Forest Pool, by Frances and Mary Allen If you know the Chronicles of Narnia at all, you will of course know about the world between worlds. In C.S. Lewis’ series, characters must travel to a bizarre middle world between the one they live in and the one they might travel too. This world is a comfortable purgatory, an emerald green forest full of pools into which one jumps to travel between worlds. It’s a lovely place to stay and there is always a danger that the enchantment of that place will leave you there. I like this image because as …
Ther were a few references on the web to the re-discovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker last month, but today I cam across this reference (scroll down a little) quoted by Joy Harjo, as her cousin wrote about the meaning of the birds to the Muskogee people: The honorable ivory-billed woodpecker has returned from the dead and is living in a wildlife refuge in the Big Woods of eastern Arkansas. It seemed to disappear in 1944 and was long presumed extinct. This spirit bird’s reappearance 60 years later reinforces a wise instruction by Native elders: ”Never give up on anyone.” That …
Here’s another call out to the global water cooler… I live in a small community, on an island with about 4000 other people. Folks know each other pretty well and the community is fairly well connected to itself. We have to deal with a number of issues related to development, including impacts on limited water resources, encroachments on wild areas, pollution and impacts from cars and other transportation issues such as ferry marshalling and public transit. We are also in the middle of a long term process to develop vision and planning for the island as a whole and the …
The Guzheng is a Chinese zither traditionally played by women. Originally it was used for vocal accompaniment, but it’s now often played solo. This piece is a traditional solo piece. Listen for the bluesiness of it, the bent notes and the pentatonic scale, which is shared between Chinese music and blues. Also, the guzheng player is using another technique commonly found in the blues: plucking two strings on the same note together and then flattening one to give a kind of mournful wail. For those of you with even more sensitive attention, you will also notice that the chord progression …
Thoreau’s Journal has become a daily must-read. Here he is on his failure to liberate friends in the woods: “How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden. I take my neighbor, an intellectual man, out into the woods and invite him to take a new and absolute view of things, to empty clean out his thoughts all institutions of men and start again; but he can�t do it, he sticks to his traditions and his crochets. He thinks that governments, colleges, newspapers, etc., …