Earth Day 2025: On the cusp of change

An early spring sky in North Texas

It's been so long since I last posted, that it took me several tries just to access this account. My cognitive skills (especially the technology-related ones) take longer and longer to ramp up, so that every effort seems almost Herculean. But I can't remember the last time I didn't post on Earth Day, so it seems like a good time to try and get back into the habit of writing more frequently.

The recent death of my step-mother (who was 93 and had led a pretty admirable life) has prompted a family get-together at the cemetery in Big Pine, California, where most of the ancestral bones and ashes are buried. This means a full-fledged road trip west in Porco Rosso, our little retro-style caravan, giving us a chance to test all the recent earth-friendly(er) modifications The Beloved Spouse has made to it: swapping out the gas hob, oven, furnace, and water heater for solar-supported battery-friendly electric alternatives; a new portable loo that acts as a cassette toilet and rids us of having to use a black tank; substantial upgrade to our solar capacity to keep our Bluetti power stations topped up and the on-board batteries charged. Porco now sports new tires and brakes, which should make towing easier for the new-ish Jeep 4xE we'll be using to haul us all out to the first family gathering on the auld sod we've managed since my brother died in 2019.

Most of the trip will involve staying at state parks and boondocking, which would have been much less feasible without the new solar capability. We'd rather be able to stay at parks and off-grid campgrounds with minimal "amenities," and to reduce our load on park services (which are under duress at the moment due to the vagaries of the federal overseers). And precisely because of the current uncertainties regarding the future of the Republic, it's hard to tell whether or not we'll be able to take another such trip before it's my turn to be gathered around and remembered over beer and pizza.

Uncertainty is a constant source of angst among most of the people I know these days, but it does tend to spark the necessity to enjoy what one has whilst one still has it. So, in the midst of the ongoing Swedish Death Cleaning efforts, we're both finding the time to enjoy the pleasures of our little piece of the planet. We're working on converting most of the formerly lawned areas into a prairie garden, and although we've got a long way to go, we're progressing with the overall design, and have given over a fair amount of the garden to native perennials and naturalized border plants and bulbs. Some years ago, I found a small patch of wild Byzantine gladioli under a Nandina hedge, and the gorgeous fuchsia-colored blooms have since taken over large swaths of the back yard and are creeping around to the front. Although the Nandinas themselves are invasive non-natives from Asia, I'm keeping them for now, but will cut off the berries as soon as they begin forming to keep them from spreading. The berries are reputedly toxic to birds and cats, so I'll go ahead and enjoy the blossoms--but will eliminate the problematic bits.

Our greatest success so far is the large patch Texas primroses that has taken over the area on the north side of the house that I used to reserve for tomatoes. Here are a couple of shots that include both (gladioli and primroses--not tomatoes):

I've been nurturing a couple of tiny stands of blue-eyed grass for years, but if I want more, I'm probably going to have to sow seeds, since they're not nearly aggressive enough for my needs. But I do love them. They pop up amidst the myriad "weeds" we foster instead of turf grass, and we mark them before we mow so as to give them a chance to self-sow. 

Visiting wildlife is always welcome here, and we've created many areas that have fostered rabbits and occasional raccoons and opossums. In recent years we've enjoyed regular visits from northern green anoles, which have all been named "Harry" after the lizard in Death In Paradise. Ours are actually Anolis carolinensis, the males of which can change from green to brown, and back again. The photo may be of a female Harry, since I couldn't see a dewlap, but I loved the perch on top of the rebar designed to help support the potted bougainvillea I like to grow each year next to the greenhouse.  (Click to enlarge if you'd like a clearer view.) In past years I've included some of this Harry's ancestors, and caught a couple of his/her progenitors in flagrante delicto--making more little anoles. If I can find the post, I'll link it here; but that's as bawdy as things get here on the Farm--although a past Earth Day post has featured mating kites. Our newest regular visitor is a chubby opossum, who likes the apple cores and other fruit bits we leave out. We've caught her (we think she's the one who once trotted her babies across the front yard hanging onto her rail) on our back-door camera several times.

Which brings me to the best wildlife event of our year so far: the appearance on April 2 of a pair of Yellow Crowned Night Herons in our yard, engaging in artful mating displays and graceful saunterings across pecan the limbs that create a corridor over our yard to next door. The day was cloudy and rather drear, and their features were difficult to capture on our phones (we didn't expect them to be around for long, so we didn't haul out the real camera; lesson now learned). But searches on Cornell's "All About Birds" site (at the link) and Wikipedia gave us a positive identification, so we sat out watching as they moved from tree to tree. They left for a while, but came back later, just before it started getting dark. We never saw them again, and wondered why they were even here, given their preferred diet of crustaceans and coastal locales for year-round living. But we are within their breeding range, and the neighborhood does provide a number of creeks for crawdads and such. Our recently pruned trees may also have offered them room for showing off their pretty crowns and feathers. Sad to say, neither of us could get clear enough shots to use for illustration purposes, and my video-editing skills are abysmal anyway. So it turned out to be one of those occasions for which we will have to rely on our own visual memories to relive.

Speaking of living: News from old friends indicates that we're still managing to survive the current upheaval of democratic institutions around the country. Of course, we're all white, home-owning, educated pensioners with (for now) stable (if not voluminous) incomes. We don't have tattoos that could get us identified as Venezuelan gang members, and I don't think that any of us speak enough Spanish to get us misidentified as border-hopping immigrants. But even if we don't get sent to a Salvadoran prison for what's left of our lives, and even if our woefully inadequate defense department manages not to get us nuked, the equally under-qualified interior department may well land us with an irreparably damaged ecosystem--one that even acquisition of Canada or Greenland would be unable to ameliorate. In all the years of the Cold War spent hiding under desks and practicing air raid drills, it never occurred to me that we might be undone not by hot-war adversaries (although they're still around), but by our own profoundly ignorant, unimaginative, race-obsessed, and  rapacious (in all of its senses) elected leaders: Not with a bang but some kind of "administrative mistake." 

I can't end this without expressing immense sadness at the loss of Pope Francis. As a practicing Cynic/Skeptic, lapsed Catholic, and secular Jew, I appreciate him more than almost any modern leader  because he truly embodied the values he taught, with grace, humor, philosophical rigor, and true charity. As I mentioned to a dear Catholic friend yesterday, we are all richer for his presence, and poorer for his loss. 

So, Folks, have the best Earth Day and spring you can muster, do what you can to protect the planet from the ravages of stupidity, and maybe together we can help stave off apocalypse--at least for now.

Photo notes: As I looked over previous Earth Day posts, I found that the images I have chosen are  often similar--if not downright repetitive. But we've lived on our little half acre for nearly twenty-five years, and it has become a haven of contentment in a problem-infused world. Taking pleasure in small moments provides some respite from all the turmoil underway, and suggests the possibility of better days--kind of like sunlit clouds emerging after a storm, as they did in the opening shot.

Perhaps Resistance Isn't Really Futile

A North Texas winter sky

Since my last post, I've been experiencing what many like-minded folk have, when practical solutions to current political chaos seem, well, futile. I've often joked that with all of the artificial gadgets that now occupy my body (chief among them an artificial aortic valve--but also stents in old bypass grafts and interocular lenses in both eyes) I'm well on my way to Borghood. The Collective's warning upon meeting any new species is that resistance to assimilation is futile. Try as one might, becoming a fellow cyborg is inescapable. 

Now that this country is in the process of being overwhelmed by the Collective-like apparatus of the fomenters of Project 2025 (including our current president and his minion-in-chief--or is it the other way around?), finding ways to escape the doomsday scenarios that emerge daily seems unlikely, if not (yet) a completely futile effort.

And so, rather than give in to the probably-inevitable cultural and political emergence of true dystopia, and given that most of us (especially fixed-income retirees with ties to hearth, home, and animals) aren't well fitted to actual Revolution, I thought I'd share some of the strategies I've been pursuing to combat utter depression and ease unavoidable anxiety. If you are in a position to actively Do Something (or, as Revrunner advised in a comment after reading my last post, to follow Nancy Pelosi's advice to stop agonizing and start organizing), please do. Please do. Alas, my days of protesting, marching, and sitting in are long behind me, so I have to content myself with sending a few bucks to worthy causes. And--as a few of my loyal readers have advised--keep blogging.

It's probably a very good idea to keep reading, as well, since there are so many wonderful writers and websites and newsletters out there that I keep running across during my weekly exercises in rabbitholery. In terms of actual strategy, here's an idea that's working wonders with my attitude and with keeping my brain from shriveling up and crawling somewhere dark and dank: Re-read the people whose work got you where you are today, intellectually, politically, religiously, or whereverly. For example, I'm currently in the midst of rereading Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea works.  Shortly after her death in 2018, I was given the collection of her stories (in the volume at the link). It's a heavy tome, and so I've taken to reading it downstairs in my living-room comfy chair, then continuing with individual volumes upstairs when I go to bed. The troubled universe she describes in the books is disturbingly like ours in its current configuration, minus the mages and magic. But her astonishingly wise take on human frailty--race, gender, economics, art, craft, and the nature of wisdom itself--is both frighteningly prescient and reassuring at the same time. Even though I generally prefer science fiction over fantasy, I have long enjoyed these books and stories. But the science fiction segment of her work explores many of the same themes, which novels such as The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Telling consider in equal depth. [Even though I haven't joined their affiliate program, I would urge anyone who wants to buy these books to order from Bookshop.org, or directly from the publishers, rather than to enrich Mr. Bezos more than we have to. Another option: buy them used from a local bookshop.]

I also plan to revisit Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, which begins in what was then the "near future" of 2024 (the book was first published in 1993) and in the very LA neighborhoods (Altadena and Pasadena) that have been devastated by the recent fires. Although Butler died in 2006, her legacy has survived in part because of her own prophetic vision--and the diligence with which her readers preserve her work and its messages. 

In addition to reading, I urge folks to write--to blog, to start a Substack, to send letters to the editors of local newspapers, and to avoid the attention-culture as much as possible. Although I do have an Instagram account, I only use it to follow a few writers and a local prairie gardener. I use Pinterest only as a curatorial tool for myself; I don't engage with anyone on it. I visit Quora less and less, and usually just to answer questions about cookery and being old. I've avoided twitterhood entirely, and see no reason to subscribe even to Bluesky--although if you find such a platform necessary, it's probably the best available choice at the moment. I try to subscribe to media populated only by folks who think and write about what they're thinking, but when I do, I resist requests to follow platform "recommendations." I will shortly be going through my own blog roll to make sure any links are active, relevant, and worthwhile. If you're interested in the cultural can of worms the Attention Economy has dumped on us, try reading Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing [a web search will turn up videos, workshops, and discussions on the book] or Chris Hayes's The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. [Again, there's a great deal online about this book, including interviews and Hayse's own podcast.] 

The benefits one can derive from keeping a journal in dark times seem, at the moment, immeasurable. In part because of what I often describe as "sleep-related marble-leaking" I tend to forget things quickly. It does, therefore, help considerably to spend an hour or so several times a week trying to record things that might be needed at some point in the future. My father's deathbed advice to my children was to "write at the end of your stint," which I've taken in earnest during the last decade or so. But don't wait! Do it now! My son will be fifty next year, and although I can plainly remember the jollity with which he posted a sign on my office door (during his brief studenthood at the Art Institute) announcing my own fiftieth birthday, that's just another indication of how quickly it all goes by. And keeping journals (I now have several, on reading/thinking, cookery, gardening, and design ideas) helps organize the brain, provides a creative outlet, and gives you something to do with all the free time you have if you give up futzing around on Tik Tok or Instagram or Facebook. If you need to keep in touch with people, write them letters in email and keep a record of the correspondence. I still have the letters my father and I wrote to each other via email from about 1997 to 2004. I copied them, printed them out, and cherish them to this day. They're like journals, only with more dimensions.

Finally, try a bit of Tikkun Olam--the Jewish practice of finding ways to heal the world. The link is to a page on the Orthodox understanding of the term, and it provides some useful ways to think about taking care of an increasingly endangered planet.  Every little thing we do, especially if multiplied by others, helps to stem the tide of of demise. Keeping even a little garden, providing even a tiny bit of habitat for wild critters, home-keeping, spending time in the out-of-doors, helping neighbors, buying less stuff, driving less, using less energy,  paying attention to the planet--even simply sky-watching. 

We really do need to enjoy what we have while we have it--and to do what we can to keep from losing it. 

What Now?

Roll clouds over Bad Ass Coffee in McKinney, August 4, 2024

I've been AWOL from The Farm for nearly four months now, trying to figure out what to do if the elections were to go badly for folks of my particular intellectual bent. Since I generally lack optimism and tend to gird myself for the worst in hopes of being pleasantly surprised, I thought I'd be well enough prepared for whatever happened. 

Like most of my fellow travelers, however, I fell into a kind of hopeful state of denial that a large enough plurality of voters could abandon common sense and/or willfully disbelieve the available evidence, and that reason would somehow prevail. And then the reality hit the fan and . . . . well, here we are. The consequences of the cognitively dissonant, counter-intuitive, intellectually and emotionally painful, and, yes, frightening election results are beginning to settle in.

The fact that we have a couple of months of marginally normal life left has numbed this household into a reflective mood, and we are beginning to shore up our inner resources--and a few of our external reserves--into strategies for facing the future in the developing dystopian moment.

So, my question: What now?

Fortunately for me, the gathering gloom brought forth some happy accidents during the last couple of months, and I discovered some interesting newsletters that kept me from doomscrolling through Quora, and gave me some rabbit holes to fall into and explore, and allowed me to enjoy the serendipity of found objects. In this case, the "objects" were really writers whose interests coincided with mine and practically coerced me into beginning to think sideways onto more productive paths. What's best about these folks is that after November 6th, they began channeling their grief and disappointment into productive avenues of creativity and philosophical engagement. So, in hopes that the folks who read this blog will not be surprised at my angst, and will probably commiserate in some measure, I decided to share some of these recent discoveries that might appeal to you as much as they have to me. I should note that everybody listed here offers ad-free content supported by subscriptions; some offer limited free access, but I urge you to subscribe if you can. 

Austin Kleon. Two or three months ago, I was idling through my Pinterest feed and came upon a compelling photo of a notebook that led me to its owner, the author of a book I wish I had known about when I was still teaching: Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative. As some of you already know (especially if you were one of my students), I am not generally fond of what could be called "self-help" books, but this little (about 6" square, 1/2" thick) tome-ette is a charmer. And it's helpful. Especially if you're in a crappy mood and can't seem to get anything accomplished. I liked it so much that I subscribed to his Substack (see the initial link), and then bought Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad, which seems consummately appropriate for this moment in world history. I'm now such a fan-girl that I eagerly await the newsletters I get twice a week, and they often set the tone for the morning. Last week's "Don't let your dreams give up on you" collage/post kept me going all day. 

Jason Kottke is a long-time blogger who's really good at connecting folks to other folks via links and commentary on his site. I subscribed to his newsletters, too, and am treated twice a week to intriguing, thought-provoking, beautiful, funny, entertaining, inspiring, and (I could go on, and on) other engaging stuff. He also introduced me to

Matt Pearce, the journalist who got me out of my snit about the Washington Post. When Jeff Bezos prohibited the WaPo's editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris for President, I cancelled my digital subscription (which would have expired on the 11th anyway). Pearce, however, in a thoughtful essay, "Journalism's fight for survival in a postliterate democracy," convinced me that losing my piddly little 170USD per year subscription wasn't going to hurt Bezos one small bit (especially since I can't really afford to give up Amazon Prime from whence I feed my addiction to French murder procedurals), but the collective effect of losing all those pissed-off readers like me would seriously impact journalists. As the daughter of a foreign correspondent, I know how that could hurt. Anyway, it would also be a good idea to read the essay Alex Wagner interviewed Pearce about on MSNBC, "Lessons on media policy at the slaughter-bench of history: Contemplating the purpose of the press after the Trump revolution." I'm still reading him for free, but only until my Social Security check comes in. One note, though: I am no longer buying books through Amazon, and I urge you to tame your instant gratification urges and start buying from Bookshop.org instead. Yes you pay shipping, and yes it takes a little longer. But some of your money goes to an independent bookstore of your choice, and you'll be a better person.

I've got more of these, and a recent visit from two former students has convinced me that I need to get back to working diligently on the Farm. As Rachel Maddow has said (and Austin Kleon, and many others), it's time to do something. Since this is practically the only something I do, I guess I'd best get to it.

Image note: I thought that an ominous cloud formation might be an appropriate illustration for the topic. I took this photo at the end of a storm after consuming a terrific cup of Kona coffee.