The immeasurable joy that a pup feels upon spying the perfect stick—though is not every stick perfect?—to seize it between the teeth, to trot about in triumphant exaltation, to preen and prance, to clench and cherish it as though gold, or life itself, were held within the jaws, precious beyond all things. If only I could delight in anything with such unfeigned enthusiasm—as that stick, its discovery, its seizure, its hold.
Ah, to find such rapture in the ordinary! To greet the world not with suspicion but with wonder, to see in the roughness of bark and the scent of earth a treasure beyond price. She asks no meaning of the stick, no purpose beyond the play; she does not weigh its straightness nor lament its splinters. She exults simply because it is there—because it can be grasped, borne, and shared with the wind.
And when I feign to take her most prized possession from her, she does not crouch defensively nor guard it with wounded pride. She startles not in fear, nor suspects deceit, but spies instead an opportunity for play—for spirited contest, for joyous fun. A game of keep-away, of chase, of tug-of-war, of tag. The stick becomes not a treasure to hoard, but a bond to share, a spark of communion between kindred souls who, for a moment, forget the hierarchy of species and simply are. How effortless her wisdom seems: to turn every threat into invitation, every grasp into dance. What the world calls possession, she calls participation; what we call loss, she calls laughter.
Laugh I must too, for in her play I am carried back to youth—when a stick could be anything the heart desired: a sword flashing against unseen foes, a spear cast toward the sky, a knight’s lance, a shepherd’s staff, a trumpet summoning invisible armies, a conductor’s baton commanding the symphony. How endless were the shapes of imagination then! She reminds me of what I once possessed without knowing its worth—the gift of invention, the sacred power of play.
And so I laugh, though a tear is not far behind, for the years slip away like autumn leaves on the wind, and I remember what it was to live so lightly. She, in her wisdom, has become my teacher—her joy a gentle rebuke to my solemnity, her play a sermon on the holiness of delight. If ever there is grace to be found, it is in such simple acts: a stick, a chase, a glint of sunlight on the grass, a heart unburdened by purpose. Perhaps salvation lies not in grand design, but in this—to love a stick as though it were the world, and to find, in that loving, the world made whole again.
When I awoke this morning, I found that I had, as usual, a productive night of contemplation while I slept. Three meditations were ready to write, and write I did. Here are the results.
I. On Being
The contemplation of being—its beginning and its ending—rather than being itself, is humanity’s fascination. We exalt its creation with ceremony, and we weave endless tales of its defeat, as if death might be outwitted by story. We fear its ending with such intensity that we grant it more weight than the fact of life itself.
We revere its beginning with awe, we dread its end with terror, yet the middle—being itself—we profane with neglect.
We curse the day, the hour, the minute, for the slightest disappointment or inconvenience, real or imagined; the weather, our companions, our labor. We curse the brevity of joy, the length of sorrow, the depth of our feelings, the complexity of our thoughts, the idleness of time, the busyness of our brow. All that is given becomes a target of our disdain.
Yet here is the paradox: if we are so careless with being itself, why then do we revere its beginning and tremble at its end? Why fear the loss of what we do not value? Why guard so jealously what we daily scorn?
The truth is simple, if difficult: life deserves more than our curses. If we cannot greet each moment with wonder, let us at least receive it with gratitude. If not embrace it as miracle, then with appreciation. If we cannot bless every hour as holy, let us at minimum acknowledge it as gift. For being itself, squandered though it may be, is all we have.
II. On Equality and Power
Men will not endure the scourge of equality with those they deem beneath them. They will sooner suffer the loss of station and status, wealth and power, even willingly and against their own interests, so long as those they despise remain below them. The humiliation of parity weighs heavier than the burden of deprivation.
The clever puppet masters—those who truly govern—have always known this. They stir enmity where alliance might have been, teaching one man to scorn his neighbor, to measure himself not by his own condition but by the imagined inferiority of another. Thus, the poor man may rejoice in the poverty of one poorer still; the dispossessed may take comfort in the greater dispossession of another.
And so men pit themselves blindly against those who should be their allies. They are content to yield treasure and status to the puppet master, provided only that they may stand athwart the “inferior.” Thus do they squander their strength, mistaking themselves for masters of destiny when in truth they are but marionettes in another’s play.
III. On Tears and Salt
There is salt in tears. Salt—the preservative—preserves remembrance. Even sorrow is instructive to heart and soul, for grief keeps memory alive.
So it was with the wife of Lot, who looked back for love of her daughters, lost to the destruction of divine wrath. Preserved in salt, she became remembrance itself: a monument to sorrow, fidelity, and the peril of divided love.
Thus every tear carries its trace of preservation, holding fast what might otherwise be lost: a fragment of love, a lesson of pain, a reminder that sorrow, too, endures as teacher.
A dream came last night, which I remembered fully this morning—unusual in itself. And it took place in my back yard, though it was both the yard I inhabit now and the yard of my childhood, merged into one, as dreams are apt to do.
There, an artful arrangement awaited discovery. Tree stumps, limbs, and trunks lay piled upon one another in an interlocking manner that spoke of intention, as if some unseen curator had composed a sculpture from what time and weather had left behind.
When I reached out to touch them, my hands found surprise. These weathered forms, which should have been heavy with the density of wood and years, had been hollowed by time itself. They were rotted through, yet not with decay’s dampness—they were light and dry, transformed into airy vessels rather than solid mass.
Somehow, as dreams permit impossible physics, I found myself propping up a trunk that had been cleft cleanly along its length. It towered above my home, this great hollow half-cylinder, and I leaned it against another tree for support. Yet it was the interior that commanded wonder—not the familiar barked exterior, but the cavernous architecture time had carved within.
The hollow space revealed itself as a cathedral of wood. Veins ran through its walls like ancient rivers frozen in timber. Hollows and chambers formed a geography of absence, more substantial in its emptiness than solidity ever was. Feathery light filtered through, revealing a multitude of dark wooden colors that dazzled the eye—chestnut depths giving way to amber chambers, shadows playing across surfaces smoothed by seasons of patient transformation.
Then came the wind. A sudden gust lifted this towering trunk—this thing that should have weighed hundreds of pounds—and set it sailing. It rose effortlessly over my home, over the neighboring trees, floating like a great wooden vessel through the air. I watched in wonder as it drifted beyond my private yard into the public realm, finally coming to rest in the street where others might behold it: a hollowed vessel that had learned to fly.
Reflection
When I woke, with the image of the trunk carried aloft by wind still vivid and present, I immediately, before any conscious analysis, found myself recalling a verse from Sirach 34:1:
“Vain and deceptive hopes are for the foolish, and dreams lend wings to fools.”
Strange that this verse should surface decades after its first encounter, yet perhaps not strange at all. Since my undergraduate days, I have described my own words as but the “ramblings of a fool.” Yet here was a dream that seemed to insist on meaning, demanding that this particular fool pay attention to what had taken wing.
And so its meaning began to unfold.
What does it mean to be made light by emptiness? In this dream, the trunk had surrendered its solid density to time’s patient carving, and in return had been granted the gift of flight. It was not diminished by its hollowness but transformed by it—its beauty now living in the spaces where wood once was, in the architecture of absence that created room for light to play.
Perhaps this speaks to a deeper truth about how we ourselves are shaped. The experiences that hollow us out—loss, time, the gradual weathering that comes with living—may not be diminishing us but preparing us for a different kind of beauty. What we think of as erosion might actually be revelation, uncovering inner landscapes we never knew existed.
The dream suggests that lightness is not about adding something but about discovering what remains when the unnecessary weight has been worn away. Those veins and chambers within the wood were always there, waiting to be revealed. The capacity for flight was present all along, hidden beneath layers that time knew how to remove.
And there is something profound about how the dream moves from private discovery to public gift. What begins in the intimate space of a backyard—this personal encounter with transformed wood—ultimately takes wing and lands where others might find it. The wind carries our revelations beyond the boundaries we set for them, beyond the fences of our private understanding.
The hollow trunk that sails over houses and trees reminds us that what we think is fixed and earthbound may be preparing for flight. What appears to be ending—the tree’s death, the wood’s decay—may actually be a becoming, a transformation into something lighter, more beautiful, more free.
In the end, perhaps the dream asks me to consider: What in my own life is being hollowed by time? What losses carve space for unexpected beauty? And what within is growing light enough to catch the wind? Sirach warns that dreams lend wings to fools. Yet perhaps even folly bears wisdom, if its wings lift what was thought earthbound into flight.
Some time ago—perhaps a year or more—I shared the thought with a friend that, in the absence of a life partner, career milestones, or the outward markers many associate with ongoing joy and fulfillment, I found myself sustained by something smaller, more elusive, yet no less profound: moments. Fleeting as they are, these glimpses—of joy, beauty, tenderness, or connection—carry a weight that lingers long after they pass. Whether in laughter with a friend, a burst of color in nature, the unexpected joy found in art and music, or the hush of shared silence, these moments are what remain.
This conversation was brought to mind earlier today, during a pause in some simple yard work. A robin—one I have come to recognize—perched beside me on a rock for nearly twenty minutes. He did not fly, only hopped, watching me as if we were resting together. That brief companionship, quiet and unexpected, brought back the full force of that earlier insight.
The poem that follows is a first, rough attempt to give shape to that reflection.
This robin, who kept me quiet company, reminded me of the beauty in small moments—and even allowed me, kindly, to take his portrait.
Moments
by Donald S. Yarab
After so long, I see it now— life is not the grand arc we thought we were writing, not triumph etched in time or years stacked with care. It is moments.
The held door, a beat longer than required. A cloud painting itself across the sky. A flower blooming through a crack in concrete.
The hum of a bee, the song of a bird, a friend’s first hello— welcome, familiar music in the air. Laughter spilling like light through a quiet room.
A touch that speaks without language. Sunlight flickering through leaves— nature’s own Morse code. The warm drift from the kitchen: garlic, hope, onions, memory.
The first bite of something sweet dissolving on the tongue. The joy of someone you love laughing till they snort, till they can’t breathe, till you’re laughing too at nothing, at everything.
These— small rebellions against the world’s weight: its monotony, its cold indifference.
But the moments— oh, they persist. They slip through the cracks of our hardest days and remind us why we stay, why we watch, why we dare to hope for just one more:
one more kindness, one more beauty, one more laugh, one more flicker of light— each a defiance, each a benediction in this brief, bright, impossible gift of being alive.
Rembrandt, “Philosopher in Contemplation” (1632). A quiet spiral of thought, descending into the hush between certainties.
“The soul speaks most clearly when the tongue is still.”
There are days now, more frequent than before, when I find myself recoiling—not from people, exactly, but from a certain tone, a cast of mind. It is the literalists who unsettle me. Those who cling to the concrete as though it were the last raft afloat. The older I grow, with my silvered hair, the more their certainties feel not reassuring but menacing. It is not their knowledge I fear—it is their refusal to admit the unknown, the unspoken, the not-yet-understood.
And yet, I do not mean to dismiss the literal out of hand. I was trained in it. I lived among it. I applied law to facts with the solemn responsibility of rendering findings in civil rights complaints—decisions that shaped lives, guided by precedent, statute, regulation, policy, and the weight of written word. The literal is necessary. It is the groundwork. The shared foundation upon which meaning may be built. One must know the noise, the surface of things, before any deeper hearing is possible. Literalism is not, in itself, a failing. But to dwell in it wholly, to build a temple upon it without windows or doors—that is a failure of imagination and perhaps of courage.
There is something holy, or at least essential, in the gaps. The hush between words. The pause before reply. The silence that says more than any explanation could. It may be peace. It may be sorrow. It may be nothing at all—and that nothing may yet be everything.
The paradox thickens with age. I cannot dismiss the concrete—it is how we meet one another—but I also cannot abide those who live only by its rule. The world is not built entirely of clarity, nor is it meant to be. There is a path somewhere between the clamor and the silence, and perhaps I am only now beginning to find it.
The literal is our first tongue. It is how the child learns: this is a stone; that is a tree. Language builds the world we inhabit. And in that naming, in that first apprenticeship to the visible and the graspable, we are equipped with the tools to navigate life’s surfaces. We learn to classify, to divide, to act. It is a necessary scaffolding, even beautiful in its clarity.
But what follows—what truly shapes the soul—is what one does once that scaffolding has served its purpose. It is in the gaps, the silences, the places where the scaffolding falls away, that something more begins.
The darkness between the stars, or perhaps the light that filters through cracks in ancient stone, draws us to pause. It is not the substance, but the space between the substance, that calls us to deeper thought. The hush in a conversation—not the words, but the breath that precedes or follows them—can speak more profoundly than the speech itself. The crevice between certainties is where wonder slips in.
In these spaces we do not necessarily find answers. Sometimes we find transformative questions. Sometimes only presence. And sometimes only ourselves, which may be enough.
There is a wisdom in the void that no amount of noise can manufacture. Not the nihilism of meaninglessness, but the reverent recognition that meaning, like light, often travels best through emptiness.
To live entirely in the measured and known is to dwell in a museum of certainties—tidy, lifeless, unmoved. But to discard all that for a world of formless suggestion is to risk disappearance. The task is to dwell attentively in both: to know the stone as stone, and then sit long enough beside it to feel what it is not.
There are those who seek certainty in everything—in people, in relationships, in experiences, in outcomes. They crave contracts over conversation, definitions over dialogue. To them, ambiguity is a flaw, unpredictability a failure. But in securing themselves against uncertainty, they forfeit something essential. They miss the quickening of the heart in a half-spoken promise, the richness of a glance misunderstood, the poetry of a thing only half-comprehended but wholly felt.
To insist that the world always yield its meaning—immediately, exhaustively—is to mistake life for a mechanism. To live without risk, without the possibility of being undone or remade, is to refuse the privilege of being human.
And yet, those who flee entirely into mystery—who refuse form, who reject grounding—are no better served. Obscurity for its own sake is not wisdom but evasion. To veil oneself in metaphor to avoid responsibility is no more noble than to cling to literalism out of fear.
We are not machines. Nor are we vapor. We are, maddeningly and gloriously, both. We are flesh and thought, bone and breath, anchored and floating. And it is precisely in that stretch between—the literal and the allusive, the known and the unknown—that we are most fully human.
To demand certainty is to deny the thrill of becoming. To refuse structure is to forgo the beauty of its breaking. Somewhere in that middle space, between what can be said and what must be felt, is where the soul begins to sing.
And so we return to the hush. That space which is not absence but presence unspoken. The unanswered breath, suspended between question and reply, is not a failure of speech but its fulfillment. There, in that breath, we are closest to the truth—not because we grasp it, but because we cease grasping.
It is silence that answers most deeply. Not the silence of indifference, nor of ignorance, but the silence of presence—unadorned, uninsistent, abiding. The kind of silence that rests beside you like a companion who has nothing to prove. A silence that allows space for your own self to rise up, or dissolve, or simply be.
There are things that cannot be said, and yet are spoken in the pauses between words. There are truths that cannot be held, but are felt in the stillness between certainties. And perhaps the deepest form of knowledge is not in knowing, but in listening long enough to no longer need to.
The literal gives us form, but the silence between the forms gives us meaning. The prose of the world teaches us its names, but it is the poetry of its silences that teaches us our own.
I do not know if this is wisdom, or simply age. But I have come to suspect that the truest things—love, sorrow, grace, wonder—do not arrive in declarations. They appear instead in the gaps, in the long glances, in the word left unspoken. They arrive in silence. And in that silence—between noise and silence—we are not alone.
Northcoast Antiquarian 