windthread

they had arrived together,  Sixteen Writers On The Decision NOT To Have Kids and

 

it's just WONDER…FULL that i read 16 Writers first.  It was easy and fast and so much energizing,  reading what women in their earlier years in this life say,  reading the arrangement of the essays that Meghan Daum deftly put together.  Looking on UTube for her and finding her and finding her with Cheryl Strayed and it so meshed with past conversations with Granddaughter about her college classes in the humanities,  human services,  how she told me that there is a great deal of activism ….she is older than most of her fellow students at the age of 27,  that the young ones are very energized and how i was surprised to hear that,  asking if they were in denial and she said no.  No denial.  but they just are GOING.  They are GOING with what they are committed to.  Just Going.   But in keeping with the first book,  many of them,  at least at this young point of their lives,  are not at all interested in having children.  There is a WHOLE HUGE thing to talk through here and it will come,  but it hasn't yet.  So i wait.  Wait and begin this

 

"Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward,  but history is not an army.  It is a crab scuttling sideways,  a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking  centuries of tension.  Sometimes one person inspires a movement,  or her words do decades later;  sometimes a few passionate people change the world;  sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do;  sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal,  and change comes upon us like a change of weather.  All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope.  To hope is to gamble.  It's to bet on the future,  on your desires,  on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety.  To hope is dangerous,  and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

I say all this because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch,   feeling lucky.  I say it because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency;  because hope should shove you out the door,  because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war,  from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal.  Hope just means another world might be possible,  not promised, not guaranteed.  Hope calls for action;   action is impossible without hope.  At the beginning of his massive 1930's treatise on hope,  the German philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote,  "The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming,  to which they themselves belong."   To hope is to give yourself to the future,  and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.

Anything could happen,  and whether we act or not has everything to do with it.  Though there is no lottery ticket for the lazy and the detached,  for the engaged there is a tremendous gamble for the highest stakes right now.  I say this to you not because i haven't noticed that the United States has strayed close to destroying itself and its purported values in pursuit of empire in the world and the eradication of democracy at home,  that our civilization is close to destroying the very nature on which we depend…the oceans,  the atmosphere,  the uncounted species of plant and insect and bird.  I say it because i have noticed:  wars will break out,  the planet will heat up,  species will die out,  but how many,  how hot,  and what survives depends on whether we act.  The future is dark,  with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.

Here, in this book,  I want to propose a new vision of how change happens,  I want to count a few of the victories that get overlooked,  I want to assess the wildly changed world we inhabit;  I want to throw out the crippling assumptions that keep many from being a voice in the world.  I want to start over, with an imagination adequate to the possibilities and the strangeness and the dangers on this earth in this moment."

Rebecca Solnit

 

a Second Iris

 

Mexican Elderberry,  stricken down a few years ago by unheard of temperature of 17 degrees below zero,  but somehow Just Going,  today,  forming blooms

 

the much maligned Salt Cedar  which will grow anywhere,  not matter what.  Salt Cedar.  Salt Cedar that bees love.

 

Salt Cedar, copper and rust

 

dog