Progress, like Spring, comes in stuttering steps

Your mileage may vary, but I'm pretty sure (and the Better Half is positive) I spend too much time and energy these days getting (and staying) upset and perturbed and agitated by one thing or another, mostly having to do with miscreants in power in Washington, D.C.; or the cold and snow and related miseries we're subjected to here in the North Country; or the short-sightedness and/or selfishness of too many people putting immediate gain ahead of long term survival. Fortunately, every once in awhile, I run into some better news that helps me regain a sense of balance and proportion. Yesterday and today that happened.

late Winter driveway

Photo by J. Harrington

Today I came across something I must have somehow missed the first time it went around. The St. Croix 360 blog pulled from its archives Getting to know St. Croix River country’s natural neighbors. The online app, iNaturalist, has the St. Croix watershed as a defined "place," with photo observations galore. I've had the iNaturalist app on my "smartphone" for a few years but hadn't done much with it. This discovery my be just the motivation needed to change that.

If you've followed these postings for awhile, you no doubt have noticed I've some firm and strong opinions about mining in Minnesota and rural development in general. Today I read a recent post by Aaron Brown, one of the more enlightened and rational commentators on the Iron Range, that educates the rest of us about The dueling realities of the Iron Range. It concludes:

No, we need not agree about mining policy or politics to make life here better, perhaps better than it’s ever been. But we must agree on reality. And the reality is we must diversify our economy and open the imaginary borders we draw between us and the rest of the world.

what do we need to have both?

Photo by J. Harrington

That seems to me (again, ymmv) to fit nicely with a recent Community Voices piece in MinnPost, written by three leaders in District #11 of the United Steelworkers union (USW). They opine that Minnesota should become the leader in responsible mining. You can guess how pleased I was to see and read that piece, since I've been advocating Minnesota should adopt something like the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance [IRMA] standards since back in 2014. The USW piece is the first I'm aware of to support a responsible ming strategy. I've no idea why.

Note to Reality

By Tony Hoagland

Without even knowing it, I have 

believed in you for a long time.

When I looked at my blood under a microscope

                I could see truth multiplying over and over.

—Not police sirens, nor history books, not stage-three lymphoma

                                                                                     persuaded me

but your honeycombs and beetles; the dry blond fascicles of grass 

                                                              thrust up above the January snow. 

Your postcards of Picasso and Matisse,

                                         from the museum series on European masters. 

When my friend died on the way to the hospital

                                           it was not his death that so amazed me

but that the driver of the cab 

                                              did not insist upon the fare.

Quotation marks: what should we put inside them? 

Shall I say “I”  “have been hurt” “by”  “you,”  you neglectful monster?

I speak now because experience has shown me

                                 that my mind will never be clear for long.

I am more thick-skinned and male, more selfish, jealous, and afraid

                                   than ever in my life.

“For my heart is tangled in thy nets;

                              my soul enmeshed in cataracts of time...”

The breeze so cool today, the sky smeared with bluish grays and whites.

The parade for the slain police officer

goes past the bakery

and the smell of fresh bread 

makes the mourners salivate against their will.

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

Thoughts on Valentine's Day

Sorry, no hearts and flowers today. This Valentine's Day it seems particularly appropriate to share Carl Sagan's iconic Pale Blue Dot monologue, especially since NASA has recently updated (reprocessed) the original Voyager 1 photograph. For now, this pale blue dot is all we have. We need to take better care of it. That means we need to do better caring for each other. We're all in, and on, this together. It's past time we Get Together.

Enlarged version of the new Pale Blue Dot release. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

    From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

    The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Residence on Earth

By Arthur Sze

As we approached the front door, I noticed

grills on the windows, bullet pockmarks

in the wall; inside, a maid served us salad,

potato and cilantro soup—and I saw,

in the amphitheater above Medellín,

the stage where twenty-eight poets read;

clouds gathered; in the ensuing downpour,

I expected the five thousand people to rush out;

instead, a sea of umbrellas appeared,

and people swayed under them; when the readings

resumed, a poet stood, chanted in Vietnamese,

and when I stepped up to the podium,

two rivers flowed down the steps to the far right

and left; as I read our emotions resemble leaves

and alive to their shapes we are nourished, 

I understood how poets from all over the world

had come for peace, solidarity, justice—

and when my host, and reader of my poems

in Spanish, invited me into his home, I saw

one way to live during our residencia en la tierra.

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