What I miss most when I return to Kenya is not the way things used to look or the way people used to act. What I miss is the firstness of experience and its accompanying intensity. I miss the very rawness of my nerves. Arriving at the boarding school where I lived, high on theContinue reading “How I Lost that Loving Feeling”
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Cold Storage
As we shift into March and the promise of spring, here’s a late-winter story from my book Climbing Lessons. It’s about a rare experience of being alone, as a grade school child, with my father. It’s about going out into nature with him at night–and the darkness working its magic, making him unusually reminiscent, unusuallyContinue reading “Cold Storage”
Perspective
The earth is full of secrets—complete cities that have sunk into soil then been brought back to light by archeologists or unsuspecting construction workers. Whole marble sculptures and mosaics, gold coins, ornate swords, clay warriors, alabaster figurines, jeweled goblets, carved urns, and stray cannonballs. There is no end to the secrets either, because the earthContinue reading “Perspective”
The Climbing Lesson
My father always enjoyed moments of goofing around, and he didn’t mind when my brothers and I put him in the middle of our own goofing around. He never took himself too seriously. And that was a lesson in itself. Here is an audio version of the title story from my book Climbing Lessons. JustContinue reading “The Climbing Lesson”
Freeway Aesthetics, Winter, Iowa
After two days of blowing snow and added sleet, a white, white world of purest white stretches out on both sides of I-35, glistening. The sun, in the cloudless sky, is white too, as it slides down from the deep blue toward the pale blue, lighting up the sheathed tips of everything—the bushes in theContinue reading “Freeway Aesthetics, Winter, Iowa”
Jet Lag
When I step out of Terminal C of the Kansas City International Airport, I am swaddled in muggy heat. I feel as if I have stepped into an immense sauna. Part of me wants to strip right there. It’s almost July, and the weather is what one might expect. However, I am no longer inContinue reading “Jet Lag”
A Beautiful Crowd
At noon, we throw no shadows. At noon, we are what we are. Each one pinned to his or her own ground. Separate as hell. But look how we stretch over time. The sun lowers and we step away. What slender reaching figures we become, each turned into something new and mysterious and gracefully elongated. Continue reading “A Beautiful Crowd”
So Far Away
From down here they seem so far away–those two-hundred souls vacuum-sealed into an aluminum fuselage and shot across the sky. And maybe they are up there thinking the same about me and the few microscopic hikers whose bright shirts can be spotted on this tiny trail in the vast expanse of Arches National Park. Continue reading “So Far Away”
STAND?
Photo: Obama supporters in Des Moines, Iowa, celebrate his win in November 2008. Do you remember the photos of people weeping with joy on the night Barack Obama was elected? Were you feeling it yourself—the almost-impossible-to-believe euphoria of a change that had seemed out of reach? The sense of a fairy tale come true? GravityContinue reading “STAND?”
