The Nature of Things

To those of you who may have noticed my recent blog silence and wondered about it, the truth is that I have been quite sick. A bacterial infection has flattened me and made it impossible for me to do much of anything, including blogging. I hope to be feeling better soon and back to my normal activities. Meantime, thank you for your patience.

Billy Collins, who happens to be one of my favorite contemporary American poets, has a new book of poetry just out. It's called Aimless Love and includes a collection of his poems, both old and new, from the past several years.  Here is the title poem from the collection. AIMLESS LOVE This morning as I walked along the lakeshore, I fell in love with a wren and later in the day with a mouse the cat had dropped under the dining room table. In the shadows of an autumn evening, I fell for a seamstress still at her machine in the tailor’s window, and later for a bowl of broth, steam rising like smoke from a naval battle. This is the best kind of love, I thought, without recompense, without gifts, or unkind words, without suspicion, or silence on the telephone. The love of the chestnut, the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel. No lust, no slam of the door – the love of the miniature orange tree, the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower, the highway that cuts across Florida. No waiti...

My rating: 4 of 5 stars Philippa Gregory's tales about the women of the Cousins' War (or War of the Roses as it later came to be known) continues with this fourth in the series, The Kingmaker's Daughter. The kingmaker referred to was Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, whose prowess on the battlefield and in the political arena made him one of the most powerful men in fifteenth-century England. He cast his lot with the Yorks in the internecine war and helped them to gain the throne, but, always, his main aim was to put his own family on that throne. He did not have any sons and so his two daughters were used as his pawns in his political ploys to achieve greatness for his family. Those two daughters were Anne and Isabel and, of course, the only use for daughters was to get them married advantageously. Meantime, he was successful in getting the York son, Edward, onto the throne where he became Edward IV. Warwick's plan was that he would be the power behind the throne, tha...

Common Buckeye butterfly, Junonia coenia , in three poses. The Common Buckeye is a beautiful and strikingly marked butterfly that is supposedly present in my area of Southeast Texas throughout most of the year, but I see it most often in autumn and I think of it as an autumn visitor. With its prominent eyespots and the wide white bar across its forewing tips, it is definitely one of the most easily identified butterfly species that appears in my backyard. It is a relatively common butterfly and it is resident throughout the southern states and into Mexico. It cannot long survive freezing temperatures at any stage of its life cycle, but in some of our milder winters here, I will see the butterfly around my yard into December and even January. In the spring, it moves northward quickly and colonizes most of the United States and all the way into southern Canada. It may produce two or three generations before fall adults begin their southward migration. Those arriving adults along with the...

Anyone who averts his eyes from the hopeless lives many of our fellow citizens lead and tells himself and others that these men and women only have themselves to blame, is either a fool or a soulless bastard.   - from "Bleak House" by Charles Simic, writing in The New York Review of Books  It seems to me that what is truly wrong with American society is that it is overrun by soulless bastards, people who have no concept of or empathy for what the lives of their fellow citizens who are less financially successful are like. Charles Simic writes movingly of these people in his piece that I quoted from above. They are people whose lives are totally invisible to a certain segment of society. It is unfortunately a powerful segment, this soulless bastard segment. This country that once waged a noble "War on Poverty" often seems to have waved the white flag to the bastards and has given up the battle to try to assist in making life better for millions of its less fortunat...

The Navajo culture has long interested me. Their spiritual view of Earth and of all the universe and the relationship of all things is an idea which I find particularly resonant.  The center of their belief system - at least in my understanding - is their concept of beauty. By beauty, they simply mean being in balance and harmony. They strive toward the "Beauty Way," a life based on balance and harmony. When I came across the following poem while searching the Poetry Foundation website this week, it evoked images of Nature which I find particularly satisfying and so I decided to make it my poem of the week. Twelfth Song of Thunder [Navajo Tradition] BY  ANONYMOUS The voice that beautifies the land! The voice above, The voice of thunder Within the dark cloud Again and again it sounds, The voice that beautifies the land.   The voice that beautifies the land! The voice below, The voice of the grasshopper Among the plants Again and again it sounds, The voice that beautifies ...

Here's something different for Caturday - an opportunity to actually help cats. The ASPCA has a grant program through which they provide food and aid to cats in shelters and in need and they have established a unique way that the public can help with that program. All you have to do is...watch cat videos! Well, we do that anyway, don't we, so why not do it in such a way as to help cats? This project is called the Morris Rescue Watch , named for the rescue cat who became a television star back in the 1970s through commercials for 9 Lives cat food. Here's one of those famous commercials. All you have to do to help is go to the Morris Rescue Watch site (click on the link above) and watch the cat videos there. The ASPCA says: "The more you watch, the more hungry kitty bellies will be filled! Through our grants program, the ASPCA will be distributing the entire amount of food as in-kind donations nationwide to shelters, rescues, and other animal welfare groups that help fee...