The 79th National Folk Festival

Sign of things to come. (On a sidewalk in Salisbury, MD)

If Music is a Place — then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.

~ Vera Nazarian

Yet our land is still troubled by men who have to hate
They twist away our freedom and they twist away our fate
Fear is their weapon and treason is their cry.
We can stop them if we try.

~ Phil Ochs, Power and Glory (1960’s folk/protest song)

A walk in the woods

A late September day.

When no one is watching Mother Earth, and most of the time no one is, she sings softly to herself.

~ Sharon Weil, Donny and Ursula Save the World

A Monday meander: The face of bravery and other things

A wicked looking fence.

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.

~ Seamus Heaney

If we were having coffee: Out, about, and in the garden edition

Enjoying the lavender.

Anthropocentric as [the gardener] may be, he recognizes that he is dependent for his health and survival on many other forms of life, so he is careful to take their interests into account in whatever he does. He is in fact a wilderness advocate of a certain kind. It is when he respects and nurtures the wilderness of his soil and his plants that his garden seems to flourish most. Wildness, he has found, resides not only out there, but right here: in his soil, in his plants, even in himself…
But wildness is more a quality than a place, and though humans can’t manufacture it, they can nourish and husband it…
The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.

~ Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education

No. 79

Beautiful morning

If you stopped yourself every single time you were about to say, “I have to” and changed it to “I get to,” it might change your entire experience.

~ Kristin Armstrong, Mile Markers: The 26.2 Most Important Reasons Why Women Run