living in dangerous times

 "Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat at night.... The first action to take is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb come when it comes find us doing sensible and human things - praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts - not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds."

                                                       -    C.S. Lewis, On Living in an Atomic Age

The clouds of judgment gather,
The time is growing late;
Be sober and be watchful;
Our Judge is at the gate:
The Judge who comes in mercy,
The Judge who comes in might
To put an end to evil
And diadem the right.

- Bernard of Morlaix, 12th century

hello, March

This morning I thought March was coming in like a lamb, but there are twenty-four hours in a day, and by mid-afternoon the wind was roaring, the clouds rolled in and it's supposed to be twenty-nine degrees by nine o'clock. That's a lion. That is March in New England. I couldn't believe how mild it was earlier - sixty-two degrees - and the cats and I really enjoyed the open windows, but I wore boots to the supermarket, because snow was predicted for late afternoon. It didn't happen.

I was reading a substack post today, and the person quoted a paragraph from a Mary Oliver poem. One line caught my fancy:

"In March, the earth remembers its own name."

Yes, the earth around here is waking up. But not tomorrow; it's going to be in the twenties, and tonight my brother threw out some carrot chunks for the rabbits; they do come!

this squirrel stayed still here for so long, I wondered if he was all right