Guitars continue to weep . . .

It's Freya's Day.

In the back of the mailbox, two items from May 5th were found in the corner, left by the Watercourse:

The giant seaweed blob making headlines recently has finally reached U.S. shores—in Key West, Florida, with more than 13 million tons of sargassum floating in a blob twice the width of the continental United States. When this seaweed hits the beaches and begins to decompose, it releases hydrogen sulfide which not only smells bad but can also cause health issues for the humans and marine life around it, not to mention the economic costs brought by it.

And, The U.S. Supreme Court on May 5th removed federal protection from half of the currently protected wetlands in the U.S, an area larger than California.

Of note today:

The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in 1922 Washington, DC.

Nineteen-year-old Joan of Arc was burned at the stake on this day in 1431, ordered by an English-dominated tribunal in Rouen, France during the Hundred Years' War.

The Beatles began recording “The White Album” on this date in 1968 at the Apple studio in London.

It’s time to grant 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote. As I write this morning, millions of young people are working and paying taxes on every paycheck they earn. They’re watching as decisions that affect their schools, their communities, and their futures are being made without their input, despite having just as much knowledge about our political system as 18-year-olds (or older!) do. That is taxation without representation – a continuing hallmark of our “democracy.” The fact that their brains are still developing is not an argument — that is a “red herring.” A significant number of our population have brains they don’t use.

Remembering the future . . .

Today is Memorial Day . . .

. . .the day Americans have honored since 1868, when we remember those military personnel who have died in the service of the country—that is to say, for the rest of us. . .We are haunted by the holes those deaths ripped forever in the social fabric: the discoveries not made, the problems not solved, the marriages not celebrated, the babies not born. . .For many of us, we know only what we've been told, and often there has been little of that.

As for me, I remember my uncle Eugene Wilson “Gene” Young – a B24 “belly” gunner who flew from England over Germany. He survived World War II and lived until his 70's with a partial lung. He knew many who died in the skies but to my memory never talked about them, preferring to joke about the living.

Those who survived are now in or near their 100's and they, along with those who died those untimely and unimaginably horrific deaths, gave up not only their lives also their futures to protect American democracy against the spread of fascism.

As fascism rears its ugliness again, now spreading across the world and our own homeland, we would do well to remember not only those who served and died for us, but why. And, it wouldn't hurt to remember this every day of the lives we now have left.

I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my

chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.
For faced with the real form of what has haunted me and governed me for so many
days and years, I would surely become a shadow. . .

I have dreamed of you so much, have walked so much, talked so much, slept so much

with your phantom, that perhaps the only thing left for me is to become a phantom
among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadow than the shadow that
moves and goes on moving, brightly, over the sundial of your life. – Robert Desnos

Optimistically Buoyant

In the mailbox this Sols' day . . .

Poet May Swenson was born on this date in 1913 Logan, Utah

It's also the 107th anniversary of Walker Percy's birth. The novelist was born today in 1916 Birmingham, Alabama.

“I still respectfully disagree with allowing Donald Trump to appear in that particular format. Maybe we should revert back to the newspaper editors and TV chiefs of the 1950s, who in the end refused to allow McCarthyism onto their pages.” – Christiane Amanpour Address to the Columbia School of Journalism’s Class of 2023.

“Bill Gates called himself an impatient optimist, and that feels pretty good for what I am.” – Geena Davis at the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media

. . .the future, like a forest

we never knew. . .

the deep innerness of all things,

the last word that can never be spoken.

To each of us you reveal yourself differently:

to the ship as coastline, to the shore as a ship.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours (transl. by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

Riverhead Books, NYC, 1996.

Neglect

The generous world grants me bounty

beyond measure every day,

yet I spend my time

regretting my losses,

a ship with its paint cracking,

neglecting to thank the ocean for its buoyancy.

– Leslie Gerber, Rattle, Summer, 2023, Vol. 29, No. 2