October 2019
A Pale Blue Dot
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great, enveloping cosmic dark.
Sunbeams
Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.
October 2019
Tipping Point
Bill McKibben On A Planet In Peril
In a rational world, we would be devoting every resource to making a difference in the short amount of time we have left. Past a certain point, we won’t be able to.
A Shrinking World
Let’s put aside, for the moment, the thought of mass extinction. . . . Even if that is our eventual due, life will first look and feel different. Life as we know it won’t suddenly end, but it will be crimped; in many places, it already is.
The Button
The little button lying in my hand brought the violent history of the place to life. For a moment war wasn’t just pictures in textbooks. I could feel the residue of it, the half-life of violence.
Sleep Study
I wake at 2:34 AM and lie in bed staring at the ceiling for a couple of hours, beating myself up for having awakened way before it’s time to get up.
Goodbye, Sugar Land
I was still exploring my power to hurt others and was continually surprised by how potent a single sentence could be. I watched my mother’s face waver and then crack open.
Green Freak
He has developed a shorthand response to my entreaties: Landfill, he hisses, and he walks away.
What Was Astonishing
What was astonishing / was that after a summer of running around the yard / and dragging our rubber dinghy a mile to the lake and rowing / and doing backflips off the dinghy and bicycling around the lake
The Extra Year: Selected Poems
— from “Almost Done” | My wife has taken Pepper to the vet this morning. She is losing her hair, doesn’t like her food, has growths on her skin, moves slowly after eighty-four dog years.
The Middle-Aged Joggers
We gather beside the pond in great ragged flocks, like birds. We run. Knees and backs stiff, we run — along the available routes, the ones before us, the paved and unpaved paths.
