Harsh mistress . . .

It's a Satyr's day and Okieland seems headed for an early Spring . . . in the mailbox this morning:

Biden has taken on Elon Musk and Red America is the beneficiary. If you have or know someone with farm roots, this may make for a more broadband perspective.

Capitalism's ugly tentacles are trying hijack the FDA into forcing CBD access to pharmaceutical Rx and a price tag of in excess of $30K per dose.

Tonight is the night of the Snow Moon.

Also known as the Hungry Moon, Storm Moon, Wolf Moon and Candles Moon, it's the farthest from the Earth tonight. As a result it will appear as the smallest full moon of the year, rising red, about 6:30 p.m. in the Northeast skies. Its appearance will signal the start of the Lantern Festival, also called Shang Yuan or the Yuan Xiao Jie, which is part of the Chinese New Year celebrations.

Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo last year, is dead after apparently striking a building Friday on the Upper West Side, according to the New York Times. I wonder if he was distracted by the “Hungry Moon.”

For your sake poets, painters, creatives sequester themselves only that the world, so transient as made in each moment by moment instant, might be given to you once again. Lovers are the poets in the briefest of hours, who gather your inheritance. Awakening desire, they make a place where growth happens with all its joy, pain, suffering and laughter – all the longings that had slept and now awakens to weep in a stranger's arms, streaming into you when things and thoughts cannot contain it. – after Rilke, Book of Hours.

Nostalgia is not an immersion in the past; nostalgia is the first annunciation that the past as we know it is coming to an end. – David Whyte

Passing

Everything passes. I mourn backwards

through time ... all the things I remember,

and all I don't ...

I mourn the lost bookstores ...

story-tellers and singers ...

I mourn the lives of those

I have not yet met,

the lives of all the creatures

vanishing before I shall ever meet them ...

And through you – somewhere we'll meet.

– by Vijaya Sundaram, in Fractured Lens, Cervena Barva Press, 2023.