A C. T U. A L. L Y

April is National Poetry Month.   I have to admit I have some dificulty with poetry; I think I’m too literal, too analytical.   But I do love prose with poetic images that can be visual or auditory, even olfactory.   And there’s been some beautiful imagery wrought by the coronavirus out of fear, suffering, and uncertainty.   So just gonna slip in here under the wire of National Poetry Month with some poetic prose and a poem for a pandemic.   From Under Europe’s Strictest Lockdown, the World is Only as Big as Our Windows , by Ben Ehrenreich, in The Nation : So far I’ve been among the lucky, locked down in a small Barcelona apartment with two people I love, and lots of windows. The strictest lockdown in Europe went into effect here on March 16. Since then, except for five memorable strolls to the grocery store and increasingly leisurely expeditions to take out the trash, my world has shrunk to the narrow, intersecting streets I can see through the wi...

Yesterday was a milestone in the Time of the Coronavirus.   No, it wasn’t the new number of deaths or new infections.   Nor the number of test kits, swabs, reagents, and PPE delivered to lucky governors and mayors who won the Matter of Life and Death Lottery.   No, it was a much more significant, a much happier, milestone.     Yesterday was the tenth birthday of The Kittens, aka The Idiots, better known as Calyx (who sometimes goes by The Big ‘Un, Rosebud, Flaw Paw, Baby Boy, or Mr. Biggie Large) seen below, and China Blue (whose sobriquets are Little Sweetie Girl, Little Boo, and Honey Bunny), seen below.    So I want to give a quick, day-late-and-a-dollar-short, shout-out to the two fur balls who make my day worth getting out of bed for.     And to their mother Orontea (below), aka Mama Tee One Time and The Tea Meisterin, for whom I played birth coach ten years ago. For The Kittens, (and they will always be The Kittens...

“Humans are part of nature, not separate from it, and human activity that hurts the environment also hurts us.” Meehan Crist writer in residence, biological sciences, Columbia University NYT Crist I’ve often thought that the Fall of Man, the biblical story of the casting out of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, that state of Nature where man and woman lived in harmony and grace with other creatures, is a parable about our degradation of the Earth after the Fall.   That is our original sin and this is my interpretation.   Eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge sought to establish a hierarchy among living beings with Man at the apex, assuming dominion over Paradise.   This false knowledge created a false hierarchy which created a false narrative:   Man is not of Nature, but above it; Man is not controlled by Nature but rather controls it.   In my interpretation of this parable, it was our blind, misguided, arrogant pride and...