Monday, January 30, 2012 at 2:50PM | by Otter 
Damn the rat-bastards with words like a knife
Who demand that the widower get on with his life.
Love won’t abandon the places it haunts:
Leave her clothes in the closet, if that’s what he wants.
— The Otter
Love, Poetry in Personal Reflection, Poetry Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 6:16AM | by Otter I have Christian friends who insist that death is not an occasion for grief because nothing is lost in God. I have atheist friends who insist the same thing but for the opposite reason, because no form is substantial in nature.
My answer to both is of two syllables, beginning and ending with fricatives.
Saturday, December 31, 2011 at 10:40AM | by Otter 
Some reflections on love, death, and dying at Christmas.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 7:44PM | by Otter I first saw that sycamore one day when I came home from fifth grade, and it was a bony white stick, carefully planted in the ground.... It seems now a symbol of my mother's strange hope, faith, and pessimism, because she planted it squarely under a power-line, half-convinced that it was futile to try to make things grow in the hard urban clay.
Sunday, November 20, 2011 at 9:11AM | by Otter You might have seen this startling starling murmuration viral video:
According to Wired Science, murmurations
are best described with equations of “critical transitions” — systems that are poised to tip, to be almost instantly and completely transformed, like metals becoming magnetized or liquid turning to gas. Each starling in a flock is connected to every other. When a flock turns in unison, it’s a phase transition.
At the individual level, the rules guiding this are relatively simple. When a neighbor moves, so do you.
The movement of each starling is influenced by every other starling. In simpler terms, there is an intimate connection between the energy of the whole and the energy of the parts of the whole.
The group of starlings is poised on the bring of becoming something: that is, it's "critical" in the physical sense of being highly attuned to respond to external stimulus: wind, obstructions, the movement within its own whole.
Suggestive stuff. Beauty might save the world. But what is it in us that responds to this metaphor of ourselves in bird-flight?
Saturday, November 19, 2011 at 12:04PM | by Otter 
"Nice hat. Did you get that at Rolf's?" Medieval death coming for the King. Death in the Middle Ages was a part of life. Life expectancy at birth was about 30 years (28 years for Jesus, around 70 for most readers of this blog). They planned for it because they witnessed it.
In the last few months, we've gotten to know the hospice folks pretty well. Good people. Dedicated, intelligent, sensitive people.
They may represent, in some ways, the best hope for America.
Consider:
One of the most divisive debates in recent North American memory was probably the debate about universal health care. What was conspicuous to me was that the public debate took place without any particular reference to what a good death means.
