mumma yaga

April 25 On my phone, Dylan's Gotta Serve Somebody is playing. Haha. I had been thinking of a god just this morning, and said a prayer. A return to a god is the creeping of the faint-hearted, in the face of creeping old age. I long for arms to hold me and tell me it's going to be all right.  The wide open thought-landscape of philosophy is terrifying to the old-age mind. I realized last night, as I sank gratefully into the mundane thoughts of here and now, of reading a book. or thinking about buying a new toothbrush. It felt like retreating from a volcano mouth, or wider, a blackness-filled universe too great for the human mind to grasp, too deep to swim in, too dark to see into, too mindless for refuge. Here again I want a god to reach for.  If only, I think, I could make the young people see this mortality, realize the precious gift of life and live it, use it to climb up, while there is still limitless height. But, I fear, it is a paradox of life that this very limitl...

 April 14 "Jack's grocery - he's going out. I came back for the car." he said. "Where is he going?" "I didn't talk to him." Shopkeepers closed and sold their stock on the sidewalk for a day or two, then went away. The sellouts added to their larder, cans and jars of foods that would soon be obsolete. No-one would take over from Jack.  There wasn't any stable commerce; factories and transportation had become unreliable, intermittent.  "He has people in the east. Maybe take the wagon, we should save the gas." There was still the corner store. They were neighbours and had not left yet. The starlings, gathering for the autumn flight. They circle and circle and stay another day, crying "when should we go, when should we go?", around again, and "when shall we?" Two or three of the houses on the street had been empty a month, two months. But no one new stopped.  They did not live on the main street so they didn't ...

 April 11, 2023  I don't know if I have seen a white squill, before. They range from violet to this blue. I have a small patch of them, wild-grown. There is not much in my garden that I put there on purpose. It is open to whatever wants to grow, for the most part. My cousin and I, who share an interest in wildflowers, have noticed two distinct species of this flower, but I could only find the scilla siberica, also called squill, listed in North American flower websites. And yet the very similar creature pictured below is common hereabouts, but its faces look upwards revealing its white centre, whereas the scilla siberica hangs downwards like an umbrella. I found the upwards facing one on a British wildflower site: it is called scilla verna, or spring squill and is indeed a different thing. So my cousin and I are not crazy! Since both of these species are "invasive" it is not too surprising that they are not a standard listing among the wildflowers of Canada. These invader...