Five Things to Remember from May

Here are five things I'd like to remember from May.

One. A question I’ve asked myself this month: what’s the name of that warbler, that one there, the one that’s black and white? (It’s the Black and White Warbler.)

Two. I’m still (as I was in January) mulling over the impossibility of summing up a person’s life in an obituary or celebrating a person’s whole life in a funeral or memorial service. I’m also struck by how connected people are, how many interests they have, how many professional groups they can be part of (and then groups of retired professionals, like retired teacher organizations), spiritual groups, even. I don’t have a wise generalization to make about cultural changes, age groups, “kids today” or whatever. I’m just impressed, I guess, at all the ways people live their values and contribute to the world.

Cloud and Island and Water and Leafing Trees

Three. Scope creep/feature creep: maybe this isn’t exactly the same as what I want to remember, but it’s related. In just a few short days, the “default view”—what I expect to see at any time I look out the window—has changed from “ice-covered lake” to “lake,” as in “all water.” Each state is nearly impossible to imagine when the default is the other.

Four. Maybe the change from early to actual spring (March to late April/early May) is more like a growth spurt—the icy surface looks status quo but is changing slowly in ways we can’t always see. Then boom! the changes are visible.

Rainbow with Tilting Horizon

Five. Readers are among my favourite people, and the part of me that reads with generous attention is one of my favourite qualities in myself. (Which is why hate-reading, or reading something I'm not enjoying but feel the need to finish for a discussion, feels so icky. And which is also why I have embraced the DNF--the Did Not Finish.) I recently had a great conversation with a very generous reader, Shawn Mooney at Shawn Breathes Books on YouTube. Here's a link.

This past month, I've posted about the following books on Instagram:

• * Shepherd's Sight: A Farming Life, by Barbara McLean (essays)
• * Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968, Hedy Margolius Kovaly (memoir)
• * Call Me Stan: A Tragedy in Three Millennia, K. R. Wilson (fiction)
• * Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, M.E. O'Brien & Eman Abedlhadi (fiction that is presented like social science)

I don't post about everything I read--just what I like or have thoughts about.

Here's to generous reading and seasonal changes, whether slow or fast.