Exploring the Third Season of Life

Notes from Vanaprastha

Reflections on Faith, Nature, and Writing

Recent Posts

Quiet Zones

Quiet Zones

Here at Vanaprastha, things are pretty quiet – literally. Vehicles traversing the mountain road and planes flying at high altitude interrupt nature’s symphony only briefly. Around our house, the geothermal HVAC system and modern appliances emit inaudible hums. Last...

Experience

Experience

“Carole, this is your Uncle.” “Uncle George, what a wonderful surprise! How are you?” Last August, I mentioned Uncle George, and again in early March of this year after a bicycle accident landed him in ICU. He spent five weeks in the hospital followed by a few...

Free Will

Free Will

Now playing at the American Shakespeare Center is Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, a familiar story of temptation and fall. Faustus’s greed for knowledge leads him to books on logic, medicine, law, and divinity, all of which he finds lacking. But in magic, the...

Enemies

Enemies

It is a chilly Halloween night in Connecticut, and Paul McCartney sings “Yesterday” on my transistor radio. We neighborhood kids walk the dark rural roads holding flashlights for the younger trick-or-treaters like my sister. At ten going on eleven, she doesn’t need...

Tree Knots

Tree Knots

“I’d like to be a tree,” said actress Katharine Hepburn during her 1981 interview on the TV program 20/20. “What kind of tree?” Barbara Walters asked as a follow up. “An oak because they are strong and pretty.” She didn’t mention that oak tree leaves and acorns are...

Dissonance

Dissonance

Bethany, Connecticut’s Amity Regional Junior High School band marched in the Memorial Day Parade that sunny day in May some fifty years ago. I played both flute and piccolo to John Philip Sousa’s The Thunderer. Our band had a good reputation and attracted large...