Early this morning, while rehanging the bird feeders, I stepped over a June bug that was walking/crawling across the deck. Mid-day, while walking SiSi the rescue dog, we noticed the first beardtongue in bloom. Several places in our fields now have yellow hawkweed in bloom. We noticed them while doing the year's first mowing of the back yard yesterday and today. Whether the yellow flowers are an invasive species or a native one isn't clear, but our fingers are crossed that our plants are the narrow-leaf hawkweed, a native species, unless, of course, they're Crepis tectorum, narrow-leaf hawksbeard. Lawyers sometimes refer to "a distinction without a difference." Is that what we have here?
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| is this narrow-leaf hawkweed? hawksbeard?
Photo by J. Harrington
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In case you also are challenged trying to properly identify certain wild plants, let me note that distinctions are also becoming blurred in literature: is memoir fiction or non-fiction or both?; and music: first Dylan is awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, and then Baez, long the Queen of Folk, is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Then there's one of my favorite genres or forms, prose poetry. Of course, in a universe where an unmitigated charlatan can become president of the United States, we must be ready to expect almost anything. Is it even possible that the United States government might admit UFOs could be real?
The Confuscianist in me finds much of this quite distressing. The Taoist in me notes that "The name that can be named is not the eternal name." Thus the times, and the names, have always been changing, haven't they?
The Times They Are A-Changin’
Written by: Bob Dylan
Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’
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Please be kind to each other while you can.
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