David Lynch: Visionary Filmmaker, Advocate for Inner Peace

Famed director, screenwriter, and actor David Lynch died on Thursday at age 78. Accolades have praised his visionary, surreal contributions to the film industry, featuring productions such as Mulholland Drive and the TV hit series Twin Peaks.

Although no official cause of death has been announced, informed sources suggest he may have been a victim of the LA fires. Forced to evacuate his home, his chronic emphysema reportedly worsened. In November, he said he required oxygen for “walking across the room” (Lynch death). A year earlier, he told sources he was unable to leave his house.

I owe a personal debt to Lynch. A few years ago, I began exploring ways to lessen my daily anxiety. Cognitive behavioral therapy, though offering insights for changing my mindset, hadn’t sufficed. I didn’t want medication with its potential side effects. I wanted to be me.

I turned to meditation, having been impressed by multiple neurological brain imaging studies at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital. They showed that meditation conducted on Transcendental Meditation practitioners facilitated anxiety reduction by promoting pacifying beta brain waves.

Looking first for a way to begin, I came across Lynch, who’d begun TM in 1973:

“I started Transcendental Meditation in 1973 and have not missed a single meditation ever since. Twice a day, every day. It has given me effortless access to unlimited reserves of energy, creativity and happiness deep within. This level of life is sometimes called ‘pure consciousness.’ It is a treasury. And this level of life is deep within us all,” he wrote.

Lynch dedicated himself to spreading the word, establishing the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education to financially assist adults and children throughout the world to learn TM.

Convinced, I hired a TM instructor and did the training. But it’s important you have the right teacher. I did not.

I couldn’t stop the incessant mental gossip known as “the monkey mind.” That is, until I read Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche’s The Joy of Living. Everything fell into place. You listen to the chatter, returning to your mantra or breath when the mind engages or pursues.

I learned technique, using any of the five senses.

But it was Lynch who did the convincing. As he said, “If you don’t already meditate, take my advice: Start. It will be the best decision you ever make.”

–rj

Crossing the Line: Humanity’s Reckoning with a Planet on the Brink

The Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, Jan. 9,2024. Photo: Mark Terrill

As Los Angeles burns, news comes that 2024 was the hottest year since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

Alarmingly, humanity has surpassed the critical 1.5°C (2.7°F) warming threshold—a limit meant to stave off the worst consequences of climate change. The fallout is clear: rising seas, relentless heat waves, severe droughts, catastrophic fires, and violent storms.  Currently, atmospheric CO2 levels have reached 410 parts per million—the highest in 3 million years—and continue to rise at an unprecedented pace.

At the heart of this crisis lies human-induced CO2 emissions, fueled by our continued reliance on fossil energy.

A 1.5°C rise may sound modest, but even at this level, irreversible damage has been done: collapsing ecosystems, intensifying weather extremes, emerging diseases, species extinction, and widespread social and economic turmoil.

The UN’s latest IPCC report demands urgent reflection: each additional 0.1°C of warming exacerbates extreme weather, disrupts food systems, and threatens a human population set to exceed 10 billion.  Between 2010 and 2019, heat-related deaths worldwide totaled 489,000 (WMO). Factoring in climate-induced malnutrition, disease, and disasters like floods and droughts, that number swells to 4 million. 

In short, neither humans nor other species evolved to survive an increasingly uninhabitable planet.

As Guardian columnist George Monbiot reminds us, “With the exception of all-out nuclear war, all the most important problems that confront us are environmental. None of our hopes, none of our dreams, none of our plans and expectations can survive the loss of a habitable planet. And there is scarcely an Earth system that is not now threatened with collapse “ (The Guardian, 28 September 2022).

–rj

RJ’s 2025 Reading Recommendations

As I share my annual New Year book recommendations—curated from informed sources—I’m mindful of the diversity in readers’ tastes and the many deserving books inevitably omitted due to space constraints. That said, these lists primarily reflect my own reading aspirations for the coming year, centered on literary fiction and thought-provoking non-fiction. I read most of the titles I recommend here. For you, I hope these selections kindle interest, expand horizons, or simply offer the pleasure of well-spent reading time. To all of you, a Happy New Year!

FICTION:

Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude. (Auster, the great explorer of the fluidity of human identity, in this early work establishes his literary mastery with themes of identity, grief, loss, and loneliness, presaging those of his subsequent fiction and non-fiction).

Bernieres, Louise de. Corelli’s Mandolin. (A war story of Axis occupation of the Greek island of Cephalonia, inflicted cruelties and devastation, but also of human resilience, cultural conflict, and the enduring power of love transcending tragedy).

Byatt, A. S. Possession. (1999 Booker Award winner, explores themes of obsession, the nature of love, and relationship between art and life. The story moves between the two timelines, Victorian and contemporary, offering poetry, letters, and journal entries that provide insight into the inner lives of the characters and evolving notions of love).

Cather. Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop. (A historical novel of the American Southwest, telling of two French priests sent by the Vatican to establish a diocese in New Mexico, the challenge of physical landscape and cultural conflict, faith, perseverance and friendship).

Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. (Ahead of his time, Defoe depicts a woman’s descent into criminality as means to survival and purview of a society obsessed by money and status).

Fitzgerald, Penelope. The Blue Flower. (A historical novel centered on the Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis’ obsession with a young girl, Sophie, exploring the nature of love and the tension between imagination and reality).

Haruff, Kent. Plainsong. (Set in a rural town in Colorado, the cyclical interweave of ordinary people and nature, life’s undulations of circumstance, and solace found in community).

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. (Comments on other writers).

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. (The novel to begin one’s reading of America’s most critically acclaimed novelist since Faulker, a saga of lost innocence in the quest for authenticity.)

Munro, Alice. A Wilderness Station: Collected Short Stories 1968-1994. (Told via documents, letters, and recollections, a series of stories centering on Annie, married to an abusive husband, whose death raises questions).

Naipaul, V.S. A Bend in the River. (The aftermath of post-colonial transition, displacement, alienation, corruption and violence).

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra. (Nietzsche’s salient philosophical novel, consisting of parables delivered by sage Zarathustra, introducing readers to Nietzsche concepts of God is Dead, The Übermensch, The Eternal Recurrence, and Critique of Morality).

Strout, Elizabeth. Olive, Again. (A continuation of Strout’s Pulitzer Prize novel, Olive Kitteridge, featuring Olive as she ages, profound in its themes of loneliness, transformation, community, and mortality).

Warren, Robert Penn. All the King’s Men. (Penn’s classic novel, exploring the subterranean machinations of politics through the rise and fall of Willy Stark; the complexities of human nature confronting ethical dilemmas).

Wright, Richard. Native Son. (Unsparing, explosive indictment of American racism, injustice, and violence.)

Zola, Emile. Germinal. (Steeped in naturalism, Zola’s depiction of class struggle, social injustice, and the harsh realities of industrial life among miners in 19th-century France.).

NON-FICTION

Balcombe, Jonathan. Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals. (Replete with examples, Balcombe maintains that animals have an emotional as well as instinctual life, requiring changes in how humans regard and treat them).

Bird, Kai and Sherwin, Martin. American Prometheus. (Pulitzer Prize winning biography of atomic scientist Robert Oppenheimer and basis of the Academy Award movie, it reveals a highly intelligent scientist troubled by his role in creating the atomic bomb and of his victimization in the McCarthy era).

Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson. (The classic 18c biography of the prominent critic, essayist and lexicographer, Samuel Johnson. Lively and detailed, it provides not only in-depth portraiture of a genius, but of an era.)

Brittain, Vera. Testament of Youth. (A moving autobiographical work set in the context of WWI and its aftermath, critically acclaimed as among the best of war narratives; exploring, as well, the changing status of women in the new century).

Graves, Robert. Goodbye to All That. (Graves’ autobiography of his war years as an officer in the trenches, disillusionment, and rejection of society’s pre-war idealism).

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. (An essential read, exploring the nature of governance, laws, and civil rights still widely debated, influential, and helpful in comprehending contemporary political structures).

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle. (Regarded as one of this century’s most accomplished writers, Norwegian Knausgaard’s autobiographical book, comprised of six volumes, explores love, death, and time, inviting comparisons with Proust).

Miller, Lucasta. Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and an Epitaph. (In a blending of salient biographical, critical analysis, and personal reflection, Miller focuses on nine of Keats’ most famous poems, offering fresh interpretations without being pedantic).

Niebuhr, Reinhold. Nature and Destiny of Man. (A seminal Christian theological work first delivered as a series of lectures in the 1940s, it focuses on sin, grace, and human destiny).

Renkl, Margaret. The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year. (Reminiscences of 52 weeks of nature’s transitional moods amid climate change, triggering reflections on joy, grief and hope amid ecological demise.)

Said, Edward. Orientalism. (Said refutes the binary mindset, linked with imperialism and colonialism, that treats the East as exotic, but inferior to the West, justifying its dominance.)

Salfina, Carl. Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. (Safina narrates his and his wife’s rescue and nurturing of an orphaned screech owl to good health, leading to reflections on human alienation from nature).

Sontag, Susan. The Pain of Others. (Unfailingly profound, the great essayist wrestles with what troubles her most, and by extension, ourselves.)

Stevenson, Robert Louis Stevenson. Travels With a Donkey in the Cévennes. (Stevenson wrote this travelogue while in his early twenties, seeking space from a romance gone wrong.)

Weller, Francis. The Wild Edge of Sorrow. (Psychologist Weller teaches us how to accept grief and allow it to work its gifts and become our greatest teacher).

Woolf, Virginia. A Writer’s Diary. (Woolf wrote 26 diary volumes. In this posthumous work, her husband Leonard distills from her diaries the architectonics of a mind engaging its artistry).

No Easy Fix: Climate Change is Coming for You!


I’ve always liked environment activist Bill McKibben, longtime prof at Middlebury College and prolific writer, though sometimes I disagree.

For example, he recently parried a reader’s hint that just maybe overpopulation poses our greatest challenge in mitigating the exponential fallout of climate change by saying he didn’t think so, given that where population is rising most, Africa, there’s little contribution to carbon discharge .

While that may presently hold true, the reason for this is Africa’s falling short on Western amenities that along with their comfort and convenience, foster carbon discharge.

The fact is Africa is incipiently engaged in catching-up to the follies of more advanced economies in adopting technologies promoting carbon discharge, especially with regard to excavating industries in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As Africa’s clamor for meat likewise grows with surging population, more deforestation is occurring, and we know that spells diminished carbon sinks, fostering destabilization of weather patterns.

As I write, prolonged drought plagues Africa, creating a vast risk of starvation and malnutrition. What it doesn’t need are more mouths to feed.

In game refuges, elephants and even rhinos, seen as competitors for flora and landscape, are being slaughtered to feed a growing population in Angola, Zimbabwe and, yes, in Bechuanaland, Africa’s last great elephant sanctuary.

McKibben entangles himself similarly in joining the chorus advocating more wind turbines, despite emerging evidence of their dire consequences, at least for seabirds and whales, according to the recent 600 page report from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).

On the other hand, he’s right about so much of our climate morass.

This year was the hottest on record, with next year unpromising. Phoenix, our fastest America growth city, endured 31 days of 110F temperatures, its emergency rooms overflowing with the burned and dying.

And he’s right—there’s no safe place to move. Vermont, where he lives, sheltered by its mountains, suffered an atmospheric river this past summer, resulting in unprecedented downpours inflicting catastrophic flooding.

Last night, I learned of America’s new housing crisis, this one weather related. It seems 30-year mortgages can’t withstand climate change, natural disasters occurring not only more frequently, but with accelerating violence.

Take Florida, for example, where home insurers are pulling out. Where they remain, and I mean across the nation, annual premiums increases are eroding many homeowners’ ability to pay.

Currently, 9% of the world’s population, or 600 million of us, lives outside what’s known as “the climate niche,” meaning safety zone. By century’s end, an estimated one third of us will fall into this doughnut hole.

Now comes the orange hair threat assuming office, January 20, 2025. Denying climate change as a hoax, he pledges “drill, baby, drill.”

Fasten your seatbelts everyone. Turbulence ahead!

–rj

Celebrating Emily Dickinson’s Birthday

Yesterday, Dec. 10th, marked the 194th birthday of Emily Dickinson (b. 1830), one of America’s most gifted poets.

Her love of nature, keen observations on life’s ironies, and daring truthfulness won me over early. I know of no poetry with more nuance.

Of her many poems, my favorite is “A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest” with its nature analogies exhibiting the incongruity of the outer appearance with the inner reality. We are often masters at concealing life’s griefs.

Though I’ve visited The Homestead (Amherst , MA) on several occasions, I’m ready to visit again to take-in the Dickinson Museum updates, which include the restoration of Emily’s beloved garden, her father’s gifted conservatory to Emily and her sister, Lavinia, and the recently completed reconstruction of the family’s carriage house.

In short, The Homestead is my literary Mecca, as there is much in Emily’s sensibility that resonates with me.

Below, Emily’s upstairs bedroom where she composed her nearly 2000 poems and many letters:

It was cerebral musician Patty Smith who reminded me of Dickinson’s birthday in her substack post, replete with quotations from her poems and letters.

I’m repeating them here, as they superbly express Dickinson’s keen sensitivity and writing acumen. Smith observes that any of them would serve well as a writing prompt:

“Forever is composed of nows.”

“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”

“We turn not older with years but newer every day.”

“The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”

“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.”

“That it will never come again is what makes life sweet. Dwell in possibility. Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.”

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

“Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.”

“The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul–BOOKS.”

“The lovely flowers embarrass me. They make me regret I am not a bee…”

“I don’t profess to be profound; but I do lay claim to common sense.”

“Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.”

“Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon.”

“To shut your eyes is to travel.”

“your brain is wider than the sky”

“How do most people live without any thought? There are many people in the world,–you must have noticed them in the street,–how do they live? How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning?”

“I have been bent and broken, but -I hope- into a better shape.”

–RJoly

I Altered My Routine Last Week


I altered my routine last week, signing up for an eight week edX course, The Living Amazon: Science, Cultures and Sustainability in Practice.

It’s all that I could hope for, an intense, but well-informed analysis of the Amazon’s plight, with 21% of its forest already harvested to make room for cattle ranches, mining and lumber interests.

The fallout for its 1 million indigenous, suddenly brought into contact with an entrenched, and growing profit-motive corporate presence, has been disastrous, violence not uncommon, indigenous lands degraded or appropriated, and cultures eroded.

Not only does the Amazon, so vital to mitigating climate change, need saving, but social justice must prevail.

The course, hosted by distinguished earth system scientist Carlos Nobre, is conducted in Portuguese, but subtitled in Spanish, and English.

Despite the Amazon’s plight, Nobre doesn’t lose hope that remedies can be found to halt the carnage while simultaneously offering a prosperous economic future, founded on eco-safeguards and beneficial for its indigenous peoples.

Frankly, if we don’t achieve solutions, the consequences will prove apocalyptic for all of us. As is, we’re nearing the tipping point of no return in the existential challenge of climate change.

In actuality, the Amazon transcends Brazil, the Amazon basin embracing portions of nine countries, housing the largest tropical forest on earth and, with its river system, 7 million square kilometers, or about 40% of South America.

50 diverse Andean-Amazonian ecosystems are within its traverse, collectively comprising 13% of the world’s biodiversity. 34% of the world’s birds and 20% of its mammals are endemic to the basin.

The Amazon biome functions as an important carbon sink, helping
to reduce the global heating rate. Unfortunately, its effect seems to be weakening, the basin experiencing diminished rainfall and forest fire occurrence.

I’m excited about this course and trust that informed, I can do my part in helping sustain the Amazon’s crucial contribution to earth’s welfare.

rj

From Pietas to Relevance: Reflections on the Death of the Classics

Boston Latin School

The ancient classics, once the hallmark of the liberal arts, have increasingly vanished from today’s college campuses.

I remember with fondness my Massachusetts education. In the eighth grade, we read The Odyssey. In high school, I enrolled in what was dubbed the “classical” curriculum, emphasizing languages and the humanities.

In those days, you could major in Latin for four years, culminating in reading not only Cicero and Seneca, but Virgil’s The Aeneid, a work that’s impacted me immensely across the years.

If you’re lucky enough to get into Philips Exeter Academy, not far from where I lived, you’ll find the classics still in full bloom, courses not only in Latin, but Greek, to an advanced level. There’s even a classics club.

In the main, however, exposure to the classics has undergone steep decline.

An early harbinger, the year before I entered the University of North Carolina’s English Ph. D. program, the required Latin reading exam was dropped.

Today, issues of relevancy, racism, changing student interests, and funding have sped up a near universal decline in classics exposure across college campuses.

While Harvard and Princeton still retain courses in the classics, though in English and within a comparative global setting, other colleges have been dropping classics programs altogether, among them, Canisius College, Whitman College, Elmira College, the University of Vermont, Valparaiso University and Howard University, the only historically Black college to feature a classics department.

But back to my New England boyhood days, I remember going “junking” as we called it, ransacking antique stores, among their fare, scores of Latin public school primers, palpable evidence of a discarding of a former ubiquitous cultural presence.

In nearby Boston, there still exists its premium public educational institution, Boston Latin School, America’s first public school, founded in 1635, a year before Harvard College.

In keeping with its traditional Latin emphasis, options in Latin language courses remain, but the trend, as elsewhere, has been to evolve curriculum to service a diverse student body and transition to modern educational priorities.

I accept it’s at least better to retain the classics in English translation where budgets permit than to guillotine them altogether and acknowledge we live in a global village and musn’t exclude its verities of wisdom contributory to fostering a better world.

For nearly thirty years, I taught The Aeneid on a private university campus in a course called Western Classics, the only professor doing so. Its notion of self-discipline over impulsiveness, the obligation to duty (pietas) and mission (fatum) remain integral to civil integrity.

As the late academic Louise Cowan aptly put it, “To lose the classics is to lose a long heritage of wisdom concerning human nature, something not likely to be acquired again. Yet most college curricula now remain sadly untouched by their august presence, or at best make a gesture in their direction with a few samplings for select students. Such neglect is one of the most serious threats our society faces today” (“The Necessity of the Classics,” Modern Age Journal).

–RJ

Blurring Boundaries: Bruce Duffy’s Vision of Wittgenstein and Cambridge Minds

To behold death in the face of this once, he knew there could be no reincarnation, and he thought it a blessing, to have this once to swell forth, then to be enfolded like a seed into the sheltering darkness of eternity — to be lost in time among such furrows as the sea makes (Duffy, The World as I Found It).

When Joyce Carol Oates praised Bruce Duffy’s The World as I Found It (1987) as “one of the five best non-fictional novels,” I knew it would be my next read.

A blend of fact and fiction, it replays the legacy of esteemed philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s complex life, thought, and turbulent relationships with fellow Cambridge contemporaries, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore.

Born into a  privileged Viennese family of wealth and culture, much of his adult life was impacted by a domineering father, his experience as a combat soldier, frequent retreats from public life, and sustained quest for truth.

Enigmatic, his thinking underwent continuous flux, making Duffy’s achievement quite remarkable.

Duffy didn’t have the resources of extant biographies at the time.

Adding to his  challenge was integrating Wittgenstein’s complex thought into his narrative, yet retaining readers unversed in analytical abstraction.

Wittgenstein premised the insufficiency of philosophy in ascertaining reality, its true function one of providing examples subject for further investigation. It mustn’t attempt to usurp science.

The World as I Found It unfolds episodically, interwoven with asides to the three philosophers—their temperaments, perspectives, strengths and weaknesses.

Of the three academic luminaries, Wittgenstein and Russell captivated my interest with their disparate temperaments: Wittgenstein, the youthful upstart; Russell, the widely celebrated academic renowned for his contributions to logic, epistemology, and the philosophy of mathematics.

In contrast, though the elder G.E. Moore, brilliant and benevolent, serves as mediator between the two rivals, his serene domesticity and lack of the same intense character traits, renders him less compelling than Russell, ebullient with conceit, yet haunted by self-doubt and bouts of jealousy, the putative exponent of free love; or Wittgenstein, volatile in temperament, given to barbed tongue directness, unsparing and wounding when critiquing his colleagues’ scholarly endeavors.

Wittgenstein emerges a good man, sincerely seeking life’s meaning and doing the right thing; Russell, in contrast, competitive and self-indulgent.

It appears Wittgenstein underwent some kind of religious conversion during his war years, though not in the conventional sense, perhaps influenced by Tolstoy, whose Gospel in Brief he carried everywhere and could virtually quote from memory. 

In fashioning a fictional biography, Duffy made numerous changes not conforming to the biographical facts or timelines:

No letters exist between Wittgenstein and his despotic father.

He assigns Wittgenstein two sisters. He had three.

Wittgenstein never met D. H. Lawrence, despite Bloomsbury’s Lady Ottoline Morrell’s best efforts.  

It was Wittgenstein’s excluded sister, Hermine, not Gretl, who sheltered Jews in Nazi occupied Vienna at great personal risk. This anomaly puzzles me.

Then there’s the inimitable, impulsive Max, rough in exterior, potentially violent, yet Wittgenstein’s faithful companion. Duffy confesses in his Epilogue that he never existed, reminding us of the controversy erupting on the book’s publication: Is it ethical to fictionalize historical figures and events, selectively altering character dynamics and outcomes to serve a narrative?

Still, the defining lineaments of Wittgenstein’s life are never distant: the interplay of a controlling father; the family’s wealth and cultural milieu; the several sibling suicides; the cottage built and retreated to in remote Norway; the two years of trench warfare on the Eastern Front in the Great War; the profound influence of Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character; the failed teaching stint in rural Austria; the abandonment of Cambridge; the late sojourn in Ireland and visit to America; the move into his physician’s home as he confronted his fatal prostate cancer. Even his last words, “I have lived a happy life.”

Seldom have I read a book so beautifully written and stylistically riveting, the cadence of its sprawling sentences endowed with verbal exactitude, rendering scenes and personages into palpable visages, an exemplar for aspiring writers.

The New York Review of Books deemed Life as I Found It a classic, restoring its availability in a handsome Classic Series edition, replete with Duffy preface and epilogue.

At its core, The World as I Found It  transcends philosophy, embracing the often contradictory lives of those driven to understanding their world.

A narrative about ambition, genius, and the human condition, it offers profound insights into the interplay of intellect, emotion, and morality.

—RJ

 

What Happens Then? Trump’s Myopic Climate Change Agenda

Caring about Mother Earth like many of you, I lament Trump’s myopic approach to climate change reflected in his pledge to curtail the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act and withdraw from the Paris Agreement.

Renewable energy alternatives like solar, wind, and electric vehicles will be curtailed, prolonging our fossil fuel dependency.

Unfortunately, climate change didn’t resonate as an important issue for many voters, inflation, job security, healthcare, and immigration taking precedence.

Not infrequently, public attention to climate concerns follows the oscillations of natural disasters and temperature rise, snuffed out shortly after each by more immediate local concerns.

As is, we’re already behind in our efforts to mitigate climate change, hastening earth’s demise and dooming future generations to apocalyptic consequences formerly the realm of science fiction.

Unlike the biblical Joseph, we are unlikely to stow up for the future. Alas, the seemingly distant phenomena of melting glaciers, droughts, famines, and biodiversity loss may falsely shelter us from their unfolding consequences.

The danger looms that Trump’s intransigence on climate change may motivate developing nations to do the same in view of budget restraints.

An excerpt from poet Neil Gaiman’s moving tribute to Rachel Carson, “After Silence,” speaks to our malaise.

What happens then?
Are consequences consequent?
The answers come from the world itself
The songs are silent,
and the spring is long in coming.

There’s a voice that rumbles beneath us
and after the end the voice still reaches us
Like a bird that cries in hunger
or a song that pleads for a different future.
Because all of us dream of a different future.
And somebody needs to listen.
To pause. To hold.