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John Roosevelt Boettiger
Mill Valley, CA, Seattle, WA, Phoenix, AZ, Los Angeles, CA, Amherst, MA, Hyde Park, NY, New York City (Manhattan), Dedham, MA, Vikersund, Norway, Paris, France, Sebastopol, CA, Berkeley, CA
Author, writer, editor, psychologist, father, grandfather, great-grandfather
Interests: Writing, reading, conversation, hiking, walking, bicycling, asking and responding to intriguing questions, metta, silence, prayer, meditation, justice (social, economic, judicial, political, familial, personal), the wily craft of coyote politics, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, family trees, redwood trees and live oaks, marsh land, hillsides, mountains, geese in flight, birds of a feather
Recent Activity
Many thanks to you, Judith, for sharing your experience of Modum Bad. I am still in close touch with some of my friends and colleagues there, and treasure my time at Modum Bad as the most nourishing therapeutic community I know.
Warm wishes,
John
Modum Bad: A Resource for Healing and Renewal
Modum Bad - A Resource for Healing and Renewal (This paper was published in May 2007, and may be downloaded in its original format at http://www.modum-bad.no/FullArticle.aspx?m=3&amid=9405.) Modum Bad is an internationally recognized center for resi...
Pope Francis: A Crisis Reveals What Is In Our Hearts
Posted Nov 28, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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Entering the Bardo, by Joanna Macy
Posted Nov 23, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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Two Poems by Rumi: Reminders of friends
Posted Nov 7, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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A father, a son, and the evolution of masculinity
Posted Oct 30, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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Louise Glück wins 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature
Posted Oct 10, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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"Kindness": a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye
Posted Aug 4, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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Two Current Perspectives on the Challenges Facing a Country in Deep Trouble: Paul Krugman and David Brooks
Posted Jun 26, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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Bill McKibben: Racism, Police Violence, and the Climate Are Not Separate Issues
Posted Jun 6, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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What if there were no George Floyd video? Even when racism doesn't go viral, it's still deadly
Posted Jun 6, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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Alan, what a pleasure to hear from you, and to learn about your encounter with Randall Jarrell. I never saw him personally, but I became familiar with the wonderful diversity of his writing while I was under the tutelage of a memorable Amherst College professor, William Pritchard, who wrote Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life. In that book, Pritchard said that "Jarrell will be remembered as one of the best American lyric poets “for his brilliantly engaging and dazzling criticism, and for his passionate defense… of writing and reading poems and fiction.”
I also recall, at the time of Jarrell's death, The New York Times covering the memorial service held in his honor, quoting Robert Lowell crediting Jarrell with writing “the best poetry in English about the Second World War,” and describing his friend as “the most heartbreaking poet of our time.” I think the most anthologized of Jarrell's poems has been "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner":
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Warmly, as ever,
John
Among The Trees
[Preface by John R. Boettiger: I've loved the company of trees all my life, their singularity and community, their slow growth and decay, their extraordinary diversity of lifespans, their changing seasonal colors of leaves and intertwined rootedness, their hospitality to other lives, their respo...
Among The Trees
Posted May 24, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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Jane Hirshfield: A poem about finding life while we shelter in place
A poem about finding life while we shelter in place Jane Hirshfield March 23, 2020 Award-winning poet, essayist and translator Jane Hirshfield lives in Mill Valley. Editor’s note: In the days following the Bay Area’s shelter-in-place order, The San Francisco Chronicle contacted poet Jane Hirshfield, asking if she would write about this rare and unsettling experience. The celebrated Mill Valley writer replied by offering a poem she’d already written, that morning, reminding us that sometimes poetry can summarize a moment with great poignancy. Today, When I Could Do Nothing Today, when I could do nothing, I saved an ant. It must have come in with the morning paper, still being delivered to those who shelter in place. A morning paper is still an essential service. I am not an essential service. I have coffee and books, time, a garden, silence enough to fill cisterns. It must have first walked the morning paper, as if loosened ink taking the shape of an ant. Then across the laptop computer — warm — then onto the back of a cushion. Small black ant, alone, crossing a navy cushion, moving steadily because that is what it could do. Set outside in the sun, it... Continue reading
Posted May 23, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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The Way We Get Through This Is Together
Posted May 15, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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It Could Happen Any Time
Posted May 9, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations
Posted May 7, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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Kahlil Gibran on fear
Posted Apr 23, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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Love and Nonviolence in the Time of Coronavirus
Tuesday, March 17, 2020, CommonDreams Love and Nonviolence in the Time of Coronavirus By Ken Butigan The COVID-19 pandemic has ground the world to a halt. While Hubei province in China has begun to recover, it has done so by locking down sixty-million people and severely disrupting the patterns of life and work there. The rest of the world is generally behind the curve in its response, with the number of cases skyrocketing and a few countries courageously taking the same drastic measures that the Chinese did toward containment and mitigation. The United States has declared a national emergency, but the pivotal strategy of testing is severely lagging. Quite likely, the next weeks will see a dramatic increase in cases and deaths. How, then, does this crisis sharpen our choice for a culture of active and life-giving nonviolence? Doesn’t it, instead, point to a future of epidemics, social disruption, economic chaos, and an increase in the politics of fear? There is no question that the current catastrophe could worsen an already grim trajectory of climate change, poverty, racial injustice and militarism. It could feed the flames of authoritarianism and regimes of surveillance, even as it could drive long-term economic dislocation,... Continue reading
Posted Mar 17, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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Hope and Falling Together: Rebecca Solnit in conversation with Krista Tippett (2016)
Posted Mar 14, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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Anne Lamott: How We Endure and Find Meaning in a Crazy World
Posted Mar 12, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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What comes after fossil fuels?
What comes after fossil fuels? By Bill McKibben, in The New Yorker, March 11, 2020 The fossil-fuel industry is slowly dying. It’s not just because of the transitory effect of the coronavirus, which has temporarily cut demand; it’s secular, as the economists say. Just last week, Bloomberg reported that even natural-gas utilities are feeling the scorn of investors, who want to put their money in renewable electricity. The key question, of course, is how slowly the industry is dying—we badly need to speed up the current trajectory to catch up with the physics of climate change. But it’s not too early to start asking what the industry will leave behind, beyond a badly overheated planet. And one answer, apparently, is a huge number of holes in the ground, not to mention a huge number of holes in government budgets. It turns out that, in jurisdictions around the planet, oil and gas companies have been failing to reclaim, or even plug, old wells that are no longer producing in commercial quantities. These unfunded liabilities are truly enormous. Take Alberta, Canada, for example: the Alberta Energy Regulator has publicly estimated that the province faces $18.5 billion in costs for oil and gas... Continue reading
Posted Mar 11, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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Adam Gopnik on Trump's impeachment and aquittal
Posted Feb 8, 2020 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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On Being: an extraordinary podcast
Posted Dec 21, 2019 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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Many thanks, Alan. I hope you are well, and send my warmest wishes.
John
Greta Thunberg and global warming
I. From The Guardian (UK): Nobody could have predicted that a Swedish teenager would shift the terms of the global climate debate in the way that Greta Thunberg has done. Since she began her school strike in Stockholm last August, Greta has addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Eu...
The Pure Spirit of Greta Thunberg
Posted Dec 15, 2019 at Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history
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