreat lasted seven days. There were clouds of mosquitoes and deer flies that bite your head. The food was good. Life gets small on a retreat. There’s no phones and no internet. There are no outsiders. There’s no news. No movies. Even books are discouraged. Instead there is meditation and breakfast…

Yesterday I sold a newspaper ad to a woman who makes soap. Today I unsold her. I have this new job – publisher of a local community newspaper. We’re one of the few still doing OK right now. It’s a good newspaper in a tight-knit community. But it’s still hard to sell ads – the…

One of the most dangerous things about driving in a Canadian winter isn’t the black ice (although that is dangerous) or the freezing rain (although that is dangerous too), it’s running out of windshield wiper fluid. In the right conditions, the salt that gets sprayed on the road becomes a mist, which crusts the glass…

I’d been married only two years – and then I was in a room with the dead uncle. Well, the uncle-in-law. It was the first time I’d seen a dead person. In my community back in England, the dead are hidden, put in a box and then slid away behind a curtain. They are barely…

The best night of the year was when Father Christmas came to my street. Never has a truck looked so magical, transformed by lights and music into CHRISTMAS – and all the excitement that meant to a little boy in his pajamas. I’d watch from the living room window and then open the front door…