First published in The Study of Light, on Substack, on November 4, 2025.
A leaf caught my eye as I walked home the other day. Imagine! What a leaf that was!
I took its portrait as it hung on the tree, and admired the contrast of the red oak leaf against the blue autumn sky. The leaf came home with me, and I set it in front of a bright light on the kitchen table. Then I brought the big camera out, with the macro lens, and explored a little further.
The leaf as I found it.
Presently I am reading two novels, painful novels that speak to lovers-of-Earth, and maybe give them hope.
The first is a re-read, Ministry For the Future, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. The second is The Overstory, by Richard Powers. The first is a book on CD I listen to while I’m driving, which I do too much of. The second is paper-in-hand (feels so good) that I read as I sit by the fire, which I do too little of. Both of these stories take readers deep into the trouble we’re making on our planet.
So an oak leaf gives me a pause. This moment is for beauty.
Then back to work, with occasional interruptions for two good books, containing dozens of subplots, and rays of hope. The hope thing is misleading. I was raised to believe that hope was an entirely objective thing, a separate thing. It existed outside of you, and if you were fortunate, it came to you, maybe landing on your head and filling you with some soul food that kept you going. But hope, I’ve learned, is not passive at all. You have to make it. “Make peace,” “peacemaker,” “make love,” “lovemaking,” aren’t passive at all. They’re things you do. The same is true of hope.
In hockey there’s a saying, usually uttered when a player scores a “lucky” goal. Maybe the forward shot the puck and it bounced off the goalie’s face mask, hit the crossbar, came out and ricocheted off the defender’s skate, and went in. Someone will say it was a lucky goal. Another person will remind you “You make your own luck.” You have to be there. You have to take your shot. If you weren’t there, and you hadn’t have done what you did, there would be no luck and no goal.
Today I pause to appreciate the colors and details of a single leaf, and then get back to work, finding the way forward.
These close-ups always remind me of medieval European cities, like if we had satellite images of München or Rotterdam from 1500, would they, could they look like this? Crude little alleyways feeding boulevards alongside great rivers, large lakes, and an ocean on the edge.