One way of surviving heartache is to stay busy. Making something right in at least one tiny corner of the vast house of wrongs...
Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair.
On the verbal portion I missed four questions, all having to do with choosing a word in a series that doesn't belong. I have always had trouble with that line of questioning. Given my own circumstance...
Oh, how can I say this: People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know once again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that i...
Oh, Rachel, Rachel, Leah said. Let me give you a teeny little lesson in political science. Democracy and dictatorship are political systems; they have to do with who participates in the leadership. So...
Of course the scientist’s position is subordinate. Our task is to make our fussy natures invisible against the mechanisms of the universe. Truth is not ours to find within, but to search out. We study...
No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.
No one seemed to realize calculating sums requires only the most basic machinery and good concentration. Poetry is far more difficult. And palindromes, with their perfect, satisfying taste: Draw a lev...
Nathan was something that happened to us, as devastating in its way as the burning roof that fell on the family Mwanza; with our fate scarred by hell and brimstone we still had to track our course. An...
My little beast, my eyes, my favorite stolen egg. Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In pe...
My favored mulching method is to cover the ground between rows of plants with a year’s worth of our saved newspapers; the paper and soy-based ink will decompose by autumn. Then we cover all that newsp...
My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.
Most of us are creatures so comforted by habit, it can take something on the order of religion to invoke new, more conscious behaviors--however glad we may be afterward that we went to the trouble.
Most of the girls my age, or even younger, have babies. They appear way too young to be married, till you look in their eyes. Then you'll see it. Their eyes look happy and sad at the same time, but un...
Morality is not a large, constructed *thing* you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.
Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It's kind of all one.
Michael Pollan: The industrialization--and dehumanization--of American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite...
Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the y...
Loose lips sink ships.
Look, if I don't flirt with you, you should take that as a compliment. I don't always respect myself, but I almost never respect men. They're like flowers all showy, a lot of color and lust. You pick...