by Craig Nagel | May 9, 2022 | Musings
Going Round One of the things we humans do best is to sort our experiences into categories. Unlike other creatures, who seem to live in a seamless world of moment-to-moment events, our species has the capacity and evidently the obsession to pass judgment upon each...
by Craig Nagel | Nov 11, 2021 | Musings
During this past winter’s depressing combination of below-freezing temperatures and COVID-induced seclusion, half ready to commit myself to a mental health facility, I stumbled upon a wonderful antidote to the blues of any sort. It’s titled “The Letters of Vincent van...
by Craig Nagel | Oct 27, 2021 | Musings
One of my earliest memories is helping my mom and my grandpa plant a couple of trees. The planting occurred at Grandpa’s summer cottage some fifty miles north of Chicago, Illinois, and seemed to my young mind a fun, but altogether ordinary, thing to do. Mom had...
by Craig Nagel | Oct 9, 2021 | Musings
Several years ago, on a trip to England with friends, we decided to visit Charles Darwin’s home in Downe, some fifteen miles south of London in the Kent countryside. The home itself proved fascinating, not because of its architecture or historical importance so much...
by Craig Nagel | Sep 9, 2020 | Musings
There’s something about a grey September day that makes the heart grow melancholy. Shakespeare, in his sonnet No. 73, captures this brooding sense of autumn when he likens himself to the season. That time of year thou mayest in me beholdWhen yellow leaves, or none, or...
by Craig Nagel | Oct 31, 2019 | Musings
On the 10th of December, 1996, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, experienced a rare form of stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Within four hours, she watched her mind lose its ability to process information. “By the end of that...
