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As usual, Julia, I enjoy your thoughtful comments. For the moment, on the deck each night, I'm at peace with the bats. Observation, a rather cleansing activity. I imagine the night skies of Michigan must hold a few bats.

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Thanks, Ted! I am back living in Vermont and could not be more grateful. Hope you are well!

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If only I could find what the bats shared with you: "I stood free from the grief of an unhinged climate, free from the grief of the delta and lambda variants, lost in the amnesty of the moment . . . free as the bats themselves."

As I research more about COP26, I must be careful not to fall into what Glenn Albrecht named "solastalgia". https://theconversation.com/the-age-of-solastalgia-8337 When the IPCC report came out August 9, I had to turn to First Dog on the Moon, Australia's descendant of Doonesbury, only wonkier: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/09/it-should-not-come-as-a-surprise-that-climate-change-is-worse-than-we-thought-and-also-getting-worser

Ecclesiastes 3:4 speaks of "a time to mourn, and a time to dance." For now, I put my mask back on and give mourning its due. Dancing will come--just not this moment. But I trust Wendell Berry and "The Peace of Wild Things".

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

And the grace of bats and their free flight.

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