Ther were a few references on the web to the re-discovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker last month, but today I cam across this reference (scroll down a little) quoted by Joy Harjo, as her cousin wrote about the meaning of the birds to the Muskogee people: The honorable ivory-billed woodpecker has returned from the dead and is living in a wildlife refuge in the Big Woods of eastern Arkansas. It seemed to disappear in 1944 and was long presumed extinct. This spirit bird’s reappearance 60 years later reinforces a wise instruction by Native elders: ”Never give up on anyone.” That …
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Here’s another call out to the global water cooler… I live in a small community, on an island with about 4000 other people. Folks know each other pretty well and the community is fairly well connected to itself. We have to deal with a number of issues related to development, including impacts on limited water resources, encroachments on wild areas, pollution and impacts from cars and other transportation issues such as ferry marshalling and public transit. We are also in the middle of a long term process to develop vision and planning for the island as a whole and the …
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The Guzheng is a Chinese zither traditionally played by women. Originally it was used for vocal accompaniment, but it’s now often played solo. This piece is a traditional solo piece. Listen for the bluesiness of it, the bent notes and the pentatonic scale, which is shared between Chinese music and blues. Also, the guzheng player is using another technique commonly found in the blues: plucking two strings on the same note together and then flattening one to give a kind of mournful wail. For those of you with even more sensitive attention, you will also notice that the chord progression …
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Thoreau’s Journal has become a daily must-read. Here he is on his failure to liberate friends in the woods: “How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden. I take my neighbor, an intellectual man, out into the woods and invite him to take a new and absolute view of things, to empty clean out his thoughts all institutions of men and start again; but he can�t do it, he sticks to his traditions and his crochets. He thinks that governments, colleges, newspapers, etc., …
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From my recent collection of linkage: Just one story of what happens when Wal-Mart comes to town. Ireland’s History in Maps Joe Frank’s website and audio archive courtesy of the soon-to-be-blogging Raffi Aftandelian Ten Laws for the 21st century from Forbes, including Gilder’s Law: “The best business models, he said, waste the era’s cheapest resources in order to conserve the era’s most expensive resources.” In other words, use bandwidth to conserve people. Thanks to Rob (and others) the best article on change and fear I’ve read in years. Gallery of magnetism Sonny Rollins talks about his three year sabbatical in …