To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.

Blake, "Auguries of Innocence"

Take a second look …

The yellow eyes of the Saw-whet Owl are so startling, their gaze so steady, that we tend to ignore everything else. It’s easy to miss the trace of blood just below the owl’s bill, a smear of something that changes the way we look at the bird, that deepens our understanding of it. What discoveries might we make if we took that second look more often, if we trained ourselves to see?

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Male Orchard Oriole--Featured Image.

Courtship Behavior of the Orchard Oriole: A photo essay

On a hike through Tommy Thompson Park in Toronto near the end of May, I noticed a bird sitting in a tree. It was small in size and yellow in color: a female Orchard Oriole. She sat on an exposed perch with a long piece of grass in her mouth. Was she collecting nesting material? She turned her head this way and that. First to the right. And then to the left. What was she looking for? Suddenly, a male Orchard Oriole appeared on a branch just below the female. In contrast to the female’s rather drab plumage, the male’s … Read more

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Featured image for The Sensual Nun

The Sensual Nun

Quietly chanting crossword puzzle clues instead of the divine office, she sat behind the wooden desk at the front of the room and waited patiently, patiently for us to finish the final exam. Sister Mark Marie, a pencil in one hand and the Globe and Mail in the other, unruly locks of grey hair wisping out from beneath her wimple. She cultivated a disheveled look, complete with tea stains on her blue habit and bread crumbs clinging to the fabric. When her colorless lips parted, they revealed a set of bunched yellow teeth, and her eyes behind the wire-rimmed glasses … Read more

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Dylan’s Voice, Part Three

Nothingness made visible The cook at the halfway house where I worked was a Ukrainian woman named Connie. A widow in her sixties, she was loquacious, vain, and opinionated, a born storyteller. I could sit in the kitchen for hours and listen to Connie’s tales of the lumber camps where she worked in her youth or of the tensions and rivalries that animated the ethnic groups—the Finlanders and Poles, the French and Italians, the Serbs and Croats and Slovenians, the Aboriginal peoples—who formed Thunder Bay’s complex cultural mosaic. Connie knew I liked her, and sometimes she would invite me to … Read more

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