High on Pine Cobble the color is deepening. When I climbed up a few days ago, the maple and beech and birch were in a glow, and I wandered along the ridge for awhile just breathing. In 20 years I had never walked the class of ’98 trail.
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Emerging Berkshire entrepreneurs build ingenuity with EforAll
We are carefully spaced on the terrace in a garden, and the maples are scrims of color. Three mentors are giving time to sit with me over almond-flour scones and spin ideas together.
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According to all sources the street’s the place to go …
The power went out. The storm blew in, short and sudden. The maple outside the window was blowing like embers in a stiff wind. … The barometer’s getting low this week, and women’s voices are rising. (Oct. 7 newsletter)
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Looking for fall brightness on the back roads (Oct. 1 newsletter)
Color has come all at once this weekend. … The leaves let the light through, and here for a stretch the woods are rich and sunlit and almost too bright to look at. I can’t ever take it for granted.
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John Steinbeck calls attention to fall color on the back roads
If I could be anywhere in the world today, I’d be here. I might be here in 1960, when John Steinbeck drove through with Charley (his dog) in the cab of his truck.
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Ground/Work gathers international artists at the Clark
Songbirds were flying through the sculpture. … I was walking slowly along Analia Saban’s Teaching a Cow How to Draw, one of the six new works in the Clark Art Institute’s first outdoor sculpture show, Ground/Work.
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A gift of story and song: W.E.B. DuBois on his home ground
W.E.B. DuBois traveled the world in his lifetime. He helped to shape ideals of independence in Africa and freedom and democracy in America. And I have begun to get to know him in the Berkshires, where he was born.
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At Mass MoCA new artists reclaim land and languages
The word for a spring and an eye are the same in Arabic, says Nasser Alzayani in his new work at Mass MoCA, a lament for a historic water source now gone dry. As I come back for the first time after the shut-down, new artists across the museum are offering a determination to preserve something beautiful, and human, and natural.
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Parable of the Sower — science fiction feels current
Octavia Butler wrote The Parable of the Sower as a novel set in a world on the edge of collapse, in 2024, and Toshi Reagon has written an opera based on the book. I remember the nnight her music came here.
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How do we respond as Massachusetts starts to reopen?
The governor’s announcement this week allows some local places to begin to reopen, and it raises questions for all of us as. And as I talk with you about the community, it raises questions for me.
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