The Nature of Things

My older daughter brought this poem to my attention last week and it proved to be just the antidote I needed for a week of truly horrible and depressing events. As I read it, I could feel the gloom lifting just a little and leaving that crack by which the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen once wrote. I think, in the end, if there is anything that will save us as a species, it might be those small kindnesses that we do for each other; the things that we do automatically without thinking because we know in our deepest heart of hearts that they are the right things to do. Because "Mostly, we don't want to harm each other", and that sentiment may be "the true dwelling of the holy".  Treasure those acts and those moments. Small Kindnesses by Danusha Lameris I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t ...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : Black-crowned Night Herons are one of several species of herons and egrets that frequent our ponds and marshes. I photographed this one on a visit to Brazos Bend State Park. He was fishing for his dinner.  *~*~*~* Light, created by humans for their comfort and convenience, is a type of pollution of the environment that perhaps does not get the attention that it deserves. It has been linked to human illnesses as well as to abnormal behavior in wild animals. There are few places in the U.S. that are still considered pristine, without light pollution. The Washington Post this week published a map that shows those places. They are mostly in the western part of the country, including one of my favorite places, the Big Bend National Park in Texas.  *~*~*~* A new report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this week examines how land use around the world contributes to the warming of the Earth's atmosph...

I seem to be stuck in the '60s this summer. Most of the books that I've picked to read over the past several weeks have been set in that turbulent and thrilling decade. A coincidence of choice or a result of the fact that that era seems to be particularly popular territory for today's writers? A bit of both, I guess.  At any rate, Laura Lippman's new book is set primarily in 1966 Baltimore, a time when the Baltimore Orioles were good and racial tensions were high. I had never read Lippman before (My bad!) and didn't know what to expect from her. What I got was a tightly plotted mystery about the deaths of a young girl and a young woman which also explored the devaluation of women by the society of the period and the great chasm that existed between what women aspired to for their lives and what was actually expected of them and what they were allowed to achieve. I read somewhere that this book was inspired by Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar  which Lippman rev...

Here's a poem by Joyce Sutphen that reminds us of just how lucky we are to be living today - even with all its problems - rather than in earlier times. And also how others years from now will consider themselves fortunate to be living in their time rather than in our primitive era. All things are indeed relative. Primitive by Joyce Sutphen How lucky we are that we do not live in the time of the Plague, when, in three years a third of Europe’s population–– 20 million people––died, and no one knew the cause. How fortunate we are to know that it was not the planets or the wrath of God that caused it but a tiny bacillus carried by fleas on the backs of rats coming by ship from Asia, and how much better it is to live now, rather than in 1891, when Thomas Edison filed patents for the first motion picture camera and viewer, which operated on a perceptual phenomenon called “persistence of vision”––a thing that tricked the brain into thinking it was seeing seamless movement as the viewer s...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : A female Ruby-throated Hummingbird enjoys a sip from the blossoms of Hamelia patens , the "hummingbird bush". *~*~*~* July was the hottest July on record for the planet since such records have been kept (about 1850). All records are not yet in but enough have accumulated for scientists to make that declaration. *~*~*~* The heat dome that caused record high temperatures in Europe shifted to Greenland and is causing unprecedented melting of the fragile ice sheet there. If the entire Greenland ice sheet ever melted, it would raise sea levels worldwide by 23 feet.  *~*~*~* Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is warning that coastal flooding that happens without rainfall or hurricanes, so-called "sunny day flooding, is getting worse. *~*~*~* It has been a devastating summer for the endangered North Atlantic right whale. Since the start of June, eight of them, representing two percen...

Israeli writer Yuval Noah Harari's book about the history of our species has been on the best-seller list for some 62 weeks and counting and for most of that time, it had been my intention to read it. I finally got around to it this week. Better late than never, or maybe better late, full stop. Now that the initial hubbub about the book has died down, perhaps it will be easier to approach it clear-eyed without prejudice.  The first thing to be said about the book is that Harari writes engagingly. He writes for a general audience and he manages to make millions of years of history and development of our species understandable. He has his theories about how we came to be the dominant species on the planet. Are they correct? And are we really the dominant species on the planet? That's something the reader has to decide for herself, but it's always best to keep an open mind and realize that there are other possibilities. Most of Harari's book is devoted to Homo sapiens, ev...

Do you ever feel that you have missed your life by being too busy looking for it? We sometimes are so busy looking to the future that we forget to live in the present. And then one day we look up and all that time has passed us by. We have passed the milestones unaware. Dana Gioia knows that feeling. The Road by Dana Gioia He sometimes felt that he had missed his life By being far too busy looking for it. Searching the distance, he often turned to find That he had passed some milestone unaware, And someone else was walking next to him, First friends, then lovers, now children and a wife. They were good company–generous, kind, But equally bewildered to be there. He noticed then that no one chose the way— All seemed to drift by some collective will. The path grew easier with each passing day, Since it was worn and mostly sloped downhill. The road ahead seemed hazy in the gloom. Where was it he had meant to go, and with whom?