The Nature of Things

The following words are a meditation by Terry Tempest Williams called "I pray to the birds." They express my feelings about birds and Nature very well. The pictures are birds from my yard, except for the Great Egret, which I photographed at Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge. I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day~ the invocations and benedictions of the Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.

Did you read the story this week about the discovery of giant Jurassic fleas ? It seems that scientists in northeastern China have found fossils of fleas from the Jurassic period! Think about that for a minute - flea fossils. Will wonders never cease? Not only have they found these fossils but they are really, really big as fleas go. The female of the species was up to one-half inch long, a veritable giant in the world of fleas. The male was smaller but still much larger than modern fleas. In fact, these Jurassic fleas were ten times as big as today's fleas. The scientists speculate that these giant fleas may have fed on dinosaurs. They had very elongated and sharp mouth parts made for sucking blood and it is believed that these siphons were long enough and sharp enough to have pierced the dinosaurs' leathery skin. Although there were some mammals around in the Jurassic era, they were small and probably were not hosts to the big fleas. I am fascinated by the fact that these sc...

People who have read  The Marriage Plot  seem to fall into two camps: They love it or they find it pretentious and hate it.  In fact, when you get right down to it, the act of writing a novel, any novel, could be seen as pretentious. What makes you, the writer, think you have anything of importance to say to me, the reader, anyway? How presumptuous of you! However, that's not my camp. I admire the courage and the tenacity which it takes to put oneself out there and write a novel. Even a bad novel deserves some respect for the effort it took to produce it. But  The Marriage Plot  is not a bad novel. In fact, it is a very good novel and I am in the "love it" camp.  In his much-praised novel, Eugenides imagines three college students from his  alma mater , Brown, in the early 1980s. They are: Madeleine, a passionate reader and English major, who is writing her senior thesis on the "marriage plot" which lies at the heart of so many great English novels suc...

I grew up with a great admiration for the profession of journalism. People like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid were early heroes of mine. Later, the dogged investigation of Woodward and Bernstein in trying to crack the Watergate case and drag all those dirty little secrets into the light was a source of inspiration to me. Later still, I married a journalist and, nearly thirty-seven years later, I am still married to him, so you can take my word for it that I do respect and even revere the profession of journalism. It makes me very angry to see it misused and abused. Andrew Breitbart, who died today, was a prime example of the most serious kind of abuse and misuse. Andrew Breitbart, a conservative blogger and activist who used undercover video to bring discredit and disgrace to his liberal targets, died Thursday. He was 43. Mr. Breitbart was as polarizing a figure as he was popular. Hailed by the political right as a truth-teller who exposed bias and corruption, he...

Sad news today that Davy Jones of "The Monkees" has died at the age of 66, much too young. I am of an age to be able to remember the Monkees when they were hot back in the 1960s. The concept for the group was dreamed up by the publicity department at Columbia. The four young guys - in addition to Jones, Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz and Michael Nesbith - were sort of a poor girl's Beatles. They starred in a popular television show called, oddly enough, "The Monkees" in which they had all manner of madcap G-rated adventures every week, patterned somewhat on the Beatles' Hard Day's Night . They were supposed to be something of an antidote to the Beatles' more R-rated adventures, and fans absolutely loved them. Of course, they were never as big as the Beatles, but for a while, they reigned atop the television world and managed to produce some pretty decent music in the process. They were trailblazers in the sense that they were among the first, if not the ...

All across North America, the adjective that has most often been used to describe the winter we are currently experiencing is "mild." January and February which often bring the harshest winter weather with plenty of snow and ice and below-freezing temperatures have been unusually warm this year. Although there have been isolated snow storms and some periods of cold weather, they have been few and far between and of short duration. Scientists considering the implications of these weeks of relative warmth in what is usually the coldest part of winter speculate that when all the data is collected, this winter may be close to an all-time record breaker . While a mild winter in North America is still considered a rare event, it is likely that such winters will be much less rare in the future. And that has serious consequences for plants and animals whose lives are bound to the cycle of seasons. Plants are flowering earlier than ever and, while it is a boost to the spirits to see ...

"To say that people of faith have no role in the public square?  You bet that makes you throw up.  What kind of country do we live that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case? That makes me throw up and it should make every American…Now we’re going to turn around and say we’re going to impose our values from the government on people of faith, which of course is the next logical step when people of faith, at least according to John Kennedy, have no role in the public square. "  - Rick Santorum to George Stephanopoulus on Sunday television show This Week     "I'm for separation of church and state.  The state has no business telling the church what to do." - Rick Santorum in Michigan today Taking these two quotes from Rick Santorum together, one can see that he doesn't believe that the state should have any control over religion. On the other hand, he obviously does believe that the church should be able to tell the...