Crossing Nebraska

My childhood was magical in many respects, but especially so for having fostered in me such keen awareness of the wonder of the natural world. Though we lived in a fairly developed suburban area, the family backyard opened onto a woodsy tract that has been with me either in reality or in reminiscence since I was old enough to venture beyond the confines of our little garden. Ostensibly, that plot of land was the plant cultivation area for a nearby garden supply retailer, which is why we in the adjoining neighborhood simply referred to it as ‘the nursery’. For all practical purposes, though, ‘the nursery’ was so infrequently tended and so overgrown that I experienced it then as I experience wilderness today.     A woodsy scene very reminiscent of 'the nursery'     A walk through ‘the nursery’ was a walk through a crazy-quilt of vaguely planned habitats stitched together and overlaid with whatever weeds and wildflowers and  woodland succession pla...

Gosh, I began this contemplation almost a month ago! It seems like ages. Since that time, however, I’ve been distracted by current events both negative and positive. On one hand, the killings in Aurora , Colorado would seem to represent the very worst that we humans can be. Even as I make that observation, however, I’m tempted to qualify it by noting that the recent drought we’ve been experiencing across the continental United States, and its very likely status as a human-caused climatic event, might be even more representative of the worst that we humans can be. No, the gradual destruction caused by global warming will not be as easily quantified as the loss of life in Aurora (as if even that can be quantified!), but it will certainly be no less real. The Olympics, on the other hand, have the potential to reveal us at our best – not our chest-thumping, blood-doping, win at all cost best, mind you, but our coming together in global goodwill best. I’ve been a fan of the Olympi...

How many mass shootings have occurred since the one in the Aurora, Colorado movie theater that first inspired this post some five and a half years ago? How many lives have been violently snuffed out? How many families have been destroyed? How many people have been forever scarred by the trauma that they were lucky enough to have survived, but not so lucky as to have avoided altogether? Some brave individuals are counting, and trying to do what they can to persuade hearts and minds to embrace meaningful change. Many others seem to have just grown weary of the reality of massacre after massacre, and the repetitive and ineffectual discussion that ensues. I'm updating this post in the aftermath of the Parkland, Florida school shooting. Perhaps I want to ascertain which group I still belong to, the one trying to affect change, or the one that has grown numb. Has the worldview that I articulated below changed at all? Do I have anything to add? God, The Buddha, and The Joker I’m ...

Sweltering summer afternoons such as these inevitably remind me of my childhood – the still air, the unrelenting sun, and the silence only intermittently punctuated by the ratcheting sound of a grasshopper in mid hop, or the unanswered call of a field sparrow, or the sticking sound that automobile tires make as they accelerate down an almost melting asphalt road. “How about we go fossil hunting?” I’d pose the question over the phone to my childhood friend, Charlie, or he to me. “What time?” was the usual response, neither of us needing much in the way of convincing when it came to such suggestions. “After lunch. One o’clock. Under the railroad trestle.” And so we’d meet in the shade of the old wooden bridge and ride our bicycles along the dusty trail to where the new highway cut through the layers of a limestone undergirded hillside. Once there, we’d make our way slowly, almost wordlessly along the fractured strata, carefully overturning the loose rock, becoming more ...

We’re awash in stuff, very little of which is actually necessary for the enjoyment of life. Simply consider how the size of the average home has increased over the years, without a corresponding increase in our happiness, and yet we still find the need for off-site storage in which to house whatever won’t fit in our basements, attics, and garages. It would be nice if the only downside of this glut of stuff was that it clutters up our lives, but that’s not the case at all. The massive amounts of fossil fuel used to manufacture, ship, maintain, and ultimately dispose of all of this stuff has the earth’s atmosphere so laden with carbon dioxide that global climate change now jeopardizes our very survival and that of all living beings. Weathered front porch Where do we go from here? Your response to this question will depend on your worldview, your faith in the advancement of technology, and your assessment of the magnitude of the problem. Some people are still in denial regarding the reali...

Illustration by Ed Young Can what save the world? Wabi-sabi. You know…, that Japanese aesthetic sense kind of thing. Actually, I don’t believe I’d ever even heard of wabi-sabi until a couple of years ago when I was introduced to the concept by a children’s story about a cat named Wabi Sabi who was trying like the dickens to figure out the meaning of his name. Of course, the premise of the story relates precisely to the fact that the wabi-sabi aesthetic is quite difficult to define. We just sort of know it when we see it – as soon as we know what we’re looking for, that is! Ah, but are we going to let the difficulty of defining a concept stand in the way of us utilizing it to save the world? For the children, for the kittens, for Wabi Sabi’s sake we must try! Let’s begin with a few recent definitions put forth by various authors: “Wabi-sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things mod...