Thomas Gilbert
Essays, reflections, and dispatches from the creative life
This is where the shorter work lives — essays, travel writing, spiritual observations, and notes on the creative life. Some pieces are polished; others are closer to thinking out loud. All of them are attempts to pay attention to something: a place, a question, a moment that seemed to ask for more than a passing glance.
There is a particular quality of light on Highway 1 in the early morning — before the fog burns off, before the tourists arrive — that I have been trying to describe for fifty years. I am not sure I have succeeded yet. But I keep trying, which may be the point.
To stand among the redwoods is to be reminded of your own scale — not in a diminishing way, but in a clarifying one. These trees were old when the first Europeans arrived on this coast. They will be old when we are gone. There is something restful about that.
Faith, as I have come to understand it, is not the absence of doubt but the willingness to remain in the question. It is less a destination than a way of traveling — open, attentive, willing to be surprised by what the road offers.
The best songs I have written came in the early morning, before I was fully awake, before the critical mind had time to object. There is a window — maybe twenty minutes — when something honest can get through. I have learned to keep a notebook by the bed.
Carmel is a different place in October. The summer visitors are gone, the light has changed — lower, more golden, more forgiving — and the town returns to something closer to what it must have been when the artists first arrived here, drawn by exactly this quality of afternoon.
Every tide pool is a complete world — self-contained, intricate, indifferent to the larger ocean that made it. I have spent hours at the edge of them, watching the anemones open and close, thinking about what it means to be small and alive and perfectly suited to your particular circumstances.