When Sarah’s mother, Penny, got sick four years into our marriage, we decided to move back to Mississippi, considering it penance for the sins of our youth. We signed a lease on a house, a white one-story on the historical register with a wraparound porch and angels, stars, and the moon painted on the transom above the front door.
Slight detour ... to listen to one of my favorite voices.
Dave Zirin, born 1974, is an American political sportswriter. He is the sports editor for The Nation, a weekly progressive magazine dedicated to politics and culture, and writes a blog named Edge of Sports: the weekly sports column by Dave Zirin.
[video:https://vimeo.com/101980554]
Dave Zirin, "Protocols exist to protect players from themselves and - during a pandemic -from each other."
"We are surrounded by a world that talks, but we don't listen.""We are part of a community engaged in a vast conversation, but we deny our role in it."In the face of climate change, species loss, and vast environmental destruction, the ability to stand in the flow of the great conversation of all creatures and the earth can feel utterly lost to the human race. But Belden C. Lane suggests that it can and must be recovered, not only for the sake of endangered species and the well-being of at-risk communities, but for the survival of the world itself.
The Great Conversation is Lane's multi-faceted treatise on a spiritually centered environmentalism. At the core is a belief in the power of the natural world to act as teacher. In a series of personal anecdotes, Lane pairs his own experiences in the wild with the writings of saints and sages from a wide range of religious traditions. A night in a Missourian cave brings to mind the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola; the canyons of southern Utah elicit a response from the Chinese philosopher Laozi; 500,000 migrating sandhill cranes rest in Nebraska and evoke the Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar. With each chapter, the humility of spiritual masters through the ages melds with the author's encounters with natural teachers to offer guidance for entering once more into a conversation with the world.
"We need that wild country…even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be…a part of the geography of hope."
-- Wallace Stegner on sacred places
More below the fold ...
by ORION STAFF
To honor the 100th anniversary of the U.S ratification of the 19th Amendment — which guaranteed women the right to vote — we’ve curated 19 of our favorite Orion articles written by women.
A discussion on Latinx identity and intersectional environmentalism.
Eighteen more below the fold ....
The Coronavirus has nothing on Antebellum and Jim Crow south.
This was America: Thousands of white families, including men, women, and children, standing for hours to watch Black Americans be dismembered or burned alive for such crimes as “acting white” and stealing .75 cents. In this environment, Black citizens are not allowed to walk too tall, speak too confidently, create art uninhibitedly, or say who cannot speak abuses at their children.
Over the course of 6 decades, more than 6 million people fled the insanity of Jim Crow for their lives and their sanity during a period known as The Great Migration. This week’s book follows the story of three strangers, all making their way North, searching for the warmth of other suns.
Today's open thread features the work of my favorite poet.
Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published almost twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His latest collection of poems from Norton is called Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016). Other books of poems include The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000), Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993) and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (1990). His many honors include the 2018 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, an American Book Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona, and has been issued in a new edition by Northwestern University Press. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston’s Latino community, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy: the mad daughter of a wise mother.
- Voltaire -
The whole value of solitude depends upon one's self; it may be a sanctuary or a prison, a haven of repose or a place of punishment, a heaven or a hell, as we ourselves make it.
- John Lubbock -
Greetings from the banana republic of funkin' North Carolina.
