To whom does the Earth belong? If you have any doubt about it, spend time at a wildlife refuge. Even 15 minutes, let alone a couple of hours, at the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey tell the answer: The Earth belongs to all creatures, not just man.
Hundreds of sandpipers gather in […]

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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. […]

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The snow is falling slowly, in its own time, on the evergreen. All is quiet. The New Year presents new possibilities and new questions. The possibilities are uncharted, the questions unanswered.
Still, the present moment is enough. What if we just reside in it, stop the running thoughts, and simply behold the surroundings? Take a moment […]

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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 […]

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“Could it be possible that a landscape might have a deep friendship with you? That it could sense your presence and feel the care you extend towards it?”
John O’Donohue
Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
If we are blessed with such kinship, then the Irish Hunger Memorial is a place of its embrace. This small. lush pocket, off New […]

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