A toast: To the grass . . .
Wednesday, April 22, 2026. It's Odin' day … strong Southerlies continue to maintain cloudy skies over Green Country and TulseyTown and an afternoon in the low 70's.
Today is EARTH DAY.
The modern and postmodern selves largely live in a world of their own construction and react for or against human-made ideas. While calling ourselves intelligent, we’ve lost touch with the natural world. – Fr. Richard Rohr, “Soul and the Natural World,” Meditations, from The Center for Action and Meditation.
Given the staggering technological power we have acquired, stewardship is humanity’s de facto relationship to earth at this point. To work, stewardship needs to be based on the non-anthropocentric assumption of fundamental kinship between human and non-human, an assumption that must exist before question and argument, shaping experience and action: A vision, as we have begun to see, of Paleolithic and ancient Chinese cultures. Only that will allow us to value earth and its individual life-forms in and of themselves, to value their own self-realization as we do our own. – David Hinton , Wild Mind, Wild Earth: Our Place in the Sixth Extinction, Shambhala, 2022.
Mindful
Oh, good scholar, I say to myself / how can you help but grow wise / with such teachings as these –
the untrimmable light of the world / the ocean's shine / the prayers that are made of grass?
– Mary Oliver, “Mindful” in Why I Wake Up Early, Beacon Press, 2004.
There is an unmistakable feeling that the wheels are coming off the MAGA bus. – Heather Cox Richardson, in Letters From An American.
A rather impressive group share their birth's today.
One of the world’s most influential philosophers, Immanuel Kant, was born in 1724, Königsberg, Prussia [now Kaliningrad, Russia].
Vladimir Lenin born in 1870, Simbirsk, Russia.
Robert Oppenheimer was born in 1904, New York City.
Jack Nicholson is 89 today. Among the foremost film actors, he was born in 1937, Neptune, New Jersey,
And, yesterday was Patty LuPone's 77th Birthday. Born in 1949, Northport, New York. Without a doubt, one of Stephen Sondiheim's favorate intepreters, toasting “The Ladies Who Lunch,” on The Late Show.