Fore runners

While Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is talking to TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie about the newly passed COVID-19 relief package on the other side of Lincoln Memorial.

Campers in Shenandoah

It is when trees are sleeping and trails are still covered by snow and ice here in the mountains that we feel more our own breaths, and our singular existence seems to have a place – not drowned – in the universe.

Animal spirits & the human spirit

I am all for exuberant animal spirits, but why do we have to drop mask mandates when reopening the economy at a time daily new cases are still as high as the last summer wave peak and the country’s vaccination rate is far below what is required to achieve herd immunity? We also need the human spirit right now, and always. But if the human spirit has become identical to political ideology, then it’s a different story – that’d be woe to humanity.

The community garden in winter

Tomatoes, lettuces, and green peppers are long gone; the fig tree only retains a bare form. It is in drab scenes like this – not in dashing gestures – and often in a shared room called home that the profound truth of human life is revealed. I am talking about plays, those great plays. Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, Djuna Barnes’s The Antiphon, to name a few.