As we were saying...

Today's windy and cloudy weather feels threatening, sort of like the regime in Washington, D.C. I've been trying to track events and developments fairly closely during this past week and I've ended up with more take-aways on what NOT to do than what to do. I'm taking that as an opportunity to claim it's time to remember the parable of the babies in the river. [check it out, we'll wait right here]

There's also the quote from Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness: “Almost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes either depressing or carcinogenic.” I believe we've reached the logical extreme end of capitalistic oligarchy as exemplified by the current crew in D.C. To borrow a dictum from my time as a planner: "More of the same never solved a problem." And who was it that claimed "Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backwards"?

"We the People"  No Kings 10/18/2025

We aren't, I believe, likely to get ourselves out of the mess we're in by trying to return to anything like an old normal. The old normal was too extractive and, as we all know, "there are no jobs on a dead planet" and "there is no planet B." We need a transformative change so our society is no longer primarily dependent on growth and GDP as indicators of success. Let me once again share one of my all time favorite quotations from a 1968 speech by Robert F Kennedy:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

It is, I believe, time for us to head upstream and see who's throwing the babies in the river and stop them. This is neither an original nor a new idea. Wendell Berry writes of a similar approach in today's poem (if you allow for a certaain stretch of poetic license).

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as Women do not go cheap
for power, please Women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

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for the children

 Leaf buds are burst. Leaf out has begun. The creeping Charlie in front of the house  has pretty little blue flowers. The lily of the valley patch along the driveway is about half a foot tall. Spring is sprunging everywhere. Today's temperature is in the upper 70's approaching 80. Next Sunday is Mother's Day. The humming bird / oriole feeder has been filled and hung.

Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi
NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

I'm trying, and sometimes failing, to not let the craziness emanating out of the state and national capitols sour me on the world and many of its inhabitants. When I stop doom scrolling and look around I can find beauty and goodness. Let's see if I feel optimistic enough this week to go buy a fishing license. 🤞

I bet you know that Minnesota's constitution has provisions governing spending lottery funds on environmental projects but doesn't have a "Green Amendment" establishing our right to clean air, clean water and a healthy environment. That strikes me as being a cart before the horse kind of deal. There's an organization / movement, Green Amendments For the Generations, with the mission:

to ensure every person and community across the United States is able to experience the health, quality of life, education, joy and economic prosperity provided by a clean, safe and healthy environment; to end environmental racism; and to help ensure that nature itself is able to thrive, by constitutionally empowering all people to secure and enforce their inalienable human right to pure water, clean air, a stable climate, healthy ecosystems and environments.

Minnesota is not listed as one of the states active in the Green Amendment movement. I'm curious to see if I can get a handle on why and how we might be able to change that. Please feel free to share thoughts in the comments

The Green Amendments movement is similar to but not the same as the Rights of Nature movement. The former focuses on anthropocentric values and the latter on nature's intrinsic values. I think we should look toward a "both and" approach rather than an either / or situation, but it may well turn out to be a one step at a time movement. Now that Minnesota is the headwaters of America's Most Threatened River, the Mississippi, perhaps the powers that be may become more amenable to the proverbial "clean up our act" effort. Stay tuned.

Today's poem is one of my own that I was fortunate enough to find a home for in a book by a friend of ours, Krista Detor's Flat Earth Diary. Most of those who will benefit from Green Amendments aren't yet born or grown up.

        A Way 

Earth's children grow
leave home
go away where
dragons roam

dragons fly aweigh
to lands on maps
filled with children grown
away from home

Hubble captures dragons a way from home
away from children
aweigh in space

children young and old
pass away as dragons fly
where earth aweigh
finds a way
to roam
home 

J Harrington

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January thaw for Christmas?

Winter Solstice arrived at 3:20 am Saturday, local time. The dogs and I were there to greet the arrival of the season as we walked down the driveway so they could “take care of business” and I could enjoy a cup of coffee when we returned to the house. I think all three of us are looking  forward to longer, warmer days ahead. But first we’ll enjoy the Yule season and an early January thaw that starts on Christmas and is forecast to continue until 2025. Mother Nature’s Christmas presence?

We wish everyone, or at least the “good guys,” peace and joy now and through the coming year. I’d love to see everyone read, reread, and take to heart, the messages in The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. It seems to me that could make for a year-round Christmas spirit without the cold and snow and commercialism.

my favorite Christmas tree ornament

Photo by J. Harrington

SiSi, my aging yellow lab rescue dog, and I got an early present. Last week she could barely walk, her hips hurt so much. It seemed to come on suddenly. The Daughter Person offered some pain pills one of their dogs didn’t need. That, followed by a call to our vet for a regular prescription, has SiSi walking about as well as I do these days. We are both very grateful for the assistance and the outcome.

As I’m sure you realize, today, December 23, is the Eve of Christmas Eve. We are now at “C” minus two and counting. We’re a day late with this posting ‘cuz we got busy with seasonal stuff yesterday and forgot to take pen/keyboard in hand until we were already sleepy-headed in bed last night. We’ll do our best to be more timely next Sunday.

For the Children

by Gary Snyder

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us,
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

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Allee allee in free?!!

Today’s weather, and the state of the country’s and world’s politics, have me waxing nostalgic for times that at least seemed simpler and more sensible. It’s been raining and pouring intermittently all day. Dog walks have been scheduled between downpours but the dogs would prefer to wait until it’s dry so they can sniff better. Today’s “poem” takes me back to high school and college days, and before. I hope you enjoy it.

rain clouds overhead, and on the horizon?

Photo by J. Harrington

Our governor is reported to be one of the two remaining candidates for Madame President’s VP pick. I have mixed feelings about that. Minnesota’s loss being the nation’s gain, etc. The reality is it will be interesting to see what happens if he’s selected and we end up with a Native American woman as governor. I’ve just about reached a point where I believe we can survive almost anything but #45 becoming #47, or would that be #45a and b?

The last line in the lyrics below is how I remember ending hide and go seek games when I was a kid in Dorchester, a Boston neighborhood. My mother used to claim she could tell whose back yard I’d been playing in by the way I smelled. The phrasing differs from the Kingston Trio’s Ally Ally Oxen Free. I have no idea what may be the real etymology of the phrase. Do you?

It's Raining

Song by Peter, Paul and Mary

It's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring

Bumped his head and he went to bed

And he couldn't get up in the mornin'

Rain rain, go away, come again some other day.

 

"hey I got an idea ... we could all play hide and go seek inside,

Now everybody hide and I'll be it!"

 

Star light, star bright,

First star I see tonight,

Wish I may, wish I might,

Have the wish I wish tonight.

 

It's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring

Bumped his head and he went to bed

And he couldn't get up in the mornin'

Rain rain, go away, come again some other day.

 

Five ten fifteen twenty.

Twenty-five thirty. thirty-five forty.

 

Lady bug, lady bug, fly away home.

Your house is on fire, and your children,

They will burn, they will burn.

 

It's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring

Bumped his head and he went to bed

And he couldn't get up in the mornin'

Rain rain, go away, come again some other day.

 

Forty-five fifty. fifty-five sixty.

Sixty-five seventy. seventy-five eighty.

 

Won't be my father's jack,

No I won't be my mother's jill,

I'll be a fiddler's wife and fiddle when I will.

 

It's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring

Bumped his head and he went to bed

And he couldn't get up in the mornin'

Rain rain, go away, come again some other day.

 

Eighty-five, ninety. ninety-five, a hundred.

 

anyone round my base is it! ready or not, here I come!

allee allee in free!

Songwriters: Allen Toussaint / Naomi Neville 

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Values for the seventh generation

It’s the time of year when fawns and goslings and cygnets and sandhill crane colts are adulting, i.e., growing into their adulthood. It’s never been very clear to me how much of animal behavior is genetic and instinctive versus learned from adults of the species. If anyone has a recommended source on this topic, please leave a comment.

almost grown Canada geese goslings and adults

Photo by J. Harrington

I recently watched a video of our almost four year old (more than 3 1/2) granddaughter learning to lead and ride a pony that’s several orders of magnitude larger than she is. She looks comfortable and unfazed both in front of and on top of the pony. I think I was in my late teens or early twenties before I took riding lessons. I never did get really comfortable on a horse.

Part of today’s theme is prompted by an article I recently read on Slashdot: Should Kids Still Learn to Code in the Age of AI? The phrase that caught my attention is “... the idea that learning to program is the cornerstone of computational thinking and an important gateway to the problem-solving, critical thinking, and creative thinking skills necessary to thrive in today's digitally driven world.” It left me wondering what other gateways are there in today’s curricula to problem solving, critical thinking and creative thinking and where does humanism and characteristics that define humanity fit in?

Before I cane across the Slashdot trigger, I was considering getting my hands on a copy of The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience, although first I need to finish reading The Systems View of Life. I’m about 2/3rds of the way through at the moment. Recent events, compounded by a pandemic and four years under the rule of a wanna-be dictator, have made me concerned about the kind of future our Granddaughter and her cohorts will grow up in and if anyone can anticipate the kind of country she’ll have to live in when she is grown up. It seems to me that the seventh generation principle becomes more challenging to apply the greater the rate of change triggered by (mostly) human factors.

All of the preceding is a convoluted and long-winded way of expressing my view that we have become too short-sighted and focused on the cost of things rather than their value. For some years now I’ve tried to be guided by a speech of a former presidential candidate, Bobby Kennedy. Here’s an essential excerpt:

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

These are the values I want to see expressed by any presidential candidate that wants my vote. These values are timeless.

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

Gary Snyder
From: Turtle Island

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