Things on My Mind.

Things are happening in the world. I try to shield myself from things I can do nothing about - but sometimes when it pushes close I can't blank them out or forget them.

For instance - the woman who died recently after waiting twenty four hours in the Kings County Hospital Psychiatric Emergency Room in Brooklyn, NY. After my own recent brush with a hospital of the NY Department of Hospitals I could believe it happened. And I can't forget her. They fired a few people. You know, take quick action to smooth troubled waters. Now what? Does it end there?

Big Sur on the Pacific Coast of California is burning. Have you been there and seen that gorgeous coastline and hills? Take a look - through the weather cam on Nepenthe Restaurant's deck. Is that mist or smoke?

Jim and I saw Yellowstone Park several years after the big fire there - stalks of charred trees and burned off underbrush. I can imagine how barren and scarred Big Sur will look and I want to cry.

The American Poet Robinson Jeffers lived near Big Sur.

Fire On The Hills
The deer were bounding like blown leaves
Under the smoke in front the roaring wave of the brush-fire;
I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.
Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror
Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned
Down the back slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle
Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,Insolent and gorged,
cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders
He had come from far off for the good hunting
With fire for his beater to drive the game;
the sky was mercilessBlue, and the hills merciless black,
The sombre-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,
The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than men.
Robinson Jeffers