“…Sophia alone completed the work to see Excursions, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers through to publication.” How Sophia Thoreau is responsible for publishing the majority of her brother’s works after his death. As Virginia Woolf said, “anonymous was [indeed] a woman.”
How medieval medicine is being revisited. Surprise: it may not have been a completely dark age… And the ‘novel’ group—humanities scholars AND scientists! Working together!—that is re-creating medieval medicine.
I don’t know why Mexico’s president’s post of an image of an alux, a mischievous woodland spirit of Mayan folklore, made news as a kind of politician-going-off-the-deep-end. I’d honestly love to know a politician is recognizing traditions of elves any day over Qanon conspiracy, racism, misogyny, bigotry, book banning, and the fact that women are not allowed to have full rights as humans any longer…
Katherine May posted last week about the seeds of her new book and shared how she became obsessed with crinoid fossils—whose segments look like stars, and are often called fairy stars or coins. I have now become obsessed as well. Not only are they fairy stars—rounded segments were known as St. Cuthbert’s beads, where monks at Lindisfarne would thread them as necklaces and rosaries. And then other crinoid fossils can look like perfect paintings of flowers. So beautiful.
By Starlight
Now far from those harsh lights and the glare over cities,
alone
By a clearing in a forest, we lie down
For the first time in our lives
Together under the stars
And, keeping the earth in its place behind our backs, we
stare
Upward into the ancient stream of starlight
Whose current, though it appears
To falter, to waver,
Has made its way to our eyes through barely imaginable
Down-curved ravines of space to dazzle us
With its streamers and wildfires,
Its ice-laden glitter,
The unconstellated burning rubble of godlings, outcast
And spilled from the zodiac and constantly falling
As they have always fallen
Even before eyes turned
To wonder and will go on falling whether we stay to watch
Or soon give back our small share of the spectrum
To the oldest of nights, to the expansive
Gestures of a universe
We share so pointedly: some (see there) bloomed long ago
And dimmed, yet shine through lifetimes without a source,
With no beginning left
Behind them now
To begin with, but only an ever-shortening reach of glory
That flickers in darkness. All will consume themselves
And be reborn, as we are
Here, having followed
Their example, love, as fixed and erring and fair and
steadfast,
Not star-crossed yet, but truly catching them
As they slant to us past hemlocks, as rich
And clear as our silence.
—David Waggoner
Freya,
The link re: Sophie Thoreau set me to wondering have you ever written anything about Margaret Fuller? No pressure but March is Woman's History Month😊