What the Muses Leave Behind

April 29, 2020 Today’s many blessings – All day, so many gifts, making it an extravagant birthday! Sometimes I draw a card from Helena Nelson-Reed’s deck of sumptuously illustrated earth oracle cards.   Each one, a meditation.   The first gift came with the card I drew – Time . It reminded me that life doesn’t have to be measured by ticks and tocks.   This sort of timekeeping is a construct that humans devised to capture its passage or its coming when we are in social groups. Milestones and losing or winning any race have little relevance in the natural world (unless you are the one being chased for a meal).   I like to think of myself as a part of that order of things. An essential takeaway for me was to stay present and be existentially timeless. Boxes have been arriving for a few days from my family and friends, and I disciplined myself to hold off on opening them until today.   The stuff is not the thrill, but it is a love token, and that is what is priceless for me now, li

April 28, 2020 Today’s observation – Well today, Governor Reynold reported that Iowa has six thousand three hundred and seventy-six confirmed cases of Covid with one hundred thirty-six related deaths. Five hundred and eight new cases popped up yesterday. That’s a jump of 8% in one day. I wonder how this reflects her flattening the curve strategy. The positive case graph on the state website looks seismic to me.   The bumps in confirmed cases come largely from outbreaks in factories and meat processing plants.   To be called an outbreak , there must be at least 10% of employees affected and ill. There must be hundreds of anxious blue-collar workers, ambivalent about their job and wondering how they can get fired and draw unemployment. Three Tyson meat processing plants on the list so far, and just yesterday, a Bridgestone plant that makes gigantic tractor tires reported workers testing positive. The governor is not doing any interventions, she announced that she will leave the m

April 27, 2020 Today’s idea – Maybe teaching environmental science is taking a toll on my psyche.   The topics line up in our textbook like a steam roller with chapter titles that sound like a funeral dirge.: Environmental Pollution and Human Health; Air Pollution, Climate Change, and Ozone Depletion; Solid and Hazardous Waste;   Water Pollution; Human Population and Urbanization; Mining and Energy Resourcing; Saving Ecosystems. Humans have been hard on the Earth for the last few centuries. I have to go to the woods to heal my heart, yes, and to revive some sense of propriety as I look here for windows onto homeostasis and reciprocity with no dollar signs. I only have to kick up a bit of duff on the forest floor to find affirmation that the world is not broken; just a fever to kill the infection, nothing fatal.   Being a seeker, I comb through piles of information each day, like puzzle pieces, it brings together a broader view. Last week, I asked myself, what will I learn from

April 26,2020 Today’s idea – Small is beautiful and indomitable. Here’s my point!  The first organisms to make a life on this planet were microbial and viral; their species are still here.  Their populations have thrived out of billions of evolutionary years beyond ours. Give them an apocalyptic catastrophe, and they might go dormant for a few moments or a few centuries (which are moments in geologic time) then… mutate. They are the birthplace of multicellular evolution.  Bigger is more vulnerable. Out of the last mass extinction straddling the Cretaceous- Tertiary period, sixty-five million years ago, the mighty dinosaurs did not survive but a scrappy little burrowing mammal did; and the odds are that she was our crisis progenitor.  I’m trying not to feel unduly vulnerable as I am looking at my large, decadent life, earnestly calculating how to pare things down, how to shrink my economy and my footprint.  Sitting under a naked canopy of forest, thinking about photosynthesis, I r

April 25, 2020 April 25, 2020 Today’s observation – the future needs to become global. There is so much melding of synergy between countries and cultures, we are woven together with economics, entertainment, health, politics and finances.       I say this while sitting in a tiny global village of foreigners nested in the Caucasian-prone Midwest. How few years ago were the newly arriving residents considered foreign too? Our communication/journalists network works best when the lines that artificially divide us are allowed to thin. Global issues require global collaborative problem solving. It benefits us to look wider than the American Way when dealing with things like the pandemic and following global recession.   After all, the American Way is the world’s way.   Once we severed generational connections to place, where earth, wind, and water shaped not only our culture but our biochemistry, we surrendered much of what produces geopolitical identity. It is in the water. An

April 24, 2020 Today’s image – A few governors have decided to reopen some nonessential businesses and encourage people to get back to work – Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida are leading this initiative much to the skepticism of both other governors and many of their citizens. I believe that New Yorkers are suffering from PTSD.   They can wait for now. Governor Cuomo, thinking more expansively than most, has joined in an East Coast regional pact with Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, so that these states can coordinate the lifting of their stay at home orders. Nevada’s governor is looking at April 30 as a go date, while Las Vegas’s mayor has pushed for her city to open now, saying that the desert heat will keep the virus at bay.   Maybe the casino owners subscribe to this thinking, but I don’t think the workers are too keen on it.   California Governor Newsom will collaborate with the Oregon and Washington governors (West Coast

April 23, 2020 Today’s observation – As I complete one postponed task after another, and the surfaces clear of piles of papers and unfinished must-dos, my mental space opens too. It looks for other targets of attention, asking questions that mostly stand outside of my day to day thoughts. I am privileged enough to dally among the big personal existential questions. What would make me happier? Is my job still a vocation or an occupation? With whom do I want to live when I move from here? Can I skinny my life down more? Where do I want to travel next? Then another foot falls, allowing the rest of humanity into my thoughts.   There is the story about day workers who have left to hang out to dry, and so are their resources. Tethered to it are the forecasts of a hunger pandemic to follow the coronavirus pandemic, while other stories loom of an IMF forecast for a global economic crisis. Our social media platforms are thriving as launchpads for misinformation that is undermining democra

April 22, 2020 Today’s observation – Never could we have organized such a significant 50 th for Earth Day as we have stumbled into today! The skies around major cities are clearer and cleaner than they have been in decades. People have slowed down consumption and are traveling less (especially by plane). Wildlife has been able to recharge populations and vitality, returning to pathways and life cycles without our disturbance.   On-campus, students, built two large garden boxes and pushed vegetable seeds into dirt-filled egg carton cells. (learning how Americans grow food at home) Our hands in the dirt, our project was like a spring tonic. I asked them how they celebrated Earth Day in their countries. One from Morocco shrugged, “we don’t.”   Another from Vietnam coyly shared that they turned off lights when no one was in a room.   I suppose practicing conservation is a beginning prayer, inviting in more and more reasons to appreciate our spaceship planet. I remain amazed at the e

April 21, 2020 Today’s observation – Things are moving; it is in the news and the air.  The Great Pause takes a breath; gears lean toward engagement. This evening while doing room checks, a student asked me for boxes.  “Do you need them soon?” “Yes, please. I am going home.”  “How soon?”  “Thursday.”  “Two days away - Thursday?” “Yes!” Verifying this information with the Res Life director, I found that it was news to him too.  Parents and students are not withholding information about their planning; this is how quickly arrangements for travel to China manifest.  I venture to say that her mother has been working for several weeks to get travel arrangements in place. A slot opens, and a multitude of requests rise to reach it first.  I learned that students cannot fly directly from the US to China now but have to triangulate their travel with a neutral intermediary country.  One flew from Chicago to Mexico to China, another from Chicago to Japan to China.  Their trip hom

April 20, 2020 April 20,2020 Wow, we have landed on a new national holiday. One to celebrate the much loved and much-maligned marijuana species. Can you feel the unescapable lampoon coalescing around such an articulated date (4/20/20/20 resounding like an echo) as it falls squarely within this year of plague? Legitimate in this country for less than a decade, cannabis dispensaries have been designated (in its legal status) as an essential business. I have made a note of this fact in previous entries, I sure.   Somehow today, the irony sank in. And this new high holiday celebrates not only a weed with its gift for intangible elevation and expansion, but it hallows the doors of perception for laughter and open-heartedness that swing wide when we imbibe. In San Francisco, I read about a festival planning committee that spent eight months putting together the first-ever free 4/20 event with legal weed for sale when the pandemic hit.   So that party moved online. But I know stoner

April 19, 2020 Today’s image – The next wave of service workers with growing infection vulnerability is the grocery store employees.   Consequently, bigger chains have already begun talking about closing the doors to instore shopping and shifting to online orders with curbside pick-up only.   If this happens, it would be a historical contraction.   Until 1916, most grocery stores did not allow shoppers to gather their goods. Piggly Wiggly opened the first self-serve grocery in Memphis with check out stands, carts, and individually marked items. It transformed the industry. A century later, we have pressed ourselves int0 a return of handing our list to the clerk behind the online counter.   When I shop these days, I notice that maybe 50% of customers wear masks and attempt safe distance margins. And what is going on with the other half?   Is this their act of civil disobedience? Is it worth putting grocers at risk? Maybe there is a more significant thing at work than mere disresp

April 18, 2020 The river is still up above flood stage but dropping.   Covid cases in the nation are holding steady, Fauci predicts a decline, (Iowa is doing its own thing, so the state is up 89% this week) and people are restless. In the news there rallies in state capitals across the country, group protests mount to call for an end to government lock down.   The  bottom line is hurting, they miss community.   Yep, we all share those feelings. And my cynical self suspects that these rabble rousers, itching to get back to “normal,” are being coached by the president. Their rhetoric resembles a Trump Rally.   He misses them too, even has sanctioned their outcries with tweets of endearment.   Meanwhile in Iowa, the vernal weather is quintessential, Persephone has made her mother beam with love.   And we are the happy recipients of her bliss.   Parks are sensibly full, kids playing outside.   The wildflower procession passes from Dutchman’s breeches to trout lilies, violets, mayappl

April 17, 2020 Today’s celebration – Last May I attended the annual school fundraising gala.   Browsing the items on the silent auction tables, I found nothing that that stirred my avarice, so I took another tack and decided to find things that I could have fun with or devise pleasure from, as a way to justify some necessary opening bids.   There was an impressive box of chocolate bars with a couple bottles of red on which I entered the first bid, and I paused at a wooden crate with another pair of wines, nice glasses and a gift certificate for a charcuterie tray.   The vintner of the Pinot Noir and Chardonnay was Kosta Browne. Without a thought of the initial bid being the winning bid, I scratched my offer on line #1 - $150. I did covet a set of hand thrown mugs from our headmaster’s wheel, but found my bid lost in the healthy bid escalations.   By the end of the evening though, I was the winner of the box of wine and chocolate and the two bottles of Kosta Browne.   Once at home