Last Wednesday (April 22) was Earth Day, an annual event celebrated around the world to show and encourage support for environmental protection. First celebrated in 1970, Earth Day now includes events coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network in more than 193 countries.
To mark Earth Day this year, I spent time after work down by the Mississippi River with my friend Adnan. I'm fortunate to live in a part of south Minneapolis very close to the river. And as you'll see from the images I share in this post, it's a very beautiful area of urban wilderness.
Along with photos taken on Earth Day by the Mississippi, I also include in this post some images from this past Sunday when I visited a friend who lives beside a small lake in Minnetonka. This post's opening image shows reflections of trees in part of this lake.
Speaking of reflections, the title of this post comes from Frank MacEowen's book, The Mist-Filled Path: Celtic Wisdom for Exiles, Wanderers, and Seekers, in particular that part in which he talks about the “Way of the Earth” as an essential component of a true spiritual framework, one rooted in a practical embodied spiritualty and which brings people together in the “awareness that we are all bound together in this holy tapestry of living shapes.”
An excerpt from MacEowen's book is also part of this post. This sharing reflects my growing interest in Celtic spirituality (including Celtic Christianity), which I'm discovering shares many characteristics with other indigenous (i.e., Earth-oriented) spiritual traditions from around the world, most foundationally the experience of a deep, abiding, and transforming connection with nature.
The landscape is a mirror. It is a splendid revealer of things not often seen with the eyes of everyday life. When walking out on the land, it is good to invite the “eyes of the seer” and the "eyes of the poet"“eyes of the poet” to be present. These are eyes that see the true shape of things. Poets and seers see things differently. When we relax the literal thinking mind and enter a landscape with more fluid perceptions (a soft gaze), we soon find that we become changed. We are then able to connect with our primal, preliterate selves. This preliterate, or perhaps postliterate, state of consciousness opens us to the Great Mirror of Nature.
The Great Mirror is that striking feature of Creation that soulfully reflects back to us our own soul when we slow our rhythm and our daily pace down long enough to be recipents of its wisdom.
Through the Celtic practice of merging the human soul with the soul of nature and the soul of place, a deep healing occurs. A profoundly sacred education awaits us all. But, as Quaker educator and philosopher Parker Palmer has said, “Education isn't necessarily a learning, but very often an unlearning of false perceptions or a remembering of what we've forgotten.”
The Celtic path of working with the beauty of Creation is one of dialogue. It is not a one-way conversation. This work is about allowing ourselves to become one-third of the sacred dialogue. We open ourselves to the inherent intelligence of the earth, the earth leans toward us in response, and a third thing is created: a true human being.
Those who follow the Celtic mystical paths have always perceived nature as sacred. There is an unspoken understanding that nature acts as a reflective mirror, shining back our own soul's essence and sometimes even prophetic information. The Great Mirror reminds us of our truest self. For this reason any spiritual work with the natural world, whether prayer, pilgrimage, hillwalking, fasting, or purification practices, is an invitation to return to the primal (meaning “original”) essence of who we really are.
Author and former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson continues, like many at this time, to hunker down at home (or in her case, at a friend's home in Florida) as she sits out the worst of the current coronavirus pandemic.
True to form, Marianne is not just being mindful of her own heart and spirit during this time but also the hearts and spirits of others. This compassionate mindfulness is being manifested in an ongoing series of videos and audios that she's releasing on her various social media platforms on pretty much a daily basis. I haven't tuned into all of them but I did watch last Thursday's video, and its message very much resonated with me. Perhaps it will resonate with you too!
Following are excerpts from six articles that explore how human destruction of biodiversity contributes to increasing disease threats. This exploration is especially timely and important given the current global coronavirus (or COVID-19) pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic is an incredible human tragedy. Today an estimated one million people have been infected by the virus, and over 50,000 have died. And, for the foreseeable future, those numbers will be rising sharply.
But this is not the first time a new disease erupted into the human population, causing significant harm. Consider the H1N1 influenza virus, SARS, MERS, Zika virus, Nipah virus, Hantavirus, and Ebola. Or consider the terrible toll of HIV. In fact, during the last few decades, the world has seen many “emerging” and “re-emerging” infectious diseases.
It seems odd that these emerging infectious diseases erupted into the world after the massive improvements in public health of the 20th century, when we saw the biggest gains in life expectancy in human history. The discovery and deployment of antibiotics, the widespread use of vaccinations, increased sanitation, better food and water security, and other medical miracles extended our lives and reduced human suffering. But it also gave us the illusion that infectious diseases were a thing of the past.
But recent decades have shown us that infectious diseases never really left, and they’re back with a vengeance.
Despite what some politicians and pundits are saying, this is not a surprise. Scientists have been ringing the alarm for decades, urging us to be better prepared. Countless reports have warned us during the last thirty years, including numerous pieces by Dr. Anthony Fauci. In the popular literature, Laurie Garrett warned us about this in her New York Times best-selling book, The Coming Plague in 1994. And Dr. Larry Brilliant spoke about this in his TED talk (which has over one billion views) in 2006.
They all warned us that changing environmental conditions were contributing to increasing disease threats. Numerous studies highlighted how infectious diseases could arise from deforestation, habitat and biodiversity loss, wildlife exploitation, the bushmeat and traditional medicine trade, confined animal agriculture, and antibiotic misuse.
Smart leaders knew this was coming. Scientists told them, again and again. And some wise leaders started to prepare. Sadly, others ignored the science, and some recently dismantled key programs needed to combat these threats.
So, here we are.
. . . While other factors can give rise to emerging infectious disease, human activities are a driver of many. In fact, back in 2005, my colleagues and I wrote an article in Science that pointed out that “Habitat modification, road and dam construction, irrigation, increased proximity of people and livestock, and the concentration or expansion of urban environments all modify the transmission of infectious disease and can lead to outbreaks and emergence episodes.”
We knew that the loss of habitats and biodiversity, breaking down natural ecological systems, and increasing contact between dense human populations, wild animal products, and poorly-regulated animal agriculture, was a recipe for disaster.
Many more studies have reinforced these conclusions. In a recent article by John Vidall, he concludes that the continued decline of biodiversity and habitat worldwide could lead to many more incidents like COVID-19.
– Jonathan Foley Excerpted from “After the Storm” Medium
April 2, 2020
The role of biodiversity in disease prevention has received increased attention of late. In a 2015 “state of knowledge review” of biodiversity and human health by the United Nations, scientists wrote that “an ecological approach to disease, rather than a simplistic 'one germ, one disease' approach, will provide a richer understanding of disease-related outcomes.” Recent research has given more support to the idea that biodiversity protection in one part of the world can prevent novel diseases from emerging and leaping into another.
It’s a numbers game, in part. Not all species in a community are equally susceptible to a given disease, nor are they all equally efficient transmitters. In diverse ecosystems well separated from human habitations, viruses ebb and flow without ever having a chance to make it to the big time.
But as people move in, those protections begin to break down. Disrupted ecosystems tend to lose their biggest predators first, and what they leave behind are smaller critters that live fast, reproduce in large numbers, and have immune systems more capable of carrying disease without succumbing to it. When there are only a few species left, they’re good at carrying disease, and they thrive near people, there may be nothing between a deadly pathogen and all of humanity.
COVID-19 is not a separate issue from climate change. It is precisely because humans have so badly damaged the environment and thrown nature out of balance that novel epidemics are happening. COVID-19 is not a one off emergency that we will sort out and be done with. It may be the new normal. Climate change will bring with it cascading catastrophes. We will not be able to manage one before another hits. The only chance we have is to act immediately and on a scale humanity has not done before.
– McAuley Hentges via Facebook
April 20, 2020
There’s misapprehension among scientists and the public that natural ecosystems are the source of threats to ourselves. It’s a mistake. Nature poses threats, it is true, but it’s human activities that do the real damage. The health risks in a natural environment can be made much worse when we interfere with it. Rodents and some bats thrive when we disrupt natural habitats. They are the most likely to promote transmissions [of pathogens]. The more we disturb the forests and habitats the more danger we are in.
We must stop talking about everything as it benefits us and start realizing that the reason for this pandemic now is because we have shown so little respect for the natural world, with destroying more and more forest and animal species being pushed together. Viruses spilling over from one species to another, which normally wouldn't [happen]; animals pushed into closer contact with people [farming], for example, another opportunity for spillover of viruses. And then of course, the animal trafficking and export and the number of animals that are being sold in these so-called wet markets in Asia, but also the bushmeat in Africa.
These viruses have been predicted for many years and [were written about] in the book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen. People haven't listened; they haven't learned from the last SARS epidemic.
The silver lining [of this current pandemic] is that many people for the first time ever have breathed clean air, because with the shutdown of some of the big businesses the air has become cleaner in places like Mumbai and Beijing.
The hope is that enough people will realize what they've been missing, [that there will be] a groundswell of people determined somehow to persuade business and government to do things differently, to have a different mindset. And unfortunately, materialism and big business being what it is, I fear that business will work even more quickly to catch up on all the revenue they've lost, and it's a real conundrum because of business shutdown, commercial things being closed down. People have lost their jobs, and they're suffering.
On the other hand, it's giving a respite to nature. So we have to find a balance, we have to get back to a different way of doing things.
If we fail to understand and take care of the natural world, it can cause a breakdown of [biodiverse] systems and come back to haunt us in ways we know little about. A critical example is a developing model of infectious disease that shows that most epidemics – AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, SARS, Lyme disease and hundreds more that have occurred over the last several decades – don’t just happen. They are a result of things people do to nature.
Disease, it turns out, is largely an environmental issue. Sixty percent of emerging infectious diseases that affect humans are zoonotic – they originate in animals. And more than two-thirds of those originate in wildlife.
We destroy them and they gift us self-destruction keys.
All that is eternal in me
Welcomes the wonder of this day,
The field of brightness it creates
Offering time for each thing
To arise and illuminate
I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Waves of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.
Well, the following brought a tear to my eye. It's a 13-minute video marking today's 9th anniversary of the passing of Elisabeth Sladen.
In the 1970s, Sladen appeared in the popular British sci-fi TV show Doctor Who, playing the Doctor’s time and space traveling companion Sarah Jane Smith. Decades later, Sladen would have her own successful TV series, The Sarah Jane Adventures (2007-2011), though it was sadly cut short by her death from cancer.
Above: Elizabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith in the
"classic" Doctor Who story, The Hand of Fear (1976).
In the video released today, one scripted by Russell T Davies and narrated by Jacob Dudman, Sarah Jane’s closest friends come together to say farewell.
There's just so much I appreciate about this creative endeavor. First and foremost, it's clearly a labor of love by all involved; that's so clearly evident.
I also appreciate how Sarah Jane's son Luke (Tommy Knight) comes out as gay. You know, there were plans for this to happen in The Sarah Jane Adventures, but Sladen's sudden death prevented it. I'm glad it's been revealed now, and in such a touching way by Luke himself. The testimonies by Clyde (Daniel Anthony) and Rani (Anjli Mohindra) are also incredibly moving.
In addition, a number of characters are mentioned from both the relaunched Doctor Who series (Captain Jack Harkness; the Brigadier's daughter, Kate; and Martha and Mickey, now married with a son, August) and The Sarah Jane Adventures (Maria and her dad, Alan; and Sky. Also, Rani's mum Gita makes an appearance and, like her daughter, delivers a moving testimony).
The video also resolves the long-standing uncertainty of what happened to Sarah Jane Smith in the world of Doctor Who. We now know that the character of Sarah Jane died alongside the woman who had so magically brought her to life.
Russell T Davies' Sarah Jane Adventures
Farewell Story Is the Perfect Send-off
By Dan Seddon
Digital Spy
April 19, 2020
Russell T Davies' specially-written farewell to The Sarah Jane Adventures debuted online today (April 19).
Now available on the Doctor Who YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages, this short-but-touching episode featured a number of the original cast in phone-captured scenes as they hunkered down during the global health crisis.
Edited into a 13-minute, 32-second piece, it was a perfect send-off for the late Elisabeth Sladen, who played the show's titular character until her death nine years ago.
Narrated by The Stranger's Jacob Dudman, the episode depicted a wonderful funeral for Sarah Jane Smith, with a carnival of Doctor Who universe characters making cameos such as Captain Jack Harkness, Luke Smith, Rani Chandra and Sky Smith "who manifested briefly in her human form".
Tall tales, laughter and "a sense of huge joy" dominated the scene, while a number of faces agreed to meet up every year and adopt the moniker 'The Family Smith.'
Actress Katy Manning made a physical appearance as Jo Jones, alongside Dorothy McShane [Ace] and Clyde Langer, before the house on Bannerman Road was later revisited.
Rani closed out the episode by confessing she believed Sarah was still out there somewhere, traversing the stars with The Doctor on one final adventure.
Above: The cast of The Sarah Jane Adventures.
From left: Daniel Anthony (Clyde Langer), Rani Chandra (Anjli Mohindra),
Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith), and Thomas Knight
(Sarah Jane's adopted son Luke).
Doctor Who Fans Honor Elisabeth Sladen
After Release of Farewell, Sarah Jane
Narrated by Jacob Dudman, who has played the Doctor in several audio dramas, the epilogue reveals that Sarah Jane had died alongside Sladen. All of her friends from Bannerman Road are there at her funeral, including Clyde Langer, Rani Chandra, and her adopted son Luke. Her funeral is also attended by two fellow companions of the Doctor, Jo Grant and Ace, played once again by Katy Manning and Sophie Aldred.
Tommy, Clyde and Rani were all allies of Sarah Jane in her fight to protect Britain and Earth from evil forces while the Doctor was off traveling through time and space. They joined the Whoniverse when The Sarah Jane Adventures launched on CBBC in response to overwhelming praise to Sladen’s return to Doctor Who for the first time in 23 years. Once an investigative journalist whose reporting led her to cross paths with the Doctor in the 1970s, Smith had become a formidable planetary defender in her own right with the help of an extraterrestrial computer, Mr. Smith, and the former robot companion of the Doctor, K-9.
The Sarah Jane Adventures lasted for five seasons and saw special cameos from Doctor Who leads David Tennant and Matt Smith during its run. Sadly, Sladen’s death in 2011 caused the show’s fifth season to be cut unceremoniously short.
With all of Britain on lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic, Davies took the extra time to write a proper send-off to Sarah Jane and the woman who played her.
“Sarah Jane is the one that told me that Sanjay was looking at me . . . in that way,” Luke says. “And she’s the one who told me to go and talk to him. And now we’ve been married for five years. That’s the greatest gift she ever gave me.”
We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.
Today is the 81st anniversary of the birth of the late, great British pop/soul vocalist Dusty Springfield (1939-1999).
Dusty's been in the news lately as her landmark 1969 album, Dusty in Memphis is one of this year's selections for inclusion in the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress in the U.S. (For The Sounds of America's recent 20-minute audio documentary on Dusty in Memphis, click here.)
My interest in and admiration for Dusty is well documented here at The Wild Reed, most notably in Soul Deep, one of my very first posts.
Other previous posts worth investigating, especially if you're new to Dusty, are Dusty Springfield: Queer Icon, which features an excerpt from Laurence Cole's book, Dusty Springfield: In the Middle of Nowhere; Celebrating Dusty (2017), which features an excerpt from Patricia Juliana Smith's insightful article on Dusty's “camp masquerades”; Celebrating Dusty (2013), which features excerpts from Annie J. Randall's book, Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods; Remembering Dusty, my 2009 tribute to Dusty on the tenth anniversary of Dusty's death; and Remembering Dusty, 20 Years On, my tribute last year on the twentieth anniversary of her death.
And, of course, off-site there's my website dedicated to Dusty, Woman of Repute (currently only accessible through the Internet archive service, The Way Back Machine).
My website's name is derived from Dusty's 1990 album Reputation, and as I explain in Soul Deep, it was this album that introduced me not only to Dusty's music but also to her life and journey – much of which resonated deeply with me. Indeed, my identification with aspects of Dusty's journey played an important role in my coming out as a gay man.
Above: Dusty, "amidst the flowing streams, standing stones and picturesque Celtic ruins of County Clare and the Galway coast" for the making of the music video for "Roll Away," a track from her last album, 1995's A Very Fine Love. The liner notes of the 2016 2-disc expanded collector's edition of A Very Fine Love include my reflections on this beautiful song, reflections which are also shared in the previous Wild Reed post, Time and the River.
In honor of today's 81th anniversary of Dusty's birth, I share the audio recording of Dusty singing Chip Taylor's "Angel of the Morning," from the fifth episode of her BBC television series Decidedly Dusty (originally broadcast October 7, 1969). This audio has been beautifully combined with a video montage of Dusty images by Francis Bacon. After this video is a series of quotes about Dusty, many of which I first shared on the introduction page of Woman of Repute.
___________________________
Maybe it's the sultriness. The urgency in the gentlest whisper, the subtlety in her boldest proclamations of love, loss, heartache, and ascendancy. Maybe it's the way she can capture both the ecstasy of the afterglow and the despair of a breakup's aftershock. But there is something about Dusty Springfield that makes her contribution to pop music - hell, to life - particular, peerless. There are plenty of divas, plenty of blue-eyed soul sisters, but there is only one Dusty, and when I think about it there is no other singer who reaches me in so many ways so deeply as Dusty. . . . While remaining incredibly true to her own sensibility and spirit, no other singer has as effortlessly proven that soul is not a matter of color or nationality but of feeling. Dusty knows not just the look of love but also its essence.
The way she looked was easy to impersonate -
the panda eyes and the bouffant hair.
But the voice was impossible to imitate.
Dusty was the perfect pop singer.
Being the first British artist to chase The Beatles up the U.S. charts, Dusty used her celebrity to champion the cause of soul music in England, bringing over Motown acts [including Martha and the Vandellas] before anyone had heard of them and featuring them on her TV specials. Her affinity with blacks didn't stop with their music. In 1964, she was deported from South Africa after refusing to perform for segregated audiences, long before apartheid was a cause celebre. "I wasn't making any major statements," she told the British press. "I just thought it was morally the right thing to do." If that isn't textbook soul, it ought to be.
She didn't write the songs, and if you had never heard her sing, you could argue Dusty was a '60s version of the non-writing, so-called divas of today, the Celine Dions, Mariah Careys, et al. But the difference is that she was an interpreter, not just someone who hit the right notes. Like Sinatra, she didn't write the songs but she sounded as if she had lived them.
– Bernard Zuel Australian music critic
[Dusty's voice] stirred up strange feelings and mysterious longings, unearthing anything you thought was buried for good. It was the voice of experience. . . . [She] refused to indulge in anything as ordinary as excess. Her voice could sound as big as a hurricane, but the British pop icon never blew a tune away just because she could. She used her power sparingly, unleashing the gospel diva within only when necessary. She treated the songs she recorded like scripts, and she negotiated their emotional peaks and valleys like an Oscar-winning Sherpa. No wonder songwriters loved her. . . . Whether she was holding back ot letting her big voice fly, Dusty Springfield sang like a woman whose interior life was as rich as the melodramas she played out on vinyl. She sang with intelligence and intuition. She gave the songs room to breathe, but she always made them her own.
Dusty Springfield's voice wafts through her recordings like smoke, spiraling into shadowy plumes, echoing in a sexy mist. Listening to her records, you can never quite locate the center of her voice. She seems to be everywhere and nowhere in the song, permeating the pianos, vibrating between violin strings. It's a bewitching mix of messages her voice exudes, expressing both power in its barreling range and vulnerability in its airy tone. Match a sound that engrossing to top-rank material, brilliantly ornamental arrangements, and a singer decked out like a Christmas tree, and you've got a certified legend on your hands . . . Dusty's authority comes through in more than just her honed persona. It also rings through the command of her voice. What other singer could combine the power of Barbra Streisand, the grace of Julie London and the soul of Martha Reeves? That Dusty can explains why her songs will always appeal to anyone who ever had a heart.
Most of the queer boy bands of contemporary rock music, as well as such androgynous or sexually ambiguous women performers as Annie Lennox, Allison Moyet, Chrissie Hynde, and even Madonna, demonstrate the musical, visual or aesthetic influence of Dusty Springfield, one of the first women in rock who dared to 'strike a pose.'
– Patricia Juliana Smith Author and editor of The Queer Sixties
She's unique, alien, an enigmatic amalgamation
of black soul and Brit melodrama,
private passions and popular myth,
fantasy and reality.
Who was Dusty?
Did she ever really exist?
What did it all mean?
Now all we have is the music.
Just listen to the music.
I established The Wild Reed in 2006 as a sign of solidarity with all who are dedicated to living lives of integrity – though, in particular, with gay people seeking to be true to both the gift of their sexuality and their Catholic faith. The Wild Reed's original by-line read, “Thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective.” As you can see, it reads differently now. This is because my journey has, in many ways, taken me beyond, or perhaps better still, deeper into the realities that the words “progressive,” “gay,” and “Catholic” seek to describe.
Even though reeds can symbolize frailty, they may also represent the strength found in flexibility. Popular wisdom says that the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm. Tall green reeds are associated with water, fertility, abundance, wealth, and rebirth. The sound of a reed pipe is often considered the voice of a soul pining for God or a lost love.
On September 24, 2012,Michael BaylyofCatholics for Marriage Equality MNwas interviewed by Suzanne Linton of Our World Today about same-sex relationships and why Catholics can vote 'no' on the proposed Minnesota anti-marriage equality amendment.
"I believe your blog to be of utmost importance for all people regardless of their orientation. . . . Thank you for your blog and the care and dedication that you give in bringing the TRUTH to everyone."– William
"Michael, if there is ever a moment in your day or in your life when you feel low and despondent and wonder whether what you are doing is anything worthwhile, think of this: thanks to your writing on the internet, a young man miles away is now willing to embrace life completely and use his talents and passions unashamedly to celebrate God and his creation. Any success I face in the future and any lives I touch would have been made possible thanks to you and your honesty and wisdom."– AB
"Since I discovered your blog I have felt so much more encouraged and inspired knowing that I'm not the only gay guy in the Catholic Church trying to balance my Faith and my sexuality. Continue being a beacon of hope and a guide to the future within our Church!"– Phillip
"Your posts about Catholic issues are always informative and well researched, and I especially appreciate your photography and the personal posts about your own experience. I'm very glad I found your blog and that I've had the chance to get to know you."– Crystal
"Thank you for taking the time to create this fantastic blog. It is so inspiring!"– George
"I cannot claim to be an expert on Catholic blogs, but from what I've seen, The Wild Reed ranks among the very best."– Kevin
"Reading your blog leaves me with the consolation of knowing that the words Catholic, gay and progressive are not mutually exclusive.."– Patrick
"I grieve for the Roman institution’s betrayal of God’s invitation to change. I fear that somewhere in the midst of this denial is a great sin that rests on the shoulders of those who lead and those who passively follow. But knowing that there are voices, voices of the prophets out there gives me hope. Please keep up the good work."– Peter
"I ran across your blog the other day looking for something else. I stopped to look at it and then bookmarked it because you have written some excellent articles that I want to read. I find your writing to be insightful and interesting and I'm looking forward to reading more of it. Keep up the good work. We really, really need sane people with a voice these days."– Jane Gael
"Michael, your site is like water in the desert."– Jayden
