Month: May 2007

All day the wind has been in the trees. I am reading next to the window when I look up in anticipation. Another sound barely breaks through the silence: the bar...

T. C. McLuhan quotes Stephanie Kaza’s The Attentive Heart: Conversations with Trees, wherein Kaza relates her travels among Pacific Northwest redwood tree...

Writer Albert Camus lived in the thick of politics and ideology in World War II and post-war France and Algeria. Camus’ political point of view was though...

Here are a few entries unrelated to the subject matter of “Hermit’s Thatch” but having to do with the structure and design of the journal, for...

I have never considered “Hermit’s Thatch” to be a “blog” in the same sense that people nowadays write blogs with the expectation o...

“Hermit’s Thatch” first appeared in late 2002 using MovableType 2.63. I never upgraded, and only tinkered modestly with the design. I know a f...

One must smile when Seneca, the ancient Roman and Stoic essayist, describes frugality. He does not want his chef to prepare too fancy a meal, he tells us, nor d...

St. Mark the Ascetic wrote 265 aphorisms under the title: On Those Who Think That They are Made Righteous by Works, or, No Righteousness By Works. Today this es...

As much as I enjoy the writings of Matthieu Ricard, in part because of his combination of a science background and his vocation as a Buddhist monk, I wish his 2...

In an essay “Total Action Without Regret,” J. Krishnamurti argues that everything around us, every aspect of culture and environment in which we are...