Stone on Stone
A few cold spring days at the Highlights Foundation at Boyds Mills, PA, for a writers’ workshop. A wonderful opportunity to learn and write. Recently the Highlights Foundation added a new building, using part of the foundations of an old barn. The new space is a cozy yet roomy classroom and meeting place on the inside. On the outside it’s a maze of intricate stonework. The lichened and weathered rocks of the old barn foundation support the newer stones. Enormous chunks of bluestone pave the classroom, the porch, even the bathrooms. The walls are mosaics of rough-hewn stones, each...
Read MoreSacred Tree
One morning in Sri Lanka. I happened to get up early, and wandered out of the hotel to see what was going on. It was in the small city of Dambulla, and our hotel was a few hundred yards away from the main road. At the crossroads, I came across what I at first thought was a park of some sort. Then I realized it was a temple. And the heart of the temple was a tree. A magnificent tree, an ancient tree. A double set of temple walls surrounded and protected it. You have to take off your shoes to approach the holy tree. The temple is right in the mainstream of life, a few feet away from honking...
Read MoreTropical Color
Tropical fruit. It appears in grocery stores like magic. Bright sparks from the tropics to brighten an upstate New York winter. With a more homely fruit like, say, apples, I grasp the idea that someone picked them, packed them, shipped them from an orchard. But somehow tropical fruit doesn’t seem like it came from an actual plant. I mean it’s hard to think of bananas as something that grows on trees. Here’s a sun-drenched banana orchard, with a handy clothesline strung through it. Every Sri Lankan town has dozens of open-air fruit...
Read MoreThe Long Brown Path: Minneriya National Park
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road… Free, the world before me The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose Henceforth I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune Henceforth I whimper no more complain no more, need nothing… Strong and content I travel the open road. –Walt Whitman A Sri Lankan national park. Actually we didn’t tread this particular long brown path afoot, which I did not truly regret—it was ninety degrees, the road was ankle-deep in mud, and the elephants in Minneriya National Park are wild animals, and human-caused elephant deaths are not...
Read MoreSensitive Plant: Am I Bothering You?
A Sri Lankan byway. Alongside the curb is a small roadside weed, very easy to miss. It has little lacy leaves and a small purple pom-pom of a flower. Pretty but not remarkable. But it’s one of the most incredible plants I’ve ever encountered. It moves. Sensitive plant, it’s called. Mimosa pudica. And it’s sensitive, all right. Touch it with a fingertip, and the leaves close up, the tiny leaflets clutching themselves together nervously. Poke it again, and the whole leaf swings down, moving away from your annoying persistence. As a general rule, plants don’t seem...
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