My mood, my internal weather is as somber as the morning sky. The news from Ukraine is of widespread shelling of neighborhoods, of a mother wounded by shrapnel in the face, as she covers her child to protect it from death in the air. There is news of thousands of civilians removed from Mariupol,…
We live in through and by our stories do we not? Who could I possibly be apart from the stories that I tell myself? What could I become unless my imagination is sparked by the stories which you have told me? The ultimate form of human association is marked by vulnerability, – such that…
We began our discussion on the expansive subject of “love.” What can be said philosophically about love, or about “falling in love?” Love is a subject commanding enormous attention, as witnessed by innumerable novels, pop ballads, movies, and the Hallmark channel. “Falling in love” is a euphemism that is often overheard. The expression can…
The officer, who had once begged us to show the world his dying city, now pleaded with us to go. He nudged us toward the thousands of battered cars preparing to leave Mariupol. The deaths came fast. On Feb. 27, we watched as a doctor tried to save a little girl hit by shrapnel….
The first spring rain produced about an inch of rainfall. An inch is a good beginning. With another day of gentle rain, we will be off the starting-line of growing season. It sounds strange to say “we.” By habit we think of homo sapiens as distinct, abstract, essentially different from nature. That is a…
What does it take to become human, to bridge the gap between… zoe and bios, physiology and biography, nature and spirit, the somatic and symbolic? For us life is meaning and meaning is life. —Inner Experience and Worldly Revolt; Arendt’s Bearing on Kristeva’s Project by Noëlle McAfee, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy The…
There is a light rain falling. Rain began yesterday. I never complain about the rain. What I fear is drought depriving vegetation of nourishment in the growing season. Severe drought stresses mature trees, making older trees susceptible to disease. I feel kinship to trees. Trees provide shelter to a variety of mammals, birds, even…
It is Friday morning. After rising, switching on the iphone, a text message was waiting. A friend asked if I could meet him at Limestone Coffee Shop at 7. I had ten minutes. I pressed ahead with the bowl of cheerios, grabbed my coat and was out the door. Arriving at the coffee shop…
Mariupol They are stacked together with dozens of others in this mass grave on the outskirts of the city. A man covered in a bright blue tarp, weighed down by stones at the crumbling curb. A woman wrapped in a red and gold bedsheet, her legs neatly bound at the ankles with a scrap…
Met up with two friends this morning. Walking along the riverfront, in the presence of waterbirds congregating on the far bank, commenting on the old buildings, built by several generations before the present, the buildings rehabilitated, upgraded not only for our end use purposes, but a reminder that we are not the first to…
