Let's read!

Titus Atkins, a high school student in Brooklyn, says that reading Captain Underpants led him, when he was in second grade, to reading The Chronicles of Narnia. His mom told him they were kind of the same. (Reported this morning on NPR's "Morning Edition." A new Captain Underpants story is being released today.)

Makes me laugh

from Jessica Custér Bindel:

haikus are easy

but sometimes they don't make sense

refrigerator

Spinning days of January

I am already able to notice that the days are lengthening, and I am thankful for the sureness that they will continue to do so. As reliable as the lengthening of time the sun shows at our particular latitude, all variety of change is utterly true and reliable.

It has also dawned on me and shone bright as a clear, January noon that for all our cultural "Think Positive" sermons, no atom is whole without its electrons. Perhaps life could be better if we each grow to be aware of and honor our negative parts, incorporate instead of suppress them, in order to experience wholeness, whole-hearted-ness?

Trash, imagining, trust.

The natural world does not create trash, it creates food, and death is our word for a specific moment of change. We humans, at the top of the food chain, imagining ourselves so powerful (and not imagining how powerful we, in congregate, really might be) have repositioned molecular structures to create Styrofoam and other plastics, medicines that we expel unprocessed, nuclear waste. A multitude of trash for land-air-water that Mother Earth didn't naturally create and cannot easily use as food. While doing this we seem to have forgotten that we, also, eat and drink and have our life breath from constant change, from the recycled Mother Earth. 

I wonder: how long can we create trash before Mother can no longer bear our burdens? What must we grow to understand?  What in our social structure must die? What in our political world can we change to diminish the multitudes of varieties of trash we create? Why, we even label some people as trash. Just imagine.

I love the mystical underpinnings of the world that I observe every waking moment. I trust nature. I also happen to love some engineers and scientists, and I trust their imaginations and their practical ways of doing. And I trust that if we must continue to destroy our home planet, it will be an easy path.

My life in retirement has much space for things that are important but not urgent.

A flock of blue birds often flutters around in the branches as I walk near Deer Creek, the male's colors so intense, blue with rosy breasts, the females more subtle and equally beautiful. A little way down the road a male pileated woodpecker occasionally works a tree trunk, so dressy in his polished black with white trim and his fancy red hat. He's so much bigger than the blue birds. Simultaneously sharing the same sky space are bald eagles, down from the Susquehanna, feeding on fresh meat put out for them in the field.

Such a size range. Just like humans. And who is to say which is more valuable?

"And now let us welcome the new year, full of things that have never been." Rainer Maria Rilke