“First there was nothing. Then there was everything.
Then, in a park above a western city after dusk, the air is raining messages.
A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words.”
—Richard Powers, The Overstory
To give mind to machines, they are calling it
out of the world, out of the neighborhood, out of the body.
They have bound it in the brain, in the hard shell
of the skull, in order to bind it in a machine.
From the heron flying home at dusk,
from the misty hollows at sunrise,
from the stories told at the row’s end,
they are calling the mind into exile
in the dry circuits of machines.
—Wendell Berry, collected in The Peace of Wild Things and other Poems
“O anti-verdurous phallic were’t not for your pouring weight looming in tears like a sick tree or your ever-gaudy-comfort jabbing your city’s much wrinkled sky you’d seem an absurd Babel squatting before mortal millions”
—Gregory Corso, Gasoline
“To say the truth, it was not how I expected—stepping off toward America past a drowned horse.”
—Ivan Doig, Dancing at the Rascal Fair
Couldn’t row this morning so I took a long looping walk through downtown. I think my walking playlist is getting pretty good. It’s big enough now that putting it on shuffle and heading out is starting to provide surprises.
It did occur to me that with my luck, I’ll get hit by a car and bystanders will catch me with I Can’t Wait by Nu Shooz blaring out of my earbuds.
What can I say? It puts pep in the step.
Wind's a bit brisk today.
Every morning @5 am, I look out my kitchen window to check this flag. I can see it even at night.
I check for two things.
If the answer to both of these questions is no, I proceed with my day as normal and head for the river.
Socked in like a New England lobster fisherman. It looks like snow blowing by but it’s actually fog. Some run-off foam in the water just adds to the allure. (Yesterday morning.)
Photo by Inge Riis McDonald
We have challenges enough, do we not? With every day presenting its difficulties, a multitude of small assaults on our well-being. We build up no credit for facing these struggles, and instead are told it’s possible there may also be bombs in the basement, strapped with electrical tape to the pillars of our sanity and our humanity.
Why then choose to add more difficulty to the day?
A particular individual has decided to get up early in the morning and go down to the river with the understanding that a number of other individuals will do the same. If that happens, they will form a group, and as a group they will put a boat in the river and attempt to row it.
Rowing a boat, any boat, is difficult and so these individuals have been made a promise. They’ve been promised that if they keep coming down to the river and trying to row the boat, something good will happen.
Today as we began the last part of our row, turning to head for the dock, I caught that look of frustration. There had been moments of good movement over the course of the practice, touches of the ideal, grasped but then let slip, making the bad strokes feel even worse.
Two metal towers of the city’s water intake system protrude above the surface of the river and a pair of geese have taken to resting on the one closest to the riverbank. As we pass by them, trying to find a few good strokes before we land, the gander raises his concerns.
He yells.
“Always with the noise, and the straining, and the flailing! What kind of bird are you? You have eight wings but you never fly!”
I can only respond, “We want to fly. We are trying.”
Photo by Echo Grid
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
—Philip Larkin