Yearly Archives 2016

Short of being completely disabled or extremely young or elderly, we must work. From the lowliest worm to the sparrow to kings and queens, we have to get after our daily labor.

In one form or other, directly or indirectly, we bring the vegetables in from the fields, the meat from the plain, the water from the river, going about our appointed tasks to keep ourselves fed and hydrated.

Call it Darwin’s first imperative: Do what we must to get food and liquid down our gullets and survive for another day.

***

Farmer Taking Banana Crop to Market, Uganda, by Robert Muckley

***

Here in the West, we often conflate work with life itself—as our passion, our very identity. And we do so with a not-always-clear demarcation between it and the other forces of family, romance, leisure, and recreation that make competing claims on human time and energy (in civilized places, that is, like Canada, or Europe…).

Or we apply t...

I am writing at least the beginnings of this post at 35,000 feet, after missing a complete night of sleep since leaving our Delhi hotel at 1 a.m. to catch a 4 a.m. flight. Twelve hours, two meals, zero sleep and a connecting flight later, I am feeling strangely invigorated after lumbering blearily through a long morning. My body seems to have forgotten its profound sleep deficit as it bows to some even deeper circadian rhythm of needing to be awake, given that it’s late afternoon and natural sleep hours are still a long while ahead. Last night’s lost sleep now appears to be lost itself to my body’s memory.

Or maybe it’s just that I’m a long way from being able to get India, sweet confounding permeating India, out of my mind.

Reader Angela noted about my last post on arriving in India that the commentary was free, for the most part, of social, cultural or political analysis, and much more an exten...

So I have made my way to India with my 17-year-old daughter and a traveling companion who knows the technical ins and outs of the Internet in order to help smooth the way for a Telemedicine project to be initiated in the low mountain town (3,000-foot elevation) of Nahan, which, if you kept going east up the mountain and could fly, would land you in a few hours in Nepal and the Himalayas.

It’s about six hours northeast by car from Delhi, which we negotiated yesterday courtesy of our ever amiable driver, Mr. Singh, and our host, Dr. Suresh Sablok of Nahan, whose rural hospital and clinic has signed on for a Rotary-sponsored, do-good-in-the-world project of connecting via computer modem a Sebastopol, California doctor to rural health centers around the world.

Four Sonoma County Rotary clubs provide the computer, modem and enough technical assistance to get the operation running, so far in Uganda, Nigeria, Z...

We spend perhaps unconscionable amounts of our adult lives marveling at the passage of time, continually shocked at the zip line that seems to have transported us from our 20s to 50s and beyond in a long breathless moment when our eyes were apparently closed.

“Last time I saw you…” we begin, lowering our hand to toddler height as we come upon the suddenly grown children of friends and relatives we see only sporadically. And the kids smile politely, despite having heard the identical prattle a thousand times before.

British director and screenwriter Andrew Haigh gives this and other aspects of time a provocative, novel twist in his current (third) movie, 45 Years, starring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay as a long married couple living out their retirement years in apparent contentment.

The film appears to be a slow-moving art house talkie but actually presents a rapid series of psychological and...

 It was one of those Moments. The daylight waning, the sky a magnificent stew of cirrus wisps both vertical and horizontal to the west and south, stratus puff balls north and east, the trending-toward-full moon already up and peeking from behind the latter.

At that still-point dusky moment transitioning from day to early eve, with the world perfectly poised between its in- and out-breath, the color palette of pale oranges, golds, purples, pinks, magentas and more seemed both fathomless and intoxicating.

And then came the geese.

They were in their classic extended V formation, winging southwest towards their home in the Laguna de Santa Rosa after their usual daytrip to the cozy confines of Spring Lake Park, where I assume they came across plentiful tasty creatures to slide down their impressive gullets. (“Oh, to have a neck like that,” I hear every model and ballerina in the world sighing…)

And mere ...