Does it average out?

While skimming through some photos, I noticed that, near the end of September a couple of years ago, the bird bath was covered by a skim coat of ice. The normal high temperature for today, August 28, is 76℉. The normal low: 60. A month later, which is when the photo in question was taken back in 2018, the normal high and low are 66 and 47, respectively. So, the bird bath icing was premature and out of the norm. In light of what passes for normal weather in Minnesota, residents of this state have developed a high degree of tolerance and coping mechanisms. I know I have. What I haven't been able to figure out is if weather exhausts our ability to tolerate and cope with wide differences among people and behavior (Minnesota Nice, anyone?) rather than provide us with the fortitude and serenity to simply accept a number of attitudes and actions we might not adopt or engage in ourselves.

bird bath: September surprise

Photo by J. Harrington

If you've looked around our state, you may have noticed that we include portions of a number of different ecoregions, depending on who's providing the framework. Each of those regions is inhabited by a wide variety of flora and fauna and has significant weather and climate variations. As I was taught after I moved here, that variety is part of the state's strength. If one sector of our economy is down, a different sector in a different part of the state helps hold things together. There's the logging economy and the mining economy and the farming economy and the urban economy and.... Like a healthy ecosystem, we depend on a variety of actors and activities to help meet our needs for clean air, clean water, shelter and healthy food.

Audubon Center of the North Woods

Photo by J. Harrington

And yet, as I've noticed over the past decade or so, Minnesotans seem to be getting less and less tolerant of each other, to the significant detriment of all us who live, work and play here. In fact, it seems to me we've become about as intolerant of each other as our neighboring Wisconsinites are reported to be. I spent a fair portion of the morning looking at summaries and reviews of Katherine Cramer's The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. I suppose I'll now have to actually read the book because there's a lot to unpack in it and referring to the source is always advisable. One of my major take-aways though is that the growing fracture between urban and rural perspectives isn't helping any of us. In fact, I was prompted to dig out a book I haven't read for decades, The Intellectual Versus the City. I wondered if the rural folks described by Cramer as resenting the "urban elites" realized that the city has a number of urban detractors also. But, we now live in a world where, for the first time in the history of humans, the majority of us live in an urban area. Much of the world we've created depends on the availability of either a labor force (urban) or natural resources (rural).

Healthy ecosystems derive from interdependence. So do healthy economies and cultures. Much as I dislike cliches, I'm going to close today with one from Minnesota's former Senator, Paul Wellstone. I believe this is true as much as I believe anything: "We all do better when  we all do better." I wish more of our politicians believed that. We have an opportunity to do something about it in about 60 days. Do we favor division or distribution? The choice is ours.

Digging

By Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb   

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   

Bends low, comes up twenty years away   

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

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

Poetry saving America Day 9 #NationalPoetryMonth

Once again we have the benefit of Hoagland's own writing from his essay Twenty Poems That Could Save America.

poetry stimulates daring

At this point, perhaps, you may feel you are on the receiving end of a William Bennett–style sermon on Poetry as Moral Improvement. That intuition is only partially right. Not all of the twenty poems I’ve selected have “instruction” as their agenda. Their usefulness is not so constrained or predictable. Poems are existentially unconventional: though some may look like philosophical fitness equipment, designed for self-improvement, others may look like Siamese cats. Consider, as an example of something unpredictable, the following poem by Kerry Johannsen:

Black People & White People Were Said

to disappear if we looked at
each other too long
especially the young ones —
especially growing boys & girls
the length of a gaze was
watched sidewise
as a kingsnake
eyeing a copperheadwhile hands
of mothers and fathers gently
tugged their children close
white people & black people were said to
disappear ifbut nobody ever said it
loudnobody said it
at all& nobody ever
talked about where
the ones who didn’t listen
went

Johannsen’s poem helps us to name a feature of the social landscape that every American will recognize; it drags into plain sight, and into our common vision, the mystery of race and the ominous way it plays out in our collective social life. It describes the haunted condition that results from repressed knowledge. Moreover, Johannsen’s poem does not avoid complexity in order to create agreement. It does not accuse or judge or cry out; it speaks from the position neither of the oppressor nor of the victim. The poem’s vocal tone is largely one of wonder, which makes it an unthreatening starting point for conversation about a touchy subject.

if these mosaic pieces were blended in a pot, what would we see?

Photo by J. Harrington

Hoagland's description of the "usefulness" of poems reinforces, we believe, our assessment that saving America requires us to change our mental picture of what our country is from that of a melting pot to a mosaic. We hope that most of us are more concerned that our assemblage of various cultures creates a beautiful picture from our individual fragments rather than assimilated into a homogenous, undistinguished, undistinguishable blend. Do you remember the Borg in Star Trek? "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated!" Is that the America we're trying to create?

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

Poetry saving America Day 8 #National Poetry Month

We're back on our own again. There seems to be no indication that Tony Hoagland has written about Randall Jarrell's "A Sick Child," the seventh of the Twenty Poems That Could Save America listed in Hoagland's essay of that title. We vaguely recall encountering another of Jarrell's poems, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," in a poetry class at Minnesota's Loft some years ago. That's of little help when reading "A Sick Child."

what magic can comfort and cure a sick child?

Photo by J. Harrington

A SICK CHILD

The postman comes when I am still in bed.
"Postman, what do you have for me today?"
I say to him. (But really I'm in bed.)
Then he says - what shall I have him say?

"This letter says that you are president
Of - this word here; it's a republic."
Tell them I can't answer right away.
"It's your duty." No, I'd rather just be sick.

Then he tells me there are letters saying everything
That I can think of that I want for them to say.
I say, "Well, thank you very much. Good-bye."
He is ashamed, and turns and walks away.

If I can think of it, it isn't what I want.
I want . . . I want a ship from some near star
To land in the yard, and beings to come out
And think to me: "So this is where you are!

Come." Except that they won't do,
I thought of them. . . . And yet somewhere there must be
Something that's different from everything.
All that I've never thought of - think of me!

--Randall Jarrell

Do you remember being sick as a child, feeling miserable and helpless, unable yourself to do anything about it? Do you remember feeling bored and frustrated as whatever made you ill began to fade but you weren't yet healthy? "If I can think of it, it isn't what I want." seems to easily lead to "I want my mommy to fix it." Has America become bored and jaded, like a sick child? Do we really need and want aliens (from some near star) to come and help us find ourselves? Are we reading too much into this poem? Would we respond differently if it hadn't followed Ginsberg's America?

According to a citation by the Poetry Foundation, in their version of Jarrell's biography,

"Jarrell's personae are always involved with efforts to escape engulfment, implosion, and petrification, by demanding that they somehow be miraculously changed by life and art into people whose ontologies are psychically secure."

That quotation seems to fit nicely with the poem chosen by Hoagland. Candidly, our reading of "The Sick Child" is heavily influenced by the events of November 6, 2016, and thereafter, which involve apparently immature, sick children, who seem to have never learned to play well with others, pretending to be world leaders. Your mileage may vary. After all, proposing to save America with twenty very different poems may be much akin to learning the varying currents and backwaters that make up one river.

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

Politics, climate change, #phenology and hope

For the first several years that I lived in Minnesota, I heard at least once each Winter, "it's too cold to snow." I watched the weather patterns and that seemed to be true. When it was really, really cold, like today, it didn't snow, like today. When temperatures were still Winter-like, but more tolerable, closer to 20℉ above than 20℉ below, we often got snow storms. Recently, I learned that, while it's technically never too cold to snow, the pattern I had observed was generally accurate. So, we need to be less vague in how we state something that's obvious. Nuance and fundamentals are very valuable and, very often, overlooked. Phenology involves a holistic perspective. Our politics need to become more holistic and systemic. We can't succeed dealing only with extremes or with minority perspectives.

it's not snowing, so it must be too cold?

Photo by J. Harrington

More and more I've been encountering people whose opinions I respect observing and commenting that we have let our tendency to overgeneralize and accept stereotypes run away with us. One example of our growing need to see all sides of an issue can be found in Jim Walsh's piece in today's MinnPost, Divided Americans: ‘We have to find a way to live together’. I read that before I had finished processing the implications of Mariam Horn's Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman.

I, and most likely you, need to be more careful in our use of the terms such as all, most, some, none. Are all ranchers like the Bundys? Not to my knowledge. Do all farmers contribute to increased nutrient loads in water flowing through their fields? Probably, some much more so than others, and nutrient-less water doesn't support much life. Have I been guilty of painting groups with too broad a brush? Absolutely. Is it aggravating and time-consuming and risky to judge individuals instead of groups? Absolutely, again. Can we have a successful democracy if we don't get much better at communicating with those who don't see the world through our lenses? Highly unlikely.

There's a reason that standard distribution curves look the way they do. Most of us can be found somewhere in the middle. Extremists are found on either tail. Do we have to give up values that are near and dear to us to get along with others who have different values or priorities? No, but we need to remember the problems that come with pyrrhic victories. If I remember correctly, there are several anecdotes in Horn's book to the effect that "some people would rather fight than win." You can rarely, if ever, work out mutually acceptable "solutions" with those folks, but luckily most of us would rather win. That's something to think about the next time you're in a voting booth. Is your candidate just a fighter or is he or she also a winner? I hate to compromise. I hate even more to lose. Really smart folks need to create and make happen win-win solutions. Have you seen many of those recently? It's a form of adaptation to a changing environment.

Silencing someone doesn't win them over

The Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party state central committee recently voted to permanently table(?) a resolution opposing sulfide mining, even though it was reported to be the most popular resolution that worked its way up through the precinct caucus system. As an environmentalist, and one who offered that and other environmental resolutions at my local caucus, I'm incensed. Do the mining interests believe they've won this battle? I hope not. Or, if they have, does the DFL leadership think they'll continue to be supported by those who value clean air and water and an economy not dominated by extractive industries? I hope not. I remember, and remind you, of Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark, in which we find this nuanced perspective:

"Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists...."

Of History and Hope

By Miller Williams

We have memorized America,

how it was born and who we have been and where.

In ceremonies and silence we say the words,

telling the stories, singing the old songs.

We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.

The great and all the anonymous dead are there.

We know the sound of all the sounds we brought.

The rich taste of it is on our tongues.

But where are we going to be, and why, and who?

The disenfranchised dead want to know.

We mean to be the people we meant to be,

to keep on going where we meant to go.

But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how

except in the minds of those who will call it Now?

The children. The children. And how does our garden grow?

With waving hands—oh, rarely in a row—

and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow.

Who were many people coming together

cannot become one people falling apart.

Who dreamed for every child an even chance

cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.

Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head

cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.

Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child

cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.

We know what we have done and what we have said,

and how we have grown, degree by slow degree,

believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become—

just and compassionate, equal, able, and free. 

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

How soon comes our next Silent Spring?

Today, driving past a picked corn field, I saw two bald eagles feeding next to each other. I couldn't make out what they were feeding on but my guess is they had pulled some scraps from the road-kill deer in the roadway ditch. We've been seeing more and more eagles around our neck of the woods. They're not as common as starlings or robins, but they're also not as scarce as they were back in the days when we were spraying hell out everything with DDT. Do you remember the issues with many raptors (near the top of a food chain) laying eggs with excessively thin shells and failure to produce offspring? For many Americans these days, that must seem like ancient history.

bald eagle pair

Photo by J. Harrington

It's also been a long time since a river caught fire in the United States. The Cuyahoga River fire of 1969 occurred within a decade of the publication of Silent Spring [1962]. The latter ultimately led to a ban in the U.S. of DDT. The former to the Clean Water Act of 1972.

The chemical/pesticide industry tried to discredit Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring. They were much less successful than those who have created doubt and uncertainty about the effects of cigarette smoke and the sources and effects of accumulating green house gases. If we, once upon a time, could reverse the decline of bald eagles and other raptors, if we could ban the use of DDT in the U.S., why does it appear that the next president of the U.S. will be someone who attributes global warming to a "Chinese hoax?"

bald eagle shadowed by a crow

Photo by J. Harrington

How is it that, long, long ago, in a country far, far away, we had an ability to forge a consensus and create a nation of immigrants, while today we can't even communicate with civility if we disagree with our neighbor next door? Have we become so self-centered and self-righteous as individual citizens that we can't accept the idea we may be incorrect and imperfect? Have we become so insecure that we can't tolerate anyone who disagrees with us? Have we managed to dumb down our educational system to the point that it only turns out citizen drones that can neither fly nor navigate for themselves because both require the ability to think critically?

It's taken us several generations to restore our national symbol to a healthy status. I don't think we have as much time to spare while we do the same for our body politic. Continuing to segregate ourselves into communities and neighborhoods filled with those who think and act just like we do is not serving us well. Nature abjures monocultures. So should we. It just isn't healthy. Distilled water won't poison you, but neither will it nourish you. As you make your list for Santa this year, think about what you need as well as what you want. See how that works out.

Eagle Plain

By Robert Francis

The American eagle is not aware he is

the American eagle. He is never tempted

to look modest.

When orators advertise the American eagle’s

virtues, the American eagle is not listening.

This is his virtue.

He is somewhere else, he is mountains away

but even if he were near he would never

make an audience.

The American eagle never says he will serve

if drafted, will dutifully serve etc. He is

not at our service.

If we have honored him we have honored one

who unequivocally honors himself by

overlooking us.

He does not know the meaning of magnificent.

Perhaps we do not altogether either

who cannot touch him.

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

The more things change...

The sun came up this morning, pretty much as it does every day. Birds flocked to the feeders. Squirrels, both gray and red, drank from the "bird bath." Grass sparkled under a light coating of frost. Despite yesterday's election results, the earth went about its business as it has for a long, long time. That's good. There is much to be thankful for this November.

Autumn sunrise

Photo by J. Harrington

Regular readers probably know that I'm a fan of Ed Abbey's writing, perspective and philosophy. If, this morning, you find yourself in need of encouragement and guidance on how to manage over the next four years, check here. Better yet, head for your local library or independent book store and pick up and read several of Abbey's entire books. His web site has a list (bibliography) to get you started. I can't recommend that you shop at the bookstore on the Abbey site, because it's a front for Amazon and I just can't picture Abbey being happy about that. Instead, try Powell's or your local independent book seller. If part of yesterday's message is that Washington is the problem, we need better local solutions. We'll only have them if we support them.

In addition to Abbey, if you haven't read Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark, it's time has come. I also suggest you take a look at Miriam Horn's Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman, although I've only started to read it, it makes a compelling argument that rural Americans need to be seen as individuals, not as stereotypes or demographic segments. In fact, isn't that something that we all hope for, to be seen as who we are?

Cafe of the Americas mosaic

Photo by J. Harrington

When I was growing up, America was often referred to as a "melting pot." I find that description flawed and picture us more as a mosaic, as in a highly diverse eco-system. Terry Tempest Williams builds a mosaic metaphor into her Finding Beauty in a Broken World, another paean to hope. Last night, many (most?) of us were delivered a great surprise. It only becomes a set back or defeat if we allow it to. That's something we can not permit For the Children.

Of History and Hope

By Miller Williams

We have memorized America,

how it was born and who we have been and where.

In ceremonies and silence we say the words,

telling the stories, singing the old songs.

We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.

The great and all the anonymous dead are there.

We know the sound of all the sounds we brought.

The rich taste of it is on our tongues.

But where are we going to be, and why, and who?

The disenfranchised dead want to know.

We mean to be the people we meant to be,

to keep on going where we meant to go.

But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how

except in the minds of those who will call it Now?

The children. The children. And how does our garden grow?

With waving hands—oh, rarely in a row—

and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow.

Who were many people coming together

cannot become one people falling apart.

Who dreamed for every child an even chance

cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.

Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head

cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.

Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child

cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.

We know what we have done and what we have said,

and how we have grown, degree by slow degree,

believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become—

just and compassionate, equal, able, and free.

All this in the hands of children, eyes already set

on a land we never can visit—it isn’t there yet—

but looking through their eyes, we can see

what our long gift to them may come to be.

If we can truly remember, they will not forget.

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