privilege, spring flowers, mourning my mother-in-law, when my dad died, KIN by Tayari Jones, afterlife, animal dreams, enlightenment thing-ing,
yesterday i was grateful for Sabelico’s nursery for lots of pretty flowers…
today i am looking forward to the april iteration of soup socials…
reading my blog post from yesterday i realized i come across as rather privileged… i guess i am… we have pretty good cash flow in retirement and accumulated resources… some of which we developed ourselves, some of which we inherited… i am grateful for all of it… i hope i am not coming across as a privileged prick though… i don’t want to be that guy/gal… i apologize if i was...
yesterday we bought flowers for the front porch and cleaned up the front and back gardens… i am trying to commit myself to at least an hour of physical labor/day around the house or in the garden… i am looking for the dual benefit of exercise that makes order out of chaos… i wonder if this has always been the best way for humans to be active… when did we start to separate exercise into it’s own specialized pursuits with concomitant equipment to purchase?… again, this is a privileged realm… does most of the world have access to gyms, health clubs, spas?… no…
i walk a mile or two in the morning most days… i like to do yoga in classes too… trying to focus my exercise energy on hearth and home is somewhat new…
my wife continues to process her mother’s death… she recounts the final days over and over to me… each time there is a new nuance… she is self centered on her grief… not hard to understand and empathize with… my job is to listen as much as she needs me to… and to reflect back to her the extraordinary gift she gave her mother by enabling her to die in her own home… being a loved one’s partner at the death bead is not easy, but it provides for a fullness of experience of that loved one that is steeped in it's own beauty… i keep thinking about how her mother brought her into this world, cared for her until she could care for herself and then cared about her throughout her life… how wonderful is the closure to care enough about her mother to help her leave this life… the scenes my wife describes to me are heartwarming even as they are mournful…
my mother in law passed away in probably one of the best ways imaginable… congestive hear failure caught up with her… energy gradually drained away from her… she remained sharp and attentive almost to the end… only slipping behind the curtain of morphine and adderal for the last handful of days… only a couple of weeks before she celebrated her 95th birthday with most of her family…
another kindness of this sort of death is to provide family with the chance to say goodbye… h’s father dies suddenly and nobody had a chance to say goodbye…
my father died in much the same way my mother in law did… i was not present… i had no desire to be… my father was pretty hateful to me the last decade or two of his life… i was no saint in the relationship, but i didn’t deserve the treatment i got from him and don’t forgive him for that… nor for the way he made it difficult for all of us to be a family… i am glad he didn’t suffer much, but don’t miss him at all… and don’t regret not being with him when he died…
the current literary fiction book club assignment is KIN by Tayari Jones... i saved this quote from it this morning...
Up in the clouds, God can heal everything, even a bullet to the brain; after death, a person got a little bit more beautiful each day. By the time Gabriel blows his horn, the angels will have gotten so glorious that it would burn your eyes right out of your head if you tried to look at them. Life on this earth, on the other, hand is the thief of beauty.
i love the idea that we are headed for our most beautiful selves after we die... even if i can't believe in it... this promise of beauty and joy in the afterlife is, i suppose, what keeps so many of us committed to our religions... i don't believe in an afterlife that includes any kind of me... death is, to channel a favored concept of Maria Popova, an un-selfing... though she is normally talking about becoming un-centered on the self while still alive when she uses the term... death is an un-selfing dissolution... our borrowed concreteness disperses back into a sea of potential concreteness to be concentrated into new concretenesses...
this quote came from the marginalian this morning...
The recognition that nonhuman animals dream dates at least as far back as the days of Aristotle, who watched a sleeping dog bark and deemed it unambiguous evidence of mental life. But by the time Descartes catalyzed the Enlightenment in the 17th century, he had reduced other animals to mere automatons, tainting centuries of science with the assumption that anything unlike us is inherently inferior.
it is hard to have a dog companion and not know that dogs dream... all the time... and that they have intelligence... my dog fiona is scary smart... she has been known to bring my wife's sleep shirt down stairs and plop it in front of us when she thinks we should go to bed... the damage that Descart and the enlightenment thinking that flowed from it did to life on the planet... an essential ingredient to the exploitation of every possible thing is the separation of the world into a multitude of disconnected things brought on by ideas such as mind/body duality... if we truly understood how everything is connected to everything, we couldn't abuse the earth and each other the way we do...
scenes from the storm of humanity...
And, just like that, President Donald J. Trump’s triumphant boasting that the Strait of Hormuz had been permanently reopened has unraveled in less than 24 hours. Citing the continuing U.S. blockade, Iranian officials announced they were closing the strait again. Reports say Iranian forces fired on two ships trying to cross the strait. Iranian media said: “Until the United States ends its interference with the full freedom of movement for vessels traveling to and from Iran, the status of the Strait of Hormuz will remain under intense control and in its previous state.”
and...
Once again, Trump’s announcement of the opening of the strait seemed timed to give the markets a bounce before the weekend. Those watching the markets observed massive trades yesterday just before Trump’s announcement. Regulators are currently examining similar trades from one of Trump’s similar announcements last month.
April 18, 2026 - by Heather Cox Richardson
photographs from yesterday...
