Linz, Austria (http://www.sternwarte.at) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6756468
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Kayak Instructor
Instead of exerting yourself to drag the paddle through water, let your other blade push the air. Trust me, you will propel your boat. Remember, the core of your strength is neither from arms or shoulders, but in your hips and abdomen. Seek to glide with efficiency – hull speed is plenty fast enough. Allow a gentle flow of wake. This way, circumspect marine life will be emboldened to join you. Sea lions approach your port side, egrets wade hip-deep at starboard. Don’t aim your boat at these creatures, for they will see it as a threat and flee. Remain oblique to them. Pause to savor how they grace you with unbidden presence. Remove the camera from your dry bag, snap some photos as a keepsake. After a few hours, turn around. Insert your paddle blade at stern, then hold still as it pivots you. Give yourself enough time to leave the marsh before the tide recedes. If in doubt, follow pelicans – they know how to find the harbor. When possible, enlist the help of wind and current. Put no more effort in than you really need. Save energy for this return: a seven-mile journey upstream, avoiding mud in the shallows. Have beer and oysters back at dock.
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The People Who You Never Get to Love
after Rupert Holmes As the song describes, there are so many missed connections, chances at love that go unrealized, attractive people with whom you will exchange no more than eye contact. But these are not losses in Cupid’s game; they are amorous possibilities left in the wake of his arrow – shot true off a taut string plucked from your beating heart. The person in the secondhand bookstore, in the elevator, the passing train: you saw them and admired them from afar. In a parallel universe, you might have fallen in love, only to find out that your goals and values are not aligned. -
Kintsugi
The pottery bowl that sits on my desk contains markers of my identity: black leather wallet with driver’s license, house keys, Covid vaccination record. The father of a childhood friend made it, spinning clay on a wheel in his garage a short walk from the house where I grew up, my hometown’s name etched on the underside. Slate-grey with a sage-green rim, it bears streaks of white as if splashed by cream. Returning items to it from my pocket, the lid slipped and broke in three pieces. My heart sank. I cursed. Much has shattered of my regard for the world since I was young. Holding in mind sorrow I have witnessed or experienced fractures my spirit. The bowl, though, has a clean break, fixable. My wife’s dad offers to glue the pieces. Please do, I say: fill the fissures with gold. May they stay bonded stronger than before, the damage lacquered to highlight repair. A scar need not be hidden or disguised. Find grace in what befalls and is endured – a thing of honor which deserves esteem. -
The Armchair in Yu Garden
One of the pavilions which seem to float on pillars above rock piles and fish ponds in Old Shanghai’s Yu Garden is home to a chair made of cypress root – a massive, gnarled jumble pulled up from the ground as a single piece hundreds of years after the tree sprouted then crafted into seat and legs, forming a place where one can sit that keeps you close to earth’s embrace. -
Looking for the Green Comet
It’s 10pm in Silicon Valley. This winter night is oddly cold and clear, good timing for a drive into the hills. My old sedan climbs up La Honda Road, nimble on the switchbacks, clutch adjusting the gears easily to changes in grade. Redwoods on both sides loom large in the dark. A sharp left onto Skyline Boulevard where the road straightens and speed increases. Elevation almost two-thousand feet. Around a bend, then shielded by a ridge from the spill of urban lights below me. The moon is flirtatious, waxing full soon. Stars assert themselves. Orion is there. So are both dippers. An eternity of constellations. But no green comet, at least none that I am able to find – the reason I came all this way out here, wanting a distraction of cosmic scale from the post-dinner weeknight routine of chores and television before slumber, which is itself a respite from childcare between the close of work and when our son falls asleep. The comet’s glow is too weak for my eyes unaided by telescope. Close to midnight when I get home again, much later than usual for a Tuesday. Step inside to the embrace of our home, warm and familiar. Glad to see you are still there on the couch watching a show and will soon join me in bed, like always.
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Mine Hill Road
How green is Mine Hill Road after a spate of rain - emerald meadows everywhere I look.
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About the Turtle
What is there to say about the turtle, content to sit on a rock in the middle of a pond for many hours at a time? Rosemary plants along the boulevard are in bloom; their little flowers host murmuring bees. A man sells carvings each done on a grain of rice for a million yuan promising eternal luck to anyone who buys them. Acres of grassland whisper secrets to the breeze but reveal nothing to the hawk circling above who cries out in frustration. A stray cat wanders into the Buddhist temple during prayer hour and strolls among rows of monks who sit in meditation.
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Mushroom, Birch, Plum Blossom
Overnight showers and in the morning, mushrooms appear on the lawn. There is no treasure more opulent than birch trees covered in gold leaves. Grey sky, but no rain – one blossom falls from the plum tree.
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Oyster Mood
Everything is an irritant: a grain of sand I cannot locate rubbing against my sunburned thighs. Coffee on an empty stomach. Hunger without appetite. A cough that dislodges nothing, not even a shimmering pearl.
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Stanford Dish
A herd of cows blocked our way down the hill, strewn across the path as if they were boulders. Since a barbed wire fence stretched out to either side, there was no going around them. Spooked by their number, by their restlessness - by the sheer muscular bulk of each one - we stepped back up the trail to consider an alternate route to what lay ahead. Just then, an older gentleman approached and strolled right through that mass of hooves and fur, whistling to himself as he went by. The bovines parted like the Symplegades, so we hurried over the cattle guard before they closed in again behind us.
From the Firefly Galaxy 