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Stealing the souls of children


“People pay for what they do,and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.”

James Baldwin 

My hand, the bay’s gift, returned

In the end, it’s the ground that will save us, if we are, or even want, to be saved.

We’re of the mud, of the air, of the water, of the sun. We diminish the folks before us on this once fine land when we “honor” these as metaphors.

We diminish our ancestors from our homelands who spoke of the spirits and the blurring of the lines between the living and the dead as autumn darkness presses on our souls.


Cliffs of Moher, County Clare (Aaron Logan via Wikimedia)

These are not simply metaphors or myths or models. They are ways to understand the world, the world beyond the digital.

You cannot grasp a fistful of earth through a screen.
Our hands were made for more than pushing keys.

We are stripping the souls from our children.

We become who we deserve to become.
But we should let our children decide whether a soul is worth keeping.

Winter is coming, again.

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The quick, the yeast, and the dead

Every damn time I throw dough in the oven or clams on the stove I pray to the Holy Whatever (for who knows the agony of heat besides the heretics, the saints, the damned, and the unlucky).

Consciousness is as overrated as life is underrated.

Yeast are alive. I know they breathe (or else we’d have no crumb), and I know they convert wheat and water into alcohol–I can smell it.

Before I cast the yeast into a hot oven they are eating, fooking, budding, breathing, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. They know other yeast are nearby.

You are not special–you will die, too.

So live a yeasty life, while you can.

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The connected child

An essential quality of technology, from the spear to Skype, is action at a distance. Technology enables us to have an effect on people and things far away. In general, the more advanced the technology, the further away it is able to impose an effect. 



Our lives cost the lives of others. That’s always been true, and will be so long as we breathe. Technology allows us to forget this.

As technophiles spew on about a global community, where your value is measured by the number of hits your words register, their hands never touch the blood and feces of the life around them.

You want every child “connected”? So do I. It’s what’s at the other end of the connection that matters.

All children, every child, should know where the stuff that makes up their bodies comes from, all the way back to the living organisms that fill up, unrecognizable, wrapped in plastic.


All children, every child, should know where their waste goes, through hidden pipes and trucks that rumble before dawn through the neighborhood once or twice a week.

We can do both, I suppose–just make sure you cover up the machines when I bring in a calf (or whatever the cafeteria is serving this week) to slaughter in the classroom.


I could live without my computer a lot easier than living without my knife.