Though I think it is easily, obviously the most important problem facing the country and world today, I am not yet ready to write my feelings about climate change. But the shuffling of a very obstructive, unpredictable deck of cards does exemplify the powerful question in the months and days before an ensuing panic attack of an administration. How do you separate your individual anxieties from those of the world at large?  My mom is coming into town for Christmas this year, and I plan to ask her, having lived through the Cold War and Nixon, how you deal with the looming threat of avalanche, especially when you've just buried your father and are trying to remember how to love and take care of yourself, if not in earnest for the first time.  

Isn't it wonderful to think of how many books were written up to the present moment? It used to be a cause of great anxiety to me. The books I would never read and the vault of secrets sealed against me. How could I  re-read a book when there are untold millions of writers I've never even heard of working to speaking from their heart, their head or somewhere even weirder and less definitive. I've sinced calmed down a bit, and am now comforted by it. I will never run out of books to be excited about. Never cease to be challenged by ideas and stories I know nothing about. It is puts me at ease. Not to drown but to float on an ocean of collective experience and effort. To ease out on the bay of unread books is the same comfort in the behind the scenes. It feels similar to me as the peace at the idea of the end of mankind coming from the hands of mother nature herself. To me it seems both a fitting end and one that would tip toward the side of justice. But more on that next week. Today I'm talking about my first love, reading.