Seeing in the dark . . .

Tuesday, August 12, 2025. It's Tiw's day . . . After overnight thunderstorms, rain chances diminish for TulseyTown today but remain into tonight. Cooler, in the upper 80's. No wind to speak of. Mixed cloud cover. A slow return to the heat tomorrow and into the weekend. If you find yourself somewhere other than TulseyTown with its cloud cover, you might get to see the Perseids meteor shower. The sky show reaches its peak on tonight through Wednesday morning.

The gift of darkness.

We forget that darkness is always present alongside the light. We know the light most fully in contrast with its opposite... There is something that can only be known by going through [that “dark night of the soul.”] … In many ways, the struggle with darkness has been the church’s constant dilemma...It does not like the shadowland of our human reality. – Fr. Richard Rohr, Meditations, The Center for Action and Meditation.

Trump's declaration of a public safety emergency in Washington, D.C., taking control of the Metropolitan Police and announcing his intent to bring the National Guard, is unique, and it’s important for us to understand what it is and what it isn’t. D.C. is not New York or Chicago. – Joyce Vance, Civil Discorse.

Heather Cox Richardson offered her perspective on Trump's power grab, in Letters From An American, posted last night.

Today is the birth date of Erwin Schrödinger. The Nobel laureate – for his contributions to physics and the fundamentals of quantum mechanics – was born in 1887, Vienna, Austria.

And, one of the founders of American cinema, Cecil B. DeMille, was born on this day in 1881, Ashfield, Massachusetts.

Night Creatures

Poetry brings light to the night creatures

who, exposed, scutter away into corners

fearful of being shown their identities.

At first blush,

silence may be about death

but it is also about peace.

Perhaps it is that poems are not so much about silence

as much as they imply to those elements of darkness

an allowance -

the silence of ourselves -

to be exposed to the light

even if there are no words.

– jab