I saw a dragonfly land on my clothesline, like this tiny alien dropped in from some other dimension. Only, amazingly, it wasn’t. It didn’t. Dragonflies, ta da! exists in this world. Astonishing! And seeing this critter I found I needed another word to use instead of one that derived from someone once called Drumpf. I settle on Eclipse: Dragonflies eclipse what I read in the newspaper yesterday. I’m skipping the news today and staring at leaves. The view outside my window is absolutely green. That’s the best descriptive word I can find for it. It’s basically a bunch of leaves. There’s something profoundly restful and maybe even newsworthy about those green leaves waving around out there, those thriving plants, deep deep green with chlorophyll and sunshine and chemistry happening on the spot. It’s hard to think these same magnolia trees were iced and blowing wildly in a snow storm only a moment ago. A few days. That’s how it seems. All seasons and times blended into one—th...
I realized I've let this blog go dark. I blame 2020 and the small fact that nobody actually reads blogs. My year was probably a lot like yours: a bit like a roller coaster, with a lot of hurtling downhill. I'm sure I don't need to expound, except that for me, the high points generally involved these two cute little people, who arrived in April and June: Which felt like amazing gifts in the middle of the rest of everything. I found I couldn't write last year, as things developed, and fell apart, and sometimes exploded. Silence, even in the face of growing awareness of suffering and inequity may still be very far from violence. Sometimes silence is listening. Processing. And listening sometimes takes all your energy as you reach to understand something that no one can ever completely understand--another person's suffering--through hearing their stories. Sometimes it becomes almost impossible to listen, like when people who in face-to-face real life are thoughtful, ...