What the Muses Leave Behind

May 6, 2020 Today’s idea – If hours were the bricks that built a life and moments were the mortar, then no wall would be straight nor angle true. Every day is shaped by our thoughts and moods, by the meteorology of mind and the seismology emotion.  Maybe bricks aren’t the right metaphor; I could shift to one more incrementally pertinent, like the mud pellets used by cliff swallows to build their nest.  A season opens for brooding babies, and swallows make a thousand swoops to a river bank, load their beaks,  then back to the cliff face to tuck a BB  sized mud and saliva ball into its place.  The nest grows from the cliff face like days grow around us, breath by breath.  In the end, a clay basket emerges as if out of thin air, the babies fill it, and then it empties.   I think I am making a point about how we live the outcomes that build a history and also create a normal.  We have been trying to imagine a new rhythm...

May 5, 2020 Today’s reflection – Dogwood winter in Iowa, it will be chilly all week. Perfect weather for the radish cotyledons pushing up in the garden boxes.   I expect peas to be right behind them.   A Baltimore Oriole flew down and perched on a chair outside my east window, morning sun. I’d been listening to him sing in the canopy all week, so it was great to get a minute to gawk at his orange and black elegance. Last night I glanced out of my kitchen window to see the fox vixen steering her kits down the west ravine. These moments build vital points of context for me, reminders that the world around us keeps doing what it does.   Maybe even with more ease since we have withdrawn. Lately, some local kids have made night raids on the campus committing small but irksome acts of vandalism. They removed the taped barriers from around the playground equipment, leaving it strewn about, they turned on an outside water tap, and it ran all night. I’m sure there is more evid...

May 4, 2020 Today’s idea – What has the fog of our modern conveniences begat? I read an article last night published in 1950 by Berton Roueche’ titled The Fog . In October 1948, a toxic smog settled on the borough of Donora, PA. This town is tucked away on a meander of the Monongahela River in the Allegheny Mountains.   During that time, it was home to three huge mills, a steel plant, and a zinc and sulfuric acid plant. The towering factory stacks of these industries pushed out thick plumes of coal smoke all day and all week. Also, given the town’s proximity to the river, boats and trains added their emission to the cocktail. To seal the deal, Donora sits in the topography of secluded bluffs and hills that allow for little or no wind to carry the smoke and fumes out of town.   So the place was known to be a smutty, smokey mess, tolerated by residents who referred to the sulfurous stench as the smell of money. On this weekend in October, a thermal inversion put a tighter li...

May 3, 2020 Today’s reflections on yesterday – This weekend marked the soft reopening of Iowa in most counties.   I don’t think people are flocking to restaurants to dine inside, nor are they rushing out for retail therapy because most of our favorites are still closed. They cannot go to a movie, a concert, a sporting event, or a neighborhood pub, but they can play outside.   And in droves, they did.   In the state park that I visited with my new cohort, the parking lots were brimming, and so were most of the trails. Walking in the woods here felt more like walking down the midway at a fair, and the mood matched the festive visual.   I imagined that many of the parents with hyper kids must have felt as if they had been released from jail or the loony bin. They would follow their children down to the creek, then passively observe them splashing around in the shallows and looking for snakes and frogs to torment. Exceptionally few people adhered to the public heal...

May 2, 2020 Today’s idea- I love to glean from our hive mind the insights that bring sparkle to our conversations.   Here is a fresh parable in lyrical verse that I’ve captured.   A wonderful extension of the Great Pause! The Great Realization It was a world of waste and wonder, of poverty and plenty Back before we understood why hindsight’s 2020. You see, the people came up with companies to trade across all lands But they swelled so much bigger than we ever could have planned. We’d always had our wants but now it got so quick you could have anything you dreamed of in a day and with a click. We noticed families stopped talking, that’s not to say they never spoke, But the meaning must have melted and the work life balance broke. And the children’s eyes grew squarer and every toddler had a phone. They filtered out the imperfections but amidst the noise they felt alone. And everyday the skies grew thicker till you couldn’t see the stars. So we f...

May 1, 2020 Today’s observation – May 1, Beltane marks about six weeks since the ripples of lockdown and tucking in really began to wash over us. I got my last good hug on March 26 with family farewells as I returned to school. Today I was invited to a gathering of friends. We decided that we are a cohort (or bio-bubble in time of coronavirus), the latest communal model adapted for these times of extended social distancing. We think of these prophylactic affiliations as a temporary modification that will be unnecessary soon when we can get back to normal. If zoonic viral outbreaks grow more commonplace as we continue to encroach and exploit wild spaces, it could develop into a factor of social evolution over a decade or two, as we implicitly pass it on as the best option to the next generation. I can see it now, new language markers for behavior before and after coronavirus.   In the days when we co-mingled into every size of a crowd with impunity, that time will be BCV befor...

April 30, 2020 Today’s image – There are tens of thousands of crew members on over one hundred cruise ships stranded at sea.     Every nation that could help has shut the cruise lines out of their ports, and crew members banned from air travel. “No safe haven insight,” so they can only wait and wonder what will happen to them.   I know how hard it is to wait for a day or a week when things are dicey or dangerous, all viable outcomes in a black box. We moderns prefer to look ahead and make contingency plans – the training begins early with a practice that lauds the one year plan, the five-year plan, even the ten-year plan. Yet if these pandemic refugees had done all this homework, would the no man’s land they find themselves in now have swallowed like the phantasmagoric dreamscape they wake to each morning? All they did was show up to work one day, albeit a day that proved to be not their luckiest. I imagine they must be righteously pissed, when they are worried and ...