What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us.
Until that moment I'd always beloved i could still go home and pretend the Congo never happened
Today at the Melchor market, a fantastical sight. A servant girl with a birdcage on her back, full of birds. She wore her blue shawl wrapped around the cage and tied in front to hold it. The willow ca...
This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If th...
This I need to be told? she’d snapped. As if, sitting in this kitchen where she felt the disapproving presence of his dead mother, she could forget where he’d grown up. Cole was the youngest of six ch...
There is not justice in this world. Father, forgive me wherever you are, but this world has brought one vile abomination after another down on the heads of the gentle, and I’ll not live to see the mee...
The thing is, it's my own fault. I just can't put up with a person that won't go out of his way for me. And that's what a man is. Somebody that won't go out of his way for you. I bet it says that in t...
Thatcher thought Mary was not invisible, but as free as any woman could be. And in the grip of fresh discoveries, always.
Summer's heat had never really arrived, nor the cold in it's turn, and everything living now seemed to yearn for sun with the anguish of the unloved. The world of sensible seasons had come undone.
Sometimes that happens. Children can be your heartache. But that doesn’t matter, you have to go on and have them, she said. It works out.
So one time when I was working in this motel one of the toilets leaked and I had to replace the flapper ball. Here’s what it said on the package; I kept it till I knew it by heart: ‘Please Note. Parts...
Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Please Note. Parts are included for all installations, but no installation requires all of the parts.’ That’s
Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and...
Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sand bars to the sea.
Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It's kind of all one. You know what Hester told me when we were working the sheep one time? She said it's no good to complain about your flock, b...
Looking out on a clean plank of planet earth, we can get shaken right down to the bone by the bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own.
Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.
I’ve heard a Buddhist monk suggest the number of food-caused deaths is minimized in steak dinners, which share one death over many meals, whereas the equation is reversed for a bowl of clams.
I’m beginning at least to notice when I’m consuming the United Nations of edible plants and animals all in one seating. (Or the WTO, is more like it.) On a winter’s day not long ago I was served a sum...