Caterina > Recent Status Updates

. . .
He waited in emptiness, in faith. And then grace came...and he felt once more the gift of pity, calm in its descent like the landing of a dove. ...
How to tell her in words, then, what he'd learned himself by pain & grace? That only by forgiveness could she forget, & forgiveness was not a single act, but a matter of constant practice.

It was a leap of faith--to throw one's heart across a gulf, and trust another to catch it. His own was still in flight across the void, with no certainty of landing. But still in flight.

The lack of bugs on car windshields is becoming the accessible emblem of insect decline, much the way dejected polar bears are now a sort of shorthand for the climate crisis.
.
.
[Huh! And for me, the fact that people come to the nature preserve where I work just to see fireflies on night hikes -- the children have never seen them. . . "They took all the trees, and put them in a tree museum..." ]

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
the desert shall rejoice and blossom;
like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly,
and rejoice with joy and singing.
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return,
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be on their heads;
they shall obtain joy and gladness,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
.
.
-- Isaiah 35:1-2, 10

Sleeping under the moon&stars in the arms of a naked lover,the two of you cradled by furs&soft leaves,lulled by the gentle murmur of the chestnut trees&the far-off rumble of a waterfall,is terribly romantic.Sleeping under a crude lean-to,squashed into a soggy mass between a large,wet husband&an equally large equally wet nephew..while fending off the advances of an immense&thoroughly saturated dog,is slightly less so.

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
And he will destroy on this mountain
the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
the sheet that is spread over all nations;
he will swallow up death forever.
Then the LORD GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces ...
.
- Isaiah 25:6-8

I am often asked whether wasps are contributing to the decline of other 'more useful' insects, such as bees..Based on these calculations, I think it's safe to say that social wasps are not contributing to the recent 'insectageddon,' at least not native wasp species. They are..creaming off the most abundant invertebrates..[helping] keep a diverse community..in check without hunting any to the brink of local existence.

Parasitoid wasps-that rarely sting-account for almost 50% of the 230 invertebrate species..commercially used as biocontrol agents.These tiny pest controllers are like house elves-you never see them,only evidence of their work.For the price of a good bottle of wine, you can be the proud owner of enough Trichogramma wasps to strip your house clean of clothes moths.Let them run free-don't worry, you won't even see them.

If the benefits of nature are assigned no value, then they will be treated as having no value. -- Dame Professor Georgina Mace, FRS (2014)

But the green had yet to prevail. It was as if the forest were on the brink, I thought, yet to decide. To burst into life or retreat once more into asceticism. For now, it had put feelers out, that was all.

Maybe this was Mum's last spring on earth.

Every single death has its own explanation.
But not death as a whole. That has no explanation.

The German poet Goethe said, "We should do our utmost to encourage the Beautiful, for the Useful encourages itself."

Archimedes: Give me a fulcrum and I will move the world.
Diogenes: Will it be better off in some other place?

Perhaps fate laid your life out for you like a dress on a bed, and you could either wear it or go naked.

...the single principle must be love.

In the course of a long career, the interpreter will meet the pestiferous, the unmanageable, the ineducable, and some whose apparent reason for existence is to provide the hangman with work...One who has suffered a number of attacks of poison ivy may get the idea that this malicious plant dominates the scenery. In truth it occupies only a little space in the whole floral luxuriance.

The wisest man is insufficiently conscious of the remedial quality of mere presence in the wilderness when he first comes from the marketplace of nerve-wracking half-truths and no-truths into a genial haven of a whole. Then as the jaded and shredded man senses the unmarred fabric of life all around him, he begins to feel himself becoming whole again.

The professor threw himself down on the sofa and moaned: "I am a hopeless failure as a teacher."
"This is just the dejection of a moment, my dearest," said his wife, gently..
"It is not momentary..For months my pupils have shown an interest in everything I tell them."
A great joy shone in the woman's eyes."You are a poet! I am so happy!..We shall now starve happily together."
-Pedro Sarrachaca, El Pedagogo Vascongado

I am thinking..about a great oak tree that stands in the woods behind the house..A remarkable number of birds inhabit it & I commit this thought to the typewriter.The thought has now left my inner being..though I myself remain here..I am & will always be enclosed within my mind & body. .
But what if there is no..division between what is inside a person & what is outside? What if the 2 domains exist in constant flux?

Death is our temporal horizon, unseen by the animals. They, on the other hand, are more closely bound to the moment, and in the Bible's account of the Creation that state is paradisiacal.

Do monsters create war, or does war create monsters?

But Kierkegaard's abandonment was different. The silence in which one might forget oneself was like the silence of the lily and the bird, they were our teachers, but also like the silence of the forest and the silence of the sea.Even when the sea rages loudly, he wrote, it is nonetheless silent, and these words I read as the sea raged loudly outside the house in which I sat.

But Nietzsche was impossible to read without consideration of the fact that he himself was a loser, weak and alone, and that everything he wrote about will, about power and about strength was to compensate for his own inadequacy.

Easter Morning

a stone at dawn
cold water in the basin
these walls' rough plaster
imageless
after the hammering
of so much insistence
on the need for naming
after the travesties
that passed as faces,
grace: the unction
of sheer nonexistence
upwelling in this
hyacinthine freshet
of the unnamed
the faceless

Majestic Great Blue Herons, the color of rain clouds, blessed my Saturday spent canoeing and walking in two local nature preserves -- and we were blessed with a tiny bit of rain recently during our drought -- and so today, in anticipation of April and Earth Day, I begin this ecologically-themed novel which begins in the style of a fairy tale.

Why were there two of me? One who said no, and one who egged me on. One who wanted to, and one who did not. How much easier human life would be if inner agreement had been our default setting.

Males are an evolutionary extravagance because they don't make any babies...[but] Despite the difficulty that PhDs have had in identifying the benefits of having males,nature must have its reasons, because males are very common in many kinds of plants and animals.
.
[Ha! This human woman is glad we have males! I even dreamed about handsome young Chuck Norris last night ... RIP. He resembled my handsome husband.]

Thus in 1944 as in 1941 Finnish resistance achieved the realistic goal expressed by my Finnish friend: not of defeating the Soviet Union, but of making further Soviet victories prohibitively costly, slow, and painful. As a result, Finland became the sole continental European country fighting in World War II to avoid enemy occupation.
.
[! - I did not know this story and it's super inspiring! Listened twice.]

Love is a climate
small things find safe
to grow in

I can't say this has the same je. ne sais quoi as the My Struggle series or the 4 seasons cycle or A Time for Everything. And what a sorry lot of miserable, drunken jerks & violent mentally damaged folks & every bodily function, which I guess emphasizes our nature as animals among the burgeoning weirdness of the greater animal world, with dead & even extinct animals coming back to life.