I spent another wild and wonderful week and weekend with writing conferences and grandkids.

I have lots of ideas, but little writing time.

​I’m thinking about music, architecture, and elephants’ relationships with bees. So, stay tuned!

I’m reading (actually listening to) The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles (Atria Books, 2021). Since I’m only about 1/3 in, here’s a blurb from the publisher. “Based on the true story of the American Library in Paris, The Paris Library explores the geography of resentment, the consequences of terrible choices made, and how extraordinary heroism can be found in the quietest of places.” Since I tend to shy away from “Holocaust Literature,” I’m a little worried that I might be headed in that direction, but since it was recommended by a friend who I trust, I’m going to keep reading/listening.​

It was a gloomy world of mountains and crevasses and caves, and wherever [Marina] looked there were mounds of grey, dead coral topped with a blanket of living purple, yellow, blue, and red coral bushes and feathery pale anemones.
             from The Coral Kingdom: Mermaids Rock, book I
                                        written by Linda Chapman
                                      illustrated by Mirelle Ortega
                                          Little Tiger Press, 2020

     If you were to ask me to name my favorite place, I might answer a quiet forest full of old-growth trees, or Sand Dune Arch in Arches National Park, or most probably I will freely admit that my favorite place is my green reading chair in my living room at home.
    Beaches are wonder-filled places, too, but as much as I enjoy a seascape (with waves or without, with seabirds or without, cloudy sky or clear), beach scenes of wrack lines, abandoned docks, and colorful regattas, and especially underwater photographs of unusual sea life and coral formations, I don’t consider myself a water-person. 
    I’m good with dry land, thanks.
    About 71/% of our Earth’s surface is covered with water, and 96.5% of that water sloshes in the oceans. The world’s coral reefs live and die in a belt around the middle of the globe from about 35° N Lat to 35° S Lat. 
    The most common corals are hard corals. Also know as stony coral, they create a rigid skeleton of calcium carbonate in its crystal form, aragonite. As many as hundreds of thousands or as few as a scant several hundred individual polyps cement themselves together with the secretions that form their skeletons.
    Although fixed in one place and sometimes mistaken for rocks, scientifically, corals are animals. They are related to jellyfish and anemones. And they have a symbiotic relationship with a microscopic one-celled algae. They live in the cells of the outer layer of a polyp’s body and using photosynthesis, provide organic matter for themselves and their hosts. 
    Essentially, each polyp is a mouth with tentacles. It flutters its tentacles to create waves which trap zooplankton, bacterioplankton, and other tiny food sources to complete its diet.
    Corals build their reefs in shallow and deep water. When shallow enough to allow light to enter, the coral that depend on their symbiotic relationship with zooxanthellae, those one-celled microscopic algae, can thrive. Even the few types of coral that do not build reefs, live there.
    Coral that build their reefs in deeper water, where sunlight cannot reach, must filter out the remains of sea life (animal and vegetable) that drips through the ocean water. 
    Corals have lived on Earth for 450 million years, two hundred million years before dinosaurs arrived. Corals been exceptional thrivers, until lately.
    We have become concerned about them only lately because the same factors threatening the rest of the world are at play in the ocean, too.
    And healthy reefs are crucial to the health of our planet.
    Towns and cities depend on tourism dollars generated by diving tours, fishing trips and the associated hotels and restaurants and businesses. When people experience the environment, they are more likely to want to protect it. 
    Coral reefs protect shorelines, homes, and lives by absorbing the huge impact of pounding waves during storms.
    Many new medicines are being developed from discoveries found in coral reefs and the plants and other animals that live there. Possible treatments for asthma, arthritis, cancer, viral and bacterial infections and heart disease depend on healthy coral reefs.
    The ocean readily absorbs carbon dioxide and 90% of reflected heat generated by greenhouse gasses. Its unnatural and unbridled increase is the primary cause of the ocean’s acidification and the resulting harm caused to corals, shellfish, and plankton. 
    When corals are stressed, they expel their symbiotic algae and turn white. The individual polyps become mostly clear exposing their white skeletons. Bleached coral is not dead, but it is not healthy. It’s more susceptible to disease. It’s harder for them to reproduce and it’s harder for them to grow more skeletal material.
    Pollution from a variety of sources like coastal development, agriculture runoff, and sewage treatment promote rapid growth of algae that compete with coral. Excess sediment smothers it.
    Fishing in coral reefs benefits communities around the world. But over-fishing is unsustainable. Scientists are encouraging people to incorporate indigenous and local knowledge about local species and fishing practices. 
    Dead corals change the reef. The resulting change creates habitat loss for the marine life that depends on them for food and shelter and the people who depend on them for their livelihoods, too.
    Enter Elvira Alvarado, a 70-year-old marine biologist who turned from cancer research with sharks to saving the endangered coral reefs in Colombia. 
    Most corals are broadcast spawners. They spawn once a year, usually about a week after the full moon, but they are also tuned to many other environmental cues. During one precious week, Alvarado set collection tubes on the reef, dove down, and collected eggs and sperm. 
    In a make-shift laboratory, she and her team mixed the eggs and sperm and watched for the raspberry-shaped eggs to hatch into planulae, the free-floating young. In the wild, they move around until they encounter something hard, whether rock or dead coral. There they land. And there they stay.
    Alvarado and her team waited.
    After about seven months, the young coral that Alvarado and her team collected, grew large enough to be transplanted to existing reefs. There they will stay. And there they will grow.
    Now, three sites, each with a team of scientists, are continuing to work to save the reefs. 
    Elvira Alvarado is realistic. She says the trick is to regenerate the coral quicker than they die. But she’s hopeful, too. She’s built a legacy. “Even when I can no longer do this work,” she says, “others will continue it.”

I’m reading The Mayfair Bookshop by Eliza Knight (HarperCollins/William Morrow, 2022). Lucy St. Clair and her mom are both enthralled with Nancy Mitford’s writing. When Lucy gets an assignment that takes her to Mitford’s favorite bookshop in London, she discovers surprising connections she has with her favorite author. Recommended, but not necessarily at the top of your list.
                                      Be curious! (and experiment)

In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.
                             from: The Diary of a Young Girl
                                        written by Anne Frank
                               Doubleday/Bantam Books, 1967
                                          first published in 1947
                                           first US edition, 1952
    
    Today is not the first time some of you are seeing this, but it’s what I’ve been thinking about for a long time.
    In October 2018, when I originally posted this piece, the first Trump regime was finding its footing. Children were being torn from their families in his “zero-tolerance” policy to stem immigration. He called Robert Muller’s investigations into the 2016 election a “witch hunt.” That fueled the Me Too movement. He nominated Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. And mid-term elections were one week away.
    In 2021, when I reposted it, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were in office. The world was still in the grips of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Biden signed a $1.9 trillion relief package into law, which worked its way to the people who needed it most. 
    The Capitol Riot/Insurrection was in our rear-view mirror working its way through the Judicial System. Key portions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were working their way through Congress. Biden brought the United States back into the Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organization.
    The relative calm lasted for four short years.
    Then 2024 melted into 2025 and DOGE and USAID and DEI. The Department of Education was shuttered. Money allocated to fund university and hospital research projects was not dispersed.
    The lives of the most vulnerable in our society are being threatened.
    This is what I saw when I checked the status of the Department of Health and Human Services: https://www.hhs.gov/ (I tried to copy/paste the message but only got this link. Open it to see our government using partisan politics to push its own “message.” Your taxes and mine are paying for it.)
    People are being swooped up first and questions about their citizenship status are asked later (usually). 
    And now this feels important enough to re-post yet again:

    One of the most famous Holocaust poems of all time, "First They Came for the Jews," was written by a Lutheran pastor and theologian, Martin Niemöller (1892–1984).
    After recanting his support for Hitler and Nazism, Niemöller was arrested and confined to the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1938 to 1945. He narrowly avoided execution and was liberated by the Allies. He stayed in Germany and worked as a clergyman, pacifist, and anti-war activist. In his 1946 book, Niemöller talked publicly of Germany’s guilt for what Germany had done to the Jews. He was one of the first Germans to do so.
    Niemöller’s poem is especially relevant. 

                   First, They Came For The Jews
                            by Martin Niemöller
First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was
       not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out
       because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out
       because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for
      me.

    I found the text of the poem and information about Niemöller on this page on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum site. (accessed on October 29, 2018, verified October 19, 2021, February 18, 2025, and October 13, 2025)

Here is a modern adaptation:
When they came for the Jews and the blacks, I turned away
When they came for the writers and the thinkers and the radicals and
       the protestors, I turned away
When they came for the gays, and the minorities, and the utopians, and
       the dancers, I turned away
And when they came for me, I turned around and around, and there
       was nobody left...
(published in Hue and Cry, 1991)

You can find some other adaptations here:
http://webweaversworld.blogspot.com/2006/10/first-they-came-for-jews-variations-on.html (verified October 13, 2025)
    
    I never thought that shooting and killing people praying in a synagogue . . . because they were Jewish could *really* happen. But, in 2018, three days before my original post, it did. In the city next door to mine. 
    And while violence in general is declining, hate crimes are becoming more prevalent, especially when victims identify with the LGBTQ+ community, or identify as a member of a minority group. Religious hatred is not abating. I’m beginning to believe that antisemitism will never go away. 
    In 2025, I’m struggling with how to turn my anger, fear, pessimism, and grief into action.
    Here’s my version of Neimöller’s poem:

When he fired FAA executives, I was unaware. 
Then 67 people were killed in an airline crash. And three more in a
    helicopter.
When he canceled DEI, I was unaffected.
I looked away from my horror and disgust.
When he shuttered USAID and fired most of the personnel, 
    I called my Senators and Representative.
When he gave Department of Treasury access to the Musk-ovite, 
    I spoke out to my friends.
When he threatened to de-fund the Department of Education, 
    I cried.
When Amy Walter echoed Simon Rosenberg’s plea to write and call government officials, 
    I did.
When I do all these things, maybe nothing will change.
    But maybe something will.
        
    Today, eight months later, we are planning for the second “No Kings Day.” We have the right to gather and rally for our beliefs. Our Constitution guarantees our right to peaceful assembly.             
    Here is the text of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution: 
        Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
     religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the
     freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people
     peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a
     redress of grievances.
For explanation and annotations go here. 
    The key word in all this is peacefully. 
    In Youngstown, Ohio, No Kings Day will be held at 3:00 pm in front of the Mahoning County Courthouse. For other locations click here and type in your zip code.
I'm reading John Lewis: a Life by David Greenberg. Jon Meacham calls it "comprehensive and compelling," I call it fascinating, enlightening, and extremely readable. Rising out of poverty in rural Alabama to a seat in the United States Congress from 1987 until his death in 2020, Mr. Lewis is a model of how to cause "good trouble." Recommended

                  -—Be curious! (and involved, safe, and peaceful)   

The next morning Arthur was very surprised when he saw Francine.
“They’re my movie star glasses,” said Francine.
“But there isn’t any glass in them,” said Arthur.
“It doesn’t matter. They help me concentrate and make me look beautiful,” said Francine.
                                             from Arthur’s Eyes
                       written and illustrated by Marc Brown
                                                        1st rev. ed.
                                                Little, Brown, 2011

    Remember Roy G. Biv? It’s a handy mnemonic to help us remember the colors in the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Most of us have favorite colors, but it turns out blue is the most favorite of all. Maybe because large swaths of sky are blue and the vastness of the ocean is blue. Blue tends to evoke calm. 
    And even though we associate blue light with our screens, according to aao.org (American Academy of Ophthalmology), most of our exposure to blue light comes from nature. “[Our screens are] no more damaging than blue light from the sun,” says Dr. Rahul Khurana, spokesman for the AAO. He also assures us “there is no scientific evidence that blue light from digital devices causes damage to your eye.”
    Exposure to ultraviolet light, though, can damage our eyes. Ultraviolet wavelengths are much shorter and so move faster. So fast, in fact that they are invisible to humans.
    Blue light is part of the visible spectrum. Even though exposure to blue light will (probably) not damage our eyes, it is blue light that can wreak havoc with our circadian rhythms. Our body’s temperature and hormone levels are tuned to a cycle. When our bodies are working as they are supposed to, even without a clock, even in a dark space, those functions occur regularly on an approximate 24-hour, internally regulated cycle. Most humans are on a diurnal cycle, awake in the daytime and asleep at night. This is our circadian rhythm, affected by the release of melatonin, triggered by the blue light of the sun and screens.
    That’s why its a good idea to shut off the screens as part of our bedtime routines. Too much blue light at the end of the day might make it hard to fall asleep.
   More screen time is turning into more indoor time for most of us. 
   Here are a few statistics from  from the blog of the Ann & Robert Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago’s survey of 859 parents with children under 13 conducted in June, 2025:
    81% of kids have their own device
    59% of kids began using screens by the age of three
    Even though the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends no more than one hour of screen time per day for children 2-5 years old, surveyed parents say kids are tuned in for an average of three hours/day. 
    So much screen time is bound to affect us. One of the most common is the increased prevalence of digital eyestrain.
    I was not surprised to learn that over 70% of Americans experience associated symptoms of digital eyestrain. Doctors at Spindel Eye Associates in southern New Hampshire say “…up to 80% of people who use computers regularly experience some form of digital eye strain.”
    The condition affects kids learning on screens and playing on them. Adults and teens, too. Our small, way-too-convenient hand-helds, (read: phones, and tablets) are frequently most to blame. 
    And the more we use screens, the more we experience their effects. And screens are part of our lives. They are here to stay.
    So, if it’s not the blue light emissions, which it’s not, what is causing all this discomfort, anxiety, and even depression?
    Partly it’s lack of exercise. The more we use our screens for information, communication, and entertainment, the less time we leave ourselves for moving around. Exercise, especially in nature combats feelings of isolation, lethargy, and depression.
    Partly it’s the act of focusing on near, close-at-hand objects.
    But mostly, according to Rupa Wong, an ophthalmologist and professor at the Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawaii, our tears are responsible for most of the clarity of our vision. Simply said, when we look at screens, we blink less. When we blink less, our eyes tend to get dry, which causes blurred vision, dry and itchy eyes, and headaches. 
    Blinking is a reflex. Since we don’t control how often we blink, Dr. Wong has some simple solutions we can try.
    You can keep artificial tears (not eyedrops) handy. Warm compresses over your eyes at the start or end of your day will moisturize the oil glands on your eyelids.
    Or, you could try the 20/20/20 rule. For every 20 minutes of screen time, take a 20-second break and look 20 feet away. Where you look is not as important as focusing on the distance. Grass, clouds, and sky are good. So are your bird feeder, blooming flowers in your garden, and squirrels frisking about gathering acorns. 


I’m reading Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (Harper/HarperCollins, 2023). Like most of her work, Ms. Patchett delves into family relationships and how they survive time’s passing. This story shows the Nelson family in their cherry orchard during the pandemic. Two time periods blur as Lara recounts her life with a famous movie star and how she met their father. We see their three grown daughters at the brink of their own adulthoods as they each find truth and meaning in their mother’s recollections. Each time I open the book, I enter the world of Tom Lake, the small, rural area of the UP, Michigan. Recommended!

                         Be curious! (and spend time in nature)