Summer Musings

Today has been one of those days when nobody seemed to be in charge of my world--least of all me. I started things, put them down, wandered off and never finished them.

I was struck by an article in the paper which suggested that plastic may well become part of the fossil record. It is swirling in gyres in the oceans. It becomes fused with sand to become a new type of rock which has been found on beaches in Hawaii.Toothbrushes, plastic bottles, flip flip flops and fishing nets wash up by the ton on shores around the globe. Perhaps it is just another step in the evolution of man…

I was going to paint a still life of some pitchers I collected for the purpose, but they were dull and inspiring and didn't look very good together. I washed them all and put them back. in their places.

I just finished rereading Peter Matthiessen's At Play in the Fields of the Lord--a depressing yet thought provoking story of missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, a couple of stateless mercenaries, and a local commandante who all come together in a malarial Amazon outpost and think they know what needs to be done about an elusive Amazon Indian tribe, the Niaruna--It has predictably unhappy ending.


I love to read, and can remember finding escape from hunger, boredom, and some difficult moments in my life in reading. I have some Protestant remnant that makes me feel it is frivolous to read a book during the day. Lately, I read a lot at night so I suppose it is also an escape from insomnia.

For lack of anything better to do, I pulled a bunch of books at random off the shelf --books which I enjoyed on some level or another, and put them in a pile. Interestingly, most of them deal with human conflict in one form or another and with one group that feels it knows best how everybody else should live their lives. Not surprisingly, that rarely works out.

Perhaps I can paint the pile of books….