by Nils Peterson The Greek poet Cavafy begins his fine poem “Ithaka”: When you set out for Ithaka ask that your way be long, full of adventure, full of instruction. The Laestrygonians and the Cyclops, angry Poseidon–do not fear them: such as these you will never find as long as your thought is lofty, as…

by Nils Peterson This is what they told me in Montana. “If you encounter a bear, walk, don’t run, away. Move slowly – don’t make eye contact – If the bear charges – stand your ground. If the grizzly continues to come at you, lie face flat on the ground, hands clapped around the back…

by Nils Peterson 1. Today mind wanted to think back to all of the houses I lived in with my parents growing up and on into my young manhood. There were five, and mind tried to walk through each of the rooms in all of the houses. It was more difficult than I would have…

by Nils Peterson On Water Somewhere I have stowed my astrology reading so I could put my hands upon it when I wanted to see it again. I don’t remember where. So there is something about a water sign [Scorpio] — a certain muddiness and flow of memory. All is at the bottom of the…

by Nils Peterson A new word brings an old memory and starts me thinking – biblichor. The chor comes from petrichor, that wonderful earth smell after rain. Bibli, of course comes books as in bibliography. It reminded me of a piece I used a couple of years ago, and from that, as well you readers…

by Nils Peterson Something about Hamlet makes us want to love him, some mysterious quality of his being. I was maybe 15 or 16 when I first met the Prince and sitting next to Boots Schneider at the Olivier movie which had just opened in New York. Yet Hamlet held my attention even more than…

by Nils Peterson I I’ve been a singer with others most of my life, choruses, choirs, chorales, madrigal groups, barbershop quartets, duets. I love singing, still try to do a little each day, warm up with the computer, doing exercises for voices over 50. In my case, it should be way over 50. At my…

by Nils Peterson One of my favorite ways of beginning the morning is by having Siri put on “Grand Canyon Suite” by Ferde Grofe. It’s pleasant and gives a sense of the day beginning and going on its way. Also, in the middle, if you’re an old guy like me, you’ll hear the music that…

A Remembering by Nils Peterson Christmas Eve began with a carol sing at the big Presbyterian Church on Crescent Avenue which many of the rich town people attended. More cathedral than church. My brother and I went to Sunday school there when we were old enough because the small Lutheran church of our parents was…

by Nils Peterson My last 3QD piece ended with Whitman interrupting my poking around the attic of my past by chanting, “Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations,/The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.” My response was “Whoa,…

by Nils Peterson At my senior center we have a Shakespeare class led by marvelous young woman, actor, playwright, professional clown. Her main method is to assign us parts and have us read the text out loud. I taught Shakespeare for a bunch of years and did some of this. But this class makes me…

by Nils Peterson Reading into and about Wallace Stevens this morning I find this quotation, “The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings…loving them and feeling them, makes us search for the sound of them, for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration….” I’m an endless rewriter and surely this is part…

by Nils Peterson I thought to myself that one day I’ll have to write an essay entitled “Goodbye Dorothy Parker, Apologies Edgar Guest.” It would have as its epigraph a quotation from Flaubert in a letter to Louise Colet, “But wit is of little use in the arts. To inhibit enthusiasm and to discredit genius,…

by Nils Peterson Thesis: There’s the physical you sitting somewhere reading this, breathing the sweet air of the now you are in. Everything else of the you that is you is memory. Well, as we know, memory is a trickster, wily as Coyote in Native American stories. Notebooks help. Here’s a bit from one of…

by Nils Peterson Freedom, high-day! High-day, freedom! Freedom, high-day, freedom! 1. One summer, roughly forty years ago, I set off to a Florida seaside town to participate in a three-week summer stock version of The Tempest. It was designed for academics who had something to do with Shakespeare or something to do with drama. So,…

by Nils Peterson I A friend sent me a day or two ago a poem that contained this story: The Buddha tells a story of a woman chased by a tiger. When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine and climbs halfway down. But there’s also a tiger below. And two mice—one…

by Nils Peterson “…another kind of net, that language, the one the world gives us to cast so that we might catch in it a little of what it is and what we are, and we are, among other things, the poverties of the language we inherit.”  Robert Hass, “Families and Prisons,” What Light Can…

by Nils Peterson Today (June 13) is W.B. Yeats’s birthday. He would have been 157. I am compelled to remark upon the similarities between Yeats, the Nobel prize winner, and Peterson, the scribbler in the corner. I quote from a short Yeats biography, “he was lackluster at school,” an elementary report card said he was “Very…

by Nils Peterson A Memorable Fancy I On the last day of the year, I think about the very first day. One early morning a Minnesota friend turned his iPhone towards his Minnesota window and we saw snow and a grove of slim, bare trees. He’d been singing, so music was in the air and…

by Nils Peterson I. The Best Meal Ever My mother’s father died during, but not because of, WWII and so she went back to Sweden on the first possible boat – 1946 – September leaving my father, brother, and me to get along. I, soon to be 13, had just started high school. We’d always…