Running for Your Life: Ginkgo Dreams

Jill Jonnes’ “Urban Forests” throws some uncommon love on the ginkgo biloba.

We’ve been blessed with more than a few ginkgos in our Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope.

It has a wonderful history, with a punk yellow color of Sex Pistols splendor.

Here’s the “nut” graf:

“An abundance of fossils record that the ginkgo tree was among the fauna and flora of North America that were glaciated out and effectively driven into extinction on the continent by the Ice Age. (Talk about a native tree!) … Scientists now know that the ginkgo biloba tree or its ancestors have existed on earth for 250 million years, longer than any other tree now living.”

They aren’t everywhere, the ginkgos … But next time you see one, bow down. Not only have they outlived everything else on earth, individual trees have been know to live for centuries … (Two famous 18^th century ginkgos – one in Utrech, the other in Kew Gardens, are still alive today.)

Next: Running for Your Life: How’s About “Ducks, Newburyport”?

Running for Your Life: Dawn Times

Two years ago I had an idea.

I had spent months that year -- the centennial of the passing of the Canadian artist Tom Thomson -- researching and writing a book of letters. Thomson grew up in my hometown, Owen Sound, Ontario, and his life and times -- especially his final days because his demise remains shrouded in mystery to this day -- have always fascinated me.

On American Thanksgiving, 2017, I finished a woodland painting of my own -- in part inspired by my Owen Sounder forebear. A image of the painting can be found attached to my Twitter page.

The 2017 Dawn Times panel lies in the back of this image; in the foreground, is Dawn Times II.

A third panel is due, yes, in 2021... Perhaps just in time for the Tom Thomson book? Let's just see!

Next: Running for Your Life: Ginkgo Dreams   

Running for Your Life: On Loving the Cold

OK, not exactly loving it.

Or is it?

What did Kierkegaard say about love?

“When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world — no matter how imperfect — becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love.”

That’s what he said.

So, it is about love, isn’t it?

No matter how cold it is, I’ve stepped out the door for a run every other of my adult life.

The truth is, severe cold gets to me in ways it never did, say, 30 or 40 years ago. But I head out the door (the realm of love?) and start to run, regardless of the temperature, the rain, snow.

Running for your love … Corny but, effective.

Next: Running for Your Life: Dawn Times

Running for Your Life: Art?

Critic Colin Burrow in a recent London Review of Books (No. 21, “The Magic Bloomschtick”) writes this and I couldn't agree more:

First, let’s start with poetry from Emily Dickinson:

The Poets light out Lamps –

Themselves – go out –

The Wicks them stimulate

If vital Light

Inhere as do the suns –

Each Age a Lens

Disseminating their

Circumference –

“(Dickinson) is doing what the best poets do, trying to think behind the words they’ve been given, whether those words come from a newspaper, from an essay, from a hubbub on the street, from a story told in church, or on their grandmother’s knee, from a whisper in the ear from the muse, or from another poem.”

Next: Running for Your Life: On Loving the Cold

Running for Your Life: Anonymous Heard From

If you read one book this election year, let it be “A  Warning” by Anonymous.

Okay, you say. I can’t read another word about politics, most especially about the circus surrounding the current president. It just depresses me.

Suppress those thoughts, and read this book.

But if Anonymous were truly courageous, he or she (he and she?) would not hide in anonymity and own the charges leveled in this stunning account of the perilous state of our nation.

Hachette, the publisher of “A Warning,” obviously thought differently. Its trust in the integrity of the message, the truth of what’s in these pages, won out.

There are things about this book that the left doesn’t like. (It is the work of a conservative true believer, not a unreconstituted liberal.) And obviously there are things that the right doesn’t like about it.

But how about us individual, open-minded readers? I submit that “A Warning” is the single-most important book to read for those who seriously want to know what it’s like today in the inner sanctum of the Oval Office.

And “A Warning” must be considered, given the stakes: As Anonymous writes, we are currently finishing Season Three of the US presidency. Read this book and just try to imagine what it will be like during the Final Season of late 2023. That, I find, unimaginable.

Next: Running for Your Life: On Loving the Cold