Old Mission Peninsula, which splits the west and east arms of Grand Traverse Bay, is covered in cherry trees—their white flowers in full bloom like a seagull-feather coat upon the land. Grape vines, also common here but not as pervasive as the cherries, are barren this early in the spring. At the tip of the […]
Outside the City Opera House, a lone evangelist cheerfully distributes hate lit. I dodge the outstretched pamphlet and pull out my phone, feigning interest in the AMBER Alert that’s been blowing up my notifications since I landed. In rural Michigan, you get crime alerts on your phone. This would not fly in Brooklyn. I wonder […]
At the mouth of the Mystic River, Mason’s Island shelters mainland Connecticut from the storm surges of Long Island Sound. At the foot of Mason’s, eleven-acre Enders Island peers through the fog toward New York. Both islands are covered with boulders—glacial till from the Laurentide Ice Sheet which crowned this land 20,000 years ago. Dr. […]
You come home, and you choose what to bring back with you. Maybe you unplug Friday evenings, or shave your armpits every forty days. Now you drive a stick-shift. Now you speak another tongue. Now you only toast when your eyes lock over a glass. This weekend, my first back in America, I went to Sakura […]
Our world has its holy cities. Mecca and Medina, the seven Sapta Puri, the Vatican, the four of Kabbalah—we know these are holy, we’ve read the texts and made the pilgrimages and we know why. But I believe there are more holy cities than our religions proclaim—cities that capture the imagination, that reflect all the desires of the […]
Fun fact: people stop killing each other when they’re dead. The thought strikes me as I wander through Paris’ Cimitière du Père-Lachaise, where the graves of Christians, Jews, and Muslims rest in peace adjacent in winding stone rows. In death, we are finally good neighbors. I’m starting to realize that for a skeptic, I think […]
The hour before sunset on Saturday, I stood outside the Synagogue de Dijon. The lights were on in an auxiliary building, but the temple itself was dark, its stone walls silent. No one entered, no one left. Either the entrance is hidden, or there are no Jews left in Burgundy—neither would surprise me. I’d wanted […]
“You haven’t been blogging lately,” my friend observes. We’re in a coffee shop near the Google building; I’ve given up on American espresso and am instead drinking something with a foam heart. “No time; I’m writing too much.” It’s partly true. The anecdotes of my past year—the journey, the harvest, the points between—have begun oozing their […]
