Spring is sprung, what's next?

Yes, thank you, I have almost recovered from the Spring cold I started coming down with last weekend. Also, once again, the snow cover has finally melted. Locally, things are looking up, but the skies are too often clouded. That hasn't kept the waterfowl from returning. The Sunrise River pools have lots of open water occupied by swans, Canada geese and diving ducks. I also saw the unusual sight of a handful of crows walking along the ice at the edge of open water. Surrounding marshes may contain red-winged blackbirds, but our observations weren't close enough to confirm identification.

returning Canada geese and ducks on Sunrise River in Carlos Avery WMA

Photo by J. Harrington

While suffering the sneezing, coughing, snuffling, nose-blowing, no energy miseries this past week, I had the pleasure of reading most of Rebecca Solnit's The Beginning Comes After the End. So far it's got me, Mr. Gloom and Doom, feeling more optimistic than I have in quite a while. I've lived through and been generally aware of almost all the changes she writes about, but hadn't put them together quite the way she does. Meanwhile, I'm still adjusting to the idea that the future isn't something out there that we adapt to but something all of us are creating by our actions (or inactions) every day.

I'm looking forward to bud burst, leaf out and green up, along with days growing warmer and maybe even occasional sunshine. However, I've lived in the North Country long enough to know better than to prematurely pack away our gear for snow and/or cold weather. Maybe the last few patches of icy snow on the shaded south side of the drive will actually finish melting one of these days and we can look forward to seeing ducklings, goslings and sandhill crane colts as the seasons go round and round.

Of Course It Hurts

by Karin Boye

Of course it hurts when buds burst.
Otherwise why would spring hesitate?
Why would all our fervent longing
be bound in the frozen bitter haze?
The bud was the casing all winter.
What is this new thing, which consumes and bursts?
Of course it hurts when buds burst,
pain for that which grows
and for that which envelops.

Of course it is hard when drops fall.
Trembling with fear they hang heavy,
clammer on the branch, swell and slide -
the weight pulls them down, how they cling.
Hard to be uncertain, afraid and divided,
hard to feel the deep pulling and calling,
yet sit there and just quiver -
hard to want to stay
                      and to want to fall.

Then, at the point of agony and when all is beyond help,
the tree’s buds burst as if in jubilation,
then, when fear no longer exists,
the branch’s drops tumble in a shimmer,
forgetting that they were afraid of the new,
forgetting that they were fearful of the journey –
feeling for a second their greatest security,
resting in the trust
                         that creates the world.

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Stop the bleeding!!!

Welcome to Sun Day! There's an (in)famous quote about news: "If it bleeds, it leads." Doom-scrolling social media, reading the US edition of The Guardian, and watching tv news leaves too many of US with the impression that everything's coming apart or, as Yeats tells US "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;"

Blue Marble, our only home
Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

I've never, to my knowledge, been accused of being a Pollyanna, but I confess that  my sense of doom and gloom has been overdeveloped recently. There's more good and interesting work being accomplished these days than is readily conveyed in Mainstream Media (MSM). I reached this conclusion earlier today when I came across the Climate Action Now website. Check it out, we'll wait.

My email inbox and snail mail box are daily filled with pleas / please to help fund this or that effort to save the world, or at least bits and pieces thereof. The aggregate effect, too often, leaves me with the impression that almost any donation is part of a largely hopeless effort to shovel s_ _ t against the t_ _ e. What is missing from most of the requests is a positive vision of what's to be accomplished. Overturning Citizens United or presidential immunity would be the restoration of a former (imperfect) status quo instead of a positive step forward such as mandating pubic only funding for campaigns or prohibiting anyone convicted of a felony (misdemeanor?) from serving as president, VP, or in the cabinet.

Before starting today's posting, I tumbled into the Sun Day announcement as I was trying to decide if I wanted to reread James Lovelock's Gaia. While skimming through inline reviews, I found Book review – On Gaia: A Critical Investigation of the Relationship between Life and Earth. That in turn led me eventually to BECOMING EARTH, HOW OUR PLANET CAME TO LIFE, which I intend to order from my regular, local, independent bookstore and read instead of rereading Gaia. I wish I had known about evolutionary biology when I was in college but then it might not have been much more than a hypothesis back in those days.

Let's see if these days we can do more and better and prove Yeats a pessimist now that we're almost through the first quarter of the twenty-first century and still have no home but planet Earth.

The Second Coming

By William Butler Yeats

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Back to the future?

Yesterday was a Red Flag day and not just because it was Mother's Day! Low humidity, winds gusting into the low thirties mph, plus no precipitation for a week or so raised the grass fire danger over much of the state. We get this morning off and the Red Flag returns at noon for the afternoon and evening. Please keep your fingers crossed that all those exposed to danger and destruction stay safe. These days that includes about all of US and most other Earthlings, doesn't it?

brush fire: not all burns are controlled

Photo by J. Harrington

Have you noticed that many librarians are moving 1984 and Brave New World from the fiction to the nonfiction section? That's disheartening, to put it mildly. Although the term Anthropocene has been rejected as a new geological epoch, I think there's a more hopeful future for the term and those living during it. It will become known as the period in which humans finally became wise enough to stop destroying the life support systems of their home planet. This assessment is based on a growing number of books that flag intelligent and successful environmental restoration movements growing world-wide. Here's a few titles for your consideration:

• What if We Get It Right?, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
• Carbon, Paul Hawken
• Hydrate the Earth, Ananda Fitzsimmons, and
• Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane

I'm rereading the third title, almost finished each of the first two, and looking forward to getting a copy of the fourth next month as a gift. To paraphrase from the opening of the original Star Wars crawl: "A long time ago in on a galaxy planet far, far away [in time]...." the First People(s) believed Earth a sacred part of the Great Mystery. If you're old enough, you'll recognize where we borrowed this from: "Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear."

I don't know about you, but I think it'd be great if we all stopped trying to burn up our home planet and dedicated more to tending what's left and restoring what we've trashed. Otherwise, we won't be the ancestors our children and theirs needed.

        Salvage

Ada Limón
1976 –

On the top of Mount Pisgah, on the western
slope of the Mayacamas, there’s a madrone
tree that’s half-burned from the fires, half-alive
from nature’s need to propagate. One side
of her is black ash and at her root is what
looks like a cavity that was hollowed out
by flame. On the other side, silvery green
broadleaf shoots ascend toward the winter
light and her bark is a cross between a bay
horse and a chestnut horse, red and velvety
like the animal’s neck she resembles. I have
been staring at the tree for a long time now.
I am reminded of the righteousness I had
before the scorch of time. I miss who I was.
I miss who we all were, before we were this: half
alive to the brightening sky, half dead already.
I place my hand on the unscarred bark that is cool
and unsullied, and because I cannot apologize
to the tree, to my own self I say, I am sorry.
I am sorry I have been so reckless with your life.

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How about a Mother Nature’s Day?

Wishing a happy day to all the Mothers out there and those who made them such. On the way home from a visit with our son, the Jeep was reporting air temperatures of 87℉. The rest of the week is forecast to be more seasonable. Unfortunately, these days the season includes wildfires and we’re under an air quality alert due to smoke from British Columbia fires that’s being brought in on the cold front that’s chilling the temps. At least no one is dropping bombs on or shooting artillery at US (yet).

Canada goose with goslings

Photo by J. Harrington

The yard is beautified by lots of white violet blooms with dark centers. Lilacs have begun to blossom. Canada goose goslings and sandhill crane colts have been observed in the vicinity. Soon it will be time for does to drop their fawns and wild turkey poults to hatch. Mornings are not as full of birdsong as they were a week or two ago. Nature is doing her best to rejuvenate our biodiversity, with insufficient help from us.

What would it take to get humans to honor Mother Nature as much as many (most?) do their own mothers? When is it Mother Nature’s Day and what does that mean? We need her as much as we need our own mothers, don’t we?

The Raincoat

Ada Limón
1976 – 

When the doctor suggested surgery
and a brace for all my youngest years,
my parents scrambled to take me
to massage therapy, deep tissue work,
osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine
unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,
and move more in a body unclouded
by pain. My mom would tell me to sing
songs to her the whole forty-five minute
drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-
five minutes back from physical therapy.
She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered
by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
because I thought she liked it. I never
asked her what she gave up to drive me,
or how her day was before this chore. Today,
at her age, I was driving myself home from yet
another spine appointment, singing along
to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,
and I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.

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Is an anti-rescue curmudgeon all wet?

There’s lots of open water showing on local lakes and ponds. The Minnesota legislature is considering a bill to reimburse counties for “ice rescues.” Apparently counties are already reimbursed for surface water rescues. The article troubles me the same way that seeing boaters act stupidly on the Atlantic Ocean used to trouble my friends and I. Since it was, and probably still is, possible to take a small craft handling and seamanship course, we argued that completion of that course should be required to enable anyone to purchase a marine radio that could be used to summon the Coast Guard if one got in trouble on the water.

An outdoor writer I read years ago, possibly John Gierach, proposed in a story that “wilderness” trailheads should have signs posted to the effect that visitors were informed “You’re on your own if you get in trouble! Don’t expect rescues beyond this point.” Not doing so seems to violate the very concept of wilderness, and could do wonders for reducing competition for permits for the BWCA.

should lakes like this be declared “wilderness?"

Photo by J. Harrington

Contemporary societies are doing a horrendously bad job of managing our commons of air, water, land and culture. In part because we allow distortions such as obscuring the distinctions between human beings and legal persons. Otherwise, corporations, which could in theory be eternal, should be faced with the prospect of a death penalty if convicted of ecocide or equally horrendous, but all too common, behavior.

In order to instill more respect for informed and appropriate behavior, why not declare all the water bodies in central and northern Minnesota as wilderness areas. No rescues permitted. If resorts want to support untrained and uninformed folks venturing forth, let those resorts provide the rescue teams and reflect the costs in their rates, providing a discount for a stay that doesn’t trigger a rescue effort.

Come wilderness into our homes

By Daniela Danz
Translated by Monika Cassel

break the windows come

with your roots and your worms

spread yourself over our wishes

our waste-sorting systems our protheses

and outstanding payments

cover us with your rustling greenery

and your spores cover us that we may

become green: green and reverent

green and manifestly green and replaceable

come weather with your storms

and sweep the slates off the roofs come

with snow and hail smash

through the collective sleep

we are all enjoying in our beds

our worn rationalizations come ice

and form glaciers over the shadow banks

and our drive for liquidity

come through the cracks under the doors

you desert with your sands fill

our desolation up until it forms into a solid mass

rise up over the search-and-rescue teams

and our growth compulsion trickle into

the control panels of the missiles

and the missile defense systems into

the think tanks and the hearts of internet trolls

just leave the hedgehogs with their

snuffling so that it may calm us

come rising sea levels

up over our shorelines both the developed

and the undeveloped the homey

lowland areas wash

jellyfish into our soup bowls

and ramshorn snails into our hair

as we swim in each other’s direction panicked

with our yearning for one another

because almost nothing is left because it’s all gone

and thoroughly soaked through with regrets

finger-pointing and tranquilizers

come earthquakes shatter the apartments

which we built on the foundations

of how we always did everything

come tremors fill the mine shafts

the end of work and

the literature of redemption bury anger

and affection and all manner of added values

swallow up the memories come tremors

hurry so that the bedrock covers us

so we are covered with water desert weather

and over everything that which covers all the wilderness

Translated from the German

Notes:

Read the German-language original, “Komm Wildnis in unsere Häuser,” and the translator’s note by Monika Cassel.

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Thanks! giving?

Last night, somebody (deer? raccoons? both?) was playing with the pumpkins we left in the field behind the house. They’ve been moved quite a distance from where we dropped them. but not very munched on yet, it appears. When deer were noshing on pumpkins in front of the house, it took them several days to eat much of the body of the vegetable. We’ll keep an eye on things and report anything noteworthy.

deer like the taste of Jack O'Lanterns

Photo by J. Harrington

The Better Half has adjusted the sparkly holiday bouquet on the book case behind her right shoulder. The "alien eyes” [see yesterday’s posting] are gone. It now looks much more holidayish. There’s also a miniature angel on top of a hutch keeping an eye on the dining-living-and-kitchen area. We may yet end up with some holiday spirit.

The oven’s preheating for the afternoon bread baking. That both helps take any chill off the living room and kitchen and, in a couple of hours, the place will smell great too. Then later, on Thursday, we’ll enjoy the aroma of roasting turkey. If I can only remember to stay away from news headlines and social media, the week could be quite pleasant, more so if the sun ever returns.

So far, a high point of the day has been a very close look at three sandhill cranes as they burst from a wetland next to I-35 and flew almost over the hood of the Jeep. They are beautiful birds. In the Marshland Elegy chapter of A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold notes how close we came to losing them. We can be thankful on Thursday, and every day, that we didn’t. Then we can do all we know how to do to protect other threatened critters and their habitat so we can be thankful we still get to enjoy their company next year at Thanksgiving time.

When the Frost is on the Punkin

By James Whitcomb Riley

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock,

And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin’ turkey-cock,

And the clackin’ of the guineys, and the cluckin’ of the hens,

And the rooster’s hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence;

O, it’s then’s the times a feller is a-feelin’ at his best,

With the risin’ sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,

As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock,

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.

They’s something kindo’ harty-like about the atmusfere

When the heat of summer’s over and the coolin’ fall is here—

Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossums on the trees,

And the mumble of the hummin’-birds and buzzin’ of the bees;

But the air’s so appetizin’; and the landscape through the haze

Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days

Is a pictur’ that no painter has the colorin’ to mock—

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.

The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn,

And the raspin’ of the tangled leaves, as golden as the morn;

The stubble in the furries—kindo’ lonesome-like, but still

A-preachin’ sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill;

The strawstack in the medder, and the reaper in the shed;

The hosses in theyr stalls below—the clover over-head!—

O, it sets my hart a-clickin’ like the tickin’ of a clock,

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock!

Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller keeps

Is poured around the celler-floor in red and yeller heaps;

And your cider-makin’ ’s over, and your wimmern-folks is through

With their mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and saussage, too! ...

I don’t know how to tell it—but ef sich a thing could be

As the Angels wantin’ boardin’, and they’d call around on me—

I’d want to ’commodate ’em—all the whole-indurin’ flock—

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock!

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“Need to know” basis

I did succeed in making yesterday a #TweetlessTuesday. It actually felt good. Except for the agitation surrounding additional indictments of The Former Guy [TFG], I would have probably felt better still if I had stayed away from online news outlets. The ratio of depressing and/or frightening news stories to happy or good news must be st least 9 or 10 to 1. One of our local tv stations has provided a clue to responding to the relentless deluge of conspiracy, theories and actions. They have a segment each morning about 4 Things You Need to Know. After watching carefully for several mornings, I decided they were wrong. I didn’t need to know most of what they were pitching. I think I’ll take a similar approach to other online news reporting.

When I first began to contemplate the idea of “need to know” it brought me face to face with the question of how it applies to this blog. My answer is that rarely am I posting about what you need to know, but I hope we often (sometimes?) bring items you may want to know.

lower St. Croix River

Photo by J. Harrington

Today I’m back to looking at bioregions and their potential roles in creating a sustainable, regenerative future. We live in the St. Croix River watershed, a tributary to the Mississippi River watershed and close to the edge of the Great Lakes watershed. Water, watersheds and related factors will become more and more significant as world temperatures increase and geohydrologic cycles become disrupted. (Colorado River ring a bell?)

At the moment, the water quality in several Minnesota water bodies is threatened by nonferrous mining. The state Supreme Court just “suspended a key permit for the NorthMet copper-nickel mine in northern Minnesota on Wednesday, ruling that state regulators failed to fully consider the threat to water quality posed by the mine.” I would argue that in an increasingly water-stressed world, protecting the quality of the water we have is a top priority, followed by restoring the quality of water that fails to meer designated use standards. If our existing governmental structures were as committed to addressing climate breakdown as they claim, there should never have been a permit that "failed to fully consider the threat to water quality posed by the mine.”

All told, these days I’m returning more and more to many of my first loves: English, poetry, environment, nature, ethics, pllace. Ian McHarg, in Design with Nature, offers the right concepts. He just doesn’t take them far enough, but then he didn’t write it in our times.

Wanting Sumptuous Heavens

By Robert Bly

No one grumbles among the oyster clans,

And lobsters play their bone guitars all summer.

Only we, with our opposable thumbs, want

Heaven to be, and God to come, again.

There is no end to our grumbling; we want

Comfortable earth and sumptuous Heaven.

But the heron standing on one leg in the bog

Drinks his dark rum all day, and is content.

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Some errors of our era

We finally got lots of rain last night. The telltale puddle in the driveway was close to full this morning. Yesterday brought several severe storms to our north with winds and hail bringing down lots of leaves and some trees. Meanwhile, the UN secretary general has announced that “the era of global boiling has arrived.” Nevertheless the Biden administration has chosen to not (yet?) declare a climate emergency. Neither have I read that there are any pre-established triggers or criteria for such a declaration.

Meanwhile, closer to home, yet another aquifer puncture has been discovered along Enbridge's Line 3. I’ve not yet learned how all the fines in the world will actually restore the environment, sort of similar to how long it’s estimated to take for earth’s climate to begin to return to “normal” if we ever minimize greenhouse gas discharges. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources is being sued to keep it from requiring approved manure management plans for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations [CAFOs]. In Minnesota, I wonder if there’s any state agency that does as much to support metals recycling as the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources does to support metals mining.

recycling before extraction

Photo by J. Harrington

Back when Manifest Destiny was aspirational, the colonizing powers gave away land to get the country “developed.” In 1972, the Clean Water Act Amendments updated and expanded the “Rivers and Harbors Act (1899), the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (1948), the Water Quality Act (1965), and the Refuse Act (1970)” Folks are still debating the interpretation and coverage of that legislation. There has been no comparable update to the Mining Act of 1872. We have long “settled” and colonized the country from coast to coast. We no longer need to promote extractive industries as an economic development strategy. Protecting and restoring clean air, water, food sovereignty and, probably, manufacturing are more critical priorities if we wish to have a survivable future, let alone a sustainable one.

There’s an old saying in the planning profession: “More of the same never solved a problem.” The same is true of law and politics. We can and must do better and stop the “same old, same old” solutions.

Value Added

By Stephen Sandy

No one knew what the stones like squatting frogs

signified. There they were, fuming in rows, out

of the ground; every critic had his explanation

or hers. But—we had to remember—they

 

came to nothing, every one; those large stones

out of the earth served the systems

of those who considered them, as explaining

something about the past it was important

 

for the explainer to explain. And yet

no one had any idea truly; there was no

basis in fact for any view of them, and

they remained like their origins—or like

 

smiling Olmec babies, sweet but ominous figures

come from the earth to reproach us, almost

cheerfully, for our ignorance—a mystery, just

as the probe of our feelings came up with nothing.

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No more heads in the sand?

Do you see a troublesome pattern here?

• Texas governor defies federal order to remove anti-migrant buoys from river 


• Lawsuit says US environmental agency ignores harm of biofuel production


• ‘No one wants to be right about this’: climate scientists’ horror and exasperation as global predictions play out


• Greta Thunberg fined for disobeying Swedish police at climate protest

What else do we need to do?

Photo by J. Harrington

More and more headlines note political leaders and executive branch institutions undermining the rule of law rather than setting an appropriate example. Disinformtion and misinformation are being spread at increasing rates while a major social media platform focuses on “rebranding,” as if that’s the problem. Climate deniers have hindered the scale and speed of responses needed to avert the kinds of climate weirding effects we’re experiencing this summer. More and more folks, including pundits much more qualified than I, are expressing growing concerns about “saving” democracy without being specific about what steps we should be taking.

Scientists told us what we needed to do but it would mean radical changes in lifestyles so we continue as we were because “What else ya gonna do?” If we continue to ignore the threats posed by those individuals and institutions that fail to respect science and/or the rule of law, might we find ourselves embroiled in a second civil war come next year? Would there be any real winners or would that make US all losers?

How to Write a Poem in a Time of War

By Joy Harjo

You can’t begin just anywhere. It’s a wreck.

                                                                                       Shrapnel and the eye

Of a house, a row of houses. There’s a rat scrambling

From light with fleshy trash in its mouth. A baby strapped to its mother’s back

Cut loose.                                                                     Soldiers crawl the city,

The river, the town, the village,

                                      The bedroom, our kitchen. They eat everything.

Or burn it.

They kill what they cannot take. They rape. What they cannot kill they take.

Rumors fall like rain.

                                     Like bombs.

                 Like mother and father tears swallowed for restless peace.

                                     Like sunset slanting toward a moonless midnight.

Like a train blown free of its destination.         Like a seed fallen where

There is no chance of trees                 or anyplace       for birds to live.

No, start here.                           Deer peer from the edge of the woods.

                                                                        We used to see woodpeckers

The size of the sun, redbirds, and were greeted

                                          By chickadees with their good morning songs.

We’d started to cook outside slippery with dew and laughter, ah those smoky sweet sunrises.

We tried to pretend war wasn’t going to happen.

Though they began building their houses all around us and demanding 
more.

They started teaching our children their god’s story,

                                                               A story in which we’d always be slaves.

No. Not here.

You can’t begin here.

This is memory shredded because it is impossible to hold by words, even poetry.

These memories were left here with the trees:

The torn pocket of your daughter’s hand-sewn dress,

The sash, the lace.

The baby’s delicately beaded moccasin still connected to the foot,

A young man’s note of promise to his beloved —

                                                                              No! This is not the best place to begin.

Everyone was asleep, despite the distant bombs. Terror had become the familiar stranger.

Our beloved twin girls curled up in their nightgowns, next to their father and me.

If we begin here, none of us will make it to the end

                                                                                                               Of the poem.

Someone has to make it out alive, sang a grandfather to his grandson,

His granddaughter, as he blew his most powerful song into the hearts of the children.

There it would be hidden from the soldiers,

Who would take them miles, rivers, mountains from the navel cord place

Of the origin story.

He knew one day, far day, the grandchildren would return, 
generations later

Over slick highways                             constructed over old trails

Through walls of laws meant to hamper or destroy, over the 
libraries of

The ancestors in the winds, born in stones.

His song brings us to his home place in these smoky hills.

Begin here.

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Getting hooked on self care

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

Henry David Thoreau

Well, thanks to the Daughter Person and Son-In-Law, I’m already ahead of last year on at least one front that’s important to me: fishing. Plus, the weather couldn’t have been more pleasant. We spent a couple of hours this morning in their boat on a nearby lake, playing with little bluegills and a couple of pint-sized bass. The official reports on the lake note an abundance of both species but below average sizes. I can vouch for that. Many of the bluegills were so small they couldn’t mouth a size 14 or 16 wooly worm, but it was fun watching them try to eat it within a few feet of the boat. It has been entirely too long since I’ve been fishing. Last year we (the Better Half and I) totally failed to wet a line. We’ll try to do better from now on. (I just remembered Yoda's “Do. Or do not. There is no try.”)

It turned out my fly casting isn’t as rusty as I feared it might have become, but I established a new personal worst by somehow entangling the leader in the innards of the fly reel. I’ve never done that before. The old phrase “Use it or lose it!” comes again to mind since the fly rod I took this morning hasn’t seen daylight for several years. Slowly but surely all my fly tackle will get sorted out, organized, and put to good use. In fact, I just realized that some gold-ribbed hare’s ear nymphs I tied years age, that may well not fool a trout, could be just the thing for playing with pan fish next time we go out. I’ll also remember to bring a fly rod more in line with the diminutive size of the fish, which will undoubtedly make for excitement when something bigger eats the fly.

flies for pan fish or trout

Photo by J. Harrington

Come afternoon it's time again to do the weekly Community Supported Agriculture [CSA] pickup. This week’s box contents include:

• COLLARDS
• KOHLRABI
• GREEN BELL PEPPER
• CUCUMBER
• SUMMER SQUASH, and
• GREEN CABBAGE

Last week there was a note in our box that Bilko cabbage was missing. We probably ended up with extra summer squash and green beans. Part of the fun of CSA membership is there are no guarantees of what will be delivered. It’s not the same as going to a big box store and picking one of these and one of those. I have mixed feelings about the lack of green beans this week. They’ve been really tasty but we’ve eaten quite a few the past couple of weeks. As unreasonable as it may sound, I really wish someone would figure out how to make fresh vegetables as tasty as junk food. Else, it feels as if doing something that I know is good for me is almost a punishment, despite the Better Half’s creativity with salads and side dishes and quiches.

Now, I’m sharing with you a challenge I’m making to myself: over the duration of at least the summer, I’m going to engage in one or more of these 60+ self care ideas every day. Feel free to join in. It’s a variation on the concept that “Living well is  the  best  revenge.” 

Remember

Joy Harjo
1951 – 

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

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Please be kind to each other while you can.

For a sustainable Summer

In addition to our spring plantings being stressed by the drought this summer, the Better Half and I planted something that seems to have attracted the attention of the local deer, or maybe it’s rabbits, but there’s a clump of plants I’ve been hand-watering that’s been gnawed into almost nonexistence. That’s frustrating. Maybe it’s comic relief, but right next to the chawed-on plants is a small dust bowl that’s getting used by at least one of the local turkeys.

Cooler weather and the possibility of rain return this coming weekend, so there’s that to hope for. At the moment, we’re under an ozone advisory until at least 9 pm Thursday. Following the precautionary principle, we’re going to forego the prospect of fly-fishing for now and hope Friday is a better day. In fact, it would be wonderful if the rest of the weather this Summer turns out better than what we’ve had so far this year.

beardtongue (Penstemon grandiflorus)

Photo by J. Harrington

Milkweed is beginning to develop flowerheads but we don’t see any little caterpillars nibbling on them. Many plants, including orange day lilies and penstemon (beardtongue), plus at least one of the asters we planted this spring, seem to be aborting flower formation, due to drought? Once again I’m getting concerned about a shifting baseline syndrome conditioning the younger generations to think that this is what Summer is supposed to be like, with skies full of smoke from afar and ozone from who knows where, and drought.

Tomorrow, at 9:37 am CDT, we’ll honor Summer Solstice with our own private ceremonies. We hope you’ll do likewise. It will be difficult, but we need to transform our culture into one that recognizes and acknowledges our dependence on Earth’s natural systems for our continued ability to survive, let alone thrive. Our economy and culture continue to behave as though it’s fine to use next year’s seed corn in tonight’s chowder. That’s not sustainable.

Solstice Litany

By Jim Harrison

      1

The Saturday morning meadowlark

came in from high up

with her song gliding into tall grass

still singing. How I'd like

to glide around singing in the summer

then to go south to where I already was

and find fields full of meadowlarks

in winter. But when walking my dog

I want four legs to keep up with her

as she thunders down the hill at top speed

then belly flops into the deep pond.

Lark or dog I crave the impossible.

I'm just human. All too human.

      2

I was nineteen and mentally

infirm when I saw the prophet Isaiah.

The hem of his robe was as wide

as the horizon and his trunk and face

were thousands of feet up in the air.

Maybe he appeared because I had read him

so much and opened too many ancient doors.

I was cooking my life in a cracked clay

pot that was leaking. I had found

secrets I didn't deserve to know.

When the battle for the mind is finally

over it's late June, green and raining.

      3

A violent windstorm the night before

the solstice. The house creaked and yawned.

I thought the morning might bring a bald earth,

bald as a man's bald head but not shiny.

But dawn was fine with a few downed trees,

the yellow rosebush splendidly intact.

The grass was all there dotted with Black

Angus cattle. The grass is indestructible

except to fire but now it's too green to burn.

What did the cattle do in this storm?

They stood with their butts toward the wind,

erect Buddhists waiting for nothing in particular.

I was in bed cringing at gusts,

imagining the contents of earth all blowing

north and piled up where the wind stopped,

the pile sky-high. No one can climb it.

A gopher comes out of a hole as if nothing happened.

 

      4

The sun should be a couple of million miles

closer today. It wouldn't hurt anything

and anyway this cold rainy June is hard

on me and the nesting birds. My own nest

is stupidly uncomfortable, the chair

of many years. The old windows don't keep

the weather out, the wet wind whipping

my hair. A very old robin drops dead

on the lawn, a first for me. Millions

of birds die but we never see it—they like

privacy in this holy, fatal moment or so

I think. We can't tell each other when we die.

Others must carry the message to and fro.

"He's gone," they'll say. While writing an average poem

destined to disappear among the millions of poems

written now by mortally average poets.

      5

Solstice at the cabin deep in the forest.

The full moon shines in the river, there are pale

green northern lights. A huge thunderstorm

comes slowly from the west. Lightning strikes

a nearby tamarack bursting into flame.

I go into the cabin feeling unworthy.

At dawn the tree is still smoldering

in this place the gods touched earth.

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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.

A bright idea on a dreary day?

The weather continues a cloudy, dreary pattern. Tree branches are about as bare of leaves as they are come February. The dogs, and at least one of their humans, are struggling to adjust to standard time. The dogs keep looking to get fed an hour earlier than the clock says they should and the human awakens at 3 am, which, a few days ago, was 4 am. The big question is, will everyone’s biorhythms adjust sometime soon or wait until just before we go back on daylight savings time next spring?

I Voted -- early

Photo by J. Harrington

If I look for a bright side, tomorrow’s elections could bring a us closer to what used to be considered “normal.” The United Nations’ COP 27 might actually make and honor realistic commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on an accelerated schedule. I could be even more optimistic and believe that the upcoming biodiversity conference, COP 15, will lead to real world improvements in our ability to protect the only home (planet) we have.

But, I could also stop paying attention to activities that are well beyond my ability to materially affect. I could focus on baking bread, reading and writing poetry, fly fishing, getting to know my local region better, enjoying my family, including the dogs. All of which might not me me happy, but would eliminate, or at least minimize, a number of sources of irritation, frustration and aggravation. I seem to have lost the ability to attain  and maintain a balance between world affairs and a happy life. That’s sad, but I’m exploring options that in my younger days I wouldn’t have considered.

One such option is the book Sacred Nature, Restoring Our Ancient Bond with  the Natural World. I never really considered nature as something that might be sacred, but I’ve been reading Robin Wall Kimmerer and a number of other Native American writers. Indigenous people see nature as more than something to be exploited. I may not be able to get to a perspective that sees nature as sacred, but I’m totally dissatisfied with  the consequences of the way we’ve been extracting resources from Earth, with but a hint of reciprocity. I believe we can, and must, do better and we won’t get to better by simply complaining about what’s wrong. We need better shared visions of what’s right, or could be made right. Our track record isn’t good and I’ve no real idea on how to improve it. Thus, I read books.

I’m old enough  to remember when anti-war protesters focused on levitating the Pentagon. Less than a decade later, the Viet Nam war was over. Is it time to levitate the UN building or the US Congress, or, maybe, Wall Street?

                      Poem on Disappearance

                    by Kimberly Blaeser

Beginning with our continent, draw 1491:
each mountain, compass point Indigenous;
trace trade routes, languages, seasonal migrations—
don’t become attached.
Yes, reshape by discovery,          displacement
move your pencil point quickly now as if pursued—
a cavalry of possession that erases
homelands: we shrink shrink—in time-lapse
of colonial barter. . . disappear             .

Now draw a brown face painted for ceremony,
half a face, nothing
            .

Draw nothing around a crumbled bird body—
no wings.

Draw emptiness inside desecrated burial mounds,
a stretch of absence where fallopian tubes once curved in hope
sketch void across buffalo prairie, draw the empty
of elk, of passenger pigeons, of silver trout.

Conjure with your hand the shape of girl
blooming, curves of face, her laughing eyes;
you’ve seen them postered and amber-alerted—
missing, missing, evening newsed, and gone.

Draw a woman wrapped in a blanket
a child’s body weighted—draw stones
sinking into every river on the map.

Draw carrion blackening skies, carrion
plucking vision from round brown faces
draw missing, draw murdered.

Work carefully now
turn your hand to the new continent. 
Again picture it—

                                          nothing               .

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Please be kind to each other while you can.

Seasonal aberrations?

Today I got an unexpected surprise. [Of course, if I had expected it, it wouldn’t have been a surprise, would it?] Most of the smaller ponds in our area, and some not so small, are now covered with skim ice. Despite some cold days and very cold nights, I honestly didn’t see it coming. We’ll probably see it going this weekend when the temperatures are forecast to reach the mid-70’s, but as I drove past some smaller ponds, and the Carlos Avery Sunrise river pools, I had a “Wait! What?” moment or two. Usually, I look for such developments in November, although we did have local ice cover by this time of month a couple of years ago, but it’s not a regular occurrence.

mid-October: rare ice

Photo by J. Harrington

What I’ve noticed in years past is that smaller, shallower ponds ice in first, forcing waterfowl that stick around onto bigger lakes. Often, the smaller ponds freeze before the great migration of waterfowl has begun, which concentrates migrating birds onto the waters remaining open. The reverse happens in the spring, with many northern migrants resting on the Carlos Avery pools before dispersing to smaller waters or continuing north. This year’s breeding duck population is below the long term average. I’m beginning to feel a little haunted by the ghosts of the passenger pigeon.

But for now, we still have waterfowl and juncos. The latter just showed up on our deck, another sign of approaching winter. I have no idea if the juncos will head back north this weekend or will simply “tough out” the forthcoming heat wave. It’s hard to say these days which is more of a rollercoaster, the local weather or the stock market. To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, this is No Country Century for Old Men.

XLV [Before the ice is in the pools]

Emily Dickinson - 1830-1886

Before the ice is in the pools,
      Before the skaters go,
Or any cheek at nightfall
      Is tarnished by the snow,

Before the fields have finished,
      Before the Christmas tree,
Wonder upon wonder
      Will arrive to me!

What we touch the hems of
      On a summer's day;
What is only walking
      Just a bridge away;

That which sings so, speaks so,
      When there's no one here,—
Will the frock I wept in
      Answer me to wear?

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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.