- We are scientists, too!
Sometimes travel is mandated, sometimes it is endured, but often it is undertaken for the sheer pleasure of seeing new places or visiting old friends.
I recently read an essay, Rite of Passage, in the current issue of the magazine 'Orion'. Writer and climate change activist Mike Tidwell takes his son to camp in a place which is part of what I used to call 'Home': Big Bend National Park. Mike relates to his son many the same thoughts that haunt me as a member of society and as a concerned human being.
Here's what bothers me about people. Everyone (almost everyone) is so fixated on their own little dramas, creating and perpetuating them to the point of ad nauseum, that they lose sight of the bigger picture out here. Of which all lived places are a part. Or they don't care. Even I fell victim to this. It took stepping back to see how we really are. Were just as selfish and destructive as those we blame everything on.
But people of any community can make a difference.
If we want to.
I know I am probably stepping on toes with this comment, but I also blame myself. And this is one reason of several I've felt the need to remove myself from just one location, to be able to step away and look back. And at least offer my time and expertise to help in any way I can, no matter how small it is. Because my conscience just won't let me not do so.
“So this whole thing—Katrina, Sandy, drought—is about Exxon making slightly higher profits for a few more years until god knows what happens to the climate?”
“Yes.”
“Dad, how are you losing this debate?”
“We’re not losing it,” I say. “We’re just not winning it fast enough.”
“What’s it going to take?” he asks. “Just what in the world is it going to take?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “I don’t know.” I keep saying it. Until I stop saying it."
And I hear my own voice echoing the same..........
We meet people and fall in love. And when we part, they leave marks for us to remember them by. Our lovers sculpt us. They define us. For better or worse. Like a pinball, we slam into them and rebound in a different direction. Propelled by the contact. And after their parting, we might be scarred. But stronger. Or more fragile or needy or angry or guilty. But never unchanged. Our lovers linger inside us like ghosts. Haunting the corridors and deserted rooms. Sometimes whispering. Sometimes screaming. Invisible but… always there. Waiting.
Perhaps after five decades, 'love' and all the
related entanglements become something one can pick up and wear for a day, like
a piece of clothing, or it becomes an old friend and companion, always at your
side but without all the frivolous ornaments that adorn younger phases. And
then for some of us it's a dog-eared well-worn book read only by ourselves,
constantly rewritten.
Labels: musings, photography, quotes
Webbed membranes are appearing between my fingers. Perhaps all the greens I’ve been eating have methylated some genes and turned on those that express for webbed membranes in ducks and other aquatic avians and mammals.
If I wake up with gills, I’ll know it’s time to get outa this place.
Rain has been a daily thing for many weeks, minus the outlier day or 2 when we are bedazzled with a large orb of plasma that gives us a bright blue and dry sky. When that occurs a battery inside us gets charged and we wind up to bask and dance outside.
Alas, another cool wet day, smothered in gray, and we fight the urge to curl up in a ball, letting go of awareness and consciousness. Part of our brain has closed its door and hung out a sign, “Due to inclement weather we have ceased functioning. Please feel free to become a zombie.”
So I walked to the fiber studio in the rain, picked up a coffee on the way, hung my wet clothes to dry, turned on the jazz station….And occasionally glance at my full special coffee mug. 😏
Labels: musings
That was my answer when a friend asked me how I was. First, I looked at her and asked myself, ‘Should I show my fake smile and lie like a robot?’. Then I decided to be honest.
The response to my reply was an up-tick of the eyebrows and peering over her glasses, with a loud silent ‘Ohh?’.
The many inner dialogues have been argumentative, unsure, illogical, but all too human. I’m sure I’m not the only one panicking, sometimes a bit unsettling, other times trying to put a cork in the volcano. Keep physically busy to calm the mind, and the moment you let your guard down, the fury screams through the gate. But it goes nowhere. Because you bite your tongue and clamp your mouth shut. Instead you see the silent scream when you look in the mirror.
I don’t want to be the biting dog barking all the time; we have too much of that already from the pulpits, the streets, and the White House. But I don’t want to be the Pollyanna, either. Sometimes I want to rub the faces of the Pollyannas in the shit that is being thrown around from all directions. “Here, take your joy-joy and your little dog, too. And get out of the way!”
In the past it all used to flow through my fingertips, but something broke, snapped, in 2013 and there’s no smooth conduit anymore. I’m not a writer, although writing was always my cathersis. And I have asked myself since then why it doesn’t work anymore. I always jokingly tell myself I need a flash drive to insert in my brain. The monologues and stories are still there, but they always trip over the door sill and never make it out. Except the stupid juvenile ones that sprint past the door and spew fury.
Then I found a perfect explanation by writer Jeremy Wade, “Tr*mp has traumatized so many of us to such an extent that attaching any positive descriptors to his name is infuriating. You don’t need me to tell you that’s a valid response. He is fascist garbage, and he’s responsible for some real heinous shit. I’m sorry for all the ways it’s affected you and the people you care about.” I feel partly vindicated, despite that it’s more than that ‘T Name I Cannot Speak.’
It’s not the virus, the pandemic, the social distancing, or wearing a face mask. I’m a biologist; I know the virus, what it is, how it works, what it does, and what I, we, need to do. I’m fine with that. It’s the politics, the history, and the humans. They are illogical, unreasonable, unintelligent, memory impaired, and blind to long-term consequences beyond their noses. And they would all rather fight against each other than try to work together to make this unfunny universe more a joy to live in. They are always right and everyone else is always wrong.
It’s also all the collateral damage. Everything we hear and read about the environment is unavoidable doomsday-esque. It’s hot, it’s on fire, polluted, becoming scarce, radioactive, dead and extinct animals, no more butterflies and bees, oil-covered ducks, fish with mercury, children drinking lead, calamitous storms, and not one acre on the planet without a human footprint. Instead we shove the flag of Planet Plastic waving over a scorched earth. I try to do more than recycle and reuse, but it’s like taking one grain of sand from the Saharan desert. Meanwhile, I’m surrounded by frenzied shoppers on their cell phones and their loud cars.
Then I found the perfect descriptor from the book, “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?” (By Lorrie Moore): “The bad news of the world, like most of bad news, has no place to go. You take it to the bulletin board part of your heart. You say, ‘Look’. You say, ‘See’. That is all.”
This has been the bulletin board, translated and deciphered. But there’s still a pin hole in my heart.
Labels: Poetry
Alyssa Milano calls for sex strike as protest over Republican abortion laws
I think a more public protest and boycott would have more impact, but she is right in publicizing the warning. And if we women and men do not oppose and protest, we will truly be a third-world country and controlled by the power of dominating males.I find it ironic that the republicans and conservatives want less restrictions and infringements of individual rights. Yet, when it comes to women, they want to control us and have all the power.
Hypocrisy at it’s worst and I have not a millisecond or micrometer of respect for anyone that is on that bandwagon. I don’t care if you are pro- or anti-abortion. It is a woman’s RIGHT to be able to make those decisions and have control over her own body.
If this continues, I propose we require a clamp on the epididymis of all men, and each male will have to get a permit to unclamp it and allow semen to pass.
See how that sits with y’all.
“We need to understand how dire the situation is across the country,” Milano said. “It’s reminding people that we have control over our own bodies and how we use them.”
She noted that women have historically withheld sex to protest or advocate for political reform. She cited how Iroquois women refused to have sex in the 1600s as a way to stop unregulated warfare. Most recently, she noted that Liberian women used a sex strike in 2003 to demand an end to a long-running civil war.
Milano said the criticism didn’t bother her and that her tweet was having her desired effect, “which is getting people to talk about the war on women”.
She said she feared one of the laws could eventually be decided by the conservative-leaning US supreme court, which Republicans hope will overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade decision legalizing abortion.
“That is absolutely horrifying to me,” Milano said. “Anyone who is not completely and totally outraged by this and doesn’t see where this is leading, I think, is not taking this threat seriously.”