What the Muses Leave Behind

I took a breather, got some work done, ended another school year, hit the road, changed chapters.  2020 continues to tumble us like we were Pleistocene river gravel in a lapidary drum. We ping around the side walls, make a lot of noise. I have launched my epic road trip - big Western Loop for the next five weeks or so.  It appears that COVID is raging as a pandemic more than ever, the push for social evolution away from our racist roots is determined to make a crater in the status quo and the Trump regime continues to astonish and divide us. I will keep to the edges as I go.  I knew before I left where my first stop would be.  Upon arrival to Judyth's, I walked onto her porch, knocked and when she came to the door, I asked, "How shall we meet?"  My hands were already prayerful at my heart.  Wordless, she flowed out, wrapping her arms around my waist, mine took their cue, enveloping her shoulders.  The reunion moment was a tall glass of water. I had car...

May 28, 2020 This week's observations and ideas – As the economic and social flood gates slide open, I try not to get washed away.   There is a full spectrum of realities in this riptide of reentry.   I was grateful to visit the nail salon for more human touch – ahhhhh; and for the innovations that gave the salon a sense of enhanced safety and hygiene: suspended plexiglass panels hung by fishing lines between Pedi-chairs; plexiglass shields mounted on mani-tables. Masked nailists have been the norm for a long time, but I showed my respect and gratitude to them arriving in my cotton face shield too.   I was not too bothered by the naked face in the chair beside me because shields were up!   Word on the street is that restaurants and bars are packed and partying like it is 1999.   I expect that the CDC will collect more data from these science experiments. I predict that it's the servers who will newly join the "most at risk" essential workers list, right behind...

May 24, 2020 Today’s idea – We have one more week in the 2019-2020 academic year.   Tomorrow is a holiday, then three days of classes, a remote school field day and graduation. The field day is a long-standing tradition going back decades, a friendly competition between the two houses of Imps and Tigers.   We are all sorted, each as we arrive, everyone a life long member of their house.   This time next week, graduation ceremony will be set up on the nest of lawn at the campus’s center – a small affair (one of the blessings right now of a small school) of seven graduates.   As we are in Iowa, masks are recommended but not required.   So many of us have arrived at this present moment by living large.   To pull things in is a challenge, one that feels too granular and one that presents the most viable path forward. The day after graduation, we get organized for the summer, the shape of which is still a mystery to most of us.   Our new normal demand...

May 22, 2020   Today’s image – At dusk, I watched a frenzy of swifts dance into the summer stack like a fistful of pennies whirling in slow motion around a vortex funnel.   Hundreds flew in wide noisy parabolas, and then unceremoniously dropped like feathered stones, out of sight. I tried to imagine what it looked like inside the red brick column, how each swift clung to his measure of mortar. If I could hover, owl silent above the chimney mouth, I could take in an excellent view of their box, study how their collective bodies resemble a dark cousin to the coral reefs. I would love to ask them some questions about displacement. After a hundred winters and demise has gobbled most of the chimney, where then does this frenzy go?   How many nights can the refugees make do in unwelcomed places, keeping an eye on the horizon?   Birds don’t know time. I thinned out the root seedlings in the box gardens, tucked in some annuals at the entrance bed. I’m giving more atten...

May 21, 2020 Today's dialectic – I’ve been thinking about the mask thing. On the one hand, they are essential for curbing the first lines of transmission. (I don’t know where people around me have been, and I don’t really want to know - TMI.)   So if one accepts the science, it is self-evident.   These nano-sized hitchhikers know how to catch a ride on spewed words and allergy sneezes, hang ten on droplets as they ride through the air following gravity, and innocently find their next host. So our public health agents have offered logical recommendations – when we go out in public, wear a mask and when you get to home base, wash your hands. It’s not rocket science; it’s epidemiology 101. But thanks to the fool in the White House, public mask-wearing has become a political game of chicken. And half of the Midwesterners with whom I now publicly circulate have taken his lead, bringing the chicken game with them. I might assume that those who opt out of masking in close public ...

May 20, 2020 Today’s image – Americans love to travel.   Sometimes I think, we see our mobility as another constitutional right, the right to go where we damn well please. It’s become part of the American existential, no doubt, ingrained by our immigrant ancestors, embedded in our psyche before five like the other pieces of our implicit upbringing.   It is an intractable attitude now and probably a driver for our restlessness and discontent with the shelter in place directives.   We just can’t be still that long unless we become impaired, and then woe be the ones who have to live with us as we grouse and complain.   The travel industry and adventure authors like Jack London and Elizabeth Gilbert have fanned that sojourner flame. Maybe it’s not the motion of travel but an insatiable curiosity.   We want to experience ourselves in other geographies – what they can tickle out of us, what new moxie they demand we bring.   Then some have found their seasonal...

May 19, 2020 Today’s idea – We are in this together -I see that a lot these days.   Billboards on secondary highways, neon-colored letters painted on storefront windows, plastic letter inserts for sidewalk signs on wheels.   It’s a good thought that rides on the back of a bigger truth. Actually, we are in everything together. Our biology has developed to be intrinsically connected to other biology around us and beyond us. The air we exchange with the plant world fans the nutrients we trade with other life, that rides with the water as it conveys through everything - sky to sea to sky to sea to sky.   The science lens continues to find more and more ways that everything has connected with everything else.   Some of the connections are up close and personal; some are subtle and extenuated.   Think about the paradox of an aspen grove.   We see hundreds or thousands of tall, slim, white trees with heart-shaped leaves that tremble in the wind.   Below th...