parallel to our train. The fields which should be lush with green - remember that if this were the northern hemisphere it would be early May! - are so dessicated even weeds won't grow. Latest word is that this is not a hundred-year drought after all, but a thousand-year one!My mind is reeling (happily!) at two pieces of earth-shattering news:
One is the seismic shift in US politics. If you ask me, the Congress should take on presidential signing statements right away. Hearings on corruption and incompetence and mendacity must come, but they will be nasty and take forever, there being so much to uncover. Before everyone remembers that they have no confidence in any of the players or institutions in question, the roots of the imperial(istic) executive need to be decisively cut! A restoration of confidence in the parliamentary process would do wonders for American democracy.
The other news: my younger nephew has become a biped! When first I heard this on Monday I felt as if a new dimension had been added to the world. He seems entirely unfazed by it, and walks about as if it were nothing.
On Thursday we went to Kyabram Fauna Park, a community-led zoo for Australian animals a few miles from Shepp, and there was no question that after eleven months close to the ground in company with echidnas, possums and dingoes, he is now decisively on the team with emus, wallabies and brolga.If Herder's to be believed (actually Herder's far too schwärmerisch to be simply believed!), the switch from horizontal to vertical brings the eclipse of smell by sight and a sense of the reality of the distant, the discovery of critical separation from the world and the unfolding of reason for understanding it better. This is indeed earth-shattering and must, come to think of it, produce some deep experience of loss of a full-body intimacy with the earth, and, for that matter, with your whole body, but what I'm wondering is: What will replace the attempted ingestion of whatever he finds on the ground as my nephew's main experience of communion with the world?
