The World, The News & My Opinions On Stuff (for what it’s worth)
A Refuge for the Broken-Hearted – How is it we were caught?
Every morning now, I find myself asking, How is it we were caught? This is a quote from “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” written by James Agee, with photos by Walker Evans, a book that has been my touchstone for the past fifty years (as it was for President Carter, interestingly). This is what…
Read MoreRefuge for the Broken-Hearted: Solace of Literature
Many brilliant thinkers have written many sparkling sentences about the solace of literature during personal and shared dark times — “The Consolations of Writing: Literary Strategies of Resistance from Boethius to Primo Levi” by Rivkah Zim and “Literature and Consolation: Fictions of Comfort” by Jürgen Pieters spring to mind. But I’m not an academic. I’m…
Read MoreA Refuge For The Broken-Hearted — Laughing at Nazis
Today is Ostara, the Spring Equinox, a time of balance and rebirth. So Blessed, Merry Ostara to all. Particularly the ‘merry’ bit. More on that below. (hint: it’s a superpower) Ostara’s roots are old, and although some claim it’s a relatively new ‘Wiccan’ holiday, it transcends all such (slightly condescending) naming. I mean, come on……
Read MoreA Refuge For The Broken-Hearted – soup and community
White Soup Bowl by Anne Coster Vallayer 1771 I made soup last Friday morning, and as happens so often when I cook, it was an unreasonable amount of soup. Enough to feed at least six when we are only two: My Best Beloved me, and sweet small dog. So, three really, but Maggie the…
Read MoreRefuge for the Broken-Hearted – a beginning
View into the Prime Hook Wildlife Refuge in Delaware Perhaps you are like me. I’m a Virgo with a list for almost everything, and my spice drawer is organized alphabetically. I mean, how do you find the cumin if it’s not next to the coriander? I do very poorly in chaos and uncertainty.…
Read MoreAs Above, So Below… Interbeing for the New Year
There is no doubt 2022 was an, ahem, challenging year worldwide. I felt it, and I suspect you did, too. As the saying by Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary figure associated with the beginning of alchemy, the birth of material and spiritual science goes: as above, so below. In other words, what goes on in the…
Read MoreThe Wheel Turns To Remind Us
A blessed Lughnasadh/Lammas to all. After a brutal spate of heat (that many are still suffering), I woke to a cool wet morning. The creek has been alarmingly low these past weeks. The deer tiptoe across and barely get their hooves wet. It rained for a couple of hours last night, but hardly enough to…
Read MoreNew Perspectives, Old Simplicities
Ever since those astonishing photos taken by the Webb telescope were released my inbox has been filled with emails discussing them. It’s a mixed bag of astonishment, wonder, and, well, horror. Seems more than a few people have been sent spinning into existential dread, right along with the stars and galaxies spinning in the images.…
Read MoreYou Are Only Free When Everyone Is Free
My friend, Robin Bates, author of Better Living Through Beowulf, wrote a wonderful essay that threw me back in my seat, exactly as a passage from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer did to him. Everything that needs to be said is here, so I am reprinting it, with his permission. He says: “Sometimes I’ll come across…
Read MoreAn Age of Questions
What a week. A new Supreme Court Justice, the first Black woman. And oh, what work she has to do since SCOTUS has overturned Roe vs Wade and has effectively gutted the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to fight climate change. Sadly, more absurd decisions are expected in the future. Then there is the war in Ukraine,…
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