Today, for some reason, this stanza comes to mind...

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!

("To a Mouse", Robert Burns)

Burns was kind of a rotter, but do be nice to your fellow critter today!

If I never hear the word "frothy" in relation to financial markets again, it'll be too soon. 🙃

*It refers to a situation in which overconfident investors have driven the market value of an asset well above its intrinsic value, and it's used to describe a lot of the hype cycles in today's economy. It essentially means that something's being overvalued and everyone knows this can't last, but the phrasing is much nicer than "we sleep on a bed of lies that could break at any time", so... it sticks!

Off for a run. Didn't sleep well, but I was still up before the alarm.

Someone dear to me is struggling very much right now, a world away, and there's very little I can do.

In Kazantzakis's Last Temptation, there's a scene where the child-Christ cries out "God, make me God! God, make me God!" (you can see why the church hated this book 😉) and I think about how often we humans ache to have the power to fix... oh, everything.

But sometimes we're just smart enough to know how little we can do. 🕊️

I would never submit my own data to a genetic test, but my sister did years ago (thus covering all of us), so every now and then I get to chuckle at the fact that I am White As Fuck... while also wondering about the Spanish/Portuguese on my mother's French heritage side.

Would they be chuckling to see me in one of Spain's old colonies now? (Sometimes locals assume I'm from Spain or Portugal.)

We humans get around, don't we?
Especially while colonizing, or driven by colonizers out of our homes.

Okay, existential anguish hour over.

(It's like tea time, but with fewer geopolitical feuds over the correct method of preparation.)

Back to work. 🕊️💛

Be kind to yourselves.

We're all just muddling through.

(I know we're still a month off from the two-year anniversary of Russia's invasion, but it's all just hitting me very, very hard today, how much this world of ours is committed to compounding hardship with more hardship. Active cruelty and callous indifference aren't the sum total of all that we can do in this life - but they are terrifically *loud* parts of the human experience all the same.)

Sometimes I think about all that we've endured and survived, and it takes my breath away.

Because it's never survived by all of us, is it?

We're the planes that made it home from war, riddled with bullet holes on less-essential parts.

We say to ourselves, look how resilient we were!

As if everyone cut down just wasn't resilient enough.

We're not still here because we're any better than the people we've lost.

But we *are* here, facing the next test, and the next.

And that has to be enough.

Thinking today about ancient creative contests, and how the prize in Ancient Greece was once a tripod.

This was before coins were common, and it was *so* much more useful than the statues given out today.

Why, with a good metal tripod you had a place to hang a cooking instrument over a nice fire!

Who wouldn't scrap for top prize as a poet or playwright, with something that useful on the line?

(We've fallen a long way with awards contests ever since. 🙃)

I have a friend who sometimes asks me to describe a photo for her, especially when it involves nature or space.

She's been blind her whole life, so there's a real gift in the challenge of trying to describe stunning visuals in other language, by invoking other senses.

And the opportunity to help always improves my care with words--for which I'm very grateful.

I hope folks remember how much mutual benefit there is in being present with each other, whenever they feel like a burden with an ask.

Gentle #politics suggestion:

Just because the news is filled with a lot of ugliness on the US front right now, and will be for the next while, doesn't mean we forget that we're preaching to the choir here when we vent about one name in particular, who's become synonymous with threats to democracy.

Venting's healthy and normal, but we also don't need to give that news cycle oxygen.

We can elevate people making a difference instead.

We're going to need a *lot* of them to turn this toxic tide.

@Alfred Who is your daddy, and what does he do?

All right kippers.

Packed day. Off for the rest of it. Some advice from children's tales:

1) Don't get into Mr. McGregor's vegetable patch if you can help it--but if you do, better to lose your clothes than your life.

2) Always be nice to woodland creatures that ask you for favours. Yes, even the weird ones. *Especially* the weird ones.

3) Never promise a stranger who helps you in crisis the first thing you see coming home. That goes doubly for if your wife's expecting!

Safe travels, all. 💛

I never know whether to laugh or cry at articles like this. They make it sound on the surface like there's some great trick to saving the natural world - with technology! - but when you read the piece, the real answer is ancient and analog: in this case, plant wildflowers and native grasses around everything to improve insect populations.

The "progress" here is simply respecting what we already know works.

https://theprogressplaybook.com/2024/01/23/study-shows-how-solar-farms-can-revive-insect-populations/

There's nothing like *leaving* the park as the sun comes up. :) Time to work. 👍🏻