Caterina > Recent Status Updates

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.

from the shoulders up
she was pure Nefertiti, and out of that divine
brown throat came honey and cockleburs.
She had nine children and no identifiable husband.
She wore a headcloth like a tiara above a sack dress
improvised from a beach towel. She'd turned larceny
against the bureaucracy into an art form.

Overhead, some crows came flying up from the fjord. More followed, and soon the sky was teeming with birds. It was like a curtain of living flesh, I thought to myself, beautiful, shimmering patterns of black and darkest blue that a moment later broke up as the crows began to settle in the line of trees..Upstairs, a window opened & I heard the sound of Line's voice, soft & gentle amid the gruff squawking of the crows.

When I was a child I'd known every tree in the neighborhood.In my mind they were individuals,each with their own particular characteristics..They bent down to me, &their feelings seeped into my consciousness..
Suddenly I saw myself surrounded by great, living creations.Silent &inscrutable,neither hostile nor friendly, &quite without opinion regarding us little people..And they were living creations, not just things..

If you remember anything at all from the movie Alien, I bet it's the scene where that alien creature bursts out of John Hurt's chest. I'm sorry to have to tell you that such gruesome scenes are not just figments of the screenwriter's imagination but commonly occur in real life.

In the daytime there was something hard and edgy about what I contained, something dry and barren..The wine made up for it..Like seaweed when the tide has gone out & it's been lying there on the rocks, dried up by the sun, and then the water rises again: the way seaweed feels then! When it senses that cold, salty water lifting it up; when it waves back and forth in that wondrous, replenishing element...

But the sun
among the sundews, down there,
is so bright, an underfoot
webwork of carnivorous rubies,
a star-swarm thick as the gnats
they're set to catch, delectable
double-faced cockleburs, each
hair-tip a sticky mirror
afire with sunlight, a million,
each mirror a trap set to
unhand unbelieving . .

. .the sun
underfoot is so dazzling . . .
there is so much light
in the cup that, looking,
you start to fall upward.

People often ask: What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today? A flip answer would be: The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem. That flip answer is essentially correct, because any of the dozen [previously discussed] problems if unsolved would do us grave harm, and because they all interact with each other.

Does the moon remember? ... One could wish the moon died nightly, if only that she be born unburdened the next eve, free from a backlog of human depravity.

Late in the day the fog
wrung itself out like a sponge
in glades of rain ...

then, in a lifting
of wisps and scarves, of smoke-rings
from about the islands, disclosing ...

the bandings of platinum
and magnesium suffusing,
minute by minute, with clandestine
rose and violet, with opaline
nuance of milkweed, a texture
not to be spoken of above a whisper ....