Author: Tim

• On “Simplification” In Drawing

  One of the main challenges in learning to draw is accepting that simplification of the scene is a lot of what you do. But you can’t simplify without highlighting. You’re changing the relative importance of one picture element versus others. And if you change the importance of A versus B you reduce the importance of…

• Where Do Songbirds Settle Down To Die?

  Where do songbirds settle down to die? If you had spent a lifetime sliding sideways on winds,and chatting up the sun with chir-chir-chiree,would you not be embarrassed being seenaflitter, fluttered awkwardly to earth to liea stone, wings skewed, throat dry? Where do songbirds hide themselves to die?

• I Love You, Sambo

  I wish we had a better place for dogs to die into. The Christian bible gives us no afterlife for them, no dog paradise where we can imaginatively park them forever in the bliss they deserve, and so park our pain. But we want them to go to heaven, so much that we imply as…

• Clocks Stuck In 1937

  On the front wall of each classroom, above the teacher’s head, was a large clock framed by carpenters into the plaster wall. There were a couple dozen classrooms in the building, all with identical clocks, and all their black hands were stopped on white faces at the same clock time. We were told they were…

• Christina Fawn

  March 25, 1952. “Christena” Four years before me, my parents had a daughter, Christina Fawn. Christina lived a few hours, then was gone. She is buried near her mom and dad’s grave, on the knoll above Rockhouse Holler, under a simple headstone befitting a baby. On the stone is carved her simple name. I can’t…

• California Coast, And Other Beauties

  Isaac, you asked: “What’s one of the most beautiful places you’ve ever been?” One is hard to choose.  But… You’ll remember when we drove the California Coast, in bright June, when you were not yet a teen. We flew 5 hours to San Francisco, grabbed a rented car, and took off northward into the Marin…

• Christmas Day, 2022

  In a week I will walk out of my workplace for the last time, and if God wills it, I’ll never need to work again. I saw winter birds today and for the first time ever felt no urge to know their names or nesting habits. Movements of their heads were movements of their heads. And once…

• Lamb, Milk, Sun, Free, Be.

  At twilight slash the the twilight lambwho woke that day to mother and to milkand aimless drums of bees, and sun.At night go splash the milk-fed blood as freeof viscous will as only sheep can be. At newlight seek your missing lamband fail. Then sleep, wash feet, slurp milkand honey syruped from the sugar sunby…

• Crawdads

  About two hours after you put the crawdads in the bucket they start to smell. They can’t survive out of the creek. They need to crouch under a flat smooth rock in steady current. None of us had a plan beyond the plop in the bucket. It wasn’t holding them or even looking at them…

• Pascal’s Memoriam

  The year of grace 1654.November 23, the day of St. Clement.Half past ten till half past twelve. FIRE. Certitude, certitude, joy, joy, joy.If the world should bare its heraclitean faceAnd the fire in the wood, the fire in the stoneLeap an arc to your heart and backAnd feed itself through the hole in your soulWhat…