Nicholas, it’s spring! the year’s true fresh start! renewal, resurrection, release–and lovely mud. And I so love playing in my yard, weeding and “breeding lilacs out of the dead land.” T.S. Eliot said it better than anyone, though the land is never dead really, just waiting to burst forth again. A Leaf Garden? In my woodland […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, My step-grandbaby is a few days old, living in Krakow, Poland. My search for flights to go visit is sliding into pathological. I’m not exaggerating.  I’m trying to figure out a reasonably-priced reasonably-doable way for her granddaddy and me to go meet her. Arranging a wonderful trip should not put me into the tailspin […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, I’m in a state of mind that’s new to me: angry and sad at the same time. Angry sad! I don’t like it. The triggers seem to be: mortality and the fact that I’m  now taking 25 mg less of my mental health OCD medication, which perhaps makes mortality harder to deal with. […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, I found this week, as I was going through pictures and papers my mother left, a surprise document. In a “baby book”– filled in at the start but quickly going blank, of course–she had written her baby’s first words, my first words, back in the good year 1949. They are revealing. So I’m […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, I never thought I had a problem with change until recently. I thought I had a fairly adventurous approach to each new part of life. Now I know for sure that I need to pick up some coping-with-change skills. I need to start getting used to things changing without my having any vote […] Read More

  Dear Nicholas, All week I’ve been feeling that I’ve really hit my stride on the book I’m working on. This afternoon my trusty writing group vigorously disagreed with me. They liked earlier chapters and really really didn’t like what I read today. So now I’m in a writing muddle. How to Write Religious Experience […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, I just came upon a description of the soul’s afterlife that perfectly describes the intimations I’ve had about what happens to our spirits after death. I was astonished to come across this; I wasn’t looking for any such thing in the book I was reading. The book is A Search in Secret India […] Read More

Nicholas, I’m turning 70 years old at 2:34 this afternoon. A big birthday to anyone who hasn’t yet achieved it, though I know it’s ho-hum to my eighty-something-ish friends. I want to make a deal out of it–increasingly, I feel big birthdays should get their due– but I haven’t fully decided how. What I know […] Read More

Nicholas–My New Year’s Resolve: Find my car in the parking lot. That’s a shorthand way of saying that I mean to pay better attention to what I’m doing and reliably remember what I need to remember. I’m going to improve my memory, at least get it back to where it was a year ago when […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, So far I’ve failed at being frantic about Christmas this year. I can’t say that this is a sign of serenity. Instead, I seem a bit lackadaisical about it. Whatever else the holiday is to me, it has long been a December 25 deadline.  And I’ve never even done much about it. I […] Read More