The ground is frozen, and the gardens put to bed, but I’m still harvesting greens and herbs from the greenhouse. A greenhouse was never part of the plan. A wood-fired pizza oven was. But Tim came home from the clinic with a story about a patient who built a greenhouse during lockdown, a greenhouse big […]

I like to start my day in the dark. It’s quiet time, when I practice a morning meditation with my pen. There’s something safe about these pre-dawn hours, before the world wakes, a time when the phone doesn’t ring, when it’s too early to engage in the world. The dark envelops me. When I raise […]

Nature as a Foreign Land Like many suburban-raised kids, I grew up as if Nature was a foreign land. Except for a small patch of front lawn, which we were supposed to stay off, and a scrappy backyard where we had a sandbox and jungle gym, “outside” was mostly paved. We played running bases on […]

I’ve been riding the rail trails: biking on old railroad beds that have been repurposed for non-motorized recreational use. I used to ride my bicycle on the roads. When I was sixteen, I biked from southwestern Connecticut to southeastern Vermont. The way I remember it, back then there was less traffic, less speeding and less […]