Come knock me down and lick me with fierce, hooked tongues
Till I cry like a sea-wind or a bird winging;
Scour me, lick the trivia out of my bones;
Leave nothing at all of me that is not singing.
(excerpt, The Wild Cats of Ireland, Edith Rylander)
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When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
(John Muir)From a recent trip around the World Wide Web:
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In my native state (Texas), summer was a seven month season, April through October. Here in Wisconsin it's shorter: three months if we're lucky.
Since moving here 11 years ago and getting in sync with the local seasons, I've developed some sadness and anger at this holy day. How can it be the longest day of the year, when summer is just starting to establish itself!?!
Season markers are changing everywhere. The five-month winters of my early years in Wisconsin have shrunk to a three-month season. I must admit I don't mind that at all. If we're settling into three months for each season around here, I can appreciate that.
But settling doesn't describe what's happening. Major shifts are happening in climate and season. We all know that. I don't mean to preach to the choir, but I have to say this makes me sadder and angrier than the yearly decline of length-of-days that begins now.
I'm remembering
what I read several months ago in Joanna Powell Colbert's Gaian Tarot Artist's Journal:
A few weeks ago, Craig and I went down to Seattle to hear Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speak. We left the auditorium thinking, When can we vote for him? A very impassioned and brilliant man. The most thought-provoking idea I took away with me was this: when asked what the single most important thing each of us can do to protect the environment is, he answered: get involved on the federal level. I was quite surprised, as I am a longtime advocate of "acting locally." But he said that the Big Corporations just love the books and articles that come out that are titled "50 things you can do to save the earth," etc. because those books put the responsibility on each of us instead of them. Not that we shouldn't recycle, carpool, etc -- all those things that help to minimize impact on the environment -- but, he said, lasting change will only occur at the federal level.
Wherever you are, may your summer be beautiful and bountiful, and may you add "acting federally" to your environmental philosophy and activism.
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Reddy, Reddy, come when you're ready, they taunted.
We'll go on ahead.
take your time, Reddy
just keep chewing on your cud.
Your hide's in safekeeping
up in the rafters
so count yourself fortunate,
Red Woman!
Yoruba diviner's recitation, in Judith Gleason's Oya, In Praise of An African Goddess
The hunter's wives taunt the new "red" wife of their husband, whose family and lineage, unlike their own, is uncertain. After many years of jealousy of the woman and her children, the wives get the hunter drunk and tease the truth out of him: The red wife is a buffalo woman whom the hunter trapped when he found and hid her buffalo skin, which she had hidden in an ant hill after she transformed herself into a woman to sell her locust-seed spice in the market.
In the taunting of the co-wives, the red wife learns where her buffalo hide is hidden. She reclaims it, softens it with water, and transforms herself back into Buffalo Woman, the Goddess Oya. When she leaves the human village, she breaks off a bit of her horn and gives it to her children, instructing them to hold it while calling her name,
Oya, whenever they need something, and promising to answer.
Oya, Buffalo Woman, virtual oil on canvas © 2005 Sage Starwalker
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When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
(John Muir)From a recent trip around the World Wide Web:
- Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries
From Human Events Online, The National Conservative Weekly
In the Top 10: The Kinsey Report (Alfred Kinsey), The Feminine Mystique (Betty Friedan)
In the Honorable Mentions: Origin of the Species and Descent of Man (Charles Darwin), Coming of Age in Samoa (Margaret Mead), Second Sex (Simone de Beauvoir), Silent Spring (Rachel Carson), The Greening of America (Charles A. Reich)
- Adult Christianity
This blog's tagline could be "By their works you will know them."
Recent articles:
- Christian Psychopathology in Africa Leaves a Wake of Maimed Children
- Satanic Ritual Sex Abuse? Nope - Christian!
- Two Pastors Arrested in Rape of Female Student
- Political Friendster "...where Christian Adulterati can connect conservative Christian mullahs to the politicians with whom they share their beds." (Miss Poppy)
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