Michael N. McGregor

Tag: nature

  • See What Beshara Magazine Loves About ‘An Island to Myself’

    See What Beshara Magazine Loves About ‘An Island to Myself’

    Haiku poet Robert Hirschfield praises An Island to Myself: The Place of Solitude in an Active Life and offers snippets from an interview with me in a piece just published online in Beshara, a UK magazine devoted to “Unity in the Contemporary World.”

    Hirschfield begins with a quote from the book: “Solitude doesn’t give me meaning so much as help me see where my life has meaning and where it doesn’t.” Then he writes: “I go over that line maybe three or four times, as if afraid it may otherwise disappear for good.”

    He credits me with “a knack…of getting at what is most essential and quietly moving on” before quoting these lines of mine from our interview:

    “It seems obvious to me that in our very busy, very noisy world, just giving yourself a break from that would have to be beneficial. Beyond that, to live a life is to experience the unknown. I think solitude allows you to exist in that unknowing state, to realize a true vision of who you are and what it means to be alive.”

    The interview touches on the relationship of solitude to several subjects, including nature, travel, and loneliness.

    You can read the full article here.

    For another take on An Island to Myself: The Place of Solitude in an Active Life, read Linda Lappin’s lovely review in the California Review of books.

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  • A Year in the Woods

    A Year in the Woods

    I’m nearing the end of what I expect to be the final revision of a memoir I’ve been working on for a number of years. It’s focused on a year my wife Sylvia and I lived in the woods on an island off the coast of Washington State. I was on my first sabbatical as a professor and was hoping for a peaceful year dedicated to writing and living simply. But that year turned out to be something else entirely. It was, as the book’s subtitle says, A Year In the Wilds of Nature, Death and Art.

    With its meditations on solitude, simplicity, living a life of meaning, and the healing power of nature, I’m hoping the book will resonate with people who have spent the past year contemplating those kinds of things.

    Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

    As I neared the fawn, it settled down, not in a conscious way but in the manner of dying. A leg twitched. Then its jaw. Then it lay still. I studied the white patch on its side, the way its sable hair gave way to its black hooves. The eye I could see was still open but I didn’t want to look at it. I didn’t want to see the dimming, the dullness, the loss of lucidity I’d seen in the deer that grazed around the cabins. In the end, I looked anyway, and what I saw moved me deeply. The eye looked limpid, liquid, and peaceful, like water I could see to the depths of, and it had a quality to it I hadn’t seen in the living. There is this, at least, in death it seemed to say: an absence of pain. Of fear. Of worry. It seemed the kindest eye I’d ever seen, the kind I wished to turn myself toward animals and trees and people.