“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
Within the criminal elements of any tyranny, a functionary is secretly taking names, compiling documents, recording stories, preparing “destroying angels” for the right time to release everything to maximum effect, in short, to begin or to accelerate the destruction of that tyranny. Sometimes that functionary is a true hero, a person who sees the wrong and determines to risk everything to make it known. More often, the witness is one […]
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The death of birds feels like the end. I do not know another way to put it. I cannot muster any optimism. Let me quote at length: “ A new study , which analyzed decades of data on North American birds, estimates that the continent’s bird populations have fallen by 29 percent since 1970. That’s almost 3 billion fewer individuals than there used to be, five decades ago. “It’s a staggering result,” says […]
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Three toads in a few hours — three of anything alive other than ticks and mosquitoes is good, but three fat toads makes me happy. It shows our yard is clean, insects plentiful, the blades on my mower set high enough. One lurched out of a pile of rocks dumped in the driveway, another from garden dirt I was moving, another from high grass I was poking through before mowing. […]
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Each Tuesday with children I become myself multiplied, and yet my attention becomes neither scattered nor diluted. It occupies layered frames of reference, as it did in the classroom. Those layers, each, intensely, gather impressions of the faces of both mothers and children, their gestures, emotions, emotions masking other emotions, levels of attentiveness, their crackling show of personalities, and over time, of character, as it has set and as it […]
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