Showing category "Reading Life" (Show all posts)

California

Posted by Edith Cook on Wednesday, March 8, 2017, In : Reading Life 
My former hosts state has been getting lots of rain and snow this seAson. Here is Son Andy (my youngest) with his children enjoying a day in the snow. MEANWHILE MY VISIT IN TEXAS HAS BEEN MARKED BY DAYS WITH HUMIDITY UP TO 90% UGH!

  

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One pic shows AJ and his younger sister Grace at a snowboarding lesson. The other pic shows Andy with AJ on the ski lift.
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Singing with my cousin

Posted by Edith Cook on Thursday, October 27, 2016, In : Reading Life 
Let's see if this works. My cousin and I recently sang this song (in German) about a mill in the Black Forest. Sorry, can't seem to upload it here Will try on the Music Gallery page. Here are a couple of pics from our singing:


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Growing Tomatoes

Posted by Edith Cook on Saturday, July 16, 2016, In : Reading Life 
A friend emailed this depiction of growing container tomatoes. I'll try her method next year. My own containers are a bit skimpy.



Why do my pics appear sideways when uploaded but straight on my desktiop?
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Getting Squeezed

Posted by Edith Cook on Saturday, July 2, 2016, In : Reading Life 
As you know, I write a weekly column that appears in the two large Wyoming newspapers, the WTE and the CST., and I post these on this website after they have appeared in print. A few months ago,when the WTE along with several smaller Wyoming newspapers, was acquired by APG Media of the Rockies, all local columnists were informed we would no longer be paid for our services. What a way to increase CEO pay! They do, however, continue to pay national columnists, some of whom are no better at writ...
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End-of-the-Year Blues

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, December 27, 2015, In : Reading Life 
  Sometimes it seems I take one step forward and slide back two. Here I was hoping to replicate my Cheyenne veggie garden on my Wheatland property. Now something has happened that really sets me back. Someone ran into my Durango 4-wheel drive, an older car I was counting on to get me through snow drifts and muddy roads. The car is totaled, and insurance won't give me much for it. No injuries in either vehicle, thank goodness--but what am I to do, having only my little Toyota Prius left to dri...
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Sneak Preview

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, November 1, 2015, In : Reading Life 
As promised, a sneak preview of the column I submitted  to the editors of Wyoming Tribune Eagle and Casper Star Tribune for this week's publication, likely for Saturday, Nov. 7, 2014. The essay is something of a mixed bag--let's see what headlines the respective editors devise.


Driving down the road many years ago, I heard a song on the radio so arresting, I pulled over to give it my full attention. It was Roberta Flack, performing her composition, “The First Time Ever,” a paean to...


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Grandparent Duty and Paganini

Posted by Edith Cook on Friday, April 17, 2015, In : Reading Life 
In California for two weeks on grandparent duty I've been listening to Paganini, particularly a duet a friend and I have been practicing as guitar duet though the original composition was for violin and guitar. The violin part (Paganini's own) is full of fireworks but its guitar accompaniment is quite elementary; it was meant for a student. Well, she was more than a student, as the title--Duetto Amoroso--makes clear. Just in case you still harbor any doubts, the composer also labeled each of ...
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Beginning 2015

Posted by Edith Cook on Thursday, January 15, 2015, In : Reading Life 
Congress in Washington wants to bring tar sands crude into the U.S. Additionally, a few days ago the Nebraska court declared it was legal to route the tar sands pipeline through the state, though it mean appropriating landowners' property  and endangering the Ogallala aquifer, which also supplies Wyoming. In response to these political decisions,On Tuesday, January 14, activists from Laramie and Cheyenne staged a demonstration in front of the capitol in Cheyenne, where legislators had been sw...
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Hiking, Again

Posted by Edith Cook on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, In : Reading Life 
Here's a picture of a more recent walk, this one in the Vedauwoo wilderness where we spotted two bull moose. It's described in my Nov. 4, 2014, WTE column, "A joyful hike at Vedauwoo." I added some interesting local info into it.
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NoKXL, cont.

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, May 4, 2014, In : Reading Life 
Yesterday (Saturday May 3, 2014,) the Casper Star-Tribune reprinted a shortened version of my NoKXL piece, which garnered a few online nasty comments, see

http://trib.com/opinion/columns/cook-anti-keystone-xl-movement-on-the-rise/article_96cbd351-169b-5f07-9045-f0a8ae03a89d.html

Some upbeat emails: one came from a Todd Turner, who is president of a group called Conservation Hawks; another from a reader in Boston, Devone Trucker, a member of Citizens Climate Lobby, a group that lobbies in DC for...
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#NoKXL

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, April 27, 2014, In : Reading Life 
We did it! On Friday, April 26, 2014, I initiated a demonstration against the Keystone XL pipeline, having been trained as action lead by one of the opposing organizations, NoKXL. That week, it happened, 350.org sponsored a massive action in Washington D.C., of the Cowboy Indian Alliance, a group that camped out, complete with tipis and horses, in a park near the White House. 

Because the project crosses international borders, President Obama must decide wether or not to approve the pipeline. ...
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Paper read at EPA Haze Rule Hearing, July 17, 2013, in Cheyenne

Posted by Edith Cook on Thursday, July 18, 2013, In : Reading Life 

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Attending Yoga in the Park

Posted by Edith Cook on Friday, July 12, 2013, In : Reading Life 
Yoga in the Park is offered this summer on Wednesday evenings. It takes place in the Cheyenne Botanic Garden's Peace Garden, in Lions Park. It's free of charge.

For me, the exercise is strenuous. The yoga instructor is an accomplished young woman, and so are many participants, who, apparently, are clients in her studio. I've had to modify some of the moves in deference to my body.

Still, the experience is intensely enjoyable. The setting couldn't be more congenial, and the exercise is close to...
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Visiting Japan

Posted by Edith Cook on Monday, April 22, 2013, In : Reading Life 

A good time to visit Japan is when the cherry trees blossom. Here I am with ten-year-old Kyoko Miwa, on the campus of International Christian University in Tokyo, from which her dad Shimpei graduated. He now works for Toshiba.
With Shimpei at a Sushi bar. Noriko took this pic.

   


 Shimpei took this pic during our night-time stroll through Tokyo. Noriko and Kyoko are with me. The statues in the background are purchasable small replicas of Tokyo Tower, which is a larger version of the Parisian Ei...
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Cows Gone

Posted by Edith Cook on Thursday, February 21, 2013, In : Reading Life 
As of February 20, the cows are gone. All of them. Walter says he's "out of the cow business." I know it saddens him, though he doesn't say much about it. As for his younger brother, who had entered the venture with him--who knows? The fact is, neither Walter's pasture nor my wheat field can sustain the herd, and the hay Walt bought in the fall is all eaten up.

My wheat production, too, is on the brink of collapse. Walt and I are but two of many ranchers and farmers in Wyoming--actually, in th...
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My once and only wheat farm

Posted by Edith Cook on Saturday, January 19, 2013, In : Reading Life 
  When I moved to Wyoming to retire and help look after my granddaughter, I invested my assets in a wheat farm.  At the time, it seemed a good thing. Wall Street had acquired a bad name. To grow wheat was a safer bet, surely, than going with a wildly fluctuating stock market? 

That was seven years ago. Today I know there is no such thing as safety, particularly when it comes to food. As Frederick Kaufman shows, famine is spreading in spite of redoubled effort to get food and money to the hungr...
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Wyoming Warming

Posted by Edith Cook on Monday, November 19, 2012, In : Reading Life 


I've been driving out there to feed the cows, for (unlike in the picture) there's no grass left whatsoever. The cows should be on my wheat field now, but the producer requested we delay for a month. He hopes against all hope that the wheat will grow a bit--but it's too cold at night now, although daytime temps are balmy.

We've had very little snow. Yesterday it rained--a first for mid-November! Still, it brought little moisture to the fields and pastures. All the farmers and ranchers are moani...
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Wanderlust

Posted by Edith Cook on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, In : Reading Life 
This book is made up of three lengthy yet fascinating essays that, along with his own travel, examine the wanderlust of certain writers he admires, past and present. First among them is Alexis Saint-Leger, aka Saint-John Perse, a French diplomat cum poet who in 1921  traveled from Bejing to Ulaanbaatar in what Christopher Merrill deems an "attempt to grasp life in its entirety" and which dovetailed into a book-length poem, Anabasis. Merrill's own 2007 travel take him from Syria to Jordan to I...
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A Small Good Thing

Posted by Edith Cook on Tuesday, May 8, 2012, In : Reading Life 
 Because I admire Bill McKibben's unflagging devotion to a cause I ponder often, I joined his group, 350.org and organized "Connect the Dots on Climate Impacts Day" on May 5. We had terrific speakers (not shown), though the turnout was disappointing. Nevertheless, I think it was a small good thing. 

As the seat of a conservative state government, Cheyenne isn't exactly a hotbed of progressive ideas. So, our handful of people must be content with small beginnings. Alo, I jumped in at the last m...
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Bleak Future

Posted by Edith Cook on Saturday, April 21, 2012, In : Reading Life 
 What will their future be like? At the end of 2011, CO2 concentrations were roughly 392 ppm, writes Michael Mann. If current trends continue, we will have reached 450 ppm by 2030. This means we will have locked in a warming of the climate that's dangerous far beyond what we have thus far witnessed. Devastating sea level rise, more powerful hurricanes, more widespread drought, and increased weather extremes are the consequences, with terrible impacts on human life and health. We should have s...
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Thinkers without Superstition

Posted by Edith Cook on Wednesday, April 11, 2012, In : Reading Life 
 Terry Eagleton may be a Marxist, but he also tries to add to the "God Debate" via critique of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion via his 2009 Reason, Faith, and Revolution. I find the book less convincing than his 2011 Why Marx Was Right, perhaps because the former consists of lectures sponsored by the Dwight Herrington Terry Foundation at Yale University, the express purpose of which is “that the Christian spirit may be nurtured in the fullest light of the world’s knowledge.” Sometime...
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To Leave Is to Die a Little

Posted by Edith Cook on Monday, March 5, 2012, In : Reading Life 
 Considering how often I have pulled up roots to settle in another place, to go on a three-week travel should be no big deal, especially since the places I'll visit are hardly unknown to me--the pictures above are from a visit six years ago to my birthplace, Leipzig. Still, as I am packing to leave for a vacation in Germany, scheduled for March to mitigate altitude-related insomnia, I am hounded by misgivings. As always, the possibility that I might not return cannot be discounted: so many ad...
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My Pleasure

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, February 26, 2012, In : Reading Life 
  "My pleasure," someone said recently when I thanked him for an unexpected kindness. I have reflected on that phrase ever since. For one thing, I'm pretty sure his gesture wasn't an unmitigated joy. Id did cost him something: extra time, a bit of inconvenience. Nevertheless, he answered with the courtesy phrase. 

Now you may say: It's just an idiom, one of the many sayings that allow human interactions to proceed smoothly. That may be so, but it made me reflect because I had never used the ph...
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Something Good my Way Comes

Posted by Edith Cook on Saturday, February 18, 2012, In : Reading Life 
"I like your essays. You write things that readers want to read," someone in my exercise class said recently about my WTE column. I smiled, remembering how many things I'd written, and attempted to publish, that nobody in the business felt strongly enough about to give me a leg up. An entire manuscript sits on my desktop, ready to go, if things should change. But maybe I learned something from my failures. Maybe I learned to let go of the desire to amount to something in the eyes of family, c...
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At a Loss

Posted by Edith Cook on Thursday, February 9, 2012, In : Reading Life 
 Fretting about the future is as useless as bemoaning the past; still, as sentient beings we can't help wonder what the future might bring, just as we can't keep ourselves from considering past acts that we might have handled better. As we age, the future is less important for our own existence--we know where we are headed--as it is for the continued existence of a child or grandchild. What does life have in store for this boy twenty years from now, when he'll be in search of a mate and a job...

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California Visit

Posted by Edith Cook on Saturday, December 24, 2011, In : Reading Life 
 It's mid-December and I once again find myself in the East Bay of California. This time of year people wear shorts and shirt-sleeves; they take their children to playgrounds after school even at four PM, which I do with my grandson today. They ride bikes; they stroll through vineyards. Back in Wyoming a storm dumps snow that turns to ice on the sidewalks; here, we enjoy balmy weather. My grandson and I put a pant into the ground before his father and I went to Farmer's Market where even now ...
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Leaving the Comfort Zone

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, December 18, 2011, In : Reading Life 
 Christopher Hitchens, the prolific writer and atheist, died a few days ago--on December 15, 2011, to be exact--from cancer of the esophagus. It must have been an awful way to go and was almost certainly caused by his incessant smoking. To say that I enjoyed reading his writing does not begin to give him credit. He travelled far and wide, often putting himself in harm's way visiting politically dangerous countries so he might report on rogue governments or on US sins committed, for example, i...
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Conversational Skills and Lack Thereof

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, December 11, 2011, In : Reading Life 

I have often thought that a course of “Conversation 101” ought to be offered, not just in high schools or colleges but at youth hostels, senior centers, and in office directional meetings. The lessons would cause participants to look at how they converse with others and to examine what tactics undermine their social exchanges. Many times someone has attempted to talk with me, only to lead the conversation to a dead end. Often I have wanted to ask, “Do you understand what damage your tal...


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German versus Wyoming Recycling

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, December 4, 2011, In : Reading Life 

Recycling has been on my mind since last time my cousin (pictured above with her mother, now deceased) visited from Germany. She commented on what seemed to her an appalling American wastefulness, an obliviousness to the need to conserve resources, as if unaware—or unwilling to acknowledge—that resources are finite. Even human-made resources like plastics won’t be with us forever, since plastics are made from petroleum, and there’s only so much recoverable petroleum left in the earth....


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Wyoming Wind--and Coal

Posted by Edith Cook on Monday, November 14, 2011, In : Reading Life 
 It’s windy in Wyoming, particularly this time of year as autumn morphs into winter. Wyoming is my home now, for better or worse. I watch with interest its wind-development. Legislators debate back and forth on wind taxes, but it looks like wind energy is on the march, now that Wyoming transmission likes have become part of a federal program that has put electric transmission projects on the fast track.

All the more surprising that coal is still king in this part of the country. One of th...


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Learning Something New

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, November 6, 2011, In : Reading Life 

  I rarely permit myself to wax nostalgic or to indulge in a glance backward. Life is what it is, no sense bemoaning what's lost; besides, come to think of it, the "good old days" weren't all that good to begin with. Today, however, I'll go back to the time when I owned the horse Star Jasmine, pictured above, when my family celebrated gift-giving, as in the snapshot below, when a continuum of life with Darold seemed yet a possibility.

We had built a lovely abode on a small hobby ranch, a hous...


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My Brother Died Smoking

Posted by Edith Cook on Monday, October 31, 2011, In : Reading Life 
 My brother Karl, two years younger than I, is twenty years into the grave. He succumbed to pancreatic cancer, which essentially condemned him to dying a slow, torturous death by starvation. The cancer, originating elsewhere in his body, was almost certainly due to his lifelong smoking. In California Karl tried EST, primal scream, self-hypnosis. He could not kick the addiction.

Two years after my his death, having completed coursework for master’s degree at University of California at Davi...


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My Garden

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, October 23, 2011, In : Reading Life 
I love my vegetable garden, and I love to share its bounty. 

"Your blue potatoes taste good," a child at a school function said and hugged me. 

 "I am glad you like them," I said. "They are from my garden." I had brought the potatoes to a school lunch, microwaved them in the kitchen, peeled and cut them into chunks and offered them with a bit of butter and salt. 

My garden is my friend in times of stress, my physical therapist when I ache, my outlet for sharing joy. Recently, when the first nigh...
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Questions and Memories

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, October 9, 2011, In : Reading Life 

I was teaching in a California two-year college when I read a student essay on global warming. It distressed him, said the writer, that most people dismissed the problem. “We are like frogs in a pot that’s put on simmer. Because the heat happens gradually, the frogs don’t do anything. If the frogs were dumped into already-hot water, they’d all try to jump out.” The year was 1994, three years before the Kyoto Accord would attempt to reach agreement among nations on how to control gre...
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At Altitude

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, October 2, 2011, In : Reading Life 
 It's lovely to visit the mountains. But do you want to live there? I thought I did.

Laramie and Cheyenne have been touted as small cities that are good places to retire. What the retirement literature doesn’t say: these cities lie at or above 6000 feet elevation. If you have lived at sea level all your life—say you retire from the fast lanes of San Francisco or Chicago—altitude will be a problem. As we age, our bodies do not acclimate as they did in youth. Someone born at altitude or wh...
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Children Today

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, September 25, 2011, In : Reading Life 

Children today, research shows, are less diligent in their schoolwork, less resilient when facing a setback or a failure, and less able to defer gratification than what is needed to thrive. Fewer personal interactions and more electronic distractions make for a more harried existence. I recognize the trend readily enough in my grandchildren: they watch television, play computer games. When I take them on an outing I must ask their parents to impound that iPod, X-Box, PSP, Game Boy or Nintendo...


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Tales About the Self

Posted by Edith Cook on Saturday, September 17, 2011, In : Reading Life 

   Men like to build things. Big things, monuments that will leave behind a grand if not grandiose picture of themselves and their group. No matter the time, no matter the culture, the males within a given society love to erect monuments. The urge begins in boyhood and lasts a lifetime. 

What men and boys don’t care to build: relationships that would make for amicable discourse, reciprocity, and empathy. That negation, too, begins in boyhood. Recent research has shown that not just individ...


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The Wheels of Government

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, September 11, 2011, In : Reading Life 

 A few miles south of Wheatland lies a field I own, acquired a few years ago in part to provide winter grazing for my son’s cow herd. Since then I’ve discovered its wheat production to be marginal; in discussion with my banker it transpired that his father’s field in Montana produces almost twice the number of bushels per acre. Only a smidgen of the income goes in my pocket as revenue; the producer gets the lion’s share, since he does the work of planting and harvesting, not to mentio...


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Keystone XL Tar-Sands Oil Pipeline: Recipe for Disaster

Posted by Edith Cook on Saturday, September 3, 2011, In : Reading Life 

 Saturday Sept. 3, 2011, marks the final sit-in rally after two weeks of civil disobedience, which has been happening in Lafayette Square Park across from the White House. Participants staged protests against TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL tar-sands oil pipeline, which President Obama is set to green-light. The current tally of arrests stands at 1,009 and it includes NASA’s top scientist, Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Before he was detained ...


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Water, cont.

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, August 28, 2011, In : Reading Life 

 My previous post mentioned Fishman’s detail regarding FIJI. The water is drawn from an aquifer on the north coast of Fiji’s main island and finds its way into more than a million bottles of water a day, bottles that make it by truck, cargo container, some five to seven thousand miles to reach American consumers while more than half the residents of the nation of Fiji do not themselves have safe, reliable drinking water. 

Until the Coca-Cola company was kicked out of India, its withdrawa...


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Water Woes

Posted by Edith Cook on Saturday, August 20, 2011, In : Reading Life 

      Texas is in the midst of an unprecedented drought: nearly 94% of the state is under “extreme” weather conditions that, climatologists predict, will continue into the next ten months if not longer. At this point, to speak of “drought” may be misleading: what’s happening looks like a shift in rainfall patterns that’s part of climate change and global warming. Most Texans, including the state’s governor, deride the possibility and ignore the warning signs, turning to prayer m...


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The Future is Here

Posted by Edith Cook on Saturday, August 13, 2011, In : Reading Life 

 

To the newcomer, Wyoming is the location of a mindless if relentless “Drill, Baby, Drill”(gas and oil) and ”Dig, Baby, Dig” (coal). “Plans in works for 4,200 new gas wells in Wyoming,” proclaims an August 2011 newspaper headline. Yes, that’s four thousand two hundred deep-gas wells. The Nirobrara shale-oil exploration, the upstart from the previous year. is proceeding at a pace. Like deep-well gas extraction, it, too relies on hydraulic fracturing. “1.2 million gallons: App...


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The Global Scene at Local Level

Posted by Edith Cook on Saturday, August 6, 2011, In : Reading Life 
          ALS constitutes “progressive imprisonment without parole,” wrote Tony Judt in his memoir, discussed in my previously post. Last year Judt succumbed to a variant of the neuro-muscular Lou Gehrig’s disease. Though the sufferer is rendered completely immobile, there is no loss of sensation and, in his case, “there is no pain. In contrast to almost every other serious or deadly disease, one is thus left free to contemplate at leisure and in minimal discomfort the catastrophic pr...
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Memories of Judt in Light of Abulhaw

Posted by Edith Cook on Saturday, July 30, 2011, In : Reading Life 
   Unlike earlier in my life, today I read few fictional stories, but when I do, I pick books that tend to address real-life exigencies thinly disguised. Of these, Susan Abulhawa’s novel affected me profoundly. The Scar of David presents a fictional account Israeli-Arab interactions, some of them astoundingly empathetic, while simultaneously providing insight into the plight of today’s Palestinians in the presence of their Israeli overlords. Recently, President Obama proposed a peace acco...
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Tibetan Buddhism

Posted by Edith Cook on Tuesday, July 12, 2011, In : Reading Life 


Can you accept that all things are impermanent and that there is no essential substance or concept that is permanent?

Can you accept that all emotion brings pain and suffering and that there is no emotion that is purely pleasurable?

Can you accept that all phenomena are illusory and empty?

Can you accept that enlightenment is beyond concepts; that it’s not a perfect blissful heaven, but instead a release from delusion? 


When you accept and practice these four truths, you may consider your...


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Empathy in Family and Beyond

Posted by Edith Cook on Monday, June 27, 2011, In : Reading Life 

 When you’ve been touched by someone’s compassion or kindness, the experience stays with you, a soothing reminder in times of trouble. Experiencing empathy is especially important in childhood: we have yet to learn to reach out and thus depend on other people’s goodwill.

From my own childhood, two such people stand out in my memory. One was a teacher who never reprimanded me for arriving late—he seemed to sense that my home life was chaotic and that it was a feat just to get to sc...


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The Writing Life

Posted by Edith Cook on Friday, June 17, 2011, In : Reading Life 

In the fall of 2009, Leif Swanson offered a creative-nonfiction writing class in the Cheyenne college known by its acronym, LCCC, that used Bill Roorbach’s Writing Life Stories. I was then part of a writers’ group that showed signs of falling apart; hence, when a participant mentioned signing up--she’d heard good things about Swanson’s teaching--I followed my friend and took the class. Swanson’s assignments revolved around Roorbach’s directives.

Roorbach urges the would-be memoiri...


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Life on Earth

Posted by Edith Cook on Saturday, June 11, 2011, In : Reading Life 


Earth is yet young, writes British-born Christopher Potter in You Are Here. Life is young. Humanity is but one page in a saga whose final chapters are yet to be written. “Chemicals older than the sun and forged in generations of stars are brought to the earth as seeds of life,” observes Potter. These bits of debris from comets or stellar dust, called chondrites, fall to earth even now, and they provide valuable information on organic compounds that may have reached the earth billions of y...
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Horse Boy and Other Life Stories

Posted by Edith Cook on Friday, June 3, 2011, In : Reading Life 

When I grew up in postwar Germany, no animals existed in our home. For a short while, when I was eleven, we owned a dog, a nervous, yippy little fellow who was soon gone. My parents claimed he developed rabies and they got someone to kill him. I never believed the rabies story. A few years earlier, soon after my dad's return as prisoner of war from Soviet Russia, my mother raised a few geese, partly for canning the meat, partly for immediate consumption. She nailed their webbed feet onto post...


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Humans and Animals

Posted by Edith Cook on Saturday, May 28, 2011, In : Reading Life 
  In our quest to become fully human, we need close involvement with animals, asserts Temple Grandin. Where Frans de Waal reminds us of our affinity with the hierarchy-enhancing chimps and the hierarchy-attenuating bonobos, Grandin shows that we have much in common with wolves, who live and hunt in family units where dominance is largely absent. Dogs evolved from their ancestors, the wolves, she reminds us, adding that dogs in their association with humans have suffered a kind of arrested dev...
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Human and Animal Selves

Posted by Edith Cook on Thursday, May 19, 2011, In : Reading Life 


 

  

Yoga instructors often use animal imagery to prompt participants into a succession of moves. The downward dog, the monkey pose, the swan dive, the cobra, the cat, the cow: these remind us that the animal kingdom is part of our own being. We are induced to reflect that the often nasty or clichéd attributes we ascribe to animals are character traits of ourselves: cunning of monkey, viciousness of cobra, self-containment of cat, faithful-to-mate swan, gregariousness of dog, docility of cow...


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Energy Production & Consumption, Wyoming and Elsewhere

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, May 15, 2011, In : Reading Life 

 

see www.coyoteclan.com

Steep prices at the pump affect our pocketbooks and the current news, and so are the speculators that profit from rising oil prices. Charging that Wall Street artificially drives up oil prices, U.S. senators sent a letter to the Commodities Futures Trading Commission on May 11, 2011, pressuring the authority to adopt limits on speculation in oil trading. “The sheer volume of new capital coming from hedge funds, financial trades, and other long-term passive investo...


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Hierarchies, cont.

Posted by Edith Cook on Wednesday, May 11, 2011, In : Reading Life 

The picture above, circa 1960, shows a youthful group of German mandolinists and guitarists. (I am playing mandolin.) The group, previously all-male, had agreed to admit women into their circle. Three of us passed muster.

Malcolm Gladwell’s “Listening with Your Eyes,” his concluding essay in Blink, documents the struggle for fairness in symphony orchestras. Not long ago, he writes, the world of classical music was the exclusive preserve of white males. Musicians’ ranks ...


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Challenging Hierarchies

Posted by Edith Cook on Friday, April 29, 2011, In : Reading Life 

As mentioned elsewhere, the division of labor and the (often unjust) hierarchies it creates have been of lifelong interest to me. In my proposed book I have examined their effect on my growing-up years and my working life. Robert Fuller’s books (Top Dogs and Underdogs; All Rise; Somebodies and Nobodies) convinced me that privileges based on weath or status arrangements are arbitrary and inherently unjust. We also erroneously believe that tall males (or good-looking ones) are more courageous...


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About Me


Edith Cook Though I now live in Wyoming, I make frequent return trips to California with visits to travel club members along the way. At home I play classical guitar, enjoy gardening and cooking, and participate in group yoga. Getting together with family and friends is high on my agenda. I value people who write or make music and love it when my adult children and their offspring play their instruments, sing songs with me, or discuss what they read and write. Such gatherings help me cope with the losses in my life, which have been severe. Next year I hope to visit family in Germany.

 

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