Vanishing Monarchs – Mar. 21, 2023
“In twenty years, 99 percent of the milkweed here has disappeared. In those twenty years, farmers have been spraying their fields with glyphosate, marketed as “Roundup.” The corn and soybeans have been genetically modified to withstand the herbicide, so farmers spray often, all through the growing season. The food crops live on, but milkweed is […]
Open Our Eyes – Mar. 20, 2023
“The very places Indiana bats trusted to preserve them betrayed them. Cool, dark, and humid, cave air not only holds bats in metabolic equipoise, it also invigorates a fungus new to North America. Brought from Europe on spelunkers’ gear, spores of the fungus multiplied rampantly in caves of northeastern states, then spread farther and faster […]
Questions in the Dark
My Lenten practice this year is to notice what questions arise in the dark, either in my dreams or wakeful times. Sleep seems to filter out the trivia, and I discover what my real questions are. Some arise from worries, of course. Others involve long-forgotten incidents, odd dream encounters, and shards of conversation that I […]
No Longer at Ease Here – Jan. 12, 2023
All this was a long time ago, I remember,And I would do it again, but set downThis set downThis: were we led all that way forBirth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,But had thought they were different; this Birth wasHard and bitter agony […]
