by Craig Nagel | May 24, 2019 | Musings
Kids come by it naturally. A stone, a leaf, a snowflake—any object, no matter how ordinary, can be transformed by the mind of a child into something special and full of mystery. Seen this way, the world teems with wonder and delight. Years pass and the child outgrows...
by Craig Nagel | Mar 4, 2019 | Musings
Every year about this time I find myself thinking a lot about my dad. It was right around now, many years ago, that he started on what proved to be an epic walk. Dad was born in 1910 and died in 2002. He married Mom in the middle of the Great Depression and eventually...
by Craig Nagel | Dec 30, 2018 | Musings
One of the least understood and most valuable entities in the universe is the three-pound electro-chemical tangle of nerve cells known as the human brain. Consisting of some 100 billion neurons and another trillion support cells, the brain is in essence a...
by Craig Nagel | Dec 8, 2018 | Musings
Everybody knows the universe is a big place. What’s hard to grasp is how big. A few years ago I bought my wife a telescope for Christmas, figuring she could check out the moon and a few planets and get a fix on a star or two and help fill in some of the gaping holes...
by Craig Nagel | Nov 28, 2018 | Musings
On a recent road trip out to Washington State and British Columbia, I found myself astonished by the beauty and variety of our continent. Not that this insight is anything new. My wife grew up near Seattle, and through the years we’ve driven or flown out there several...
by Craig Nagel | Nov 21, 2018 | Musings
In Chad Harbach’s superb novel The Art of Fielding, in a burial scene near the end of the book, one of the characters says of her dead father, “You told me once that a soul isn’t something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error,...
