How It Happens by W.S. Merwin

The sky said I am watching

to see what you

can make out of nothing

I was looking up and I said

I thought you

were supposed to be doing that

the sky said Many

are clinging to that

I am giving you a chance

I was looking up and I said

I am the only chance I have

then the sky did not answer

and here we are

with our names for the days

the vast days that do not listen to us

W. S. Merwin, like most poets, knew a thing or two. Here's a good quote of his, suitable for these times: 

We are asleep with compasses in our hands.

Josie Has the Playground All to Herself

Any Mushroom Experts Out There?

These guys showed up in my greenhouse and I'd very much like to now what they are.

My little Golden Nature Guide to Non-Flowering Plants leads me to think they could be Meadow Mushrooms. But I don't know.

And no way would I be tempted to try one even if some expert out there tells me they're edible,

I wish I knew more though. The only fungi I trust myself to identify are the shitakes and oysters we have grown and the occasional rare find of a morel.  I know there are probably many edible mushrooms in our woods but I need to see an expert identify, cook, and eat one before I'm ready to try. 

And even then, I'll wait a day or two to make sure the expert survived.

Shopping Buggy Corrals Make Me Think of Kant

Sometimes it's the littlest of little things that can make me wonder what's wrong with folks.  As in, whoever returned that second buggy in such  way as to block the whole corral.  Yes, no big deal to pull it out and put it right but still . . . 

And then I began to remember Philosophy 101, my freshman year at Emory, and Kant's Categorical Imperative. 

Our professor, Dr. Gould, was something of a magician. Each week he introduced us to a new system--Humanism, Utilitarianism, Positivism, Existentialism, Pragmatism, to mention a few I kinda remember--and presented each so convincingly that I would leave the class thinking, Well, that makes sense. Now I know what I believe.

Till the next class, when I'd find myself convinced that some  new -ism, the opposite of what I'd embraced the last meeting, was It.

About this time is when I was enamoured of Atlas Shrugged and I actually wrote my mid-term paper on Rand's personal philosophy Objectivism.  Dr. Gould met with me in his office and proceeded to demolish all Rand's talking points. He was appalled that I'd fallen for this system of belief. "But where's the compassion?" he shouted. "There has to be room for compassion."

So, I got over Ayn Rand halfway through my freshman year. Thank goodness.  That was just one of three enduring lessons from that class.

A second lesson was Kant's Categorical Imperative, the first formulation of which was: "Always act so that you may also wish that the maxim of your action become a universal law."

In other words, maybe not putting your shopping buggy in the corral properly is no big deal. But what if nobody did?  

Chaos in the parking lot.

The third lesson I learned was a deep mistrust of my own ability to hew to a prescribed belief system. With this came a new found appreciation for Zen Buddhism. Not, I hasten to say, that I thought I might become a Buddhist. Just a pleasure in the paradoxical koans and the escape from logical thinking.

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

Or perhaps What does a shopping buggy say? 

I'm guessing there are some Objectivists on the loose. They're in our government. . . and they're in this parking lot.

Falling Toward Fall

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

I practically inhaled this novel, reading in bed late into the night as I remember doing with Gone With the Wind about sixty years ago.

Lee's multi-generational saga of a Korean family in Japan chronicles the difficulties immigrants face, their survival skills, their struggles, their failures, and their triumphs.

Rich with detail, packed with raw emotion, Pachinko is an up-close look at one family, pre- and post WWII. The three-dimensional characters demand the reader's attention and empathy. Strong women, weak women, moral men, pragmatic men, and all the ramifications of forbidden love and its consequences make this a compelling read.

And the broader story, the heartless treatment of immigrants and minorities, resonates here and now, even as our own government steals children from their parents, caging them and denying them basic necessities. 

Highly recommended.

Josie Is Back

September Song

Photo by John