Category: Encounters With Great Beings

  • Turkey talk

    Telluride Daily Planet, e-edition, Friday, November 21, 2025 Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. — Melody Beattie Every time I see a rafter of turkeys — another word for flock, I have learned — a little gold wildlife-sighting star lands on my shoulder like a…

  • Satisfied and tickled, too

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, October 16, 2016 (last essay for this paper!)   The only fan letter I ever wrote was to the novelist, Tom Robbins. No eye rolling, please. It’s important to note that I happened to be working for his publisher in New York City at the time (1982), and I happened to be…

  • Ripespans

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, July 24, 2016 A half pint of raspberries sits on the kitchen counter. These are the tiny variety, handpicked by someone who cares a lot, maybe someone deep in blissful connection to nature as the midsummer sun beats down, a heat interrupted only by the occasional thunderhead lumbering across the sky, laying…

  • Here’s what you do

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, September 6, 2015 Starting with my father, I have always had people around me who knew exactly what to do in any given situation. Without a split second’s worth of hesitation, he would go about fixing or fabricating or directing anything. These processes for him were self-evident and without alternative. If you…

  • Bluebird

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, June 28, 2015 In a blue suit so bright a shard of sky might have fallen to earth and then bounced off the ground into flight, a bluebird, chasing a bicycle down a bikepath, swoops from fence post to fence post as a June day trumpets its particular glory. Suddenly, the bicycle…

  • The Bear, the Man, and Blueberry Manna (a fable)

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, May 31, 2015 Part 2 (In part one, Alonzo, an unconscious and mean-spirited bear loses his already failing sight and finds himself an object of derision from the very woodland creatures he had relentlessly tortured. He is about to give up hope when a stranger, Florentine, appears, offering the starving bear kindness… and…