We didn’t have internet at our house for three days so I enjoyed going to our local libraries, and seeing how well-used they are.  Community.  I also had more time for meditation and reading.  I see what a habit it is to come to the computer first-thing, and throughout the day, and feel the necessity to know the latest news.  This morning as I read what the Trump administration continues to do, I feel like I’m going to vomit, so I’ll post this and return to reading a book I recommend: Can Poetry Save the Earth, A Field Guide to Nature Poems by John Felstiner.  

What a contrast to the Trump administration dismantling environmental protections and reveling in the billion he got to do so.

From Felstiner’s book:  

Motion and stillness, a changing constancy.  “The early American painter Thomas Cole saw in waterfalls a “beautiful but apparently incongruous idea, of fixedness and motion – a single existence in which we perceive unceasing change and everlasting duration.” A poem, like a painting catches life for the ear or eye, stills what’s ongoing in human and nonhuman nature. 

Richard Wilbur writes of windblown bedsheets on a clothesline, “moving / And staying like white water”.

Of course, for many, this may be an image from the past and so we unite in the stillness of memory as it waves in us like bedsheets on a line.