“I see a safe journey, I see a safe return.” ~ Kundun, 1997, about the 14th Dalai Lama. A Martin Scorsese film.
“Do not be distracted,” a Buddhist master says to the young Dalai Lama as he comes into the enlightenment. Well, friends and neighbors, I say this to the American public when discernment of the truth is critical among America’s voting public. We ARE the ones standing and acting at a dangerous turning point where how we vote, who we vote for will determine whether America holds together, as it was intended to be – a country of mutually crafted laws and norms, the rule of law and freedom to participate in governance and a free exchange of ideas.
Gnawing at the gates of Freedom are wolves, artful dodgers, hoodwinkers, and cowards. Don’t let them in!
“If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, its probably is a duck.”
Liberty Bell – oh ring, ring clear!
National Consitution Center in Philadelphia is a treasure trove of discussions that can help us stay clear on what our Founders established and how we strive to perfect and interpret it through each generation of Americans. Check it out!
The chart below shows the relative humidity and temperature and how they interplay to create lethal conditions such as heat stroke and death. See the second chart below which is in Celsius for recommendations to protect yourself.
Each independent bookstore is an important cog in democracies. Diverse voices, original works as they emerge, community engagement through book clubs and public programs, and a platform for emerging writers are all important aspects of locally owned, independent bookstores. I consider them the seat of what we once knew as town halls where people gathered to discusss our democracy.
Parnassus Books in Nashville was founded by two women, a beloved author, Ann Patchett, and Karen Hayes, a career professional in publishing and business partner, are good friends and savvy business women. Sign up for their weekly review of new titles and enjoy the kitchen/hearth warmth of women who love books. Join a book guild! Attend an author interview.
Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, founded by Louise Erdrich and partners, is a literary vortex for Indigenous writers and artists. Compared to William Faulker, Erdrich has published dozens of books and poetry that have received the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize among others. She promotes emerging writers in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction works. Louise was raised by an Ojibwe mother and German father who nutured her writing with stories from these streams of cultural influence. I live by the release of each new work by Louise. She just announced the latest novel: The Mighty Red.
The Lynx, a bookstore founded by Lauren Groff and her husband in Gainesville, Florida, is purposed to protect diverse voices (banned books in Florida and the nation). They open tomorrow – April 28, 2024. Expect it to be a vulcrum for diverse voices and excellent books in all genres. Lauren’s books have received national recognition and numerous awards. She illustrates the essential role writers play in freedom of thought and deeper examination of the values that underly our personal and political lives. The Vaster Wilds is her most recent novel. I read both print and audio. I recommend you read it in that order. It contains a profound message to Western culture regarding our future on Earth.
What are your favorite independent bookstores? Please comment on this post and give readers a link if you can. Also, tell us what you like about the local independent bookstore and why you think they are important in our culture.
“A reader lives a thousand lives before [s]he dies . . . The [hu]man who never reads lives only one.” ~ George R.R. Martin
Readers of this blog know that nature is a constant theme in my writing, reading and public work. We all have our roots plunged in soil we call home as did Lauren Groff, a magnificent writer who first found her inspiration at the family farm in New Hampshire.
Groff’s recent novels The Vaster Wilds and Matrix. pose profound questions about how religious and cultural practices have led to the depletion of nature’s resilience and how both men and women contribute to it when acting from an anthropocentric view. The journeys of discovery of both female protangonists is personal, imbued with hopes and dreams in the crucible of living their lives in times when women possess little social agency.
Groff is currently writing the third in the “triptych” of stories that carry the thread of inquiry and discovery. Readers are led to consider our present predicament of killing the very thing that gives us life: the living Earth.
Here are two excellent interviews that explore how Lauren Groff came to write each story, all the complex threads of thought, stories and influences that helped her conceive these outstanding novels.
The first interview explores The Vaster Wilds which takes place briefly in Jamestown colony in the “starving time”and mostly in the American wilds in 1609 North America.
The Matrix concerns Marie de France, the first published female poet in France, a poet and deep thinker whose writings are surprisingly free of social and religious strictures on women at a time of low female agency. Many sources contributed to the final story Groff tells. I found this instructive and supportive for writers of fiction.
This lecture from the University of Notre Dame is in my view the best exploration of how Matrix evolved and the exceptional thinking of one of America’s most brilliant writers of our time.
There is a music interlude to begin. Start of the Interview is 5 min. 23 sec
As a writer who shares the theme of nature I am so grateful to Lauren Groff for demonstrating the power of fiction to move us to understand the deep roots of our misunderstanding.
Get a cup of tea or java and prepare to listen to this insightful projection of how it happened. About 10 minutes.
From the great science fiction novelist and futurist, Kim Stanley Robinson, another salient message.
His recent book, The Ministry for the Future, rocked the world of people concerned about climate change. Why? Kim took on the gargantuan task of imagining how our country and the world community finally made the realization it could no longer live at odds with a living planet.
It is not a straight line by any means. But, Kim shows how the world came together to secure the biosphere from the vantage point of a person looking back to the terrible twenties from 2071.
Billions of dollars have spawned so many good things in the clean energy transition – almost on a daily basis – most people miss the daily announcements of billions of dollars invested in business, communities and private citizens…lost in the drone and rancor of political news.
Due to the hard work of the Biden-Harris Administration and partners in many sectors of our society, America is deep into the transition!!
Volts Podcast on Substack is one of the most reliabe reporting sources in media today on the clean energy transition in the U.S. David Roberts, the host, interviews Costa Samaras, Chief Advisor for the White House Office of Science and Technology about where we are now on the clean energy transition.
Industrial supply chain, labor and widespread planning are next. Utilities that are ready for electrification is next on the trail to a clean, cheap energy society.
We must recognize the danger and come together as an electorate.
U.S. Capitol Building photo by Susan Feathers
The Nature of This Election
There is an important misunderstanding among many of us about the nature of this Presidential election. Normally, the debates bring to the voter’s attention the policies of their respective political party which form a Presidential platform of ideas and legislation for voters to consider and then vote.
Instead, the Far Right is proposing a new form of Govenment.
This so-called Republican party openly endorses Putin and Ormand as examples of leadership they admire. The Far Right plans to end democracy and replace it with an autocracy. HELLO?
In any other time, the American public would be appalled and alarmed. But today a large segment of the American voting public has become desensitized to violent rhetoric, racist comments, and threats to change our government. Fear is the undelying force among supporters of the Far Right, which is against many things but not for what most American’s want.
Our public is asleep and/or hoodwinked by manipulative leadersand media.
Our common reality is that we have a clear and present danger in Donald Trump and the so-called Republicans. THEY MUST NOT GET INTO OFFICE
It will take all of us who love democracy and wish our country to continue as it has been for nearly 250 years (under both Democrats and Republicans) to assure Donald Trump and an authoritarian, nationalist political movement will not destroy our Republic.
We will have to show heretofore devotion to democracy as our form of government by voting for a ticket you might not normally endorse.
However, if you look closely, with a non-partisan eye, it might not be too far from your own views and hopes for the future. President Biden’s policies are focused on the best interests of all voters with programs to strengthen the middle class worker. Our economy rebounded from the Pandemic under Biden’s leadership and is top in the world in growth and low inflation. Business is booming and job creation at record levels.
Biden’s administration has made major investments in familes, industry and small business, and in the safety of our population and the world through climate change investments in business, science, and health and wellbeing.
The next five months before the election we must gather together and determine that our country’s democratic way of life will be sustained by electing a leader who has proven to be a guardian of democracy.
Eligible voters must vote. Support candidates for democracy in other states. Volunteer with a legitimate party organization.
Volunteer at election precincts to assure fair voting.
Correct misinformation wherever you hear it or from anyone you know.
Anti-Trump Republicans and undecided or Independent voters must vote for the Democratic ticket eventhough you may favor Republican policies or other forms of democratic governance.
After the election, if we somehow make the curve and preserve democracy, a new party of conservative values, or whatever is determined as its policies will need to be formed to assure a well-functioning government where a healthy debate about policies can be reestablished.
We can then all work together to secure a future for our children and coming generations in an increasingly warming world.
We must keep working with the world community on climate mitigation, peace and justice, and the health of democracies across the planet. You can do this effectively as a Democrat, Republican or Independent when you live in a vibrant democracy. Recognize that the Far Right is masquerading as Republians but they are not; they are autocrats.
On St. Patrick’s Day, celebrate the ongoing story of our Earth Walk
John O’Donohue was born in 1956, into a native Gaelic speaking family, on the farm inhabited by previous generations in the Burren Region of County Clare, Ireland. As the oldest of four children, he learned to work alongside his parents and uncle, developing a close kinship with the wild landscape, framed by an ethereal view of a limestone valley and the beckoning waters of Galway Bay. This valley was the shell of John’s soul, forging a deep and powerful connection with the elements shaping him. He was educated at the local primary school, alternating his studies with the farm chores of tending livestock, raising crops and carving peat for fuel, in his youth. John later described the profound influence of his childhood home as, “A huge wild invitation to extend your imagination…an ancient conversation between the land and sea.”
John Interviewed by Krista Tippett on the OnBreing Program/Podcast
The theme this year is “spréach”, the Irish for spark, which could manifest itself as “the glint of craic in the eye that is so familiar to Irish people” or “the light of innovation and discovery so present throughout our history”, examples in the official festival literature suggest.
My family and I have roots in Ireland on the Feathers line of our family tree. I have in my heart a strong pull of both imagination and need to be there to soak up that which my relatives lived and to understand the forces that ultimately spurred immigration to America. John Feathers settled in Albemarle County, Virginia in the latter half of the eighteenth century.
Justices Sotomayor and Barrett discuss civic engagement, trust in public insitutions, polarization, and community as the locus for civic actions.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor began the iCivics program when she observed that the American public did not know basic information about the three branches of government and their functions, i.e. how each functions to check power being centered in any one branch. They discuss how the Supreme Court Justices manage discussing and making decisions when there are conflicting perspectives and how in general the Court manages their relationships as friends and colleagues. We can learn much from this discussion at this point in American history.
A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, ‘although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,’ wrote Orwell, tends to be ‘uninterested in what happens in the real world.’ Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism ‘has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.’ A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better.”
Dr. Snyder’s book, On Tyranny, is pocket-sized for a reason. It’s meant as a guide and inspiration to discern antidemocratic forms and pundits while taking action to defend our Republic and democracies everywhere.
Photo by Susan Feathers
Biden’s State of the Union Address
It infuriates me to listen to news commentators pick apart President Biden’s State of the Union Address as partisan. It was not. Biden’s first call for action addressed the assualt on our freedom and democracy. He shined a light on the Republican Party which seeks to destroy democracy – to weaken the Republic – to install a strong man, nationalist govenment. Biden is sounding an alarm, not promoting himself. Everyone of us should be echoing that charge!
We are a society of many religions, genders, and we all have immigrant origins. This vision emanates from the Founder’s vision for a new kind of government. For nearly 250 years the U.S.A. has been striving to achieve that vision.
We are not a nation of one religion, one dictator who makes decisions for us. To claims that nationalism is easier, I wonder how Republicans might react to their personal freedoms being taken away because one man decides to take it. Women on both sides of the political spectrum felt that when a law of the land for reproductive freedom was dramatically ended, after half a century of their god given right to make decisions about their own body. And the assault continues as the right to contraceptives is being threatened.
There are signs everywhere that nationalistic forces are pressing down on Liberty. We must stay vigilant and everyone who cares about American liberty must show up at the polls to vote, and bring along several people with them.
Susan Feathers 