Towheeblog

Here are a some fun videos of birds with the people they own; and some stoat activity.

Mr. Baby Snuggles is a Java Sparrow living his best life on Kauai. The species was introduced to Hawaii about sixty years ago, now widespread. It is in the Estrilid Finch family, found in Old World including Australia. Cousins include Common Waxbill, Zebra Finch, Common Munia.

More intellectual than a raven conversation, but perhaps as intense and inspiring about our lives…click here for profile of author, Wendell Berry, in new New Yorker.

Berry has been my favorite poet and essayist since I first found his works over 50 years ago. He is now 86 and I haven’t quite caught up with him. He studied writing under Wallace Stegner at Stanford and periodically would return to the Bay Area. I got to see him give three different readings there. The book of his letters to and from Gary Snyder has some of the best humane expression of the past century. Berry is a man who loves our Mother Earth and admonishes us to treat her, and one another, right.

Some of Berry’s words from the letters mentioned above:

“The human species is dominant, and its dominance is disastrous without responsibility.” 
                                                                                                     — Wendell Berry
“In a society even nominally Christian, the Bible is bound to be a source of cheap religious thrills and of a false and abusive authority.  It also becomes a kind of ‘parent” against which the rebellious will rebel.”
                                                                                                 –Wendell Berry

“Both profit and monoculture, it seems to me, only stand for the civilized depreciation of sacredness and the consequent willingness to desecrate.”                            –Wendell Berry

“There are worse things than extinction.”                                   –Wendell Berry

“It’s not necessary to have so many human beings, in fact it’s degrading.  For people.”     –Gary Snyder

“I don’t see how anyone can responsibly determine and prescribe an optimum human population.  That would be a job of enormous intricacy, and I think there would be an enormous risk of error… A lot of monstrosity could be the result, and I unhesitatingly prefer extinction to monstrosity.”  –Berry

“I find modern history of our species (culture) profoundly discouraging, and I don’t think I am alone in this.  I see a lot of what looks like evidence of outright misanthropy; in advertising, on TV, in modern weapons, in books and movies, in popular and scientific attitudes toward bodily life and sexuality.  A lot of contempt for what Blake called ‘the human form divine’.”              –Wendell Berry