One of the bloggers at DailyKos had some extra tickets to the Ani DiFranco concert in Hyannis for Sunday night.  Their car was out of commission and they were looking for a ride in trade.  Hyannis is two hours away, but the tickets were free, they were right on the way, and it was practically a good deed.  So we left the boys with Alberto and hit the road.

Kimya Dawson put on a beautiful opening act -- a great sweet woman full of shyness and steel.  She played her stuff, including a few of her songs from the movie Juno, and the crowd was in love with her.

And Ani DiFranco is 95 pounds of guitar-pounding charisma.  She and her band had 'em on their feet.

Church

The Unitarian-Universalists keep their services rare and informal through the summer months.

And it's mostly about food and politics and jumping in a lake.

The girls are closing in on Porter.

Hospitality is an ancient art -- making a place for the guest, giving them food and cool water.  It is good to receive.  And Monica and I have received more than our share from Uzbekistan to Ireland to Costa Rica.  

But it's even better to give it back.  To seat your guest in the shade of your tree and pluck the best sun-warmed berries for them.  Especially when they've traveled from afar.

On Saturday Marysia and Ian came on the ferry across from Long Island for a visit with two Polish friends, Krystina and her niece Ewelina.  So we played hosts and settled everyone in the shade of the climbing tree and had an elaborate lunch spread out upon the table.  

And we took them into the woods where there were more berries -- blueberries, huckleberries, and dewberries just purpling.  And, since they were Poles, we showed off the wild mushrooms even though we don't know which ones are tasty and which ones are poisonous.

Last night people gathered at a beautiful hilltop winery in Stonington for music and wine.  By the time we got there just after 7, the raggedy trio of musicians was already filling the big sky with jouncey roots music.  We found a grassy spot beside a bed of lavender.  

"It's just like the Reunion, except people aren't related," said Nico as he plunked himself down onto one of Esperanza's quilts.   By the time Monica and I had bought and uncorked a bottle of the zinfandel, our friends Sharka and Yuri had shown up with their boys and Porter in tow.

The four boys quickly raced off through the alleys of grapevine toward the stonewalls where the trees drop an ordnance of little green apples.  The four adults were dismissed to their wine and their conversation.  

As humans big and small danced in the grass before the players, orange and blue sky gave way to indigo ink and an alabaster half-moon a-nest in the stars.  The boys were happily lost in the gloaming.

the politics of doom

My father has long been fond of saying that human intelligence may not be a “survivable trait.”  

The emissions from this weeks “G-8 Summit” of political leaders is pretty good evidence for pessimism.  One the great challenges of our era is to recognize and address the fact that we’re changing the atmosphere of the planet in ways that will make it uninhabitable, if not for the species then at least for civilization.

There were four imaginable outcomes from the summit.  First, and least likely, was a set of actual practices to not only slow down the ever-accelerating pace of carbon emission, but actually move toward reductions.  The second possible outcome, and the one an optimist could have hoped for, would be to sound the alarm about how unprepared we are politically, socially, and technologically to deal with problem and to call for a global discussion of what genuinely needs to be done not just technologically, but politically.  The third possible outcome, depressing but familiar, would have been an outright rejection of the notion that climate change is a defining problem of the age. 

What we got was the fourth and worst of the scenarios.  We got fine-sounding words that are designed to do absolutely nothing, except to destroy clarity and to defuse all popular push toward addressing the problem.

These failed leaders showed the dangerous and perhaps fatal bankruptcy of our political system, by kicking the can down the road.  Even those politicians who personally may have hoped otherwise just helped put lipstick on this pig.  The powers-that-be have now decided that they have neither the power nor the will to do anything but race headlong into an un-mappable process of global over-heating -- to create climatic change on a scale unprecedented in the Earth's long history as a complex biosphere.

As individuals, humans can be capable of great intelligence, foresight and wisdom.  As a species it seems clear we have the intelligence of a toxic lichen.  

Which of these missed opportunities is going to be the last one, I wonder.

Update:

A blog post over at "The Oil Drum" makes and some interesting points about politicians:

People trained in engineering or science deal with numbers and outcomes. Our lawyer friends are trained to look for precedents – data that supports their argument - while we are trained to derive the argument from the data . . . Plenty of lawyers go into politics [and] as a result politics tends to be framed by lawyer thinking, not engineer thinking.  [snip]  Politicians tend to inherently believe that the outcome of an event will depend on people’s perceptions and beliefs about that event. Politicians have very little experience with situations where objective reality is more important to outcome than the subjective perception of the reality.  

                                                       

Does a ten year old know that gravity has them?   

  

 

A cuckoo was in the backyard today -- feasting on the tent caterpillars feasting on the cherry.  It made no call, from neither right nor left.  Which is fine -- omens make me nervous.

Porter's back

from a week at camp.  Nine boys at Medicine Bow, but three with mean streaks.  It wasn't Lord of the Flies, but no repeat of last summer's idyll, either.  I had a feeling we should have sent him to that riding camp.

He doesn't seem troubled by it -- just disappointed.  Not just by the obnoxious trio, but the thunderstorm warnings that derailed the island campout, and the heavily fletched "flu flu" arrows that offended his archer's heart with their sluggish inaccuracy.  It may be that after a few days he'll remember the positive things as well . . . 

Scouting may have a national organization, but it is still profoundly local.  And it runs on a spectrum from old-fashioned outdoorsy to paramilitary.  The manly virtues can be stressed and intermixed in various ways, some that build strength of character and some that tear it down.  You see part of that spectrum among the troops that gather in a place like Camp Yawgoog.  I'm Den Leader of Porter's den, because he wants to do scouting, and I don't want him in some volunteer fireman's idea of a military unit.

Nico's pictures

                      

                                

                                               

Independence Day

A good day to reflect upon the patriotism of rebellion.  The language of patriotism and liberty has too long been treated like property by people who mean exactly the opposite.

We've woken from our complacency to find ourselves living under a government that tortures and imprisons people disregardful of whether they are innocent or guilty; that breaks its own laws to spy upon its citizens; that builds its rule to enrich the few and impoverish the many; 

that degrades and disregards science and knowledge and democratic debate; that treats the young as raw material to be wrung for profit.  

A patriotic stance toward such a government means contempt, derision and a profound commitment to reform and revitalization.

Happy Birthday, America -- across 232 years there are bound to be some rough patches.

Photos by Nico B.

The sea was rough

in Narragansett Bay.  The lifeguards' yellow flags whipped in a stiff breeze.  (I don't think I registered what that meant.)

I was encouraging Nico while he taught himself how to boogieboard in the shallow surf.  But finally, annoyed by waves splashing coldly onto my dry shoulders, I told him I was going to go for a swim and I'd be right back.  Monica would watch out for him.

I was quickly out of the shallow surf and into deeper furrows and bars -- swimming down amid the tatters of seaweed torn from some undersea rock somewhere and being shredded further in the violence of sand versus water.  It took only a few moments to realize that there was a massive current under the waves and it had me.  On the surface, I struck out toward the beach, stretching a foot downward for the reassurance of a foothold that wasn't there.

Soon, I was making all the headway of a cork bobbing in the surf.

As my breaths came louder and rougher, I felt a twinge of panic.  It wasn't fear of death, but a fear of the humiliation of being rescued.  Fear of being the man who matched his weak swimming up against the undertow.  Or worse, of being the fool who hadn't even known such a contest was in the offing and swam blithely out as though the sea were a great, domesticated bath, rather than the indifferent and merciless deity that it is.

Maybe my swimming had an effect or maybe the waves just consented to cast me forward rather than back, but my toes rasped the bottom and I walked and swam and thrashed my way back in.  

Humbled but happily un-humiliated.  

(An epitaph worth living up to?)

                 

                                                                               Photo by Nico B.

tuesday morning

Gray Cat

Black Coffee

Green Garden

Silver Hair

          

Photo by A.B.

And naked feet

on stones that echo with

the night-cool.

Oh, Nico, your abuelo is getting old!

It's good. 

 It's good that you are old. 

 That shows you have survived

 a long time.

Long hours for the webelos scout

Porter was up at 6:30 this morning.

Probably the longest day of  his summer so far

Counting the minutes until 4 o'clock when I had promised

 to take him off to Camp Yawgoog.

Enemies

I am implacable -- a ruthless harasser of my enemy.  A tangerine hued nemesis called the oriental bittersweet.  Not the tethering vine, the round-leafed sprout, the dark leaved, woody, sun-starved shrub.  Those are only its most superficial disguises -- its forays into the light.  

No, I know that the soul and body of my enemy is the orange root-vine lurking, linking dark redoubt to dark redoubt underneath the moss and fallen leaves.  I snap the shoots, cut the vinestems -- attack the supply lines for sugar and carbon.  But it's only when the hairy, orange rootbody comes up that I feel the grim, satisfying pang of a blow well-struck.

Last summer's challengers, the poison ivy and the greenbrier still send out their scouts and their sneaking runners, but I dispatch them without malice.  I have my enemy.

Mark Twain on George W. Bush:

"His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket 

and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere."

Photo by Nico B.

Nico's view: a six-year old takes the camera

Catbirds stood by for the rosy flesh of discarded melon.

M. snapped asparagus spears from their bed beneath the rhubarb

Photos by Nico B.

Shattered sky sected

by fractling twigs.

April's foetal leavelets

seep stainlike from

the inkish 

and interstitial wood.

My fingers' own

banal opacity becomes 

the thirsting, thrusting gap 

whereinto gouts 

of sharded world will pour.