“Perspective”
“It looks empty,” he pointed to the coaly heavens, “but it’s actually full of dark matter. The stars look tiny, but some of them are ten million times the volume of the sun and a million times brighter too. We all look solid, but we’re really 99.99 percent empty space. Atoms are proportionately as far […]
Continue reading“The Magic of Books”
“Pages of books worked like wings to carry him back (and even forward) through time, across vast oceans and over the mountains, rivers, and deserts of far-off continents. By the genius of the books’ authors he was introduced to beggars and princes, lovers, lechers, tipplers, gamblers, and thieves. He heard the piteous wailing of starving […]
Continue reading“Final Spring”
“That spring Skylar’s senses tuned exquisitely into nature. He noticed the first gorgeous flowering of the rosebud cherry trees, whose blossoms were unevenly pink, ranging from rose to pastel, and further, even to white, and which, from a distance looked hoary. The long-stamened, yellow-green flowers of the Ohio Buckeyes appeared just before their distinctive, five-parted […]
Continue reading“In Here”
In the moments just prior to transcendence, she witnessed all of nature spreading out across her inner eye. There were vast acreages of ancient forests, cirques of steel-blue lakes bounded by icy cliffs, stars populating immense spaces in galaxy upon galaxy upon galaxy, hordes of streaming shooting stars, undulant meadows of richly colored flowers, and […]
Continue reading“Nature’s Dare”
“I saw these images and thought these thoughts. Nature harrowed me with her beauty. She attacked me and dared me to master her. As the sun, she flaunted her flames, born of a billion filaments of micro-light, a fusion of hydrogen to helium, an extrusion of the vivifying heat, the dazzle, the brilliance of all […]
Continue reading“Seduction of Nature”
“Nature was the celestial nymph of the Infinite come to seduce me. Like the seaborne semi-silk-draped enchantress in Cot’s The Storm, she floated enticingly close, near enough for me to feel her body warmth and smell the inner-earth scents of her form but too far away to capture her as my own. I could feel […]
Continue reading“The English Teacher”
“What drama and excitement there was in the classroom when Diepen first opened the pages of the great poem and begin to declaim its lines. His free left hand swept up above his head in vigorous gesticulation, pausing there momentarily before flipping up in a snap so that the palm faced the ceiling. The teacher […]
Continue reading“The Workshop”
“At times, Skylar followed his father down to the sacred space and watched him as he worked. To the boy, this was a magical, manly place, silent except for the sound of tools at work, organized to the point of perfection, filled with the wholesome smells of sawdust, oil, and Elmer’s glue. It was a […]
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