Never Underestimate the Bandwidth of a Bird Song

This is pretty neat.

A Thought Is Born

What To Do:

Places we leave

slick our bodies

with silky air

or foam we feel

faithful and tickly

(even somehow taste)

but can't clearly see.

We wear its weight

like atmosphere—

runs, blots

of what we've done

in and with

each place

—what to do

with it now?—

and what it does

to us still.

W. S. Di Piero.

thinkers and poets of the past

They had to leap into the dark so blindly.

Murmuration

The Starlings:

If there were no stars to say something of the coming weather,
No quarter moon to see by,
The starlings would not go south but shiver like water
In the tall trees, their eyes narrowed on the wind.

Refusing the fog and the rain against leaves,
They would climb the branches of the gray light
Until snow feel, and they fell, their feet raised
And showing through the white, twigs to grow a new year.

Gary Soto.

#throwbacktuesdaybirthdaytwofer

That time we went to Yellowstone for Sam's birthday (2018).

Sam's 10th on Vashon (2019).  

This year, he said he didn't want cake, but rather key lime pie, so we're going out to the Hardware Store for dinner.

My heart has told me, and told those before me

We're the ones who choose our path.

Best I Can Do Is Change the Name to Department of War

Open Memo To The Congressional Appropriations Committee And The Military Department Of Defense:

To Whom It Does Concern:

 

           Could we please have just one space flight,

           one nine-million dollar adventure into the great breath,

           so that we could divide the loaves and fishes

           and put 900 more people to work for a year.

 

           Or could we please have one nuclear missile,

           so we can difuse it, sell the used parts

           for one-point-ten billion worth of more than just

           rice krispies breakfast-lunch-dinners.

 

           What if we could exchange an M-1 rifle for a solar reflector

           so that our building could have heat all the time,

           not wait for avaricious gun-toting landlords

           to remember to call the oil company tomorrow

           for the child next door with pneumonia today.

 

           We would even accept a leftover bomber,

           or one two-million dollar high tech space suit,

           however patronizing it may seem,

           or a decommissioned aircraft carrier to relieve tight housing

                problems.

 

           Its not much, is it?

           When you add it up, pull together the sum total

           of the four billion dollars-a-day catastrophy fantasy,

           the whole is worse than its parts.

 

           So to continue our list,

           could you please refund on our next tax return

           the difference between the limousines you drive,

           and the tokens we do not have

           to build our nation strong.

 

                                        Signed,

                                        The People of the Rest of the World

Sandra Maria Esteves.

Glittering Glass and Burning Light

Understanding is a dream.

Only in Silence the Word, Only in Dark the Light

Destruction:

At my side the Demon writhes forever,

Swimming around me like impalpable air;

As I breathe, he burns my lungs like fever

And fills me with an eternal guilty desire.

Knowing my love of Art, he snares my senses,

Apearing in woman's most seductive forms,

And, under the sneak's plausible pretenses,

Lips grow accustomed to his lewd love-charms.

He leads me thus, far from the sight of God,

Panting and broken with fatigue into

The wilderness of Ennui, deserted and broad,

And into my bewildered eyes he throws

Visions of festering wounds and filthy clothes,

And all Destruction's bloody retinue.

Charles Baudelaire.

We Mustn’t Ask Ourselves What It Says but What It Means

Things have been crazy at work, and it's taxing my undiagnosed ADHD something fierce.  I've been reading a lot, bouncing around between books - astronaut memoirs, random sci-fi, Tolkien, Le Guin, Shakespeare's Kings - which, despite my lack of attention span, still helps me wind down (certainly more than watching sportsball of late).

Trying not to doomscroll too much, as my mental health is already tenuous at best.  Yet I see that the orange rapist/felon/fascist plans to send his brownshirts into Portland, all based on MAGA's conspiracy theories and other fever dreams.

It's a big stretch, but all this insanity reminds me of a debate over heresies between William of Baskerville and Abo of Fossanova in The Name of the Rose:

“[T]he Patarine preaching of Arnold of Brescia, in Rome, more than two hundred years ago, drove the mob of rustics to burn the houses of the nobles and the cardinals.” 

“Arnold tried to draw the magistrates of the city into his reform movement. They did not follow him, and he found support among the crowds of the poor and the outcast. He was not responsible for the violence and the anger with which they responded to his appeals for a less corrupt city.” 

“The city is always corrupt.” 

“The city is the place where today live the people of God, of whom you, we, are the shepherds. It is the place of scandal in which the rich prelates preach virtue to poor and hungry people. The Patarine disorders were born of this situation. They are sad, but not incomprehensible. The Catharists are something else. That is an Oriental heresy, outside the doctrine of the church. I don’t know whether they really commit or have committed the crimes attributed to them. I know they reject matrimony, they deny hell. I wonder whether many acts they have not committed have been attributed to them only because of the ideas (surely unspeakable) they have upheld.” 

“And you tell me that the Catharists have not mingled with the Patarines, and that both are not simply two of the faces, the countless faces, of the same demoniacal phenomenon?” 

“I say that many of these heresies, independently of the doctrines they assert, encounter success among the simple because they suggest to such people the possibility of a different life. I say that very often the simple do not know much about doctrine. I say that often hordes of simple people have confused Catharist preaching with that of the Patarines, and these together with that of the Spirituals. The life of the simple, Abo, is not illuminated by learning and by the lively sense of distinctions that makes us wise. And it is haunted by illness and poverty, tongue-tied by ignorance. Joining a heretical group, for many of them, is often only another way of shouting their own despair. You may burn a cardinal’s house because you want to perfect the life of the clergy, but also because you believe that the hell he preaches does not exist. It is always done because on earth there does exist a hell, where lives the flock whose shepherds we no longer are...”

A big stretch, as I said.  Regardless, it does almost feel like Antifa is akin to the Fraticelli to some extent in the current political context.

Selah.