Spiritual Activities

A recent poll by the Pew Research Institute asked people a number of questions about their beliefs and their “spiritual life.” One of them was:

Do you do one or more of the following things for spiritual reasons at least once a week: visit a nature spot, listen to music, exercise, look inward, practice yoga or meditate.

I was surprised at the results, which were broken down by state. Mississippi topped the chart, though only 75 percent of respondents answered the question in the affirmative. New Hampshire came in dead last, at 48 percent. Minnesota ranked tenth from the bottom, at 56 percent.

Mississippians also reported the highest “spiritual well-being,” with 48 percent claiming to have achieved that state. In Minnesota, barely one in three made that claim. We hard-headed Minnesotans did even worse when it comes to “feeling the presence of something beyond this world.” Third from the bottom!

A more careful look at the results brings out a few contradictions, however. When respondents were asked if they believed in a spirit or soul, four fifths in even the most skeptical state, Oregon, answered in the affirmative. Yet only 29 percent of Oregonians believe in “the presence of something beyond this world.”

This contrast highlights the crux of the issue. How can it be that so many people believe in a spirit or soul, yet not feel the presence of something beyond this world?

The obvious answer would be that they consider spirit or soul to be entirely immanent—that is to say, of this world. But wouldn’t that be tantamount to saying that spirit is matter? For myself, when I “look within” and contemplate my own soul, the notion of “matter” never enters my mind. I might think of such things as obligation, exhilaration, promise, or contingency. I might revive the childhood question of why I happen to be me, and not someone else. Any and all of these responses produce a moral frisson that’s both exhilarating and slightly scary.

But if spirit isn’t matter, what is it? Where did it come from, and why have I been saddled with this particular speck of it? (And who is the "I" to which I referred just now?)

The Pew questionnaire wasn’t designed to probe these subtle issues, and right now I’m not in the mood for such things, either. I only wanted to observe that when I read the question with which I started this piece, my reaction was: “Only once a week? I do several of those things almost every day.” Sure. Lucky me. But can I honestly say I do them “for spiritual reasons”? Why else? Spirituality and good feeling aren’t mutually exclusive.  On the contrary, they often work very well together. 

Though I'm not entirely sold on the idea of exercise.

Do you do one or more of the following things for spiritual reasons at least once a week: visit a nature spot, listen to music, exercise, look inward, practice yoga or meditate.

 

Happy Earth Day

It’s been a brief but remarkable string of days. Why? Because the leaves are coming out. Young, bright, and translucent, they glow in the sun. Add to that a gentle breeze, with the temperature hitting that cool, comfortable mid-range, and it makes you want to shout.

Hilary and I drove down to Eloise Butler yesterday at 7:30. No one was there to open the gate, so we took a stroll through the woods, peering down at the ponds and swamps below, then crossed the parkway to the quaking bog. We chatted with a couple of birders, one of whom gave us a tip as to the location of a great-horned owl nest. We couldn’t find it, but little matter.

As the day heated up, we washed the windows, shedding our coats and swapping stocking caps for baseball caps. Later I removed the leaves from the garden. (Is it too early, or too late? I don’t know.) I couldn’t identify some of the plants at first, though they’ve been there for years. Ah, yes. Siberian bugloss, and ligularia. And our pulmonaria is boasting a single pink flower!

Further back in the woods I spotted some white trout-lilies that have been coming up every spring for more than forty years.

As if on cue, the mail carrier came by with “In the Garden,” a twenty-page pamphlet that Steve Kelley has been publishing every spring for I don’t know how long. I enjoyed working with Steve and his wife, Arla, a few years ago, on a collection of essays describing their many years at the helm of Kelley & Kelley Nursery out in Long Lake.

Nodin Press published that book. And as it happens, Earth Day is also Norton Stillman’s birthday. We took Norton out to dinner last week, less as a birthday celebration that as a thank-you for giving me the pleasure of working with him almost daily for the last few decades. We do it every year.

We took him to Vinae, where we ate peppery cucumber salad, creamy boiled cabbage, eggplant puree with purple sticky-rice, and other exotic stuff. The place was hopping. It was fun.

Earth Day is also Eddy Albert’s birthday. You probably know him as the star of Green Acres, a silly comedy that had little to do with environmental issues, I think, though the title is suggestive. But he was also an early, and a staunch, environmentalist. Albert went to Central High School in Minneapolis and the U of MN. (He studied economics.) The fact that Earth Day takes place on his birthday is no coincidence.

Norton is a bit of an environmentalist himself, though I think his greatest contribution along those lines is as the publisher of many fine books related to the outdoors. These include essay collections by Jim Gilbert, Matt Schuth, Steve Kelley, and others; and works by poets too numerous to name, nearly all of whom draw sustenance from the out-of-doors in one way or another.  

But on a day like today, a stroll through the back yard or even a simple glance out the window is as stunning as any poem. The cherry orchard is coming along nicely, there’s a robin in the birdbath, the air is cool, the cardinals are twittering, the sky is blue. And the clouds are white.  

 

Film Fest Notes 2026

The MSP International Film Fest is in full swing once again, and the riverfront across from downtown Minneapolis is lively. The glorious weather doesn’t hurt.

The organizers have rearranged the venue somewhat, moving the office and various lounges a block down the street. There are now more bars and glitzy social spaces, but the buzz that used to enliven the halls east of the theater lobby is largely gone. Hilary and have developed a new routine, too; we cross the river at Plymouth Avenue and park on Marshall across from the Ukrainian Church, as close to Hennepin as we can get. From there it’s a ten-minute walk to the theater.

We’ve seen six films so far, covering a range, geographically, from China and Viet Nam to Belgium and Montreal, with stops in Iceland, Syria, the French Alps, and Germany. It’s been lots of fun.

Three of the best were Living the Land, Ky Nam Inn, and A Lovely Day. Also good were Girl in the Snow, and A Silent Friend.

Living the Land offers a portrait of rural China circa 1991. It follows the daily life of a young boy who’s been left behind to be raised by his aunt and grandma while his parents look for work in the city. Promotional material for the film highlights the themes of modernization and social change during that era in China, but the film actually dwells almost exclusively on village customs and farming techniques that haven’t changed for centuries. There’s a lot of shouting and horse-play, a funeral or two, a wedding, and disruptions caused by the local officials who are trying to keep track of who’s related to who, during an era when the appearance of a second child could lead to the loss of social benefits or a civil service job.

It’s polyphonic narrative. and the documentary style might remind some viewers of Tree of the Wooden Clogs—less polished cinematically, perhaps, but far more energetic. Director Huo Meng won the Silver Bear for his work at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival.

A Lovely Day is a comedy focusing on a single wedding day, but it draws together strands of narrative from every direction by means of flashbacks to earlier periods in the groom’s life, and also to incidents in his parent’s life before they divorced. 

Weddings tend to be fun, and this one is no exception, though it’s sullied repeatedly by Alain’s parent’s animosity, the untimely reappearance of an old “friend,” and especially by Alain’s long-standing personal anxieties and other health issues.

Alain, played by Neil Elias, reminded me of Northern Exposure’s Joel Fleishman—smart, fidgety, annoying, prone to excess … but likeable just the same. The film’s original title, Mille secrets, mille dangers (A Thousand Secrets, a Thousand Dangers) perhaps better conveys the atmosphere of the tale. Alain’s fiancée shows remarkable—almost unbelievable—calm and forbearance throughout the day.

It was a treat to listen after the film to director Philippe Falardeau answer questions. He’s a witty man, sharp, scattered, and self-depreciating. One highlight of the Q & A was the remark by a young woman in the audience who said; “I’m Lebanese, and I want to let you know that you nailed the ethos of the Lebanese community perfectly.”

Falardeau replied, looking right and left into the crowd, “Does she work for the festival? Did someone pay her? Thank you SO MUCH!”

The Girl in the Snow is an unusual piece, and all the better for it. Set high in the French Alps, it follows a few months in the life of a woman who’s been hired to give lessons to the children in a small hamlet during the depths of winter, when most of the village women have gone down the mountain to find work as domestics. The kids are unruly, the men taciturn and stand-offish. The snow is deep and it gets dark early. But gradually the woman begins to fit in, attending a gathering in a nearby lodge where the dance steps are as lively as the hurdy-gurdy music is simple.

Much of the film is shot indoors, in rooms lit by firelight with dramatic chiaroscuro reminiscent of Caravaggio. The men and older women tell stories about ghosts. Avalanches are an ever-present danger. But it isn’t long before one or two of the men start to take a deeper interest in the attractive newcomer. And as the story unfolds, it begins to take on the form of one of the occult tales the mountain folk have been sharing by the fire.  

Ky Nam Inn might be the most polished film we saw. It follows Khang, a quiet, well-mannered young translator who's landed a job translating The Little Prince into Vietnamese, in part due to the influence of a relative he hardly knows. He moves into a collective housing block and soon becomes acquainted with Ky Nam, the widow downstairs, who makes a living cooking meals for people in the neighborhood. When she injures her hand, Khang offers to help her out in exchange for regular meals.

In the course of the film, we also get to know quite a few of the building's other residents, including Ky Nam's son, who's soon to be married, and an elderly doctor with whom Khang plays chess when he's not in the kitchen or at the typewriter. It's inevitable that several of the younger women in the building take an interest in Khang. Everyone knows everyone, and gossip gets around. It comes as no surprise for us to learn that Ky Nam has a checkered past. We just don't know what it is. And neither does Khang.

The mysteries and complexities of the plot aside, the film has an unusual and attractive "look." Is this what Viet Nam looked like in 1985? I should have asked the director, who was present and spent a good deal of time answering questions after the screening. He told us some funny stories about the censors, and tried to explain some of the racial nuances between northerners, southerners, mixed-race Vietnamese, and "left-behind" offspring of American soldiers--distinctions of which some in the audience, including me, were only dimly aware.

Time and Water is a low-key look at Iceland through the medium of home movies. Its central event is the discovery by Icelanders that one of their smaller glaciers has entirely disappeared. It was declared dead in 2014. This really shouldn't have come as a surprise, considering that the glacier has been shrinking for a long time, Icelanders have been studying their glaciers for centuries, and the understanding of global warming can be traced back to the nineteenth century. In fact, glaciers have been coming and going for almost two million years now. Yet the narrator keeps repeating, very slowly, "I never imagined that ..."

More interesting than the central thesis are the grainy home movies that show the narrator's family having a good time, going on expeditions, celebrating birthdays, smoking endless cigarettes, cross-country skiing, and so on. Views of the landscape, the waterfalls, and the glaciers themselves also contribute to the film's interest. 

Our Silent Friend is a far more polished and ambitious film. In fact, it's three films in one. They're set in different time periods and are connected only by the fact that they focus on botanists and take place on a college campus in the vicinity of the same ginkgo tree.

The best of the three examines the history of a brilliant young woman who's struggling, at the turn of the twentieth century, against the rampant sexism of academic gatekeepers who would rather she devoted her sense and intellect to making coffee than to exploring the jungles of Indonesia. It's shot in a glistening black-and-white tone and is well acted. (Luna Wedler recently won the "emerging actress" award at the Venice Film Festival for her performance, joining the company of previous winners Gael Garcia Bernal, Jennifer Lawrence, and Mila Kunis.) Every frame is a pleasure to watch.

The second tale focuses on a young woman in more recent times (maybe the eighties?) who's conducting research on a potted geranium in her dorm room. She's hooked it up to a polygraph to study its responses to her watering schedule, among other things. She leaves on a backpacking trip and entrusts her research to a newfound campus friend--a self-styled farm boy who's sick and tired of plants and would rather spend his time reading Rilke. But in her absence, he begins to take an interest in the experiment, and eventually makes some remarkable discoveries.

In the third narrative, a child psychologist who's trapped on the same campus grounds during Covid, modifies some experiments he'd been using on pre-verbal children to see if he can arrive at similar insights regarding the inner life of trees. He eventually resorts to harvesting magic mushrooms from the botanical garden in his quest for results.  

These strands are intertwined time and again throughout the film, but they never coalesce, and none of the three arrive at a conclusion. The film ends, somewhat arbitrarily, with what might be called a cosmic New Age sensory forest bath.

One critic has described Our Silent Friend as "beautiful, elusive, and peppered with provocative nuggets about the nature of life and our place in it." My reaction was more in line with that of the critic who, in a generally positive review, described it as "glacially slow," "prioritizing philosophical atmosphere over narrative momentum," "not driven by cause and effect," and demanding a "surrendered mindset" from the audience. 

I guess I'm not ready to surrender. 

There has been a steady stream of material in recent years exploring what we might call "the hidden life of trees." I read (and liked) forester Peter Wohlleben's book by that name when it came out in 2015. The works of Suzanne Simard in this field have also been widely disseminated. Most of this material deals with biochemical relationships between trees and soil, trees and one another. Not much has been unearthed about what trees may have to say to us. 

It strikes me that we could develop a better rapport with our natural surroundings by dropping the quest for scientific exactitude and begin to think more like the infants the child psychologist describes in Our Silent Friend's opening minutes. You might get a sense of this more open and curious but less analytically focused attention in the films of Terrance Malick. In short, less science, more poetry.

 

Why a Duck?

We drove south along the river to meet and greet the ducks migrating north and were welcomed with open arms. Well, that’s not entirely true. The ducks were too interested in one another to pay much attention to us. In fact, they tended to drift off any time we opened a car door or pulled the spotting scope out of the trunk.

The appeal of the spring migration has several sources, prominent among them being its mystery. Why do tundra swans depart in huge numbers from Chesapeake Bay and fly 4,000 miles to the arctic wastes of northern Canada? Hilary and I were walking the upper trail along the cliffs at Frontenac State Park when we first heard their joyous shouts and honks. (You can listen to it here.) We looked up and there they were, silvery bodies no bigger than grains of rice, flying in formation, hundreds of feet above us.

Five or six flocks passed as we wandered the park. The sky was clear; the air was cold and crisp. I could feel the ardor passing back and forth as these very large birds churned their way north. The excited, clamoring voices set the mood and also told the story.

Hilary and I were also in a quietly ecstatic frame of mind simply to be out in such a beautiful morning, The bluebirds were iridescent. Field sparrows called in the distance—at a more rapid, insistent pace than they do in summer heat. Several woodpeckers were hammering away in the woods along the path to the overlook, as loud as I’ve ever heard them, but hitting notes more than an octave apart.

The previous afternoon we’d driven around Lake Pepin, and in the town of Pepin itself we came upon a huge assembly of ducks milling around near the protection of the marina. They were mostly scaup and ring-necked ducks, with a few handsome canvasbacks and redheads here and there.

On our way out to the end of the pier, we met a short, energetic, casually dressed woman returning from the breakwater. She was excited. “Oh, there are so many!” she said. “But yesterday there were even more. What are they?”

“Mostly scaup,” I told her. “Hunters call them bluebills.”

“Oh, ruddy ducks!” she exclaimed.

 “Well, no,” I corrected her. “Ruddy ducks do have blue bills, but they aren’t called ‘bluebills’. And do you see that duck with a big white ring around its beak. It’s called a ring-necked duck. But you can’t really see the ring around its neck.”

“Strange,” she said. “But I’ve got a duck with a blue bill in a plastic bag back there on shore. An eagle was eating it. It’s dead. I’m going to bury it.”

We passed the woman again on our way to the opposite end of the marina, where the ducks were now congregating, and she showed us the bird in her bag—or what was left of it. Mostly guts.

When we reached our new viewing spot, I noticed that one of the eyepieces on my binoculars had fallen off. But where? We retraced our steps around the harbor, scanning the grass and rubble along the path. No luck.

Then our new friend appeared out of nowhere and said, “Did you lose an eye ring? I found one.” She showed us where it was. How nice.

A few hours later, at the wayside rest north of Lake City, we got a much better look at another raft of ducks. To identify them is one thing. To see them well enough to thrill at their beautiful is something else again. Once again, the redheads and the canvasbacks stole the show.

Before checking into our motel on the western outskirts of Red Wing, we took a little trip away from the river and up into the hills on the urban fringe, in search of Spring Creek Scientific and Natural Area. I’d printed out some details before we left home, and we had no difficulty finding it. We parked in the single slot provided and headed down a path through the woods. Ten minutes later it opened out onto wonderful views to the west of the valley created by Spring Creek eons ago as it cut its way down through the Rochester Plateau to the Mississippi. Three ospreys drifted by overhead—or the same osprey three times? Pasque flowers were blooming inconspicuously amid the dry grasses on the rock exposures.

We spent the next day puttering south, indulging ourselves with a series of side trips and detours. We discovered a coffeeshop in Lake City we'd never seen before. I asked  the young woman behind the counter how long it had been open. She thought for a moment and said, "About eleven years, I think." 

We took Highway 84 out of Kellogg and came upon a large group of blackish ducks frolicking in a vast puddle out in a farmer’s field. They were hard to identify in the midday glare but Hilary finally noticed the flash of green on the face that convinced us they were green-winged teal. Looking up that species in the bird book she read: “Common in very shallow marshes and flooded fields.”

A few miles further south, we heard three eastern meadowlarks during a short hike through the Weaver Dunes. And our duck quest received a further boost as we wound our way though the backwaters of Goose Island County Park, a few miles south of La Crosse: Gadwalls, shovelers, blue-winged teal, and a single widgeon, his white forehead glistening in the early morning sun. “The hunters call that one a ‘bald pate,’ “I would have told our new-found friend from Pepin. “But the forehead isn’t really bald.”

Pelicans are a common sight on the river this time of year, sometimes soaring together in graceful arcs, at other times bobbing far off shore in large, brilliantly white clusters. One evening a few years ago we watched four hundred of them—I counted—come gliding in at dusk in a long line to a back bay south of Goose Island to spend the night.

Our pelican sightings on this trip were more sporadic, but we did come upon a huge congregation on our last day, just north of Winona, at McNally Landing. The wind overhead was fierce, but they all seemed to be having a good time together!

 

Mercurial Season, with Books

The first day of spring arrives at this time every year—usually more than once. I mean, one day it’s warm and sunny, the next two it’s chilly and drab. 

A few days ago the temperature topped 70 degrees for the first time. This means that everyone gets out of work at 3 p.m. At any rate, that was the rule at Bookmen, and I try to remain faithful to it, which isn’t difficult these days; I hardly have any work to do.

One gray day recently, we made an effort to cook up something special. Hilary spent the morning and a good part of the afternoon at the potting studio in Minnetonka. But we’d marked out an itinerary, and when she got home we set off.

Our first stop was Pioneer Park on the east bank of the Mississippi in Northeast. We took a stroll across the railroad bridge and made our way around Nicollet Island, on the lookout for stray buffleheads and early arriving kinglets. My thoughts turned to the history of the island I’d helped Chris and Rushica Hage put together a decade ago. Nowadays few are aware, perhaps, that most of the attractive clapboard houses we were admiring during our stroll were moved there from South Minneapolis during the 1960s as part of an urban renewal project. It remains one of the few neighborhoods in the vicinity that has been neither neglected nor overbuilt.

Our next stop was Kramarczuk’s deli, where we picked up a few tasty-looking dessert items. Then it was on to Eat My Words used bookstore, which has recently relocated to the western fringe of Southeast, right around the corner from Brasa and only a block or two from the apartment where Hilary and I lived in 1975. (Egad!) 

Hilary was looking for a copy of Wuthering Heights for her book club. No luck. "That type of thing goes pretty quick," the young man behind the counter told us. But before we left she did buy a slim paperback copy of James Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times. It was an inspired choice.

On the way home we stopped briefly at Gorka Palace to pick up an order of chicken biryani and beef korma we’d ordered before leaving the house. Everything fell into place like clockwork.

After dinner we sat around in the living room reading  goofy narratives with titles like “The Night the Bed Fell on Father” and “The Car We Had to Push.” To add to the fun, I fetched copies of S. J. Perelman’s Last Laugh and Robert Benchley’s My Ten Years in a Quandary: and How They Grew from the other room.

_____________________

The next morning was as bright as the previous afternoon has been overcast, but a sharp wind made it as chilly as ever—possibly more so. In the midst of scanning the news—terrible as ever—Hilary noticed an article reporting the opening of a new bookstore in St. Anthony Park in the building where Micawber’s used to be. We decided to get out into the day and take a look.

It’s a small shop, utilizing only two of the tree rooms Micawber’s stocked. Stepping in from the bright morning, the lighting struck me as poor. And to my eyes, the shelves seemed to contain a large number of paperbacks with unpleasantly colorful pastel bindings. I don’t know why. The few used books I spotted had been stocked on rotating wooden spindles that looked cute, but tottered, creaked, and groaned when you tried to spin them.

Then again, I have so many books at home that few retail bookstores hold my interest for long.

A few minutes later, perusing the sale items in the public library a block away, I came upon a thick, good-as-new, hardcover biography of Adam Smith, priced at fifty cents. I was thumbing through it when it occurred to me that I already owned a biography of Adam Smith back home, half the size, waiting on the shelf, unread.

Later that afternoon we took one final jaunt in search of Wuthering Heights. The website of Magers and Quinn, in Uptown, reported several copies and editions in stock.

It was a pleasant drive down the parkway, though the skies had turned gray again and the ice on Cedar Lake was even grayer. Having parked the car on a side street near the store, we walked past a block of shuttered restaurants, several of which we’d had it in mind to try, but never did.

Magers and Quinn is the best bookstore around, in my opinion. And I was happy to see there were plenty of people inside, browsing. Hilary hunted down the edition of Wuthering Heights she was looking for, while I drifted through the archway to the chaotic remainder shelves on the back wall. I thumbed briefly through an astonishingly thick volume of Elizabeth Bishop’s collected letters, then hit on a less massive Oxford edition of the complete poems of Robert Herrick, priced at two dollars. Bingo!

I know next to nothing about Herrick, which is why I bought the book. I’m finding his religious poems less uncanny than those of George Herbert, and his amorous secular poems less brilliant than Donne’s. 

I’m not giving up on him yet. After all, he did write these famous lines:

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,

Old time is still a flying;

And this same flower that smiles today,

Tomorrow will be dying.

But let's get real: he’s no match for Thurber.

  

  

The Academy Awards 2026

The Academy Awards ceremony has come and gone. We watch it very year, not slavishly, but with mild anticipation and curiosity, hoping the clips will be long and the production numbers short.

This year was a good one, right from the beginning, on the red carpet, where the breathy interviewers asked intelligent questions, mostly ignoring who made the gowns, and the stars mostly responded in kind.

Conan O’Brien handled his responsibilities well as MC, in the best Johnny Carson tradition, reaching neither the highs of Bob Hope and Billy Crystal nor descending to the lows of David Letterman and Kid Rock.

The tributes to Rob Reiner and Robert Redford were sincere and touching. The comedy skit about repetitive dialogue aimed at distracted viewers was hilarious. And to top it all off, the run of nominated films was good. Well, I only saw half of them, but I liked what I saw.

If someone asked me to rank them, I’d put them like this:

One Battle After Another. An adventure comedy with numerous twists and turns and an exquisite visual flow, marred only by the absurd overacting of Sean Penn as a deranged military man.

Marty Supreme. A good old-fashioned bildungsroman with lots of energy and color and an annoying protagonist. (Well, Citizen Kane was also annoying and abrasive. And when was Jack Nicholson not annoying?)  

Sentimental Value. A wandering family drama with four acting nominees including an Oscar-worthy performance by Stellan Skarsgård. (The question in my mind remains: by the end of the film, had Dad really changed?)

Hamnet. A “small” film with a single theme, but emotionally affecting.

Sinners. Many parts of it looked like a filmed theatrical performance, which isn’t good. It reminded me of the Saturday matinees I used to go to at the Avalon Theater in White Bear Lake when I was twelve. In short, hokey and over-the-top, yet fun.

After decades of movie-going, one thing I’m convinced of is this: However you imagine a film, based on reviews, clips, or word-of-mouth, it’s likely to be different … and richer, than you expected. Even if it’s bad, it’s likely to be bad in ways you never imagined.

What’s next on the list? It Was Just an Accident? or The Secret Agent?

 

Before the Blizzard

Waiting in front of the fire for the storm to hit,

drinking wine and nibbling a dish of nuts.

I’ve thrown a thick log on the blaze,

Unsplit. Now I’m wondering

which tree it came from. And when.

I saw the first flake two hours ago,

while we were walking down by the creek.

A loner. A scout. The avant garde.

Hooded mergansers were drifting in pairs;

(I’d forgotten how beautiful they are.)

 We met a couple on the trail

who’d seen a brown creeper!

(Did I hear crane croaking in the distance,

Moving north above the clouds?)

 I’m reading a biography of Li Po. It fits the mood.

Now Hilary’s in the kitchen mixing dough.

The pasta machine’s clamped firmly in place.

The pesto thaws as the world turns white again.