Then and now, what's the difference?

Choice more than Chance

Photo by J. Harrington

The Martin Niemöller quote below is reported to be a version he used after the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II.

First, they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And by then there was no one left to speak out for me

The annotated version below has been updated with references to the contemporary United States. Please draw your own conclusions.

First Now, they came come for the Communists [https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-team-tests-anti-communist-message-midterms-rhetoric-intensifies-2026-07-08/]
And I did not speak out because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Democratic Socialists
And I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
[union membership now ~50% of 1983's]
And I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews Palestinians
And I did not speak out because I was not a Jew Palestinian 

Then they came for me
And by then there was no one left to speak out for me

If I were female, the last phrase would refer to me and SCOTUS' 2022 decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade.

Please consider printing today's posting and taping it on your refrigerator until after November's elections. Let's hope we can settle this with ballots, not bullets.

Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings

by Joy Harjo

I am the holy being of my mother's prayer and my father's song
—Norman Patrick Brown, Dineh Poet and Speaker

1. SET CONFLICT RESOLUTION GROUND RULES:

Recognize whose lands these are on which we stand.
Ask the deer, turtle, and the crane.
Make sure the spirits of these lands are respected and treated with goodwill.
The land is a being who remembers everything.
You will have to answer to your children, and their children, and theirs—
The red shimmer of remembering will compel you up the night to walk the perimeter of truth for understanding.
As I brushed my hair over the hotel sink to get ready I heard:
By listening we will understand who we are in this holy realm of words.
Do not parade, pleased with yourself.
You must speak in the language of justice.

2. USE EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION SKILLS THAT DISPLAY AND ENHANCE MUTUAL TRUST AND RESPECT:

If you sign this paper we will become brothers. We will no longer fight. We will give you this land and these waters "as long as the grass shall grow and the rivers run."

The lands and waters they gave us did not belong to them to give. Under false pretenses we signed. After drugging by drink, we signed. With a mass of gunpower pointed at us, we signed. With a flotilla of war ships at our shores, we signed. We are still signing. We have found no peace in this act of signing.

A casino was raised up over the gravesite of our ancestors. Our own distant cousins pulled up the bones of grandparents, parents, and grandchildren from their last sleeping place. They had forgotten how to be human beings. Restless winds emerged from the earth when the graves were open and the winds went looking for justice.

If you raise this white flag of peace, we will honor it.

At Sand Creek several hundred women, children, and men were slaughtered in an unspeakable massacre, after a white flag was raised. The American soldiers trampled the white flag in the blood of the peacemakers.

There is a suicide epidemic among native children. It is triple the rate of the rest of America. "It feels like wartime," said a child welfare worker in South Dakota.

If you send your children to our schools we will train them to get along in this changing world. We will educate them.

We had no choice. They took our children. Some ran away and froze to death. If they were found they were dragged back to the school and punished. They cut their hair, took away their language, until they became as strangers to themselves even as they became strangers to us.

If you sign this paper we will become brothers. We will no longer fight. We will give you this land and these waters in exchange "as long as the grass shall grow and the rivers run."

Put your hand on this bible, this blade, this pen, this oil derrick, this gun and you will gain trust and respect with us. Now we can speak together as one.

We say, put down your papers, your tools of coercion, your false promises, your posture of superiority and sit with us before the fire. We will share food, songs, and stories. We will gather beneath starlight and dance, and rise together at sunrise.

The sun rose over the Potomac this morning, over the city surrounding the white house.
It blazed scarlet, a fire opening truth.
White House, or Chogo Hvtke, means the house of the peacekeeper, the keepers of justice.
We have crossed this river to speak to the white leader for peace many times
Since these settlers first arrived in our territory and made this their place of governance.
These streets are our old trails, curved to fit around trees.

3. GIVE CONSTRUCTIVE FEEDBACK:

We speak together with this trade language of English. This trade language enables us to speak across many language boundaries. These languages have given us the poets:

Ortiz, Silko, Momaday, Alexie, Diaz, Bird, Woody, Kane, Bitsui, Long Soldier, White, Erdrich, Tapahonso, Howe, Louis, Brings Plenty, okpik, Hill, Wood, Maracle, Cisneros, Trask, Hogan, Dunn, Welch, Gould...

The 1957 Chevy is unbeatable in style. My broken-down one-eyed Ford will have to do. It holds everyone: Grandma and grandpa, aunties and uncles, the children and the babies, and all my boyfriends. That's what she said, anyway, as she drove off for the Forty-Nine with all of us in that shimmying wreck.

This would be no place to be without blues, jazz—Thank you/mvto to the Africans, the Europeans sitting in, especially Adolphe Sax with his saxophones... Don't forget that at the center is the Mvskoke ceremonial circles. We know how to swing. We keep the heartbeat of the earth in our stomp dance feet.

You might try dancing theory with a bustle, or a jingle dress, or with turtles strapped around your legs. You might try wearing colonization like a heavy gold chain around a pimp's neck.

4. REDUCE DEFENSIVENESS AND BREAK THE DEFENSIVENESS CHAIN:

I could hear the light beings as they entered every cell. Every cell is a house of the god of light, they said. I could hear the spirits who love us stomp dancing. They were dancing as if they were here, and then another level of here, and then another, until the whole earth and sky was dancing.

We are here dancing, they said. There was no there.

There was no "I" or "you."

There was us; there was "we."

There we were as if we were the music.

You cannot legislate music to lockstep nor can you legislate the spirit of the music to stop at political boundaries—

—Or poetry, or art, or anything that is of value or matters in this world, and the next worlds.

This is about getting to know each other.

We will wind up back at the blues standing on the edge of the flatted fifth about to jump into a fierce understanding together.

5. ELIMINATE NEGATIVE ATTITUDES DURING CONFLICT:

A panther poised in the cypress tree about to jump is a panther poised in a cypress tree about to jump.

The panther is a poem of fire green eyes and a heart charged by four winds of four directions.

The panther hears everything in the dark: the unspoken tears of a few hundred human years, storms that will break what has broken his world, a bluebird swaying on a branch a few miles away.

He hears the death song of his approaching prey:

I will always love you, sunrise.
I belong to the black cat with fire green eyes.
There, in the cypress tree near the morning star.

6. AND, USE WHAT YOU LEARN TO RESOLVE YOUR OWN CONFLICTS AND TO MEDIATE OTHERS' CONFLICTS:

When we made it back home, back over those curved roads
that wind through the city of peace, we stopped at the
doorway of dusk as it opened to our homelands.
We gave thanks for the story, for all parts of the story
because it was by the light of those challenges we knew
ourselves—
We asked for forgiveness.
We laid down our burdens next to each other.

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

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?

Something fishy about National Poetry Month?

As I hope you know already, April is National Poetry Month. If you’re a repeated reader of this blog, you may have noted that I’m a trout fisher. That combination makes me absolutely delighted to share the following from the Minnesota Trout Unlimited monthly newsletter that arrived in my email inbox this morning:

The Last Cast
It's National Poetry Month and we're looking for your favorite and original flyfishing poems to share! Submit yours here. Our longtime Trout Unlimited Minnesota print newsletter contributor Larry Gavin shared this recording of himself reading Vespers: Pine Creek with us. Enjoy! 

dry flies hook anglers before they hook trout

Photo by J. Harrington

I’ve been a member of TU for decades and consider the recognition of National Poetry Month by the state council of a national cold water conservation organization to be one of the healthier developments since the first Earth Day in 1970. Speaking of which, I hope you already have on your calendar that Earth Day is April 22. What are you planning to do to honor and celebrate it this year?

In addition to touting (no, I didn’t unintentionally drop the “r”) TU and Earth Day, as part of NPM I bring to your attention Larry Garvin’s A Fragile Shelter, a copy of which sits on one of my bookshelves. It was published locally by Red Dragonfly Press. Try it, you’ll like it, I bet. Here’s a sample of his work:

Christmas Morning South of Town

by Larry Gavin

 

A blue spruce, out of place here,

with bittersweet

twined on its south side—the vine's

orange fruit, autumn's promise,

still hanging like one final

question against blue sky.

On the north side's branches:

snow. Light, a “dusting”

they call it. Dusting.

Two cardinals decorate

the uppermost branches;

scarlet hosts searching

for food.

In the distance, three bells:

one on the collar of each beagle

busy sifting scent in wild raspberry

sumac and Russian olive

and, above the bells, the sound

of voices: mother, son, laughing

in knee-deep snow.

Which of these gifts do I deserve?

None of them, I think,

then I reconsider and realize

I deserve them all. Unasked for

and echoing down through

the years, years full

of gratitude and heartbeats

as one hound's plaintive voice

rises above all of it,

then two more. Simple as

the wishes we all hold dear.

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

The shape of time

More and more acorns are dropping from the bur oaks, and being joined on the ground by ripened fruits and berries. Signs of impending autumn increase by the week. “And the seasons they go round and round,” as Joni Mitchell tells us in her wonderful lyrics to The Circle Game. Six months from now, some of us will be praying for a prompt end to winter, but first we have to harvest and store the products of the current growing season. Those who make it through the winter will be able to plant again next spring. The circle continues, though we age as it does. Is our passage through time a straight line? Do we pass through our own seasons as we age? Is there another universe to which we will pass at the end of our time on earth?

bur oak acorn

Photo by J. Harrington

Einstein tells us that space-time is a continuum. I have as much trouble picturing what that means as I do picturing an oak when I look at an acorn or a butterfly when I look at a chrysalis. If a continuum never ends, what was there before the big bang? If the universe is all that exists, into what is it expanding? Can we ask “how big is a light-year?” Or, do we need to stick with how far light travels in a year? Got a headache yet?

I got pulled into thinking about these kinds of questions when I tried to follow a simple direction this morning, “travel sunwise.” My first thought was: Is that clockwise or counterclockwise? Then, I was on to the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, but that’s not actually the sun moving, that’s the earth spinning on her axis. The seasons are caused by the earth’s orbit around the sun, neither days nor seasons are clockwise or counter. See how all of this circles around like a game?

By now you may be feeling as I did the first time I realized that Joni Mitchell’s lyrics from Woodstock aren't simply a metaphor, they're also literally true.

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief excursion through space-time as much as I have. Now, let’s put on our gloves and get back to work. We have a garden (earth) to tend. It’s time to shape up.

Squaring the Circle

By Philip Fried

It’s a little-known fact that God’s headgear — 

A magician’s collapsible silk top hat,

When viewed from Earth, from the bottom up — 

Is, sub specie aeternitatis,

A pluperfect halo, both circle and square,

And a premonition of this truth

Spurred on an ancient philosopher,

Anaxagoras, to make numerous vain

Attempts to approximate the circle

Of his concerns with the square of the cell

He was jailed in for impiety.

Doomed calculations which God acknowledged

By doffing then pancaking his topper.

He was still bareheaded millennia later,

When he learned of von Lindemann’s proof that pi

Is not the root of a polynomial

With rational coefficients, hence

Squaring the circle’s impossible.

God un-collapsed, re-donned his hat!

But — it was 1882,

Progress was a juggernaut

And the public had no patience for “proof.”

From below, God’s gesture looked like a signal

For all hat- and cap-wearing men,

Proper in their headgear, for nations,

Well-stocked with helmets for delicate brainwork,

To take up “the compass and straightedge”

And prepare for a singular all-out attack

On this seductive conundrum, so men 

Enlisted en masse in Geometry’s army,

Tossing up and away all hats

Of cloth, opaque haloes, hurray!

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

STEAM beats STEM

These days there are more birds bumping into windows and the walkout doors to the deck. Young of the year have fledged but not yet learned to avoid glass, even that with some warning markings on it. Young Baltimore orioles have been seen at the grape jelly feeder several times this week. We shortened, again, the chain from which the feeder hangs in an effort to keep the squirrels from dumping the jelly onto the ground as they try to feed on it. That seems to be working. It was a field guide that reminded me this is the time of year parents lead fledgling orioles to grape feeders. We hope they’ll remember and return next year.

Baltimore oriole at grape jelly feeder

Photo by J. Harrington

Today we once again stumbled onto some delightful discoveries on the internet, thanks to Maria Popova and the marginalian. The sequence of links we followed from that site is undocumented, but at one point we ended up searching for Jane Hirshfield and Poets for Science where we found The Collection of Banners with poems and Posters with quotes. Also, somewhere along the line, we tumbled onto Janna Levin’s Theory of Doing Everything, which we recommend to those willing to suffer the possibility of headaches by reading about astrophysics and related matter.

Long ago I surrendered any claims religion might make on me, but continue to explore spirituality and am trying to offset an acquired, highly cynical perspective with a regained sense of wonder. (Second childhood time, anyone?) The fact that my astrological sign is Gemini pushes me toward seeing at least both sides of most questions. Nevertheless, I continue to trust science when it’s well-communicated. That helps explain my delight at discovering Hirshfield’s and Levin’s work today. If only most scientists wrote and spoke as well as Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman.

Once again we believe we have presented evidence that Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) provides a more complete, and therefore realistic, worldview than offered by STEM alone. Better humans make better scientists and poets!

On the Fifth Day

Jane Hirshfield
1953 – 

On the fifth day
the scientists who studied the rivers
were forbidden to speak
or to study the rivers.

The scientists who studied the air
were told not to speak of the air,
and the ones who worked for the farmers
were silenced,
and the ones who worked for the bees.

Someone, from deep in the Badlands,
began posting facts.

The facts were told not to speak
and were taken away.
The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent. 

Now it was only the rivers
that spoke of the rivers,
and only the wind that spoke of its bees,

while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees
continued to move toward their fruit.

The silence spoke loudly of silence,
and the rivers kept speaking 
of rivers, of boulders and air.

Bound to gravity, earless and tongueless,
the untested rivers kept speaking.

Bus drivers, shelf stockers,
code writers, machinists, accountants,
lab techs, cellists kept speaking.

They spoke, the fifth day,
of silence.

—2017

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

Whose environment is it? Ours!

 I recently watched a presentation by a fisheries biologist regarding the fishing pressures and fish stock structure of a nearby trout stream. The essence of the presentation was that the current fishing regulations include a possession limit of 3 fish and a minimum size of 12 inches. The majority of fish in the stream are in the six to ten inch class. To improve the fishery structure [to what end?], the preference is to change the regulations to a maximum size of 12 inches and a possession limit of five fish.

trout stream? polluted? who’d know?

Photo by J. Harrington

I’ve read about other fisheries where the biologists claim that an overabundance of smaller panfish precludes the ability of the habitat to produce fewer, bigger fish. I believe I understand the concepts involved but I have major doubts that the fisheries folks have clearly enough defined the problem they’re trying to solve to be confident their proposed solutions will work without generating unintended consequences in today’s world, a world in which “New research from Stockholm University found that the levels of PFAS in rainwater now exceed levels deemed safe by health and environment advisory agencies.” 

For example, recent stories about PFAS/PFOS in fish indicate more and more of our environment has become contaminated. Other articles note just how ubiquitous those contaminants have become. For example, Minnesota’s Fish Consumption Advisory [FCA] goes on for 25 pages, mostly because of mercury contamination, but we’ve been sampling for mercury much longer and probably more extensively than for PFOS. According to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency:

PFAS testing began in Minnesota’s lakes and streams in 2004, which has led to fish-consumption advisories due to perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) levels in fish tissue. PFOS is just one of the almost 5,000 PFAS chemicals. Continued monitoring is needed; many Minnesota lakes and streams that are potentially contaminated by PFAS have not been tested.

Please note that the FCA is issued by the Health Department, the water quality is overseen by the MNPCA and fishing regualtions are set by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. Presumably, many other states, and the federal government, have a plethora of agencies involved in the permitting of intermedia transfer of pollutants that ultimately end up in our bodies and cause health issues for which each of us must pay for treatment. This state of affairs is yet another reason citizens should be able to petition for the termination of corporate charters so remediation costs don’t just continue as a cost of business (See, e..g., fossil fuel industry.)

If you’re reading this and you live, work or play in Minnesota, you might want to let your state legislators know how you feel about a bill to ban nonessential use of PFAS. Here’s some background that includes a link for contacting your legislators.

There It Is

By Jayne Cortez

My friend

they don't care

if you're an individualist

a leftist  a rightist

a shithead or a snake

They will try to exploit you

absorb you  confine you

disconnect you  isolate you

or kill you

And you will disappear into your own rage

into your own insanity

into your own poverty

into a word a phrase a slogan a cartoon

and then ashes

The ruling class will tell you that

there is no ruling class

as they organize their liberal supporters into

white supremacist lynch mobs

organize their children into

ku klux klan gangs

organize their police into

killer cops

organize their propaganda into

a device to ossify us with angel dust

preoccupy us with western symbols in

african hair styles

inoculate us with hate

institutionalize us with ignorance

hypnotize us with a monotonous sound designed

to make us evade reality and stomp our lives away

And we are programmed to self-destruct

to fragment

to get buried under covert intelligence operations of

unintelligent committees impulsed toward death

And there it is

The enemies polishing their penises between

oil wells at the pentagon

the bulldozers leaping into demolition dances

the old folks dying of starvation

the informers wearing out shoes looking for crumbs

the life blood of the earth almost dead in

the greedy mouth of imperialism

And my friend

they don't care

if you're an individualist

a leftist  a rightist

a shithead or a snake

They will spray you with

a virus of legionnaire's disease

fill your nostrils with

the swine flu of their arrogance

stuff your body into a tampon of

toxic shock syndrome

try to pump all the resources of the world

into their own veins

and fly off into the wild blue yonder to

pollute another planet

And if we don't fight

if we don't resist

if we don't organize and unify and

get the power to control our own lives

Then we will wear

the exaggerated look of captivity

the stylized look of submission

the bizarre look of suicide

the dehumanized look of fear

and the decomposed look of repression

forever and ever and ever

And there it is

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

A prayer for the season

There is a loaf (boule) of sourdough bread in the oven. The oven is both baking the bread and warming the house. I am enjoying a rare sense that, if not all, most is well, at least in my immediate purview. The dogs are fed and walked. When they get to their regular afternoon crazy time, I’ll be on my way, with the bread, to the Daughter Person’s for a birthday dinner.

I have spent little time on social media today, or yesterday, for that matter. I seem to be much happier than those days I end up doom-scrolling things about which I can do little. I’m reverting to some of the approaches I learned waaayy back in my college days. That’s when I was learning about and reading folks like Abraham Maslow and Fritz Perls. The latter is the source of a “Gestalt prayer” that I find I can honor better than the concept of trying to love everyone. Here’s the prayer:

I do my thing and you do your thing.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
and you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped.

— Fritz Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, 1969

It seems to me that the world would be a better place if more of US prayed the Gestalt prayer rather than trying to convert, forcefully or otherwise, everyone into believing some one true belief. That brings me to another quotation, this one I believe new to me, that I found in a Jim Harrison book. The quote is from Simon Ortiz. “There are no truths, only stories.” When I read that my immediate reaction was “how true!” Here’s an example:

if...we find each other, it’s beautiful

Photo by J. Harrington

Maslow is noted for, among other things, describing a hierarchy of human needs. However, there are those who claim his work was derived from or influenced by Native American Blackfoot wisdom. If you’re not yet convinced about the relationship between truths and stories, I call to your attention the time-space continuum or almost any aspect of quantum physics. Schrödinger's cat, anyone?

This is the season in which we can and should do our best to find each other and make the world a little more beautiful. Once we learn to share and live the stories of Christmas, we can share them all year round, right?

The Oxen

By Thomas Hardy

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

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

Poems for the early Anthropocene?

Since at least mid-2016, I’ve been finding it more and more difficult to make sense of almost anything, and I became increasingly sure the issue didn’t lie exclusively with me. Poems, classics such as Yeats’ The Second Coming and Wordsworth’s The World Is Too Much With Us, seemed to suit our current times too well.

One perspective that recurs in response to the increased dissension in our interrelations is that we don’t listen to or respond civilly to those whose perspective is moderately to radically different than ours. We’ve become entirely too tribal in much of Western “civilization." (There are those who assert the continuing problems in places like Afghanistan are attributable to cultures dominated by tribalism and warlords.)

Earthrise, Planet B         credit: NASA

Questions I suspect many of US struggle with run something like “Why would we want to listen to anyone who’s so obviously wrong? Why can’t they be reasonable and do it our way?” My answer to such questions is to suggest the questioners go watch West Side Story. Remember the Sharks and the Jets? How about the lyrics:

When you're a Jet
You're a Jet all the way
From your first cigarette
To your last dyin' day

When you're a Jet
If the spit hits the fan
You got brothers around
You're a family man!

You're never alone
You're never disconnected!
You're home with your own:
When company's expected
You're well protected!

Not much room for compromise or accommodation when you’re a Jet, is there? Of course, before the internecine warfare on New York’s Upper West Side, and today’s Middle East conflicts, there was Verona and the Montague and Capulet families, households of sworn enemies, encapsulated by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet.

Issues like our climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic make it abundantly clear, more and more each year, that our Earth is getting increasingly crowded. There are not currently sufficient developable resources available to support the world’s population at the living standards of those of US in the  “developed economies.” Our ecological footprints need to be made more equitable and brough into better balance with global resources. That can be accomplished peacefully or not. If it’s not accomplished at all, we will be  faced with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s worst case scenario. That’s what our descendants, and, possibly, US if we live long enough, are faced with unless we redevelop a degree of civility wherein we can at least talk to each other. But, as the climate change activists tell US, “we don’t have time.”

According to yet another classic poem, the specific issues we’re facing may be different, but one way to face them was identified around a century and a half ago. The proponent of a “stiff upper lip” has since been judged by many to be politically incorrect to a significant degree. Nevertheless, incorporation of the approach described below seems to offer a valid early step in a journey toward civility that we all sorely need to undertake. And yet, I do indeed have the temerity to suggest an improvement to this classic poem by a Nobel laureate. In the last line, I would insert two syllables and delete three others, so it reads:

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man Human, my child son!

Could it be that the human race is but one large tribe, inhabiting one home planet, with more in common than not? Perhaps, with edits such as above, we could be... 

 

If—

By Rudyard Kipling

     (‘Brother Square-Toes’—Rewards and Fairies)

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

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

It's "Fat Tuesday"

All too briefly and temporarily we have entered above 0℉ territory today. This being Minnesota, that breakthrough will promptly be followed by (light?) snow tomorrow, we're told. That prompts thrashing between "Beggars can't be choosers" and "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride" to reflect reactions to the "improvement" in our local weather.

will Ash Wednesday bring us more snow?

Photo by J. Harrington

On this Shrove Tuesday / Mardi Gras, if times were more normal, lots of folks would be anticipating tomorrow's ceremonies to observe Ash Wednesday. We noted with some surprise that today's Star Tribune has an article referring to "Lent kits," a reflection on our unsettled times. On the other  hand, we suspect all of us could really do with "a six-week period of reflection and repentance," at least we know we could. The past four or five years, compounded and complicated by a year's worth of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the past few weeks of a polar vortex, have severely dampened our once sunnier disposition. Spring thaw should help a lot when it finally arrives sometime near the end of Lent.

We don't recall suspecting our Better Half [BH]of being a student of Machiavelli, but a present she gave us this Christmas past has us wondering if we've misjudged her. The present was a book entitled The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy. We've now read it twice. That's not something that happens very often. We wouldn't be surprised if, during a six week period of reflection and repentance, we managed to read it again. If we've peaked your curiosity, you can view a sample of the book at Mr. Mackesy's web site. In any case, the BH has now enticed us into believing there are other ways to go through life, or at least through Lent, than as a grumpy, cynical, old man suffering an overdose of self-pity. We fear that a failure to heed the message(s) in Mackesy's masterpiece may well leave us to spend the rest of our life haunted by our mother's voice reminding us that "You haven't got the brains god gave little apples." If that's not food for reflection and repentance, we don't know what is. Enjoy what you can of what's left of Mardi Gras.

Reflections Irregular

John Rollin Ridge - 1827-1867

I cast a backward look—how changed
       The scenes of other days!
I walk, a wearied man, estranged
       From youth’s delightful ways.
There in the distance rolleth yet
       That stream whose waves my
Boyish bosom oft has met,
       When pleasure lit mine eye.
It rolleth yet, as clear, as bold,
       As pure as it did then;
But I have grown in youth-time old,
       And, mixing now with men,
My sobered eye must not attend
To that sweet stream, my early friend!
The music of its waters clear
Must now but seldom reach my ear,
But murmur still now carelessly
To every heedless passer-by.
How often o’er its rugged cliffs I’ve strayed,
And gaily listened, as its billows played
Such deep, low music at their base—
And then such brightening thoughts would trace
Upon the tablet of my mind!
Alas, those days have run their race,
Their joys I nowhere now can find.
       I have no time to think
            Of climbing Glory’s sunny mount
       I have no time to drink
            At Learning’s bubbling fount!
Now corn and potatoes call me
From scenes were wont to enthrall me—
            A weary wight,
            Both day and night
My brain is full of business matters,
            Reality has snatched the light,
            From fancy’s head, that shone so bright,
And tore the dreams she wove, to tatters!

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

Some adventures of an emergent locavore

We're not going to talk about the snow that's falling while we're writing this post. Why? Because we remember reading years ago that one of the reasons Mondays can be so difficult is that many people dislike Mondays because they have a reputation for being difficult. Weather and Mondays seem to have a lot in common this year. This month's weather is topsy-turvy enough that it seems like our best strategy is to forego any sense of control or command and take what the weather gives us and do what we can with it. For now, we're really curious how much of the forecast snow will melt or get washed away by rain and if we'll get to enjoy a warm spell of seasonal weather before real winter sets in.

things I can and cannot control

On the chance that our winter may be colder and wetter that normal, thanks to La Nina, I'm going to spend more time studying the graphic our Daughter Person sent me some time ago [see above]. Notice, on the right hand side, it lists that I cannot control and will let go of "The weather." So, I'll focus on my actions and how I respond to this anomalous weather pattern. I'm hoping this will be helpful training for how to react to the election, its outcome, and the events surrounding the election and its outcome. I'm beginning to wonder if there may be just a wee bit of validity to the wild rumors I've heard, that I tend to be a bit of a control freak. My story is I'm a problem solver, not a control freak.

So, I'm spending the afternoon awaiting, with hope, a notification that a technician from our heating contractor will be able to squeeze in a visit today to replace the chimney cap that blew off during one of our recent wind storms. With cold and snow occurring in frequent episodes, I decided that someone with more experience roof walking would be a better course of action than me climbing up and taking a chance on falling off. Thusly have I disproven the other unfounded rumor, that I'm a total idiot.

Anyhow, while I'm house sitting, so to speak, the Better Half [BH] and the Son-In-Law are off picking up a "whole beef" we're splitting. I've never had, to the best of my knowledge, beef from Scottish Highland cattle. It's supposed to be so lean that there's no suet that comes with a whole beef. The birds would be disappointed to learn this but it just means we'll buy suet, but not beef, from our local grocer this winter. This locally-sourced farm-to-plate type food program we're working on is also turning eating into an adventure. Yet another challenge for someone that tends to find what they like and try to stick to it. Remember "Mikey?" "He won't like it, he's never had it before." The BH even managed to sneak a bunch of leeks into me a couple of days ago by hiding them in a squash and potato soup. It tasted pretty good but I'm afraid if she finds out I actually liked it, next year she'll trying something similar with zucchini.

Dust of Snow

Robert Frost - 1874-1963

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

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

Antidote to antipathy

 Today's posting has no relationship whatsoever with the fact that today is Primary Election Day in Minnesota. It also has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that way too many of our politicians, and those who vote for them, have an extremely short timeframe through which they view their votes. In fact, it seems to us that many of them have a perspective that makes day traders look like they  have a long term view. Now that we have that out of the way...

did you vote?

Photo by J. Harrington

The Center for Humans and Nature has published a series of essays responding to the question: What kind of ancestor do you want to be? I've not yet read all the essays, but I have begun to think about what I see as a glaring distinction between contemporary time frames and the Seventh Generation philosophy as envisioned by the Haudenosaunee:

"The Peacemaker taught us about the Seven Generations. He said, when you sit in council for the welfare of the people, you must not think of yourself or of your family, not even of your generation. He said, make your decisions on behalf of the seven generations coming, so that they may enjoy what you have today."

Oren Lyons (Seneca)
Faithkeeper, Onondaga Nation

If we assume that each generation covers a time span of about twenty-five years, seven generations equals about 175 years. In a world that appears to be changing as rapidly as ours, making a decision that's that forward-looking is a real challenge, especially for a society that seems to have forgotten how to take into consideration the next generation as it decides who to choose as its leaders. As reminders, not for today, but for the general election on November 3, eighty-four days from now, please make a Spotify, or Apple Play or whatever playlist of these songs and think about whether the characteristics of those for whom you are voting will help protect the audience intended for the songs.

• The Unicorn - The Irish Rovers
• Forever Young - Bob Dylan
• The Circle Game - Tom Rush
• Puff the Magic Dragon - Peter, Paul and Mary
• Cat's in the Cradle - Harry Chapin 
• The Marvelous Toy - Tom Paxton

There's a few more that could be added here but half-a-dozen should be enough to get the basic message across. We can't very well decide, it seems to me, what kind of ancestor we want to be without seriously thinking about for whom we will be ancestors. What songs would you add to the list for your descendants? Share the titles in the comments and maybe they'll show up in an updated version of this post sometime before November 3.

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.

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

Monarda mystery?

I have encountered, or created in my own mind, a mystery today. There are two plants in the Monarda Genus that are native to Minnesota:

• Monarda fistulosa, Wild Bergamot, and
• Monarda punctata, Spotted Horsemint

The former is more widespread in Minnesota and grows wild along roadsides in the county about 15 or 20 miles North of our property, but I've not noticed any growing in our area. The latter is growing abundantly all over the fields behind our house but only grows in a few counties in the state. The mystery that has occurred to me is "why one and not the other?" in each location. I'm going to see if I can figure out what's going on.

Spotted horsemint behind the house

Photo by J. Harrington

In the process perhaps I'll gain some additional insight into how people can go about learning what's native to their place and broader bioregion. Most of what I can find and have read is much longer and stronger on theory than application. For example, watersheds are considered to be one of the major elements of a bioregion. We live in the Sunrise River watershed of the St. Croix River watershed of the Mississippi River watershed. The first seems too limited to be a bioregional boundary; the second covers several ecoregions or biomes, and the last traverses several bioregions. How is one to determine relevancy?

Chisago County plant hardiness zones

Somewhere in our bookshelves I believe we have a county soil map. That may offer some clues to why we have punctata but not fistulosa growing in our fields. I doubt that there's much difference in annual precipitation in the two locations. There are three hardiness zones in the County and the area where I've been noticing the bergamot is mostly 3b while we're in 4b. That might help explain the distribution, or not. It will be interesting, at least for me, to see how far I can get at accounting for the locations of Monarda mysteries.

The Mystery of the Hunt

By Michael McClure

It’s the mystery of the hunt that intrigues me,

                   That drives us like lemmings, but cautiously—

The search for a bright square cloud—the scent of lemon verbena—

                    Or to learn rules for the game the sea otters

                                      Play in the surf.

                  It is these small things—and the secret behind them

                                    That fill the heart.

                        The pattern, the spirit, the fiery demon

                                That link them together

                      And pull their freedom into our senses,

             The smell of a shrub, a cloud, the action of animals

         —The rising, the exuberance, when the mystery is unveiled.

                                 It is these small things

                   That when brought into vision become an inferno.

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

There's madness here. Is there a method to it?

Long, long ago, when I was young and sure of what I knew, I learned that "the Future" was something I needed to prepare for. I studied hard at school, got good grades, thought  about what I wanted to be when I grew up and believed that "the Future" was some separate, independent thing out there. It never included something like COVID-19, although I was a child at the time the polio vaccine was developed, I vaguely remember having some Summer plans disrupted as a precaution.

These days I'm trying to wrap my head around the idea that "the Future" is something we create by the actions we take, or fail to take, every day. For someone who is a Type A personality (who, me?) this disrupts a certain preference for a "Command and Control" world. Then, several decades ago, I read a few papers by Donella Meadows. From her writings I learned that systems don't respond to command and control structures, but Type A's can, and should, learn to dance with systems.

I am also learning from her, and others who share the values she espoused, to let go of my cynicism and work to create the future I want for myself and my descendants. I can't do much for my antecedents except honor their memories. In her last Global Citizens column, Meadows put it this way:

There’s only one thing I do know. If we believe that it’s effectively over, that we are fatally flawed, that the most greedy and short-sighted among us will always be permitted to rule, that we can never constrain our consumption and destruction, that each of us is too small and helpless to do anything, that we should just give up and enjoy our SUVs while they last, well, then yes, it’s over. That’s the one way of believing and behaving that gives us a guaranteed outcome.

Personally I don’t believe that stuff at all. I don’t see myself or the people around me as fatally flawed…We are not helpless and there is nothing wrong with us except the strange belief that we are helpless and there’s something wrong with us. All we need to do, for the bear and ourselves, is to stop letting that belief paralyze our minds, hearts, and souls.

This is our "Planet B"

Here I must confess that I haven't yet read the Global Citizens columns nor the Dear Folks Letters, an oversight I will correct this Summer. Meadows is wise, very readable, and, as I look about me these days, increasingly relevant. If you've been paying attention to what's been going on for the past several years, or longer, you have seen evidence of the regime in Washington, D.C. using one of Meadows' observations about systems. I feel better realizing that it's not sheer incompetence driving our ship of state these days. Consistent with and confirmed by the observations of contemporary chroniclers such as Sarah Kendzior in her book Hiding in Plain Sight, some years ago Ms. Meadows pointed out to us that:

“You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

Watch the evening news, read a daily paper, check out social media from time to time and see if that isn't what the tRUMP / Putin gang, aided and abetted by the GOP,  isn't trying to do to us. Now go back and read the second paragraph in italics above, then see if you can answer the following:

13 Questions for the Next Economy 

Susan Briante

On the side of the road, white cardboard in the shape of a man,
           illegible script. A signpost with scrawl: Will pay cash for 
              diabetes strips.
 
A system under the system with its black box.
                     Disability hearing?
a billboard reads. Trouble with Social Security? Where does the
 riot begin?
 
Spark of dry grass, Russian thistle in flames, or butterflies bobbing
as if pulled by unseen strings               through the alleyway.
         
My mother’s riot would have been peace. A bicycle wheel
              chained to a concrete planter. What metaphor
 
              can I use to describe the children sleeping in cages in 
                  detention
centers? Birds pushed fenceward by a breeze? A train of brake
 lights
 
extending? Mesquite pods mill under our feet
on a rainless sidewalk. What revolution            will my daughter feed?
 
A break-the-state twig-quick snap or a long divining            as if
for water? A cotton silence? A death?                 Who will read
 this
 
in the next economy, the one that comes after the one that kills
 us?
What lessons will we take from the side of the road? A wooden
 crucifix,
 
a white bicycle, a pinwheel, a poem
waiting to be redacted:                         Which would you cross out?

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