Category: Uncategorized
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Into the woods
14 May 2026 We went to the woods last April, specifically Walden Pond, because we wished to revisit what it meant to Thoreau and what it might mean to us now. Katherine, one of our core Madbury Library Book Club quartet, had last November gifted us with illustrated copies of Autumnal Tints, Henry David Thoreau’s…
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Hope
7 April 2026 Waking to snowfall this morning—belated April Fooling from Mother Nature—surprised me out of the incipient MADD-ness (Mixed Anxiety-Depressive Disorder) that has too often characterized my first waking moments of late. Accustomed to feeling overwhelmed by worries personal (the whips and scorns of time) and public (a world subject to the Felon-in-Chief’s latest…
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Bridging the Gap with Living Art
In his 1960 introduction to the Viking Compass edition of his 1955 play A View from the Bridge, Arthur Miller wrote of how rarely a play gets a second chance: it “makes its mark right off or it vanishes into oblivion.” He goes on, however, to examine the success of both that play and The…
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Winter Experience; Reprise and Reprieve
10 March 2026 Winter’s ice bonds cracked wide open for me last Sunday. Thanks to Boston Ballet and now sprung forward to Daylight Saving Time, I am no longer frustrated by my unfulfilled quest for what my wise friend and artist Carol terms the meditative, “existential break” of art, a reprieve from a very long…
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Intersection
17 February 2026 Today, Tuesday, 17 February 2026, marks the beginning of Ramadan, the celebration of Mardi Gras, and the Lunar New Year of the Horse, as well as the second anniversary of my sister Jane’s passing, and the birth of our twin granddaughters, now 24 years old. Is’t possible? What to make of such…
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Distraction Confounded
29 January 2026 As the snow storm approached last Saturday, 24 January, I found myself in a rare if brief mood, focused and pleasantly anticipating both the coming snow and a lovely little tea party in New Castle to honor two friends with January birthdays, one 87 and one 89. Humans are hard-wired for certainty,…
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January Blues
11 January 2026 As we head into mid-January, I’m finding myself uncomfortably empathizing with our volatile weather, alternating heavy rain warm enough to melt much of what had been a lovely (and brightening) snow cover with dropping temperatures that freeze my sloping backwards question mark of a driveway into a contorted luge course, making me…
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Transition
20 December 2025 Koyaanisquatsi, Dear Reader, is a Hopi word that translates to “life out of balance” or “a state of living that calls for another way of living.” Koyaanisquatsi is also the title of 1982’s wordless documentary directed by Godfrey Reggio with music by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke. That film made…
Georgeann Murphy 