It’s really hard to believe that, here in the 21st century, we still vote by filling in dots on a piece of heavy paper. Remember to use a pen (blue or black ink only), and of course your vote won’t count if you either don’t fill in the oval completely, or G-d forbid, go outside the line!
There are some parts of the world
Where writing begins at the upper right edge
For those who know how to write.
The dead are lined up according to size and type,
as neatly arranged as clothing in a drawer,
records on a shelf,
bullets in a chamber.
A quiescent machine waits to lift them,
its steel mouth clamping one, nipping at mossy skin
and flaccid lichens.
Once upon a time there was a little town by a big ocean. It was a wise little town. Long ago it had looked at its dunes and beaches, its big trees, its marsh where the red-wing blackbirds sang, its little streets and little grey shingle shops and houses, and said: This is all good.
If we are to truly measure morality, then we need to look at what we prize as a society. How do we spend our free time? What is our treasure? What motivates us? What do we value the most?
The answer isn’t very far away–it’s in our driveways, in the corners of our living rooms, in our hands, our ears and our pockets. It is money and everything money can buy. [Read More]
Some of my conservative friends that I’ve talked to recently think that America in particular and the world in general is in a moral decline. It is common for them to compare America with ancient Rome. “We’re heading the same way as Constantine,” a Republican colleague said to me a few weeks ago.
“Our little house is a wonderful, quiet place to work. Also a very good house for dreams, many people who’ve slept there have told me that. Dreams and the kind of writing I do have some connection. One morning when I was waking up in our Cannon Beach bedroom, the whole idea of one of the “Earthsea” books came to me as the light grew. When I got up, it was daylight and I had a novel to write.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
[Read More]
Closer and closer his little spaceship came
To the event horizon of the black hole.
This was his great adventure.
What he had studied all his life
Might today be proven true or false.
Or perhaps not proven at all.
How can human beings, with our arrogance so many orders of magnitude greater than our understanding or our reverence, hope to recreate the intricacies of these familial relations between different types of trees, plants, fungi, and fauna?
When I was a child, two sounds soothed me to sleep each night: the washing machine in the basement and the bell buoy in the bay. The liquid repetitiveness of the washing machine churning laundry in its gullet contrasted with the intermittent knelling of the bell as it warned ships away from the shoreline.