In a churchyard near Caernarfon.

 

   

@MorleyRA

Another possible door.

Groupthink and stories are now a challenge and not a solution.

‘None of us is as dumb as all of us.’

     (This was a note on a board at NASA referring to groupthink.)

Hermann Hesse, ( 2 July 1877 - 9 August 1962 ).

 

"No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. " Hermann Hesse.

 

I love you, you bold red, So sun-thirsty, wild and alive, In the summer scent between day and death So blooming and happily floating. — Hermann Hesse

Sometimes one has to choose.

 

       By Tom Gauld.

July 2023

“July is hollyhocks and hammocks, fireworks and vacations, hot and steamy weather, cool and refreshing swims, beach picnics, and vegetables all out of the garden.” — Jean Hersey 🌿 🍉 🏖️

Jefferson Airplane -White Rabbit-

My last June (birthday) post is White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane. I was really too young to understand the "hippie movement" but I wanted to be part of it so some of my core values came out of that movement. I was "Green" before there was a "Green Movement." I was Alice at one time, too. But I guess reading changed me. I ran off with a hippie at 18, (we read Thoreau together and played folk songs) only to leave him later and marry a Renaissance Man who said he married me because "only with me could he be his true self." I was so honored to have his trust and love. But he knew I was a wild child. I've had a lot of wonderful birthdays in my life. I've been incredibly lucky. Here's my favorite hippie song, my brother used to send me Alice in Wonderland pictures. They hang over my bed now. I still play this song almost every day. See you all later.

Doors and Portals

 

@Springborn21

My next to last post of June 2023 for the end of my Birthday month celebration and reflection. I saw this door on Twitter this last week and I knew when I saw it that it would go in the story. Doors are portals, literally, even if they are just portals from one room to the next room in a small house. Metaphorically, doors are passageways to separate spaces that may be metaphysical. Doors are always choices or journeys. Some small. Some grand and wide. They are also, in a very different context, openings in walls which keep separate spaces.

I've always been obsessed with doors. I've always found the architecture fascinating. I often paint my doors, over and over, different colors or even paint flowers on them. This door is from a garden in Suffolk. The aesthetics moved me emotionally. I love flowers and brick walls. The colors are pleasing to me and some of my favorites. The door is very old. What lies behind it?

Doors are essential to my own mythology in The Ambitious Fairy Project which is a tale that pays tribute to portal fantasies but not in the usual ways.

Much of what I have celebrated in June 2023 has been leading me to my work and my novel. There are many stories in the world but some only one person could have written. 

It's too idiosyncratic, too shadowed by personal experience, its edges are not shaped properly, the spaces are off kilter. They feel uncomfortable and at the same time, pleasant and inviting. They are full of contradictions and layers.

Open this door and this is what you will find.

In all Joy, we will find some sorrow.

“To speak of sorrow
works upon it
moves it from its
crouched place barring
the way to and from the soul's hall.”
         

                         ― Denise Levertov

(We must all carry our sorrows as best we can)

Jane in June long, long ago.

This was another summer, another June, so long ago, in a town I loved and still love. It's the setting of my fictional town in the novel. Though we really lived in two towns, Greenville, Mississippi and then a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee, this third town was where we spent a lot of our time when not on other trips. My mother kept us very busy. It was nothing for us to take a long weekend somewhere any time of the year, to pack up and just go somewhere. She had wanderlust. 

We spent lots of winters and yes, summers in St. Francisville, Louisiana, where we rented trailers and houses and little cottages for weeks at a time. St. Francisville was our jumping off point to New Orleans, LaFayette, Morgan City, Baton Rouge, Sulphur, Lake Charles, places where my mother knew people or had had relatives. We would go down on weekends a lot. But when school let out in May, mother took to the road. The two youngest of her children never returned home until after Labor Day. 

When she got into horses, this changed some and our trips were scheduled around horse shows. I did not like horses or horse shows so sometimes I went down with my Daddy to St. Francisville or with my older brother and his wife. This summer that happened. My brother later went to booth camp and then in 1971 he was in Vietnam. We slept on couches and floors that summer. I never wanted to go home. I could have stayed all summer in St. Francisville where I had local friends, some I had known since I was six years old. But mother wanted to go home for some reason. 

I ended up staying a month in Greenville with some friends and then going over to Moorhead to my cousin's where I spent at least two weeks. My grandmother lived nearby. I am not sure how I got home or when, probably by Greyhound, which was my friendly travel service in those days.

I suppose this old faded polaroid made me think of how much I really loved St. Francisville, the Mississippi Delta, and how I never settled into that little suburb of Memphis as a young girl and even struggled with it as a young woman, though I live there now and have for years. I am not sure where I call home, but the house I live in or the proximity of my children and their families. Where is my home?

I suppose the answer to that now is where my books and computers are. My flowers. Outside my children, all the people I truly loved are gone and this girl looks like a ghostly memory of the wildflower. She was lonely and always floating. 

The wildflower now still is and does.

Make meaning or go insane.

“Meaning is primarily a subjective psychological experience. A smart person is more likely than the next person to be aware of its absence and to be affected by its absence. He is more likely to get bored, to experience meaninglessness, to begin to see the extent to which neither his society nor the universe are built to satisfy his meaning needs, and to then hunt for soothing or exciting meaning substitutes that ultimately reduce his freedom. Meaning is a smart person's most difficult challenge.” 

 ― Eric Maisel

P.S. I have posted this previously on the blog, but it fits in June things that are totally necessary. Meaning is a difficult challenge but finding it and maintaining it is always my first objective these days.

Gustave Moreau, “The Peacock Complaining to Juno.”

Juno, from which the month of June takes its name. She was the Roman sky goddess, who married Zeus and while he never resigned himself to a restrained life of any sorts, Juno was a good wife, occasionally indulging in turning Zeus' lovers into other things. Smiling. I never thought I would truly fall in love, the kind of love that would bring a marriage full of delights and even children. I was so self-absorbed. When younger, I did not trust easily and I did not desire steady companionship. I liked my freedom and the fact that I could do as I pleased most days. A lack of commitment allowed me to indulge my own whimseys.

     And then I met Johnny.

     He was different. Odd. Childish. But a Renaissance man.

     It was the wildflower he loved and wanted.

     Smiling.

    And so we married and were lovers and had babies...

    We spent years exploring and understanding each other.

    Happy Days. Sad Days. We shared a life, really.

    Summer was our time.

    Summerland.

    We named our home, "Satis House" which means "It is enough."

Death is at the center of things.

 An important book. Not an easy read. But perhaps, a necessary one. As I wrote in the post previous to this one, Psychology has really helped me get out of the little box that was me and view the world differently. You have to step outside that box to see the world. Perception is not everything. That's the postmodern lie. And we no longer live in a postmodern world. We are shifting into something else even as I write this.

Psychology changed my life for the better.

I began studying Psychology in 2001, too. I'd like to mention these great men and thinkers. Of course Freud! His greatest student Alfred Alder, Jung gets an okay, Laughing. Ernest Becker and his influences, which included many great thinkers, Søren Kierkegaard, Norman O. Brown, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Otto Rank. Others Rollo May, John B Watson who created Behaviorism, Alfred Beck who followed and formed CBT. And Daniel Kahneman. Going to therapy off and on throughout my life, studying Psychology gave me a chance to view the world outside my own little box. And believe me, getting out of our boxes is hard to do. My June celebrations would like to thank all these people, to recognize their brilliance and hard work and how studying them has changed me, make me a better version of myself.

The Big Influences

 

At the Bottom of the Garden by Diane Purkiss

Mortals and Immortals by Jean-Pierre Vernant

From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers by Marina Warner

The Big Influences. A little over 20 years ago, I bought these books. I think I bought all of them around 2001, the same year. These three books led to the buying of other books and helped reform "my thought on everything" really. Laughing. This June I've taken stock of my influences, my luck, and how I have changed as a person, all the little crooked paths that led me to be the person I am. In some ways we are all the same people we were as children. The core foundation and value were there in childhood. But as adults we grow and change and become better versions of ourselves if we are lucky. And I have been lucky.

The Walkabouts - The Light Will Stay On

The other song that gets a spot in June 2023 celebrations is  The Walkabouts' The Light Will Stay On. Even though I had created some of my world in a paracosm as a child, many things came along that made a mark. This video inspired a certain idea that had been floating around in my mind after I read a book titled The Porcelain Dove by Delia Sherman and it really fit into the world of my paracosm and I knew it would always be there. It is on my writing playlist and never rotates out.

Placebo - Come Undone [Rock Am Ring 2009] HD

June 2023, has been a month of the things I love. Birthday month, Midsummer, flowers, gardening, beloved books to read and yes, music that haunts me.

A lot of whimsey and beloved aesthetics. Living with the fairies, learning to Re-enchant my ordinary life. Romanticism. Fairy tales, children's books, the wildflower and child in me. The best things that I am embracing in order to live the best possible life now.

And this performance of Come Undone is one of those beautiful things that I will always cherish. It is on my writing playlist and never rotates out. At one time, it was the Placebo song I played the most year round. Brian Molko never, ever, looked more beautiful than in this 2009 performance at Rock am Ring.

Current Motto.

"Creatives need "imaginative space" to produce art. We have to balance the amount of information we crave with the needs we require to let our imaginations thrive. So we must choose carefully to protect that imaginative space. Too much information destroys our capacity to create." — Jane  Harrington

(This post was inspired by an earlier post/quote by Percy Shelley on creativity.)

“We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest.” 

                       — Percy Shelley

Inside the Tim Walker: Wonderful Things exhibition

Sexual Communion.

His skin covers me entirely; we are like two halves of a seed, enclosed in the same integument. I should like to grow enormously small, so that you could swallow me, like those queens in fairy tales who conceive when they swallow a grain of corn or a sesame seed. Then I could lodge inside your body and you could bear me. 

              — Angela Carter. The Erl-King

The biggest influence on my novel is this story by Angela Carter.

 

The biggest influence on my novel and yes, my entire work is Angela Carter, and especially this short story, The Erl-King. While Carter's work is subversive feminist reinvention of fairy tales, my work is something else. Angela Carter was the postmodern. I have deliberately left postmodernism behind and looked to something else.

When the flower blossoms, the bee will come.

 

Swamp Mallow.

Summer love.

Inside this flower a bee buzzes right now.

From The Erl King by Angela Carter...

‘The woods enclose. You step between the first trees and then you are no longer in the open air; the wood swallows you up. There is no way through the wood any more, this wood has reverted to its original privacy. Once you are inside it, you must stay there until it lets you out again for there is no clue to guide you through in perfect safety; grass grew over the track years ago and now the rabbits and the foxes make their own runs in the labyrinth and nobody comes.' 

                                        —     Angela Carter, The Erl King

Midsummer Love.

"I am doomed to overflowing, both in living and in imagination." 

               — Anais Nin

June, June, June

“Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly.” 

                                — Pablo Neruda

Lana Del Rey - Summertime Sadness (Official Music Video)

Kiss me hard before you go
Summertime sadness
I just wanted you to know
That baby, you the best

I got that summertime, summertime sadness
Su-su-summertime, summertime sadness
Got that summertime, summertime sadness
Oh, oh-oh, oh-oh

I'm feelin' electric tonight
Cruisin' down the coast, goin' about 99
Got my bad baby by my heavenly side
I know if I go, I'll die happy tonight

Oh, my God, I feel it in the air
Telephone wires above are sizzlin' like a snare
Honey, I'm on fire, I feel it everywhere
Nothin' scares me anymore

Kiss me hard before you go 

Summertime sadness 

I just wanted you to know 

That baby, you the best 

— Lana Del Rey

Victorian Fantasy favorites

 

Favorites.

Climate Choir joins XR at Bristol Cathedral for Luke Jerram’s Oil Founta...

This is a fascinating image. I've been having trouble getting it out of my mind, even in June, which is a month I dedicate to myself and whimsey. But it somehow fits, and how that is happening I am not sure. And I have seen it and cannot unsee it, and I am affected in ways I do not fully understand and they are NOT simple directions that I can easily follow. For now it is puzzle that will surely be a story of some kind. Sighing. 

The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde illustrated by Lisbeth Zwerger.

 

“He did not hate the Winter now, for he knew that it was merely the Spring asleep, and that the flowers were resting.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Selfish Giant

What I am Reading Now, June 18th.

 

“None of the things one frets about ever happen. Something one's never thought of does.”                      ― Connie Willis, Doomsday Book

(reading now, June 18th, 2023)

Choose Life. Choose possibility. Choose Joy.

 

"That it will never come again is what makes life sweet. Dwell in possibility. Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough." — Emily Dickinson

Jane is June, June is Jane.

 Having been born and spent my childhood in Greenville, Mississippi, I learned to cherish summers where I lived outdoors like a free little wild creature. I was born on the first day of June and perhaps because of that birthday, June became part of me and I part of it. A month of magic and play. The official kickoff of summer vacation from a long list of family obligations including my own schooling. This morning, I wrote on Twitter (then deleted it for placement here) that I have a lifelong habit of going around barefoot in the house and garden. I've also developed a lifelong habit of sitting on the side of the tub and washing my feet throughout the day. It seems so easy to think about putting on a pair of shoes or even slide-on sandals, but I never take the time. Today, when I was washing my feet for the first time, before noon, I thought about all those who had lived who had sat in houses with dusty floors and washed their feet in a bowl of water which I am sure was a luxury. It gives new meaning to those people in Biblical stories who washed and anointed feet, doesn't it?

I like the feel of floors beneath my bare feet, the blade of green grass, even the stones that I walk across, the paths I have made in the garden over the years. I love summer, I love June. It's easy to see that I love myself and my life, that I work to slow it down, to feel as much as I can, pay attention to as much as I can, be grateful as much as I can. That I relish the senses, even the thorns and small pebbles that occasionally prick and cause pain.

How do we stay enchanted when we see so much horror throughout our lives, when we experience illness and pain, and great losses? I am beginning to believe that this is about personality and that forms in childhood. The toddler here was never free from trauma, a medical issue, and yet, that little girl, with all her pain, saw great beauty everywhere. I am still that girl. I was flexible and teachable. Curious. Grateful.

Walking around with no shoes, perpetually living in a "summerland" even when winters came, enchanted by being alive at all.

June is always Yellow.

 

Le petit Dejeuner by Pierre Bonnard. 1936

(I like yellow.)

RIP July 20,1933—June 13,2023

“The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.”

― Cormac McCarthy

Metaphors and Storytellers

 

Much to consider on why we read or write tales of enchantment, those magical stories from our childhood and adolescence. Some of us love these tales our entire lives in their original form or ones we create for our adult minds. It is a complex journey to understand why tales of enchantment and magic are so steadfast in a post-postmodern culture built on existentialism, personal identity, and even cognitive science. Perhaps this is really a question about metaphors and history and even psychology. Perhaps it is an enchanted tale about a species who built a world completely out of stories?

Grandmother and Hollyhocks on Summer Vacation.

 

“There was so much time that marvelous summer. Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted away from the Plain. It was a sort of stage-magic.”
                                 ― J.L. Carr

I like Henri Lebasque's work and it's new to me.

 

Young Girl Sewing on a Sofa by Henri Lebasque

Nature is important.

 

“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help.”
            ― May Sarton

Art by Angela Barrett

For me, it was both.

“Psychoanalysis was probably more useful to me as a writer than as a neurotic.” 

                 — Philip Roth

Magic is powerful.

"Magic enables man to carry out with confidence his important tasks, to maintain his poise and his mental integrity in fits of anger, in the throes of hate, of unrequited love, of despair and anxiety. The function of magic is to ritualize man's optimism, to enhance his faith in the victory of hope over fear. Magic expresses the greater value for man of confidence over doubt, of steadfastness over vacillation, of optimism over pessimism". 

           — Bronisław Malinowski

Stepping outside yourself

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention—on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God—that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying. 

                           — W. H. Auden

Gondal and Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights Grade 9 GCSE

Diane Purkiss on Wuthering Heights and the paracosm of Gondal. 

Gondal. Gondal. Gondal.

Soulmates are two people who have a deep understanding of one another. Love is easier. Understanding is complicated.

 

“For you
i have saved poems
under my skin.”
― Sanober Khan

Art by Max Švabinský

The Own Service by Alan Garner

 

Going to post every day in June to celebrate beautiful things I love. This is about finding an anchor, doing my art, being enchanted by the beauty of life, and learning to live in the present. Worked in the garden today, planting sun impatiens, Shasta daisies, and new lilies. Soaked everything. Tonight, after supper, I am going to read The Owl Service by Alan Garner, a classic low fantasy novel. I love low fantasy where something extraordinary intrudes on ordinary life. This is a classic story that I never got to read as a child. I've been making up for all the age appropriate fiction that I missed. I'm feeling both confident and good about my own work-in-progress and it's coming along faster now. I still face challenges in my personal life and am working all that out. But I am optimistic.

Modern Restlessness

"Collapse into never."
— Brian Molko.

All reactions:

Come from the fairies

I got drunk on that honey wine🌼

of the lunar cocoon that the fairies

collected in hyacinth glasses:
dormouse, bats and moles
they sleep in the crevices or in the grass,
in the deserted and sad courtyard of the castle;🌿 🏰

when the wine spilled on the summer land🐝 

or amid the dew its vapors rise,

happy their blissful dreams become
and, asleep, they murmur their joy; well, they are few
the fairies that carry those chalices so new. 🌺
— Percy Shelley

June 1, 2023

"And then one fairy night, May became June." — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Dead Flowers for Her by Skywatchers

She cries on broken wings, she lies on all she's seen
Oh and you know I can change for, her ways
She cries well, still she cries
She dies from, broken songs
She lies on histories thorns,
oh and you know I can change for, love
She dies well, oh she dies
And i live on open seas,
and i drink down on my knees,
oh and you know I can change for, love
I die well, oh i die
For love

Skywatchers

I am a summer girl.

 

Some days I am yellow and warm-hearted, living in tune to place and people, eyes opened, soul stirring, skin pricked, attached to nothing and everything.  

Dear Diary,

This last winter and early spring was difficult, the worst times I've had since the winter John died and the following spring when I was so ill, I did not know if I would survive. That was 2016-2017. I posted this because I am painting my door this color. Smiling. And because I now feel like it is summer though that date is not officially here. But it's swimming temperatures, and I planted some very special yellow/orangey Petunias today. Although I face a few challenges, I survived the end of last year and the earlier part of this year and began work again on the first of April. Now I am pushing full speed ahead with several projects, including house repairs and painting.I've returned to my Brian Molko project, along with my novel and feel very confident in both efforts. I tend to thrive in the heat. Many people do not, but I was born and reared in the hot Mississippi Delta. We did not even have an air condition until I was about ten years old. An attic fan was all we used. Windows were screened but the glass was raised all late spring and into the summer until cold temps returned. I have been thinking of my childhood a lot this year and I had such wonderful experiences. It was a sort of freedom that many children do not know today. We lived outside as children, riding bikes, playing soft ball, jumping ropes, volley ball, kick ball, tennis. We swam in pools and lakes. First person out the door, last person in the door—that was me. Oh, how I wish I could still do a cartwheel. Maybe next year. This is not really a selfie. Someone took this photo because I am wearing my favorite yellow shirt which I got off a sale rack at J.C. Penney's for $9 last spring. Normally, I never get a deal. I love yellow. It reminds me of summer, of my childhood, and keeps me anchored in some kind of possibility. 

Three Pots of Tulips by Claude Monet

Three Pots of Tulips by Claude Monet

43 Years Ago on this Day, Mount St. Helens erupted.

 

It was 43 years ago, May 18, 1980 that Mount St. Helens blew its side out and killed at least 57 people. Dick Lasher was not one of them. If he had rounded the ridge not far ahead of him, he would have been caught in a wave of heat and ash and died. Thinking he was going to die, he took this photo of his red hatchback Pinto and motorcycle. It is an iconic shot. Lasher then turned around and drove, blinded most of the time by ash until he escaped the blast. Ironically he went back a few times trying to get more photos until he was arrested and jailed to protect him from harm. I imagine an event like this is overwhelming and really addictive. Robert Landsburg, a freelance photographer from Portland who often took photos of the volcano, was not so lucky. When he realized he was going to die, he rolled his film back up, put it in its case, then backpack, and finally on the backseat of his car where he laid on top of it to protect the photos he had taken of the blast. Seventeen days later, Landsburg was found in his car. He had died instantly in the pyroclastic cloud that engulfed the car and him. His film survived and has been published. David Johnston, a volcanologist, also died that May morning, after sending this message,"Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it!"

Flowers are so beautiful. Learn their history. Learn a lot.

“Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.” — Theodore Roethke

Flower and Fruits by Paul Cezanne

Flower and Fruits

Paul Cezanne

May 1st is sunny.

"Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness. If they are happy by surprise, they find themselves disabled, unhappy to be deprived of their unhappiness."

         — Albert Camus

Ballerina Rose

 

Ballerina rose, April 30, 2023

The last day of a very wet and cool April.

(Note: The sunlight was perfect for the camera. I didn't have to do anything to this photo. I love pink and green)

For Complainers

“When you live through the mind-made self comprised of thought and emotion that is the ego, the basis for your identity is precarious because thought and emotion are by their very nature ephemeral, fleeting. So every ego is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and enlarge itself. To uphold the I-thought, it needs the opposite thought of "the other." The conceptual "I" cannot survive without the conceptual "other." The others are most other when I see them as my enemies. At one end of the scale of this unconscious egoic pattern lies the egoic compulsive habit of faultfinding and complaining about others. Jesus referred to it when he said, "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?" At the other end of the scale, there is physical violence between individuals and warfare between nations. In the Bible, Jesus' question remains unanswered, but the answer is, of course: Because when I criticize or condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, superior.”

                  ― Eckhart Tolle

P.S. I just wish people would quit complaining all the time.

Finally a Title

I named my WIP today. It's final. And I am smiling. I never had a proper name for it all these years. I just borrowed names occasionally for saving the files or to keep myself going. Once I thought I had one, but it was too weird. Naming a novel is important for an author. It can be changed by the publisher, but at some point, the author as to see it as "the title."  It's a milestone for me. I just need Time.  It's going to be finished if I have Time. I see it. All of it. The entire story. Grinning from ear to ear here. These moments are rare in big projects. 5 words. Each three letters.

Surviving......

You are like an undulating billow warmed by the sun."

               — Thomas Hardy

(And I am)

Hope

“Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul

And sings the tune without the words

And never stops at all.”

― Emily Dickinson

The UnSelfie titled Jane Reading her Social Media Feeds on Friday while still in her pajamas.

 

Haylee and I have been laughing at other suggested titles. Haylee is the BFF. John would have called this "My Wife every single morning. Step back."

Loud Like Love by Placebo

For all of our youth We have craved them Their beauty and their truth So we name them And somehow they pull us through We have craved them For all of our youth

— from the song, Loud Like Love written by Brian Molko of Placebo

Happy Easter

 

EASTER is about HOPE.

Happy Easter from Jane

Six gregorian chants for Easter night

Vexilla Regis (Hymnus)
Exsultet (Praeconium Paschale)
Haec Dies (Alleluia - Antiphona)
Victimae Paschali Laudes (Sequentia)
Exsultemus et Laetemur (Cantus Responsorialis)
Benedicamus Domino, Alleluia (Ad Dimittendum Populum)

Seeing the world from another view outside your own is essential for the lover, artist, politican.

“You can't love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can't be a good lover, a good artist, or a good politician without this capacity …” 

                                 — Julian Barnes

SPRING 2023

Ernest H Shepard

Daffodowndilly’

She wore her yellow sun-bonnet, She wore her greenest gown; She turned to the south wind And curtsied up and down. She turned to the sunlight And shook her yellow head, And whispered to her neighbour “Winter is dead.”

— A.A.Milne

Why fossil fuels are hanging around.

Concrete, Plastic, ammonia, and steel are all fossil fuel things. Every road, every bridge, every building, every single garden that uses fertilizer, every hospital and nearly everything in that hospital, every car of any kind, gas or electric, every utensil in the kitchen, pots and pans, your kitchen mop, FOOD, guitars, every single piece of furniture, every sewer and sewage system, your driveway, the road to the grocery store and pharmacy, and the list is almost countless. All fossil fuel based. 1/3 of all vegetables and fruits feeding every European nation is made from one gigantic collection of greenhouses in Spain which uses fossil fuel to produce those foods in more than a dozen ways. My computer, your computer, your phone case, my lamps, my stapler, the picture frames that hold my grandchildren's photos, FOOD, my glasses, your glasses, your camera cases, sewing machines, flash drives, albums, CDs, many paints, FOOD, parts of airplanes and their fuels, your favorite gel pen, lots of jewelry, all that is made with fossil fuels and yes, the list is practically countless. The four pillars of civilization is concrete, plastic, ammonia, and steel, says every engineer who has lived since WWI and let's not even talk about the space industry and the military. 

Lastly ENERGY, that thing you cannot see but it gives you warmth in the winter, cools the summers, fuels the cars, and makes light. It does so much more. One can hardly imagine what it does. 

When they say getting rid of fossil fuels is "gigantic" and "unprecedented," THEY MEAN IT. And it will change the world. And yes, It will not be our world. Not all fossil fuels will go at one time. We need them.

But sooner or later all nonessential fossil fuel things will disappear.

Because none of the above is sustainable as it is. Someone right this very moment is worried about those chips in your phones.

And that is our dilemma that hardworking people are trying to resolve. The projected world population on Jan. 1, 2023, 7,942,645,086.

I've only fallen in love a few times in my life.

“The mind I love must have wild places.” 

                                ― Katherine Mansfield

(Not likely to find this again. I found it once and lost it, mourned it, let it go. But I would like it again, at least believe it could happen. I tend to live in possibilities. Even if they are small. Must be able to make me laugh.)

Never has anything been more true now in our 21st century culture than these words.

“We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full." —Thomas Merton

March 2023

Dear March—Come in—
How glad I am—
I hoped for you before—
Put down your Hat—
You must have walked—
How out of Breath you are—
Dear March, how are you, and the Rest—
Did you leave Nature well—
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me—
I have so much to tell—

              — Emily Dickinson