Seasons of a Refractive Mind

A wide-ranging collection of poems, aphorisms, and black-and-white photographs by an American writer and public policy scholar born in California in 1953 and raised in the American South and Pacific Northwest. Topics include faith and its loss, nature and the environment, war, social justice, friendship, teaching, chronic pain, mental health, and the struggle to communicate with others when ordinary words fail. The photography emphasizes California and the Northwest, but includes images from the American South and from Japan. Many of the writings and images convey nautical themes or nature themes. A major section addresses the Portland, Oregon, of the 1990s. This is a collection that can be read in any order or sampled a little at a time, and it can be revisited many times with new insight and delight.