Voting isn't enough!

If you look to the right, you'll see a new poster we've added, courtesy of patagonia. More than a little foolishly, we've been hoping that, some weeks after November 3, it would be all over. Today we realized just how misguided that hope is. We need to change the way the world works, much about how we live and work, and that's not going to be settled next month even if the Democrats win with a Blue Tsunami (we hope).

If we really want to have a better world and a better life for our children, and their children, and other children, we have to change a lot of minds. Patagonia gives me hope and inspiration on how that can be accomplished. So does the Sierra Club and Trout Unlimited and The Nature Conservancy.

Patagonia has a local store in St. Paul. The Sierra Club, Trout Unlimited and The Nature Conservancy all have local chapters in Minnesota. We've supported these organizations, and others, for years and years now. We've had the pleasure of watching a number of them become more relevant to the problems I think we (this country and this world) are facing.

Superior National Forest overlooking the Lake

Photo by J. Harrington

The Nature Conservancy just preserved more than 2,000 acres of our wilderness in Northern Minnesota. Trout Unlimited is becoming even more family and education oriented. The North Star Chapter of Sierra Club has a number of active campaigns in support of clean air, clean water, wild Minnesota and in opposition to climate breakdown.

So, once you've got your "I Voted" sticker, or even before, if you're waiting to vote in person, join, donate to, volunteer with and otherwise support one or more of these outfits, or a similar one such as the Friends of the Mississippi River or the St. Croix River Association or MN350. They, and we, and mother earth, need all the help we can get. We're all in this together whether we know it or admit it or not.

Before we go today, please join us in offering our most sincere congratulations to Louise Glück, for being awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature.

All Hallows

By Louise Glück

Even now this landscape is assembling.

The hills darken. The oxen

sleep in their blue yoke,

the fields having been

picked clean, the sheaves

bound evenly and piled at the roadside

among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness

of harvest or pestilence.

And the wife leaning out the window

with her hand extended, as in payment,

and the seeds

distinct, gold, calling

Come here

Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

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