I turned another year older. A collection of small moments and choices that let me be me. One guidepost for each year I've been alive — some I've practiced for decades, and a few new ones. Feel out the day and go where your energy wants you to. Your energy is precious. Don’t let someone else take it. Show up and do the work. Your partner, friends, family, pets, and loved ones are more important than any passing digital connections. Spend more time with them at this age. We’re all getting older, and some have already moved on from this plane. Check in on your loved ones and friends. Build a resilient life. Seek diversity. Walk in someone else’s shoes. Walk in the shoes of a BIPOC or queer person. Sometimes, you just need a chocolate croissant. Make it a point to travel. Travel to a place where the people, language, and culture are nothing like yours. Call your mom. Dance. Never stop air drumming. Go find a space to play real drums. Talk to your neighbors. Befriend them. Smile at passersby. Give pedestrians the right of way. Say goodbye when you leave a store. Hug more. Go to a show. Support artists. Always take the stairs. Always walk the travelator. Don’t hog the sidewalk. Be aware of your surroundings. Wear a light long-sleeve shirt/hat/pants instead of sunscreen. Eat real food. A.B.C. Always Be Curious. Never stop learning. Stagnation is death. Let your skin feel the sun. Let your skin feel the rain. Take a walk in warm rain. Take your shoes off and feel the ground. Find a quiet place and just be. Do something you love that doesn’t involve making money. Do something that’s yours and for you only. Listen more than you speak. Reflect on the day, the week, the month, the year, the decades. Talk to people. In person. Or pick up the phone and listen to their voice. Or get on a video call to see their face, their expression, their smile, their laugh. Be genuine. Feel the feels. You’re human. Make a life you love. Have no regrets. Visit this post on the web or Reply via email

Finding a message for today in the music of Gustav Mahler The post Song for the Earth appeared first on The American Scholar.

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Wolf Solent has pressed his beautiful young wife against an ash tree, presumably as a prelude to sex, but he begins rubbing the bark: ‘Human brains! Human knots of confusion!’ he thought.  ‘Why can’t we steal the calm vegetable clairvoyance of these great rooted lives?’ (Wolf Solent, “’This Is Reality,’” 356) I have learned that it is just when writers, many writers, write the strangest things that they really mean it.  John Cowper Powys has, like any good novelist, has a strong sense of irony, but he also has a fantastic, visionary mode that pushes past it.  As with his trees. To step back for a moment.  The first page of A Glastonbury Romance introduces three characters.  They are: The First Cause, which passes “a wave, a motion, a vibration” into the soul of A “particular human being,” John Crow (name on the next page), a “microscopic biped” who is leaving the third-class carriage of a train, returning to his home town just like the protagonist of Wolf Solent.  He is not especially affected by The sun, which is experiencing “enormous fire-thoughts.” On the next page, another character is added, “the soul of the earth.” John Crow turns out to be not the protagonist of A Glastonbury Romance but one of many, which is how Powys gets to 1,100 pages.  But the other characters or sentient metaphors or whatever they are recur occasionally.  Powys is, among other things, a fantasy writer, even aside from his use of the King Arthur and Holy Grail stories.  His landscape, his cosmos, is full of sentience, of which he occasionally gives me a glimpse.  For example, the old trees that are in love with each other: As a matter of fact, although neither of these human lovers were aware of this, between the Scotch fir and that ancient holly there had existed for a hundred years a strange attraction.  Night by night, since the days when the author of Faust lay dying in Weimar and those two embryo trees had been in danger of being eaten by grubs, they had loved each other…  But across the leafless unfrequented field these two evergreens could lift to each other their subhuman voices and cry their ancient vegetation-cry, clear and strong; that cry which always seems to come from some underworld of Being, where tragedy is mitigated by a strange undying acceptance beyond the comprehension of the troubled hearts of men and women. (AGR, “Conspiracy,” 786, ellipses mine) My single favorite passage in Glastonbury is also about the language of trees: The language of trees is even more remote from human intelligence than the language of beasts or of birds.  What to these lovers [lovers again!], for instance, would the singular syllables “wuther-quotle-glug” have signified?  (“The River,” 89) John Crow, one of the lovers, has just uttered a phrase – “It is extraordinary that we should ever have met!” – that “struck the attention of the solitary ash tree… with what in trees corresponds to human irony” because this is the fifth time in a hundred and thirty years that the tree has heard the exact same phrase.  Powys gives me the details – an “old horse,” a “mad clergyman,” an “old maiden lady” to her long-dead lover.  “An eccentric fisherman had uttered them addressing an exceptionally large chub which he had caught and killed.” All this the ash tree noted; but its vegetative comment thereon would only have sounded in human ears like the gibberish: wuther-quotle-glug. That chub, or its descendant, appears again about 700 pages later as a prophetic talking fish.  I believe the last talking fish to appear on Wuthering Expectations was the trout in John Crowley’s Little, Big (1981).  The talking chub is in the most Crowleyish chapter, “’Nature Seems Dead,’” about the night the of the powerful west wind, “one of the great turning points in the life of Glastonbury.”  Crowley has put a magical, history-changing west wind into a number of his books. I thought about writing about a marvelous antique shop Powys describes early in A Glastonbury Romance, but I will instead finish with one line of the description, a description of his own novels. But it was a treasure-trove for the type of imagination that loves to brood, a little sardonically and unfastidiously perhaps, upon the wayward whims and caprices of the human spirit.  (“King Arthur’s Sword,” 345)

His small, democratic communities would revive and defend our republic.