A Week of Gratitude

February 28, 2017 / Juliana Lightle / 1 Comment

Negatives emerged lately in my life, the events in the last two posts, two good friends with health issues and a lot of pain. Nevertheless, yesterday, I started thinking of so many things for which I feel grateful. Then I said to myself, I am going to work on a week of gratitude, a week where everyday I make a list of things for which I feel grateful. Out of years of habit, I make a mental gratitude list every night as I drift off to sleep. This is more formal, a list I write down.

Yesterday’s list includes these:

-pure water from a deep well

-healthy food I cook myself

-children who live good, productive lives

-my own good health

Today’s list includes:

-a job I really enjoy in spite of paper grading tasks

-students who make me laugh and tell me they love me–who knows whether they mean it and honestly it’s ok either way

-outside chores, e.g feeding horses morning and evening. I cannot imagine life without this even when it is cold and miserable

-singing–after I post this, I will head to my weekly chorale practice. Currently, we are singing all these touching songs, poems by Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda put to music.

-taxes–crazy, I know. I recall someone once telling me he was happy to pay taxes because it meant he was making decent money and was not poor.

I Watched Movers Box Up a Life

February 22, 2017 / Juliana Lightle / 3 Comments

Saturday, February 18, 2017

I watched movers box up a life today, a life I thought left me thirty some years ago. I was wrong.

When our daughter and I cleaned out the refrigerator, we found a large pot filled with egusi stew, remnants of the last meal he cooked. I took the footlong, hand carved, wooden spoon, scraped the dry bits clinging to the sides of the silver pot. Scrubbing it clean, smells of memory flooded my nostrils–cayenne, bitter leaves. It took me ten minutes, ten memory laden minutes. Even after scrubbed and dried, the pot’s cayenne smell filled my nostrils, the distinct smell of West African food.

I watched movers box up a life today, a life I thought left me thirty some years ago. I was wrong.

Our daughter and I found papers and photos, items her father kept all these years, detailed memories of our life together. I could barely look at them, throat constricting, tears welling in the eyes of this woman who never cries. Our daughter, dismayed, told me to go outside. I walked down the quiet street, brown leaves scattered from autumn, unraked, a strange street both urban and rural inside a city of nearly half a million residents. Is this where he walked, attempting to improve his health? Was I walking in his footsteps?

I watched movers box up a life today, a life I thought left me thirty some years ago. I was wrong.

Frozen

February 5, 2017 / Juliana Lightle / 7 Comments

Two weeks ago today, the sickening news came: my daughter’s father, my ex-husband, suffered a massive heart attack while working. Rushed to the hospital, resuscitated, then open heart surgery. He never regained consciousness, not yet. He lies there, part of his brain not working, tube-fed, not breathing on his own.

She drove all night, six hours to get there. She thought they had taken her to the wrong room, unrecognizable. Last week end, I drove with her. Except for his hands, I would not have recognized him myself, so thin, so aged. How could someone change that much in the ten years since I had last seen him? She went back again late this week, returned late last night. Moved to a longterm care facility, he remains the same except he no longer even opens his eyes, no more staring into the void.

I feel frozen. This morning I delivered my grandson to my daughter–he stayed with me this trip. Checking on her father’s apartment, my daughter found his photos, some from when we were young. She showed a few to me. I stared, shocked, dismayed. My today’s to-do list just sits here. I force myself to work at it bit by bit, write two peer review assignments for a class I am taking–I do not want to disappoint, vacuum and dust one room at a time, tell myself I need to go out on this 20 degrees warmer than normal day and garden, write this blog post. I feel frozen.

He had plans neither she nor I knew about, plans to perhaps make him happier, return to the land of his birth. Will some miracle occur, will he awaken, recover? Is there some appropriate time for which we wait?

I feel frozen. When will I thaw?

Random Acts: Don Freeman

January 3, 2017January 3, 2017 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Planned another hiking post today but found this and its message seemed too important to ignore.

Christmas Day 2016

December 25, 2016December 25, 2016 / Juliana Lightle / 1 Comment

Leonard Cohen sings Hallelujah

Rain sheets in the Texas wind

Dark clouds fly across a cerulean sky

Christmas with all my family

Top predators like wolves, bears, lions and tigers have declined dramatically around the world over the past century

December 23, 2016December 23, 2016 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Some parts of Eastern Europe have worked at figuring out how to balance saving predators and protecting farmers and herders. Spain has programs to reimburse herders.

Wolves of Douglas County Wisconsin Film Company

Conservationists widen toolkit for predator management

Source:Berkeley News
By Brett Israel, 12/13/16

Top predators like wolves, bears, lions and tigers have declined dramatically around the world over the past century. One major driver of these declines is retaliatory killing by people following predator attacks on domestic livestock. This lethal approach to predator management is increasingly controversial not only because of ethical concerns, but also the role predators can play in healthy ecosystems. A new UC Berkeley study shows that many non-lethal methods of predator control can be highly effective in protecting livestock from predators and in turn, saving predators from people.
A tiger drags a cow at Jennie Miller’s study site in India

The Berkeley study examined 66 published, peer-reviewed research papers that measured how four categories of lethal and non-lethal mitigation techniques — preventive livestock husbandry, predator deterrents, predator removal, and indirect management of land or wild prey…

View original post 752 more words

Learn Something New

November 7, 2016 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

After grading 45 essays this weekend, it remains a wonder that I learned anything new. I did, sadly, once again find a few plagiarizers, but I also read some good essays on which students had obviously spent time.

As a person extremely interested environmental issues, I belong to several environmental organizations and read a lot about related issues. Here are some of the things I have learned either recently or in the last few days:

-June and July were the warmest June and July on record and the 14th and 15th straight months in which such records have been set.

-Thawing permafrost near the Alaskan Highway has caused it to sink in places.

-In Siberia the same thawing has caused the release of deadly bacteria–anthrax to be specific.

-This past summer, toxic algae affected waterways in states as diverse as California and Utah. It does not smell all that wonderful either.

-In Alaska so many wolves have been killed that naturalists can no longer research them in their natural state.

-The Republican Platform claims coal is a clean source of energy.

-Hot summers have caused Douglas fir trees to quit growing.

Catrinas

October 31, 2016 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

In 1913, Mexican print maker Jose Guadalupe Posada sketched the original Catrina, an elegant, upper class skeleton woman in a ball gown to symbolize the emptiness of the upper classes. Subsequently, Catrinas have come to be a part of El Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead. None of this has anything to do with Halloween, absolutely nothing. People sometimes associate the two erroneously, but only because of the dates when they occur.

This evening I was privileged to be one of the judges of a Catrina contest. Before the contest occurred, the evening began with some traditional Mexican dancing.

There were also several traditional El Dia de los Muertos family displays to honor deceased ancestors. The following was the most elaborate.

Finally, the Cartrinas were ready. Ten young women competed. The following photo shows the top three, judged for originality, costume, and makeup.

The young woman on the left never smiled. The top makeup impressed everyone. The skeletal bones you see on the young woman on the right were all painted on and a backbone, etc. was painted on her back as well. The young lady in the center won the costume portion–a bride in a black veil, elegant, empty.

The Community Bardic Exercise Revisited: Body, Land, Tribe Poetry by Kate Brunner

October 15, 2016October 15, 2016 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

An inspiration to write a poem every day for seven days, release negativity, be yourself no matter what others say or do.

Norway Plans To Kill Most Of Its Wolves

September 22, 2016September 22, 2016 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

It has always puzzled me why wolves are hated more than other predators. Wolves are a lot like humans. Do we project our worse traits on them? They kill few livestock when compared to deaths due to disease, weather, etc. I am interested in feedback regarding this question.

Wolf Is My Soul

September 21, 2016 Source

There aren’t many wolves left in the Norwegian wilderness Just 68, in fact.

But Norway’s government has decided even that’s too many. Authorities announced plans this month to kill 47 wolves, or about two-thirds of the remaining population.

FLICKR/BJARNE LOHMANN MADSEN

The move has sparked both intense criticism and praise. Farmers welcome the cull, claiming wolves threaten their livestock, and therefore their livelihood. Conservationists, on the other hand, condemn the move as an attack on a species that’s already on unsteady ground.

“The wolf population is already very small and critically endangered,” Silje Lundberg, a prominent Norwegian environmentalist, told the U.K.’s Express. “To eradicate 70 percent of such a vulnerable species is shocking.”