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December 2024

Urban Myths

Morro Bay is a touristy little spot on coastal Highway 101 winding its way north along the Pacific beaches.

It has two landmarks, an enormous dome-shaped rock and massive chimneys from a power plant, long since decommissioned and just blighting the landscape.

The rock is actually a volcanic plug, what’s left of an extinct volcano when its ash and lava are eroded away, magma that stuck in the throat of the volcano once it cooled. It is protected as a State Preserve, but linked by a causeway to the mainland, so you can walk around there and ponder people’s indelible desire to leave their marks on the landscape…

The small town is filled with tourist shops, restaurants and motels, but also has a working harbor, with the fishermen happily throwing tidbits to the seagulls and sea lions too lazy to even move, sleeping it off on the rocks circling the moored yachts.

It is also a short, 30 minute drive away from a major tourist attraction: Hearst Castle. If willing to pay a mere $35 per person, you can visit the estate of the former media tycoon William Randolph Hearst in a 127 acres garden, a minute part of the 250.000 acres he acquired in the region. My severe allergy against tycoons prohibited me from exploring, but it served as a reminder of the fate of Patty Hearst, the magnate’s granddaughter, which brings us to today’s topic.

As a 20-year old college student, Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbioses Liberation Army and went on to commit several crimes with them, for which she was later sentenced and eventually pardoned with the understanding that she might have been brainwashed to commit to the goals of the radical organization.

The term bandied around was “Stockholm Syndrome,” coined originally by a psychiatrist after an earlier kidnapping scenario in a botched Swedish bank robbery, where the hostages were claimed to develop psychological bonds with their captors and agree with their agenda and demands. It was even insinuated that they formed romantic attachments.

You can imagine my surprise, or dismay, when I learned from a recent Radiolab Podcast (verified when I did some more research) that the whole concept is based on someone’s imagination, not facts. The psychiatric assessment was originally made without ever talking to the hostages, something that did not stop the concept’s adoption into our arsenal of cultural assumptions, (here, for example is the Encyclopedia Brittanica defining it,) including the training of some 7000 police and FBI agents on how to deal with hostage situations regarding this aspect. Of note is, of course, that it never made its way into The American Psychiatric Association‘s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). “It’s never met the strict review requirements to be included; in fact, it seems that no one ever submitted it for inclusion in the first place. That means there are no identified diagnostic criteria at all for the alleged condition.” (Ref.)

If you are like me, we assumed it was something that is indeed happening when captors exert power over people fearing for their safety, turning them into acolytes. Yet, when you look at the actual unfolding of the original bank robbery, it was clear that it was the bank and the police that so completely mishandled and botched the operations, that it was no surprise the captives felt safer with the captors than with the institutional responses, without forming attachments whatsoever. There is now a whole literature that has debunked the case.

For the most part, it is women victims who are pathologized, with a focus on their “crazy” reactions, rather than the perpetrators’ arsenal of threats. No surprise, then, that the concept is often extended to domestic violence cases as well.

Canadian psychologist Allan Wade, who interviewed the original victim deemed pathological in her appeasement of the kidnapper in Stockholm, phrased it this way:

Stockholm Syndrom is “one of a whole network of concepts that … shift focus away from the powerful role of … institutional responses… Such concepts also tend to protect offenders because, instead of looking at strategies used by perpetrators to suppress victims, resistance theories such as Stockholm Syndrome and others (there’s a long list of them: identification with the aggressor, infantilization, traumatic bonding, learned helplessness, internalization, false consciousness, it goes on and on) don’t evolve focus on how victimized people have responded to and resisted violence. Rather, they assume that they did not...It’s part of a family of notions that stem from hyper-individual, problematic notions in psychology and psychiatry, rather than careful analysis of circumstances on the ground.

These practices of implanting pathologies in the minds, brains and bodies of oppressed people, they’re inherent to what we might call colonialism, patriarchy, different forms of racism, different forms of violence and oppression,” he says. “So this is not sort of an accidental or uncommon problematic way of thinking; rather, it is endemic.” (Ref.)

Before wandering off into Morro Bay’s spectacular sunsets, let me point out how easy it is to create and/or fall for these kinds of urban myths, when the concepts align with other things you believe to be true. It is also the case that we need to distinguish between misinformation (inaccurate info), disinformation (deliberately gaslighting) and conspiracy theories, which encompass the idea that malicious actors are engaging in a secret plot that explains an important event (Jewish space lasers or the government covering up an enormous death toll from vaccines, etc.) And last but not least, we have to be aware that there are those of us who are perfectly willing to admit they fell for a myth, and henceforth let the facts rule, compared to others who will cling to prior held beliefs even if it involves ignoring the facts and instead coming up with substitute justifications.

Music today from Swedish composer Hugo Alfven, his Symphony #5.

For informative readings today on the topic of how to undermine conspiracy theorizing:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-can-you-fight-conspiracy-theories

On the topic of how misogyny increasingly affects our lives (and, alas, that of future generations,) including the pathologizing of women in violent situations:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/01/america-misogyny-gender-politics-trump/680753

Highly recommended. Gilbert is one smart writer.

And if you are more in the mood for black comedy/ entertainment, here is a film about one of the criminals involved in the Swedish hostage situation.

https://www.netflix.com/watch/81215890?trackId=255824129

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Random Thoughts while standing on a Land Spit.

I had never been to Point Reyes before. Driving back home from L.A., it seemed a worthwhile destination. The road up to the landmark lighthouse winds through endless, bare headlands occasionally interrupted by dairy farms. Cows dot the windy landscape, as do black-tailed deer. The peninsula, part of the Salinian Block transported north by the Andreas Fault, was once part of the Tehachapi Mountains, located 350 miles to the south. Since 1962, the region is a National Seashore Park, with some of the land leased back to ranching operations that coexist with tourists flocking to the landmarks and beaches.

I was there on a clear day, able to photograph the light house without having to climb down and then up again the 300 or so steps – during the usual dense fog, you are apparently unable to see it from the top of the stairs. According to a sign at the small visitor center, it is celebrating its 125th birthday. Its construction must have been a mind-boggling task.

Point Reyes juts out about ten miles (16 km) into the ocean, and the views of the Pacific and the long-stretched beaches are awe-inspiring. I did not see elephant seals, known to appear on those shores, but plenty of cormorants huddling on little rock islands, and ravens finding shelter against the wind.

A few cypress trees on the way up to the top are testimony to the force of the wind and nature’s resilience – look at the angle at which they continue to survive.

Resilience was also on my mind when looking at the concrete dome built into the granite rocks adjacent to the foot path. It is part of an elaborate water collection system, since there are no natural springs on the Point. The dome covers a cylindrical, concrete cistern that catches rain water run-off from the hillsides and natural rock formations. By true coincidence, I had just read a fascinating science report on how the Pantheon in Rome was built, the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. It has been indestructible since 126 AD, while more modern concrete structures crumble all around us. MIT researchers recently solved the mystery of little white aggregates suffusing the cement, long believed to be impurities sustained during the cement mixing process: they are a form of quicklime that ancient engineers intentionally added to the cement mix, enabling it to heal itself, blocking tiny cracks that could develop into large fissures, which would eventually burst the structure.

“As soon as tiny cracks start to form within the concrete, they can preferentially travel through the high-surface-area lime clasts. This material can then react with water, creating a calcium-saturated solution, which can recrystallize as calcium carbonate and quickly fill the crack, or react with pozzolanic materials to further strengthen the composite material. These reactions take place spontaneously and therefore automatically heal the cracks before they spread.”

Adopting ancient technological knowledge would not only provide for more durable structures. As it turns out, their way of mixing the ingredients required half of the temperatures currently used to produce ordinary cement. IF we could apply this approach commercially, we could reduce greenhouse gas emissions of this process by about 70 % – a huge number, if you consider that cement is one of the most used substances in the world and responsible for 8% of all greenhouse gas emissions globally.

Dome over the Point Reyes cistern.

Resilience: Maybe we could all be tiny white lime casts in the fraying societal fabric around us, healing small cracks before they become agents of complete destruction. Individual acts of resilience or resistance to malign forces accumulating to stabilization of the whole. Believing in the wisdom of ancient creators rather than chasing the modern technology at all cost, as a start.

A woman can dream.

Point Reyes, as it turns out, is also an intermittent rescue location for lost birds. As I learned here, some birds, know as vagrants, get deviated during migration and seek shelter on land far from their usual routes. Scientists have revised their early assumptions that these birds are disoriented, flying into random directions. Instead, they seem to be misoriented, consistently oriented, but in the wrong (mirror image) orientation.

“The result of mirror-image misorientation is that, if a species’ normal route is, say, 40 degrees east of due south, the misoriented individuals orient 40 degrees west of due south and keep going, eventually reaching the coast of California.

But mirror-image misorientation does not affect birds in a uniform manner; otherwise, the tendency would have been eliminated by natural selection. Rather, experts have concluded, it works in tandem with wind drift, a second critical influence on vagrancy in California. If northeasterly winds occur just when a misoriented bird sets off, this individual will be blown in a southwesterly direction and, rather than making a course correction, the bird simply continues. “

Some of these birds will continue South and never make it to their location, eventually becoming exhausted, drowning in the ocean. But some species, palm warblers, white-throated sparrows, and swamp sparrows, have established wintering populations in Northern California. So there is testimony to resilience as well – given a bit of luck with external circumstances, you might survive being different from the norm required by migration coordinates, eventually flourishing in newly established patterns. Another lesson to take to heart, I suppose, in the coming storms pushing us adrift. Just stay out of the way of the hawks on high.

Mozart to the rescue…. here is his Requiem in D-Minor.

And speaking of catastrophic storms: As I had promised, here is my first link to an occasional long read, an essay by Yale historian Timothy Snyder that pulls no punches about a twice impeached, adjudicated rapist, business fraud and felon, who is above the law in this country.

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Happy Thanksgiving

Still so much to be thankful for. I hope the day finds you surrounded by loved ones, in good health and determined spirits to fight for what is just and ethically demanded. I am grateful for you, my critical readers and friends, a community that sustains me and each other in hard times. Grateful for nature and the arts. Grateful for younger generations undeterred in their activism for a better world.

Grateful for reminders that surrounding darkness cannot always extinguish a central light.

Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter yesterday reminded us:

“(in 1864…) Lincoln proclaimed another day of Thanksgiving, this time congratulating Americans that God had favored them not only with immigration but also with the emancipation of formerly enslaved people. “Moreover,” Lincoln wrote, “He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions.”

In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.

And in 1865, at least, they won.”

And always grateful for music!

Regular YDPs will resume when I am back home by the end of next week.

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Uninvited Symbolism.

Imagine yourself on a mountain ridge between two deep canyons. The city is spread out at your feet, the mountains behind you.

You are surrounded by olive, palm, eucalyptus and pine trees, with an occasional sycamore thrown in.

The vegetation is dry to the bone ,

and when you marvel at the fiery sunrise in the mornings your heart goes out to all those affected by wildfires, enraged by the thought that soon we will have a president and his minions who will make disaster help contingent on political lockstep, as announced by them.

Worse, they will do away with environmental protection and pollute as long and as hard as they can, climate change be damned, its science ridiculed or overruled by the demands for profit.

You feel privileged, up there on that beautiful ridge, to be able to look at the changing sky,

to hike down the small private trail to the city, along the waterline, sandy, steep, surrounded by dead yuccas and a landscape filled with luminous rusty colors. The only official access is a one-lane dirt road crossing the canyon with a small bridge, your car soon anticipating the worst potholes and getting the hang of serpentine curves.

Imagine yourself waking up in the middle of the night to the acrid smell of fire, loud crackling and popping noises, flames already sky high. You don’t know what is burning in your vicinity, one of the other structures, and how far away it is. You grab your meds, your purse, your computer and the car keys, and race down that hill fully aware that once a firetruck comes up you are stuck on the ridge.

This happened to me Tuesday night. I am still processing, rattled to the core.

The first fire-police jeeps came within a minute after I had exited the lane onto the street, where I had stopped the car, shaking too much to drive safely. The firetrucks, later, could not cross the bridge. The fire was extinguished with hoses on site and helicopters dumping their load, onto the vicinity as well, to prevent the spread of fire into the wilderness. One person hospitalized, some non-human life lost.

I went back the next day, still in my nightshirt, to pack up my unharmed stuff, my house completely unscathed as all the others in the neighborhood but that one structure and parked truck that burnt to the ground. I can no longer envision myself up there without fear, forever hyperalert to the smells and sounds. And I cannot help myself but thinking of the symbolism mirroring our current situation, ever aware of potential catastrophes and then, in a flash, they have arrived. Yes, it could have been far worse here, but in many instances it HAS been and WILL be far worse, with so many people affected, around the world for lack of appropriate leadership.

I lost nothing other than a cherished place to spend my time in SoCal, and even that loss is entirely psychologically grounded in my own fear to return to the place. I don’t want to think about how it must feel for people who lost loved ones, or their entire material existence, or a community that will never again cohere, thrown into the winds, and still floating many years later. In fact, I don’t want to think about it much at all, since I still get these waves of flash-backs of that drive down the mountain, the overpowering noises still in my ears.

I had meant to visit the World Forestry Center’s current Exhibition Following Fire once back in Portland. Can’t see myself doing that, either. Subtitled A Resilient Forest/An Uncertain Future it is a photography project by photographer David Paul Bayles and disturbance ecologist Frederick Swanson, documenting the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire that burned 173,000 acres along the forested McKenzie River canyon in the Cascade Range of Oregon. You should, though, if only to get motivated to help protect our world against the dark forces.

Onwards. With the appropriate musical accompaniment.

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A Strong Beginning

“We do not know what will happen. But we can know who we can commit to be in the face of what happens. That is a strong beginning.” – Rebecca Solnit

So who do we want to commit to be in view of being surrounded by voters willing to tolerate or invite fascism, voters manipulated into ignorance about the consequences of their actions, or non-voters indifferent enough to fail to prevent it? (I think it is important to remember how many people did not vote at all.) Who do we want to commit to be in anticipation of the catastrophes brought to our neighborhoods (and the world) by agents of hate, retribution and lust for power?

In my own case, I want to commit to nourish community, in my real as well as my digital life, as expressed here on the blog. I will stand on principle and not make compromises halfway between the truth and lies, as appeasers in the media would like to have us. I will continue to use the tools I have, to stimulate thinking about politics and history, to use my background as a scientist to educate about the domains of psychology, health and climate change. I will also add a new feature once a week, Does this makes sense?, linking to one or two long-form pieces of writing that were particularly thought-provoking in my perusal of the week’s publications (and not necessarily something I agree with), perhaps prompting a community discussion in the comments. I will post reading recommendations from people who are smarter and more organized than I am, geared towards the issues at hand. You’ll find some at the end of today’s blog. Solnit’s encouragements are a good way to start. Mind you, I completely understand if reading is too much now, or ever; it’s just my frantic default option….

I will commit to balancing the reports on the frightening with all that we can still be grateful for, the beauty around us, nature that models resiliency, indigenous wisdom that guides us, art that encourages resistance, poetry that fortifies us. Today’s choice, written during the horrors of the Civil War, describes adaptation as a form of resilience, not defeatism. Let that be the manner in which we tackle our current universe!

We grow accustomed to the Dark-

We grow accustomed to the Dark –
When light is put away –
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye –

A Moment – We uncertain step
For newness of the night –
Then – fit our Vision to the Dark –
And meet the Road – erect –

And so of larger – Darknesses –
Those Evenings of the Brain –
When not a Moon disclose a sign –
Or Star – come out – within –

The Bravest – grope a little –
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead –
But as they learn to see –

Either the Darkness alters –
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight –
And Life steps almost straight.

by Emily Dickinson

I am currently in Southern California, surrounded by nature in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. The noisiest birds that visit me are the California acorn woodpeckers. I wrote at length about this fascinating species here two years ago. They are perfect models for what we have to learn: to live in “bushels” of community, tending to our broods and granaries as a cohesive group, rather than fixating on individual success. They are a prime example of the evolutionary benefits of cooperation, across many generations, both with regard to breeding patterns, raising the young and creating, using and restoring granaries for acorns, riddling oak trees with custom-sized holes which provide storage for food during winter. Cannot think of a better symbol for the road ahead.



Music today is Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. Feel it.

Reading Recommendations (some might be of interests to book groups that don’t shy away from difficult conversations):

Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum

Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen

Let This Radicalize You. by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba

Strongmen by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

How to be an AntiRacist by Ibram X. Kendi

Several of these come with work books helpful to guide group discussion or offering further action proposals.

Here is a compilation of analyses of how we got here:

https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/ten-articles-explaining-the-2024?ref=organizingmythoughts.org

Here is a road map from Choose Democracy founder Daniel Hunter:

https://therealnews.com/10-ways-to-be-prepared-and-grounded-now-that-trump-has-won

Here are ten currently free e-books around dealing with times of crises.

Yesterday’s sunrise:

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It can happen here. And it Has.

Trump’s victory is a grim day for the United States and for democracies around the world. You have every right to be appalled, saddened, shocked, and frightened. Soon, however, you should dust yourself off, square your shoulders, and take a deep breath. Americans who care about democracy have work to do. ” Tom Nichols in Nov 6, 2024 The Atlantic

My night was disrupted by constant despondent messages from my European friends and readers – not that I could sleep anyhow. I found myself embracing conspiracy theories rather than acknowledging the real horror of this election outcome: the majority of American voters are happy to act on racist, misogynistic, patriarchal and christian nationalistic impulses. The spectacle of cruelty and power, of ignorant belief in empty promises and a desire for traditional hierarchies restored, attracted millions of voters, White women and men predominantly among them. Embracing the fact that they are empowering a convicted felon and his coterie of oligarchs and supplicants. Equality, as enshrined in the Constitution, but an empty term.

Who would not rather believe that voting machines were manipulated, by oligarchic shenanigans or foreign powers, that bomb threats and voter suppression disrupted the process, that votes were systematically not counted, than to admit in what company of landsmen we exist?

The grief I feel today is compounded by the fact that German history is so closely associated with my life as German-born, as a Jew, as a scientist, who sees the writing on the wall, whether it will be show trials for opponents of a malignant narcissist, withholding of disaster aid to blue states, willful ignorance of scientific data ranging from vaccination denial health care decisions (welcome back, polio and diphtheria, measles and pandemics,) to climate change in what short window of time we still have. The damage will be irrevocable.

Millions around the world will pay the price for this nation’s election, starting with the Palestinian and Ukrainian peoples who will have fought in vain against genocidal aggression. The grief is compounded by knowing that so many of my younger friends or children’s generation worked so hard for a better future, throwing themselves into canvassing and other organizing work, because they realized that their own future is so much more endangered than that of my generation that soon will be gone.

I know that autocrats’ goals are to instill fear in us, and exhaustion, isolation, disorientation. George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian before the election:

Never underestimate the vengeful nihilism at the heart of this movement. The glitter-eyed fanatics behind Project 2025 and other such programmes will smash whatever is most precious to you, partly at the behest of commercial interests – but also to enjoy watching the pain it inflicts. They will crush beauty, joy, community and hope precisely because other people value them.

Well, they will try. There will be a time to resist that, to move and organize and understand that those of us who are privileged as white middle class people are called on supporting the multitudes of more vulnerable fellows. But today I grieve. I withdraw. I have nothing else in me. I had gotten my hopes up, unable to fathom the depth of racism that drives this country and the lust for hate, and fell all the more. Allow yourself to grieve, too, if you share these fears. Then we’ll figure out what comes next. Together.

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San Ramon Valley

Eugene O’Neill looked for and found a seemingly peaceful enclave for writing his all but peaceful plays in the San Ramon Valley. For 6 years he and his wife lived in a gated house built with the money from his NobelPrize for literature, overlooking Mt. Diablo, grateful for the seclusion in the valley, the writer struggling with progressive tremors from Parkinson disease.

He felt he could only create with pen put to paper, an increasing hardship. His oldest son’s suicide, the estrangement from with his other 2 children, actively pursued by him after his daughter Oona married Charlie Chaplin, threw long shadows over a landscape filled with light. Eventually the couple moved back to the East coast.

“Peaceful” was in the eye of the beholder, anyhow. The original peoples of the region were violently uprooted by the 1772 arrival of the Spanish who established missions, killed those who objected in direct warfare and spread diseases that decimated the Tatcan, Seunen and Saclan tribes in horrifying numbers. When the missions were closed in 1863, fewer than a score of Indian descendants in the region were alive.

Of course, it didn’t end there. The Mexican government granted two Ranchos in the valley. The grazing cattle and sheep destroyed the herb and bulb meadows carefully nurtured by the tribes to provide traditional foods when hunting or fishing was precarious.

Then came the miners. The Gold Rush invaded more Indian lands and when California joined the Union in 1850 they immediately passed a law that allowed Indians to be enslaved by any White man, cynically called the “Act for the Protection of the Indians” (repealed in 1863, well into the Civil War period.)

I learned all this from a visit to a tiny history museum located in an old train station in Danville, attendant struggling to figure out that admission was $3, since they usually deal with school classes. A single room filled to the brim with dusty exhibits, lovingly collected across decades.

Displays ranged from stuffed animals to tribal artifacts, to walls of photographs celebrating noted personalities of Indian descent. Prints of works by famous photographer Edward S. Curtis and drawings by Michael Harney were isolated highlights among a lot of idiosyncratic exhibits.

Walking in the valley early in the morning provided welcome access to species alive rather than embalmed by eager taxidermists.

It is beautiful out here, even after the hottest, driest summer on record. The rains are supposed to return today.

Dried out creek.

Instead of music here are links to “Beyond the horizon,” a play filmed on the grounds of the O’Neill Tao House and in the landscape I currently walk in.

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Southbound, with company.

I was not alone on my way South. Surrounded by innumerable drivers, we were all stuck on I 5 behind a garbage truck that managed to blow up and burn out on the middle of a bridge over the Willamette river, with no room to move it aside for people to pass. Firetrucks, police, all on site, with us patiently sitting and waiting for eternity in turned-off cars.

Fire seems to have been a theme of the drive. When I arrived at my motel for the first overnight stop, all fire alarms were blaring, fire police frantically trying to find the source of the alarms. 45 minute wait later, they decided it was just a false signal from a corrupted sprinkler system. I fell into bed, fried.

Surrounded by innumerable water fowl, I saw smoke of a small fire billowing on the horizon. By the time I had left the wildlife preserve, smoke clouds covered the landscape and wafted over the highway, the fire had clearly exploded.

What was really fascinating, though, was the constant change in light in this California landscape, close to Sacramento. All the variations you see in the photographs below were taken during a 45 minute stay amongst my migrating pals.

Rain coming down hard

Some 10.000 white fronted geese and about 2000 snow geese hung out, if we can trust the species lists provided by birders for the day I came through.

Snow Geese

White fronted Geese

I did not focus on many of the other birds,

a large flock of turkey vultures, however, focused on me. One came so close overhead that I thought he’d dive….

There is something interesting about people naming collections of these birds, depending on the activity they can be found in. Mostly they are called a flock or a kettle, but when they rest they are called a committee and when they feed on carrion they are called a wake. Sometimes they are called a venue or a congregation Is that true for other raptors as well? In any case, do migrate as well, sometimes in kettles of up to 10.000 birds. I had no idea that was the case. I sure was surrounded.

I am now near San Francisco, hoping to see gardens new to me. Stay tuned.

Here is some New Music.

“The performers of this work by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer (b. 1933) imagined that the central figure of Wild Bird (1998) is a vulture, who finding his prey on the ground, tears it to pieces and eats it, before flying off again. The work is full of extreme dynamics, changing tempos and meters, and sharp dissonances. Clearly this is not your cute little song bird. In “Wild Bird” from 1997, the violin embodies the startled fluttering spirit, while the harp creates an echo chamber for it. The exhausting tour ends in audible fatigue.

Perfect parallel to driving south days on end …

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    Intermission

    I am leaving town a bit earlier than anticipated, so am jumbling to get everything squared for a month-long trip. Yes, I owe you a book review, no worries, it will come. So will travel reports and of course Art on the Road, given how much is currently on offer in Southern California. Just not on a regular schedule.

    In the meantime, walk with me one last time in the fall woods of Oregon, along the river. It was an easier choice than that of the peace dove from this fabulous photograph that my sister sent. Clearly her options are overwhelming, a sad testimony to the current state of the world, but the set-up was, I thought, ingenious. (The lowest sign adds: and all other countries not mentioned here…)

    I was encouraged by the fact that there is this public reminder expressing our hope for peace. I was also propped up by a recent article by Anne Applebaum making a case against pessimism. (Gift link, should allow you access.) And I want to remind you that excursions into nature are by far the easiest and most effective remedy for momentary despair, if only to remind you what’s a stake to fight for, rather than give up.

    Need not be a monumental hike. Can be sitting on a park bench, for all I care, or counting the daisies in a strip of lawn, or, as in the case below, walking around a wildlife preserve on easy paths.

    Falls has arrived, luminously so.

    Herons, ibis and cormorants hanging out, ready for lunch.

    Some finding morsels more easily than others.

    Next to the yellows, and isolated reds, there was a sense of the lushest of green, almost mirroring early spring in one last Hurrah before the cold nights set in.

    As always, there were surprises: yesterday some form of land art, I suppose, although it made me think of all these sneakers slung across the street wires…

    Familiar trees, ever changing. Through seasons, through wildlife activity, through human interference. A reminder that change is inevitable, at times beautiful, and we might as well go with it. Says this aging blogger, about to drive my car to L.A. for a change in scenery.

    I’ll listen to Piazzola’s seasons on the way South, but here is Fall.

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    Placeholder

    Soooooo – I was going to write about a book I thought I would have finished reading by now, but life and a knitting project intervened. Sneak preview for all you Richard Powers fans out there: he scored again. Get on the library wait list for “Playground.” Very much worth it. I will report more anon. What to do for a placeholder in the meantime?

    As it turned out, Greg Olear published a W.B.Yeats poem yesterday in his newsletter Prevail. I could not think of a more prescient description of our very own situation here before November 5th. I had to look up Helicon – a mountain in Greece, praised for two springs that sustained the muses in Greek mythology – and calumny – malicious false accusation or slander. Yeats’ ire was likely directed at the religious factions in Ireland, our’s is most certainly applied to whom the descriptions below match best: those averse to learning, open to slander, masters of fantastic falsehoods and opposed to anything that diverges from white supremacist norms….

    The Leaders Of The Crowd

    THEY must to keep their certainty accuse
    All that are different of a base intent;
    Pull down established honour; hawk for news
    Whatever their loose fantasy invent
    And murmur it with bated breath, as though
    The abounding gutter had been Helicon
    Or calumny a song.  How can they know
    Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone,
    And there alone, that have no Solitude?
    So the crowd come they care not what may come.
    They have loud music, hope every day renewed
    And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.

    by William Butler Yeats (1921)

    Just think. We’re 100 years on….

    But before we start this week with dismay, let’s look at those beautiful owls that simply sat next to my path in the woods, looking at me while I was looking at them. Bliss.

    Now I must go back to the novel, dying to know how it ends…

    Music is a reference to W.B.Yeats as well…a bit strange, and quite enticing.

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