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...
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...
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....
All the more surprising that coal is still king in this part of the country. One of th...
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.
Two years after my his death, having completed coursework for master’s degree at University of California at Davi...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...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...
Edith Cook |
South Of Wheatland In Wyoming |
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