James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.
My poem “Visions of a Healthy Planet” is up at qarrtsiluni as part of the currently unfolding “Health” issue. You can even listen to me read it. Go. Check it out and be sure to look around while you’re there since there’s a lot of great writing to be found.
There are some things that make the world spin a little slower. One of those is snow in Austin. Not the icy rain and sleet we get every few years that shuts the city down, but real snow. The light fluffy stuff you can use to make snow men and snowballs to hurl at your colleagues in the parking lot.
I work a good fifteen miles north of where I live and up there, the snow really accumulated and even covered the grass in some of the nearby fields. Along the neighborhood trails, there wasn’t quite as much, but it was good enough for someone to make this pissed off looking snow man. He’s probably upset that it’ll be sunny with highs in the 50s tomorrow when spring comes back.
After work, I took a walk down the trail to see what it looks like in snow, since it hasn’t snowed since we’ve lived here. I walked to the bridge, figuring the area around it would have the greatest accumulation, but the trail had been well-walked today. I took the above picture thinking it might make a nice contrast with this one I took last summer.
I walked down to the pond to check on the ducks (Gadwalls, Ring-necked and American Wigeon). They were huddled together in the reeds on the near shore. I watched them paddle about and tried to think of when it’s snowed like this here.
I don’t remember ever seeing real snow accumulating in the 22 years I’ve lived here other than one day in Dallas when all of us working at a video editing company stood out on the fire escape and watched it snow while the pawn shop next door burned down.
No fires today, which is fine since it wasn’t really all that cold by the time I got out on the trail. Most of the snow had melted off and there wasn’t much in the way of accumulation, but it was nice to see the trail in a different way, which is, I think, the magic of snow days when you live in a place that doesn’t have them.
These kind of days are good for their slow stillness and silence and the way sometimes nature changes the rules just a bit to remind us to stop and pay attention.
On the way back home, I saw these sticks poking out of the snow. They reminded me of runes, though I have no idea what they might mean. If they said anything, perhaps they were one more reminder to witness the mystery and be awed by it.
Since finishing my small year, I’ve enjoyed going back to not counting birds quite so much. I’m still participating in Project FeederWatch and I did the Great Backyard Bird Count the weekend before last, but it’s good to just enjoy the birds for what they are instead of as checks on a list.
Still, I do like participating in these citizen science projects and so I’m list blogging, which seems hardly worthy of the Kreativ Blogger Award kindly bestowed on my by Angie at woman, ask the question.
For the GBBC, I counted along the pond trail after work on Friday and then stuck with my backyard on Saturday and Sunday, which are my Project FeederWatch count days anyway. I didn’t do a GBBC count on Monday.
This year’s count yielded no surprises. I haven’t seen anything new in the neighborhood or in my yard this year, and I haven’t seen any American Goldfinches. Maybe the Lesser Goldfinches have claimed the yard, but last year I regularly saw both species.
And here are the counts. The numbers in parentheses indicate the greatest number of individuals seen at one time…
GBBC Day 1 (2.12.10): Pond Trail:
GBBC Day 2 (2.13.10): Backyard:
GBBC Day 3 (2.14.10): Backyard:
Project FeederWatch – Month 3 (a running total):
Be sure to check out the latest edition of I and the Bird (#119) hosted at Somewhere in NJ, which includes my poem “Hummingbird Heading Out to Sea.”
After defeating Wolf, Fox, Moose, Tiger and One of R’s Slippers in single combat to show us what he’s capable of, Joey sets his sights on the fearsome Green Dragon Dogstick, which he has here dragged back to his lair where he’ll either attempt to eviscerate it or force it into servitude as a comfy pillow. Apes be warned, this is the fate of any who may delay in feeding the greyhound.
[saveagrey]
Poet Sherry Chandler wrote a very nice review of my chapbook a gnarled oak over on her site.
For those who may not know, I made a chapbook as a holiday gift for family, friends and lucky blog readers who asked. It’s a collection of some of my micro-poems that have appeared on my other (micro-poetry) blog a gnarled oak over the past year. I cross post them on Twitter and Identi.ca for those who are into the social web.
Of the ones reserved for blog readers, I still have 2 left. If you’d like one, use the contact form to get in touch and tell me where to mail it.
Sherry posts her micro-poems on Identi.ca under the moniker Bluegrass Poet.
Now that February is half-gone and winter winding down, I’m starting to think about my garden again. It’s in the shade of the house so it only gets direct light in spring, summer and early autumn. In the hottest part of summer, it gets 5 or 6 hours of sun, not much, but it protects the plants from the extreme heat that kills many other gardens.
I once spoke with a gardener who claimed the best things to plant in the midst of a Texas summer are “your feet on the coffee table,” but my shady garden is almost pleasant even in July. Of course, the trade-off is a lack of winter gardening, but the break is nice. It’s good to return to it after letting it lie for a few months.
I’m still finding shards of broken glass from last June’s hailstorm so I need to remember to wear gloves, but looking at the empty beds and imagining the the good things that will be growing there soon fills me with anticipation. I love the work of gardening, which is good since the possum and birds make off with a lot of the produce.
This is looking west over Narragansett Bay from Middletown or Portsmouth, Rhode Island in April 1988 just months before we moved to Texas. I was in the car with a couple of friends and we pulled over so I could get a shot of the light bursting through that hole in the clouds. We called it “God light” because it reminded us of the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which God commands Arthur to seek the grail.
I had just gotten my first real camera, a Pentax K1000, the previous Christmas and so I was learning the habit of carrying it nearly everywhere I went, searching for the photographic holy grail of being in the perfect place when the light hits just right. It would be years before I began to understand that the real wonder was not so much in the picture, but in the way that being open to finding those pictures helps me better see and know the world around me.
As with all the photos on the blog, click to enlarge and view it at a higher resolution.
Does the hummingbird know
the vastness of the Gulf of Mexico
when land is lost from sight?
Oil rigs and shrimping boats—
fast-blurred memories, random ghosts afloat
where sky and sea seem one.
Is there any inkling
of monsters below that other ceiling
birds can scarce imagine?
Tiny feathered jewel,
leagues from any flower’s nectar fuel,
how do you know the way?
Above those trackless seas,
in doldrum times of windless apogee,
one heart of pebble’s size
pounds alone against the gulf,
pounds alone against the world.
—
One of the most amazing bird migrations is that of the Ruby-throated Hummingbird. On its southbound journey from eastern North America to its wintering grounds in Central and South America, it flies up to 500 miles nonstop over the Gulf of Mexico.
Update: This post was included in I and the Bird #119 hosted at Somewhere in NJ.
I didn’t read it.
Back when I started the Lost Book Club and decided to read all the books shown and referenced on Lost, I made a decision to focus (mostly) on the fictional/literary works and leave the philosophical and religious works to others and since the philosophy was referenced mostly in certain characters’ names (John Locke, Desmond David Hume, Danielle Rousseau, and Mikhail Bakunin) and the books didn’t actually appear, it was no problem.
The Season 6 opener “LA X,” however, introduced two books to the Lost Book Club: Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie, the book Desmond was reading on the alternate reality Oceanic 815, and Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard, which is the book found with the one-armed skeletal remains of the French guy beneath the temple wall.
I will, of course, read the Rushdie book, which I’ve got on hold at my library, and I will post my thoughts on it once I’ve read it. As for the Kierkegaard book, I don’t intend to read it (at least not now) since it falls outside the purview of my Lost book project and I had to draw a line somewhere, but I figured I’d at least try to find and post some information about it for those who may be curious.
From Wikipedia (source of all knowledge):
Fear and Trembling presents a highly original and provocative interpretation of the Binding of Isaac story as told in Genesis Chapter 22, and uses the story as an occasion to discuss fundamental issues in moral philosophy and the philosophy of religion, such as the nature of God and faith, faith’s relationship with ethics and morality, and the difficulty of being authentically religious.
[…]
In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard introduces the “Knight of Faith” and contrasts him with the “knight of infinite resignation”. The latter gives up everything in return for the infinite, that which he may receive after this life, and continuously dwells with the pain of his loss. The former, however, not only relinquishes everything, but also trusts that he will receive it all back, his trust based on the “strength of the absurd”.
From Lostpedia (source of all Lost knowledge):
The book encountered in the Temple is “Fear and Trembling” (original title: Frygt og Bæven), an influential philosophical work by Danish philosopher, theologian, and psychologist Søren Kierkegaard, published in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio (John the Silent). In the book, through alternative retellings of the Biblical story of the Binding of Isaac, Kierkegaard examines the role of faith and its relationship with morality and ethics. The title is a reference to a line from Philippians 2:12, “…continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”
The story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac has been referenced on Lost several times over the years and almost works like a background hum meant to remind viewers of how far certain characters will go to protect the island. It also reinforces the tension between faith and reason, one of Lost‘s central themes.
Based on this limited reading about the book, it seems a logical book for Lost considering that we’ve now delved into at least one alternate retelling of the story. Perhaps we should be expecting a few more alternate realities? I hope not.
The Knight of Infinite Resignation and the Knight of Faith read like descriptions of Jack Shephard and John Locke.
That’s probably enough for a post about a book I didn’t read.
Here’s a link to a post on The Fish: A Christian Look @ Pop Culture about “LA X” that includes excellent analysis of the episode as well as some more thoughts about Fear and Trembling.
Enough about the book I didn’t read; it’s time for some half-baked theorizin’.
For nine months, Lost fans wondered whether the show would reboot to an alternate reality after the detonation of the jughead or if the 1977 survivors would be blown back to the “present.” I don’t think I’m alone in being surprised by the writers’ dispensing with the or and doing both.
Here’s my half-baked theory. In the alternate reality, the jughead destroyed the island in 1977, thus leaving the Dharma Initiative’s save-the-world work unfinished and undone. Ben, Widmore and Eloise all died, which means Penny and Daniel are never born, which means Desmond never sails around the world, winding up “just saving the world, brotha.” Come to think of it, nobody is saving the world from whatever electromagnetic anomaly now lies at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, which means someday (I’m guessing someday soon in the alt-reality of LA X) something will happen that effectively destroys the alt-reality world because Dharma hadn’t been able to do whatever it was it was supposed to do.
The alt-world ends, but not before alt-Juliet, who will have memories of both worlds just as Desmond did when he detonated the Swan Hatch at the end of Season 2, explains to the alt-survivors that there is something that must be fulfilled by them to help Jacob. After that, the two realities will reconcile with the end of the alt-reality and everything that has risen will converge.
Maybe, that’s only a quarter-baked theory. Hell, it’s barely cooked and you’ll probably wind up with some kind of mental salmonella poisoning, but that’s what I’ve got and it reminds me why I love Lost so much. It’s one of the very few TV shows I’ve ever watched that has consistently surprised me and kept me guessing. I love not knowing. I hope I’m wrong. I hope I find out how wrong I am after tonight’s episode “What Kate Does,” so I can come up with a new theory.
Here’s the link to the list of all the Lost books I’ve read. Look for my take on Haroun and the Sea of Stories in the next few weeks. I intend to read that one.