I used to wish the children would sit somewhere else and stop crying. Now I realize they–and their sainted mothers–have come to greet me.
OUR COMMON HOME
THE FRIENDS OF GRIFFITH PARK NEWSLETTER
What I love most about the park is the smell of sage, plus the array of people: elderly ladies power-walking with their visors, tanned buff guys running shirtless, young people talking about their screenplays and restaurant jobs.
KATHERINE BOO’S BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS
Boo is firmly enshrined in my personal communion of saints, a subset of which is “Writers Who Are Catholic Without Being Catholic.” Would that more of us wrote with her curiosity, excellence, intelligence, willingness to suffer, and heart.
CROWNED WITH THORNS
I may not look like I’m doing much, but believe me, the wheels are turning! My spirit is forming and firming up by the minute. And to top it all off, from walking around for hours every day in the blazing sun, I’m getting a tan!
THE ORCHARDS OF PERSEVERANCE
In the silence and solitude, stripped of their previous lives, many of the men underwent a kind of disintegration of personality. The realization that they weren’t who they thought they were could be profoundly unsettling.
MONICA AISSA MARTINEZ: NOTHING IN STATIS
Her women are sturdy, strong, questing, joyful. Of “Portrait of Sara, Head in Profile, Arms Akimbo” (2017), she observes: “Leonardo da Vinci says: The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.”
THE SPIRITUAL CASE FOR A DAILY WALK
In “A Philosophy of Walking,” Frédéric Gros reflects upon some of the many thinkers and writers throughout history who have also considered walking essential to their work: Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thoreau.
THE FOLKS I DIG
I wasn’t hallucinating but it was kind of like when I used to drop acid back in high school–an altered state except not dark, not delusional. If only I could see through those eyes and feel that way all the time!
FINDING FREEDOM AT THE LOST KITCHEN
“Finding Freedom” is the story of how Erin French picked herself up by the bootstraps, begged, borrowed, scavenged, refurbished an old Airstream trailer and opened a popup, made a handshake deal for an abandoned gristmill in rural Maine and bit by bit, breathed a world-famous restaurant into life.
OBSESSED BY THE SPIRITS OF THIS AGE
“Some people cling to what is past; some, the fewer and braver, face the future; but to live harmoniously in the present is an almost superhuman task.”
VIVA MAESTRO!: COMPOSER GUSTAVO DUDAMEL
Dudamel’s philosophy, work and life constitute a resounding rebuke to those who maintain that art is a frivolous whim in these dark times.
MIDWEST AUTUMN
Chicago, Lake Forest, and Oak Park were incredible. But way more important–I made a new friend.
EVERYTHING PROFOUND, PART III
“Do you know the origin of that word ‘saunter?’” mountaineer John Muir once asked an interviewer. “It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, ‘A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’”