Life at the Roost, Sandhill Cranes, San Antonio NM, January 17, 2011
Collectanea
Collectanea, A miscellany of collected passages, is my catalog of passages clipped from books, magazines and the web.
Passages are saved over in Clippings and cataloged here
- American History
- Some quirky passages drawing on life in historical America.
- Art and Sculpture
- A collection of passages relating to art and sculpture.
- Finger-Ring Draw
- This is a collection of clippings I'm gathering as I research the mystery and history of the large circular symbols drawn in the desert at Finger-Ring Draw north of Deming New Mexico.
- Food and Cooking
- These are not your mothers favorite recipes.
- Humor
- Haw! Haw! Haw!
- Natural Science
- Endlessly fascinating, the natural world is.
- Philosophy
- Why, what's the point?
- Politics and World Affairs
- Politics is not something I want to dwell on here but once in a while I run across a passage I can't help but clip.
- Word Play
- What magic it is to read a passage that lights up the mind's eye.
- On Writing
- I've never studied writing and I struggle with it every day. Here are some passages bearing on this mysterious art.
Recent additions
A Voyage and a Harbor
The native American was forced westward by the young escaping the limits of east coast villages that had been established only a generation or two earlier by parents escaping the limits of European villages. From then on, whether seeking a whale, rafting with Huck Finn, easy riding with Peter Fonda, or next week in Cancun, there has been a strong belief in America that happiness lies somewhere else. And yet as we find freedom we also rediscover loneliness. As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says, we require both shelter and venture. We need freedom and support, silence and cacophony, the vast and distant but also the warm and near, a voyage and a harbor, the great adventure and the hobbit hole. Much of the iconography of our times gives little sense of this. Instead, the individual is treated as a self-sufficient, self-propelled vehicle moving across a background of other things, other places, and other people.
The Value of Time
Time is the most valuable and finite commodity that any living thing has. Think about it, everything – you, me, people, plants, animals, even the Earth itself – has a limited and set amount of time. From the moment we come into existence, we begin an inevitable march to a final end. Even the age of our solar system exists in but a minute of time within the context of the history of the universe. The average human lifespan does not even register on that clock. With that said, in many ways, time is the very definition of life itself.
Writing Forces Thinking
An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.