Down for the Count

Down for the Count:
On October 27, 2006
In the United States of America

2,810 U.S. Military Fatalities in Iraq (thru today)

343 U.S. Military Fatalities in Afghanistan (thru today)

20,687 U.S. Military Maimed in Iraq (DoD Update: 10-Sep-06)

49,692 Iraqis Reported Killed (thru today; source: Iraq Body Count)

5.6 hectares per person U.S. Carbon Footprint (Global Footprint Network ‘06)
0.42 hectares per person Africa Carbon Footprint (Global Footprint Network ‘06)
2.2 hectares per person World Footprint (Global Footprint Network ‘06)
1.8 hectares per person Earth’s Biocapacity (Global Footprint Network ‘06)
(One hectare = 100 acres)

64% voting-age citizens voted in ‘04 elections (‘06 US Census report)
72% voting-age citizens registered to vote (‘06 US Census Report)
81.3% $100K over income voted in ’04 elections (‘06 US Census report)
48.3% $20-$29 K income voted in ’04 elections (‘06 US Census report)


219 years since the signing of the U.S. Constitution
728 days until the 2008 Presidential Election
11 days until the Congressional General Election
0 days to shape the future



References: pulled from Internet on October 28, 2006
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/04000lk.html
http://www.lwv.org/

Achille-Claude Debussy's Early Morning gift

Claire de Lune softly played on my Bose at 4 am this morning, sweeping me back in time to my teens when I was a budding clarinetist in Plattsburgh, New York.

That time in my life was filled with good music, shared inspiration of fellow musicians; directing the Philharmonic from my third floor bedroom, a new LP from Columbia Records blaring the Firebird Suite, in a nineteenth-century brick home overlooking Lake Champlain. I was thirteen years old, and how could I have known that what I experienced then would be some of the best experiences I would ever have?

Claude Debussey broke with tradition at the Paris Conservatory, writing music influenced by the period's Impressionist painting schools. Afternoon of a Fawn and La Mer are two other Debussy favorites of mine. Debussy takes listeners into a kind of rapture. This morning's happenstance, listening to Claire de Lune and drinking organic coffee from Chiapas...these are the experiences of only a small part of the human race.

How can it be that while I sit in my warm living room, enjoying great music and coffee, anticipating a day when I can determine my own future, go my own way with no worries about food, shelter or safety...that three-quarters of my fellow man are lying on the bare ground, starved and threatened by a mean race of people within their own borders?

How can these realities exist in time together?

When I was thirteen it was perhaps forgiveable because I rarely encountered information about people living in these conditions. But now we have CNN and that other reality is present in my living room with me. It comes as a discordant fact in the midst of Debussy's exquisite creation presenting me with a dilemma early in my day. What should be my response? How can I proceed now that I recognize I am related to those who suffer?

Is adulthood a time when the seriousness of the world community steals away the rapture of youth when life was taken for granted and fully tasted, embraced? No, I think not...but the art of living in the world's incongruity requires me to live with integrity, to try to do what I can do so that any human being on the Earth can enjoy an early morning interlude with Claude Debussy's masterworks.

For information on the latest situation in Darfur: http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/document.do?id=ENGUSA20061022002



Susan

Among Garden Spirits

A garden is a spiritual place. I have always created a garden, at each house I have lived. My garden in Tucson is maturing. By that I mean each shrub or plant, or seedling tree, is taking root more deeply or widely, depending on its strategy for collecting water. Roots and branches, vines and flowers intermingle providing support for another or shade; some compete for space and sunlight.

I let my gardens grow wild, following the shape of growth, surprised by fruits that pop up in odd places from my mad composting of kitchen waste. Under my bedroom window a new garden bed hosts a tribe of butternut squash seedlings rising from one spot. I'll let them all grow, determining among themselves which will prevail to grow the vine across my tiny backyard.

Pieces of pottery as seen above (a wall vase my daughter made when she was young) I hang on a wall, or I place bowls and vessels in the soil where water collects for ants, lizards, and a wild cat that drinks from a pitcher smothered by white allysum underneath the birdbath. Cat is a sleek, black panther just the right size for a small urban garden. He stalks unwary birds and about once a month manages to get one, leaving me a pile of grey feathers and white down as a marker of his work.

Salvia is flaming red and I noticed a ruby-throated Anna's hummingbird (Calypte anna) drinking from one of the carmine pockets this morning.

Because Tucson is experiencing a West Nile outbreak from mosquito bites, I have let my birdbath go dry. The usual feathered friends no longer drop by for a drink. But the Inca Dove (Columbina inca) flutters down when the coast is clear to eat small seeds from grasses and the over-hanging Foothill palo verde tree (Cercidium microphyllum) . The palo verde is a legume and my garden benefits from the nitrogen rich seed pods it drops profusely in the late spring.

Earlier I wrote a note about the Sacred Datura or Jimson Weed that sprung up in my front garden. This large leafed plant sprawled over a six-foot circumference, about two feet high. But, in only three days it was "mowed down" by the larvae of the Hawk moth (Sphingidae) which is a prime pollinator of Sacred Datura (Datura wrightii).

When I examined the leaves of the disappearing Datura, I came "face to face" with a garden shape shifter (below). This one was five inches long!

I left the horn worms to grow. After one more day the entire leaf canopy was gone, the only trace of the green spirits a pile of dark balls of dung left to enrich the garden soil. Where the larvae diappeared to I have no idea. Maybe they are under ground waiting until next spring when they will metamorph into the huge brown hawk moths that visit Datura on warm summer nights drinking from the white trumpet flowers.

One thing about gardens: they awaken a different sense of time through the cycles of plant and animal life that follow the moon and sun, the rain and influences of mountains, rivers, and wind. A garden holds my feet on the Earth.

Writing and William Faulkner's Advice

On the trip home from Taos, closing my writer's residency at the Frank Waters Foundation, I encountered the Very Large Arrays, Radio Telescopes of the National Science Foundation. I pulled into the visitor center, curious to learn the purpose of this amazing site with over twenty giant discs aimed toward the heavens. A storm brewed, kicking up winds that found no obstruction across the high plateau in southwestern New Mexico. I always imagine sinister plots at sites like this, some covert U.S. operation underneath the veneer of science research. I learned that these telescopes use radiowaves, not to listen to sounds emanating from space, but to visualize the far reaches of our galaxy. In fact they produce images of places that may be from the beginning of time, fourteen billion years ago. That seemed more mysterious than a covert plot. At its least, it might afford me an idea for a new chapter in the book I just finished drafting at the Waters' Foundation studio.

Writing itself is somewhat of a mystery. Beyond the obvious need to learn to write in correct format and convention (something I am still learning), writing taps into streams of consciousness hidden even from the writer herself. Where, for example, do names of characters come from? I was writing about a minister recently and the name Cleveland Sturgess popped in my mind. Now where would a name like that come from? I have no idea, but I rather liked it and incorporated "him" into my story. Maybe he even exists somewhere on the planet.

Then two days ago I felt the need for redirection in my writing. Scanning my library I picked The Faulkner Reader from the shelf. William Faulkner inspired me early in my life when I studied his works as an English major at East Tennessee State University in the rolling foothills of the Smoky Mountains. Ike McCaslin and Old Ben (The Bear) remained powerful images in my own psyche and probably led me to become an environmental educator later in my life. There in the beginning of the Reader is Faulkner's address upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Therein I found the redirection I sought:

"Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in this workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed- love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice....

It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart...."

Now how did I know to pull that book from the shelf just when I needed a lighthouse?

For more about William Faulkner go to William Faulkner on the Web:
http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/faulkner.html

~ Susan

P.S. That same evening the owner of the B&B in Alpine, Arizona told me his military friend believes that, indeed, the Very Large Arrays sometimes engage in spy operations here on planet Earth. The wheels are turning.