Category: Utah Phillips

Shadow

“I have a friend- a singer, a good folk singer, song collector. He comes and listens to my shows and says ‘you always sing about the past, you can’t live in the past,’ and I say to him ‘I could go outside and pick up a rock older than the oldest song you know and come back here and drop it on your foot. The past didn’t go anywhere, did it? It’s right here, right now.'”
-Utah Phillips

Longtime readers will remember my fondness for that quote. It is one of my dominant themes, both of my writing and of my life. Continue reading “Shadow” →

Motion of the Ocean

Motion of the Ocean

In 2004, I was 16, a Junior in high school and in the middle of a year that was a rocket to the moon. Many important things happened that year. I pride myself on usually being pretty good at realizing the importance of things as they’re happening, but something I didn’t realize was so important until later was reading Old Times on the Mississippi, a portion of a larger Mark Twain memoir named Life on the Mississippi, for my AP English class. (Ms. Grant, we loved you and you are sorely missed.) Continue reading “Motion of the Ocean” →