Imagine that you were walking in a city park, on a campus, or along a street, and suddenly you see that someone has set up a dozen original paintings of Claude Monet. The masterpieces are before your eyes. Along your path, you see “Impression, Sunrise,” “Winter At Giverny,” and “The Water-Lily Pond,” among many others. […]

[Read Full →]

It’s the very essence of calm, a still surface of blue-silver water reflecting billowy cumulus clouds above. Large shafts of light pour down through the clouds at angles on the shoreline, creating swaths of light-green trees in the middle of darker pines and bejeweled light on the water.
On a 90-degree humid day, I can feel […]

[Read Full →]

Sometimes, surprising beauty lies behind a nondescript gate. At the end of a long street in Kingston, N.Y., and behind a wrought iron gate, lies a sparkling little park. It’s situated on the Hudson River near where the Rondout Creek flows into the wide river, so that water seems to surround the park. It has […]

[Read Full →]

Seasons come to our bodies much like they do to trees and mountains, lakes and bays. Each individually has its own rhythm and signs of changing, adapting, and flowing from one season to the next, until the momentum of so many heralds the new season en masse.

Beckoned by the brilliant sunshine, predictions of temperatures in […]

[Read Full →]

Frank Emberson was wounded on Dec. 21, 1944, while fighting in Luxembourg during World War II. But when the bullet passed through his arm, a packet of family photos in Emberson’s breast pocket deflected it from hitting the Army soldier’s chest, thus saving his life. The story itself is moving, but seeing the small envelope […]

[Read Full →]