Like the entire Republican Party establishment and, in a profound sense, much of the country at large, I am coming to grips with the cold, hard, heretofore unimaginable fact that Donald Trump will be the Republican presidential nominee. And having achieved that status, he is just a few more improbable steps away from the presidency in a year that has scuttled everything we thought we knew about probability.

The thought amazes and appalls. And there is more than a middling chance it will come to pass. “President Trump.”

And we, who laughed heartily at the petty, petulant, juvenile showman with the orange hair who was slated to be our comic relief for a few early months of the campaign, until he either torpedoed himself with one too many offensive absurdities or the Old Guard had him summarily removed with a show of Old Money and Influence, now wring our hands and wonder why we didn’t, couldn’t, see it c...

wet   life   drip   moist   damp   cloud

here   yes   drink   suck   slurp   gulp

gone   none   parched   pinched   paucity

salve   swim   immerse   cleanse   anoint

where   there   mirage   drought   dry

slip   slide   ease   merge   one   spurt

grasp   groan   cracked   arid   shrivel

douse   dunk   splash   soak   wade.

now oh lord deep bless bliss wet

Water Play by Prashant Godbole

Hands to Heavens by Rob McIlvaine

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Twitter: @AndrewHidas

Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewhidas/

Deep appreciation to the photographers!

Elizabeth Haslam, whose photos (except for the books) grace the rotating banne...

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.

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

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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...