Scenes from a snowy afternoon bring to mind a favorite Jim Harrison quote:

“I'm hoping to be astonished tomorrow
by I don’t know what.”

"Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain."
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

So much of rewriting is waking up your verbs, my God.

New cookie plates in sour apple & pink shadow. I can’t get enough of these glazes!🍏💖 #pottery

Turning Around to Admire the View Sitting down to write this article, I find myself not only at the end of a year but also at the end of a long project (or at least, at the end of a first draft).

My December #CraftArticle is all about reflections, looking back at the end of a year or at the end of a long project and contemplating the achievement in that. What did we write? What did we learn? What did we gain? What did we overcome?

prattlefogandgravelrap.substack.com/p/turning-ar...

Liminality

In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between them, there are doors.

William Blake

Happy birthday, Tom! Hope it was a great one and many blessings for your year ahead!

“It is not our job to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves
Like the trees, and be born again,
Drawing up from the great roots.”

—Robert Bly

Eleven Beers by Tom Snarsky Whenever Sid would drink, he would drink Eleven beers. This created some logistical Problems, including a bad stomach and no Driver’s license, but one advantage was the One beer left over from the twelve-pack: Sid would save the flimsy paperboard from One of the twelve-packs, slowly filling it with Survivors, though their survival was only Temporary. Then when it was filled up All the way Sid would go out to the lake, Drink eleven beers, and instead of saving One like usual he would open the last beer And pour it into the water, where the little Bluegill would be visibly confused in the Shallows. One time, driving home from the Lake, Sid didn’t notice the blue heron in the Right lane, standing, but since he’d swerved So far over the midline anyway the bird, Instead of being killed, flew safely away.

today is my birthday, and I couldn’t imagine a better way to celebrate than having a new poem out in Burial Magazine! infinite gratitude to Z. H. Gill for giving this one a beautiful home :) 🙏

one hand opens in grief
the other in gratitude
pressing them together to pray

— Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, “One on Thanksgiving”

an intimate gathering of egrets in all their poses and postures in a stained glass world of mirrored loblolly pines aglow

egret extravaganza

“Don’t you think it’s odd that we appreciate absurdity?”

“I suppose if we couldn’t laugh at things that don’t make sense, we couldn’t react to a lot of life.”

Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams is a perfect novella With blunt grace, Denis Johnson navigates the line between realism and the American frontier myth in his perfect novella Train Dreams. In a slim 116 pages, Johnson communicates one man’s life…

Denis Johnson's Train Dreams is a perfect novella biblioklept.org/2025/11/23/d...

At the link, this week's oasis of small sanities in one place – how to love the world more, what it's like to meet an orca, how not to be a victim of success: mailchi.mp/themarginali...

the measurable distance
between poems

one maple leaf falls
then another

one Canada goose calls
then another

one snowflake drifts
then another

one memory arrives
then another

one lifetime
then another

and another

#vss365 #measurable

Happy belated birthday!

“Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of the soul’s passage through the valley of this life, its adventure in time, in history.”

—Stanley Kunitz in conversation with Bill Moyers

To Be Alive To be alive: not just the carcass But the spark. That's crudely put, but... If we're not supposed to dance, Why all this music? GREGORY ORR

The Wing - The Maine Review The morning Nadine’s feathers sprouted, a light snow fell. She was standing outside, watching Meg board the school bus, noticing how the little girl’s hair, frizzy like her own, glistened with snow, m...

Excited to have a flash in the beautiful latest issue of The Maine Review.♥️

www.mainereview.com/the-wing/

A MOMENT Across the highway a heron stands in the flooded field. It stands as if lost in thought, on one leg, careless, as if the field belongs to herons. The air is clear and quiet. Snowmelt on this second fair day. Mother and daughter, we sit in the parking lot with doughnuts and coffee. We are silent. For a moment the wall between us opens to the universe, then closes. And you go on saying you do not want to repeat my life.

Ruth Stone

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

—T. S. Eliot, from “Four Quartets”

Keats on the Measure of Compassion “The best of Men have… a kind of spiritual yeast in their frames which creates the ferment of existence — by which a Man is propell’d to act and strive and buffet with Circumstance.R…

Keats, born 230 years ago today, on the measure of compassion www.themarginalian.org/2019/07/02/k...

at the seam of days the silhouette trees and their mirrors form a seamless seam in which we’re held in fold of glow of sky of glow of water in hallowed and timeless time

the hallowed seam

Anne Lamott | Substack Mostly WD-40 and duct tape

Sharing . . .because her words are always a balm

open.substack.com/pub/annelamo...

“How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the center of the world…
This is what things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke

An abstract painting with various shapes in green, berry red, pink, and cream.

Many, many warm thanks to Court Harler at Flash the Court for publishing my prose poem "What It Takes, What It Gives." It's had a long journey to here, and I'm so grateful to see it published.

The work that inspired the piece is Lee Krasner's Palingenesis.

flashthecourt.com/2025/10/03/w...