Green Tribe of Belonging

 During these cold winter months, still in the throes of the pandemic, our usual ways of life are at least partly suspended. Especially for those of us who live alone, interaction with others has gotten curtailed, and touch is not much a part of our lives. Pets have become more important. I am so grateful to live with Shadow, my cat. She is all black except for a white patch under her chin, and she and I are at roughly the same time in our lives, late middle age. We limp around together (or I did until my recent surgery) and appreciate each other's presence. So when Shadow leaps up on my bed each morning to say hello, it is comforting to have her lie beside me while I pet her and she purrs. There seems to be an instinctual physical closeness especially between mothers and their young. You see it in our mammal cousins. We've all watched a mother dog licking her puppies, with them tumbling around her. And the gentle care of mother cats with her fuzzy kittens. I did a little resea

 For at least the past week, I've been thinking about hibernation. I've even done some research on it. You would think that I would sit right down at my laptop and write a post. Yet it would seem that I myself am in a near hibernation state. It is freezing cold outside, the ground is covered with deep snow, and my new hip isn't really ready to navigate across icy surfaces. So I've been sitting in my comfortable recliner and listening to enthralling books on my Kindle. Hibernating. This morning in Friends Meeting, though, someone talked about how we all have passions. This thought pulled me enough out of my comfortable restful leisure to remember that indeed I have passions. And one of my passions is understanding and learning from the natural world. Now that I've woken up from my temporary hibernating state, I'm ready to write about hibernation, a phenomenon of the natural world which also affects us humans. Hibernation has been around a long time. It usually ha

Here's another poetry group assignment, this one focused on birds, a category that has been sadly neglected by me. Until now. So I did some research, found out about the origins of birds, and got caught up in the interesting history of this fellow creature. Can you believe? They are descended from dinosaurs! (Maybe I'm the only one who didn't know that...)   Ode to Avian Life To those of us fettered on the ground by gravity, the sight of you flying creatures soaring past in the clear air, high above us, floating free can seem like a miracle. It does not even occur to us to spread our arms and try to copy you, running fast, pulling free of the earth. Our bodies are not made for the air. We are terrestrial animals and have made our peace with it. Yet once, millions of years ago, your pre-avian ancestors were also earthbound. These small dinosaurs walked along the ground in a vastly different world. And then a few feathers developed. At first these might have been only an allu