t if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will liter-ally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get

It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out. — HERACLITUS

“God is subtle,” Einstein said, “but not malicious.

On a dark day, or a hazy one, everything’s washed-out and lackluster but the water. It carries its own lights.

So I think about the valley. It is my leisure as well as my work, a game. It is a fierce game I have joined because it is being played anyway, a game of both skill and chance, played against an un-seen adversary—the conditions of time—in which the payoffs, which may suddenly arrive in a blast of light at any moment, might as well come to me as anyo... See more

The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand.

Squirrels, the neighbor-hood children, and I use the downstream fence as a swaying bridge across the creek. But the steers are there today

very live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac . But at the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, “The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest? ” It’s a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an un-thinkable profusion of ... See more

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.... “Seem like we’re just set down here,” a woman said to me recently, “and don’t nobody know why.”