drmstream[writing]

Argu­men­tum Ornitho­log­icum I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a sec­ond or per­haps less; I am not sure how many birds I saw. Was the num­ber of birds def­i­nite or indef­i­nite? The prob­lem involves the exis­tence of God. If God exists, the num­ber is def­i­nite, because God knows how […]

And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew won­drous cold: And ice, mast-high, came float­ing by, As green as emer­ald. And through the drifts the snowy clifts Did send a dis­mal sheen: Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken — The ice was all between. The ice was here, the ice […]

There is no Silence in the Earth — so silent As that endured Which uttered, would dis­cour­age Nature And haunt the World. –Emily Dickinson

The tents stretched for acres, refuge to the hun­dreds of thou­sands that were flee­ing the ris­ing waters of the Mis­sis­sippi. The pud­dles in the alleys were symp­toms of the land’s ill­ness. It was spring­time in 1927. The rain had started the year before, lash­ing tor­rents, steady down­pours, mist­ing driz­zles over hun­dreds of miles. Some days they […]

A wagon will come shortly to take them to the cot­ton field. They will cram in with a cou­ple of dozen other cot­ton pick­ers and ride out to the far fields. The morn­ing sun gets hot and draws the mois­ture from the ground and spills it into the air. A per­son has to breathe lightly […]

Bud­dha told a para­ble in a sutra: A man trav­el­ing across a field encoun­tered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Com­ing to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung him­self down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trem­bling, the man looked down to […]

This photo sets my spine tin­gling. It’s hard to explain, but if you have the same reac­tion, you’ll get it. All those books! Worlds and worlds and worlds of imag­i­na­tion, places, things, moments, ideas, facts, sto­ries. Mas­sive, immo­bile, still…but the gan­glia of enchant­ment and dis­cov­ery. You can read about the project at the link below. […]

Two trees I stud­ied the topo­graph­i­cal map once To find out the secret of the two big trees In the lower yard. They were the per­ma­nent Things about that piece of land our house Had stood on for more than one hun­dred years. The two acres peaked at 480 feet above sea level And dipped in […]

via bldgblog.blogspot.com Bios­phere 2 was a ill-conceived effort to recre­ate the earth’s ecosys­tem within an vast geo­desic dome, a kind of Earth-pod on the sur­face of Earth. Bldg­Blog is fea­tur­ing the pho­tos of Noah Shel­don, who recently vis­ited the defunct struc­ture and recorded nature’s steady creep. A dead build­ing, Bldg­Blog pro­claims. A dead build­ing is one […]

via ahistoryofnewyork.com An adver­tise­ment for the first Macy’s Thanks­giv­ing Day Parade. Ele­phants! Bears! Mon­keys! The first bal­loon? Felix the Cat in 1927. Live ani­mals fell by the way­side. Posted via web from Dan McCarthy’s Stream