REFLECTIONS ON LIFE

JULY 2017

REFLECTIONS ON HOME IN COLUMBIA

Two additions this month to the menagerie surrounding our home:  a lone red fox spotted for the first time this year, and a lone red-winged blackbird, also a first time spotting for this season.  We are particularly happy to see the latter since we are slowly but surely losing the weeping willows on the 15 acres held jointly by the owners of the sixty townhomes in our community.  Since red-winged blackbirds are particularly attracted to this type of tree, each year we wonder whether one will visit us.  With its bright red chevrons and distinctive call, this is Lloyd’s favorite bird.  Although we had spotted a deer in our yard earlier in the year, this month they frequently showed in pairs along our walks in the Middle Patuxent Valley.

In my June Reflections I wrote that Lloyd and I have subscriptions to only two periodical magazines:  The New Yorker weekly and The Atlantic monthly.  I did not include two basically spiritual quarterlies:  Tricycle and Parabola.  Tricycle is a Buddhist review.  The editor of the Parabola describes that publication thusly: “A parabola is one of the most elegant forms in nature.  It is the arc of a thrown ball and the curve of a cast fishing line and the arc of a suspension bridge.  A parabola is also the arc of a spiritual quest – seekers leave the known for the unknown, coming home again transformed by a new understanding.”  Lloyd has subscribed to both of these publications as a gift to me for more than fifteen years.

The Summer 2017 edition of Parabola contains an article “Spring Burst Upon Thoreau (The sage of Walden finds bliss)”.

While exploring and rejoicing in the wonders of nature, Thoreau wrote:  “It takes us many years to find out that Nature repeats herself annually.  But how perfectly regular and calculable all her phenomena must appear to a mind that has observed her for a thousand years!”  He cataloged the calls of all the local birds and was just as enchanted by frog calls, christening them “birds of the night.” How perfectly that describes my nighttime experience of our ponds.  Living to the age of 44, Thoreau was less than half my age when he compiled his magnificent chronicling of nature and the heavens.  “Have not the fireflies in the meadow a relation to the stars above? Do not the stars, too, show their light for love, like fireflies?”

Baltimore Sun July 11 2017

“Thoreau has lessons for modern life”

…

As summer moves on here in Jim Rouse’s Columbia, we continue the celebration

of its 50^th Birthday, even as it sometimes appears that we are witnessing proposals to transform it into an exclusive community, devoid of his “garden for growing people.”

…

The op-ed below from the Baltimore Sun was written by Kim Flyr, the daughter of Bob and Arlene Sheff, our long time friends from the beginning of Columbia.  Kim is now one of my younger friend s who helps to coach me with my writing. A talented writer herself, Kim captures the reality that change is unavoidable, and often positive, in conjunction with the awareness that there are aspects of the past not only well worth preserving, but necessary to a loving community. Thank you, Kim.

Baltimore Sun   July 9, 2017

Midlife reckoning for Columbia

REFLECTIONS ON ZACH

For twenty years Lloyd and I with our kids and grandkids have vacationed as a family in the same beach house in Corolla on the North Carolina coast. The first year we had only two grandkids, Zach and his sister, Julia.  This year we moved to a larger house only “four doors” down the beachfront.   It was a somewhat sad, though needed change.  Among our seven living grandkids we now have two almost six-footers, and the others are virtually all adult size.  Julia graduated from college in the spring.  Patrick, Crew and Katerina are in college, and Greta, Christine, and Will are in high school. Even with kids sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags, we clearly needed more space.  I thought it may be difficult for me to miss seeing all the places in our vacation home:  the door to our bedroom where Zach would knock each morning at 6 to go for a walk along the beach with me (he greeted me with a great big smile each day when I opened the door), the big deck spanning the width of the house where all of us – adults and kids – could fit comfortably in the mornings and evenings for porpoise watching and star gazing.  There were other “Zach” spots about the house:  the ceiling beam that he kept on trying to reach jumping in his bare feet until one year he touched it easily, the spot by the sliding door to the deck when his mom struggled against his adamant resistance year after year to see that he was well coated with sun screen.  I actually did miss some of those places in the beach house, though what I had failed to calculate sufficiently strongly is the awareness that “Zach is everywhere” whether we are on vacation or any other place where he lived his ultimately remarkably inspiring life.

Yes.  Zach is everywhere and always will be.

REFLECTIONS ON BALTIMORE, MY HOMETOWN

I have written in previous “Reflections” about the important role the Enoch Pratt Library in downtown Baltimore played in my high school education.  There was a bus stop right around the corner of the library on Cathedral Street where I would transfer busses on my daily ride from school on North Charles Street by Johns Hopkins University to go west back home to Edmondson Village. (Ta-Nehisi Coates teenage territory)  The library was a large stone building extending an entire block of central downtown Baltimore.  In the article below, Jacques Kelly captures the magnificence of this building in which, as a teenager. I had the great good fortune to research my homework assignments in the extensive wooden card catalogs using the Dewey Decimal Classification System designed in 1876.

Before catching the bus back home, I would sometimes cross the street and drop into the Basilica to light a candle.  It was impressed upon us students in my Catholic high school that Baltimore was the “center of Catholicity” in the U.S., being the home of the first basilica.  “The Baltimore Catechism” was the uniform book used in all Catholic schools through out the country. I clearly recall being very proud of that.

Jacques’ article reminds me to be grateful for historic preservation projects.

Baltimore Sun    July 8, 2017

Touring the renovation at the Pratt Library

National NAACP Conference held in Baltimore

Among the criminal justice issues featured at this conference was the egregious widespread economic injustice of cash bail reform.  Maryland’s Attorney General, Brian Frosh, is a national leader in calling for legislative reform of this immoral practice.  Thank you, Brian

Baltimore Sun    July 25, 2017

REFLECTIONS ON OUR PLANET BEYOND THE UNITED STATES

Lloyd and I will fly on Air Canada to visit China on our 23^rd wedding anniversary, October 10, 2017.  It will be our first visit to this nation.  We will be travelling with a small group who are exploring the formation of a fifth sister city relationship with Columbia.  We currently have sister cities in France, Spain, Ghana, and Haiti.

Our senses will be alert and wide open to experience all we can of this nation with such deep culture and history.

The recent front-page news story and editorial from the Washington Post covers the recent death of a Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo.

The Washington Post     July 14, 2017

“Liu Xiaobo 1955-2017   An empty chair, and a life filled with peaceful fury”

“What are China’s Leaders so afraid of?”

REFLECTIONS ON OUR UNIVERSE

We have experienced dazzling views of Venus on morning display this month of July.  It showed up off the east coast when we were vacationing  - “this brilliant planet ruled the morning sky before sunrise.”  The Washington Post

The Washington Post      July 18, 2017

Juno flies by the largest storm in our solar system and lives to tell us about it

…and we think our summer thunderstorms can be earth shaking.