Sunday, July 31, 2016

SHANKAR ~






It's finally raining! Overnight!
I awoke and read a poem by Queneau about the rain.
A fine and silly and fully Parisian poem for a later BH.
We were climbing the mountains over the weekend
and noticed the exhaust and thirst of the trees, the earth.
Leaves that should have rotted into good soil compost last spring
with a rain that never came, are left, dry and out of place.
Trees are losing their leaves now, thirsty and spent.
Leaves shriveled falling to the ground, not quite August.
All wanting this rain.
I watch rain drip well off the steel roof I just put down.
Time to turn over side A to side B.





Shankar: double violin
Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman, mridangam
Zakir Hussain, tabla
V. Lakshminarayana, conductor

Compositions by Shankar
Recorded November 1980

This album is dedicated to John McLaughlin






STORIES FROM THE LEOPOLD SHACK ~








"In 1934, conservationist Aldo Leopold and his wife
Estella bought a barn — the remnant of a — farm and
surrounding lands in south-central Wisconsin. The entire
Leopold clan — five children in all — worked together
to put into practice Aldo's "land ethic", which involved
ecological restoration and sustainability. In the process,
they built more than a pleasant weekend getaway; they
established a new way of relating to nature. In 1948,
A Sand County Almanac was published, and it has
become a beloved and foundational text of the
conservation movement."

Leopold's youngest daughter's own memoir
can now be placed comfortably beside her father's
classic.