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See more Prairie Ecologist memes here, and explore the site for additional wisdom, beauty, and foolishness.

The river flows.… Can you hear it? Can you hear the murmur and harmony of millions of raindrops mingling and flowing to the sea?

If we tried, could we hear the river’s desires? Its hopes, its promises? And could we speak for it?

Or … we could stop kidding ourselves. It’s a river, not sentient in any sense. When we claim to speak for it, we really say what we want for the river, what we think it ought to want for us, and what we want and need from it.

If the river were a thinking entity, we might hear something different and disquieting, maybe even an echo of our self-referential, self-delusory relationship with nature.

We might hear millions of raindrops arguing with each other, loud and angry, too much like us, all the way to the sea.

Chapter 1 of a novel I’m writing now, Princess Magpie, has been posted at the Decameron Project. I began writing it when I was living in Spain.

Nine hundred years ago, Queen Urraca ruled over the Kingdom of Leon. The novel begins with her betrothal in marriage at age eight and follows her life as she becomes a canny monarch who can sing a song, prevail in a thorny negotiation, and lead an army.

The novel is underway but won’t see print for a while. Chapter 1 will give you a taste, though.

The Decameron Project began on March 16 and posts a new story every day. In its own words:

“This project was inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron, written shortly after the Black Death hit Florence in 1348, which takes place during that time of plague. In the story, ten young Florentines, seven women and three men, retreat into self-isolation in a villa in the hills and pass the time by telling stories, one each per day for ten days, or a hundred stories.

“The New Decameron was the idea of Maya Chhabra, and is organized by Maya Chhabra, Jo Walton, and Lauren Schiller. Participants include Daniel Abraham, Mike Allen, Leah Bobet, Pamela Dean, Max Gladstone, Rosemary Kirstein, Naomi Kritzer, Marissa Lingen, Usman Malik, Ada Palmer, Laurie Penny, Ellen Kushner, and many others.”

The content at this Patreon project is free and visible to everyone. Enjoy! However, you can become a patron, and the donations are split between the authors and a charity, Cittadini del Mondo, a Rome-based clinic and library for refugees.

Last year on Mother’s Day, I blogged about my new favorite plant, a Rhipsalis creuscula or coral cactus.

In April 2019, my brother sent me some cuttings from his plant by mail. His plant came from cuttings our mother gave him almost thirty years ago from her own plant. She died in 1994. That means this is my mother’s coral cactus!

As you can see from last year’s photo, the cuttings arrived a little travel-weary, but it’s a survivor, and the plant has become a beautiful way to remember Mom.

Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe describes itself this way: “A fun-filled discussion of the big, mind-blowing, unanswered questions about the universe. In each episode, Daniel Whiteson (a physicist who works at CERN) and Jorge Cham (a popular online cartoonist) discuss some of the simple but profound questions that people have been wondering about for thousands of years, explaining the science in a fun, shorts-wearing, and jargon-free way.”

In this episode, they discuss the real possibilities of the planet of Pax and its life forms. Then I have a delightful talk with Daniel about the science and the dramatic considerations that went into the book Semiosis.

In other news, Semiosis has a Wikipedia page!

At my author webpage, sueburke.site, I’ve republished a nerdy article, “Let me talk to the aliens.” In it, I consider how linguistics shape our thoughts and what a chance to speak to aliens would mean for the world.

Finally, here’s a flash fiction story, 900 words, “Normalized Death,” which I wrote in 2008. If you could choose between happiness and sorrow, which would you take?

Cognitive dissonance provides a good reason for not wearing a face mask against Covid-19. If you want to believe you won’t get ill, then you will feel very uncomfortable doing something that reminds you that you might be vulnerable. A mask-less neighbor told my husband: “I never catch colds or anything.”

It must be nice to be invulnerable. Or unafraid. Every morning, I wake up and think: “Fuck. There’s still a pandemic.” I know I could get sick, and I’m afraid of that.

When I see people protesting the quarantine, it reminds me of a poker bluff: an attempt to intimidate your opponent. But who is the opponent? The protesters seem to think it’s the governor of their state. I think it’s a virus.

My father, who played a mean game of poker, taught me not to rely on bluffing. Instead, he shared better card-game techniques. One, very effective, involves keeping a mental tally by counting the cards that are face-up or that have been played. In certain poker variations, this helps make smarter decisions. In other games, like sheepshead (I grew up in Wisconsin) or blackjack, it helps so much that some casinos throw out card-counters.

We still know too little about the exact deck for Covid-19 and only some of the rules of the game. Slowly, we’re seeing more cards to help us guide our bets and figure out how to play. Meanwhile, I’m losing income, I’m depressed about being cooped up, I’m scared, and I hate this game. But I don’t see any winning strategy besides counting cards and playing the awful hand we’ve been dealt as effectively as we can. Only when we’ve learned enough will we be able to leave the corona casino.

Years from now, this will be a beautiful bonsai.

The leaves, although tiny, reveal the distinctive fan shape of a Ginkgo biloba, sometimes called a maidenhair tree. Ginkgo trees originated in the early Jurassic, and several species once grew around the world, but by two million years ago its range had shrunk to a small area of China and its diversity to one species. Now it grows around the world as a sturdy ornamental tree that can make a fine bonsai.

I have reached step four of a half-year-long process.

Step1. Gather seeds. This involves danger. Last fall, a ginkgo in the park behind my apartment building was dropping seeds: free bonsai starter kits! I decided to gather a few. But the seeds come inside a soft, yellowish, smelly sarcotesta, which is a fleshy, fruit-like coat. Smelly? I would describe it as reeking like putrid dog vomit. Worse, handling the caustic flesh might make your skin not merely stink but peel like a bad sunburn. I proceeded with caution and gloves, cleaned and washed the seeds, and in the end they looked like large pistachio nuts.

Step 2. Stratification. This takes months. The seeds needed to rest for the winter. I put them in damp dirt and stashed them first in the corner of a cold windowsill, then for a few months in the back of my refrigerator.

Step 3. Planting. This requires dirt and possibly some household trash. At the start of March, I planted the seeds in potting soil in ecologically friendly cups made from toilet paper tubes (accumulated before the Great Toilet Paper Panic). A month and a half later, I had healthy seedlings.

Step 4. Repotting. This is where we are now. The best-looking seedling has a new home. Water and sunshine can take it from here for a while.

Another interesting factoid about ginkgos is that they have no genes for senescence, or growing old. They literally do not know when to die. They eventually succumb to illness, injury, or a changing environment. Otherwise, they can thrive for hundreds of years and remain young. This tree might outlive me for a long, long time.

Sometimes writers are asked to imagine their ideal reader and to write for that person.

My ideal reader is smarter than I am — so how do I write in a way that’s smarter than I am? I have a technique that I think works: I try to make the prose more intelligent with every edit. If I edit enough times, I can outdo myself.

My ideal character, the kind of person I like to write about, is someone better than me. William Faulkner defined that person in his speech when he received the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature:

“ …the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself … make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat … the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

“ … The poet’s, the writer’s duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

What can stories teach us? Here are three quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018).

“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel — or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel — is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.… And a person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know quite fully what it is to be human. For the story — from Rumpelstiltskin ” to War and Peace — is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.” (1970)

“Distancing, the pulling back from ‘reality’ in order to see it better, is perhaps the essential gesture of SF. It is by distancing that SF achieves aesthetic joy, tragic tension, and moral cogency.” (1973)

“Those who refuse to listen to dragons are probably doomed to spend their lives acting out the nightmares of politicians. We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark; and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.” (1976)

Like many avid readers, I read more than one thing at a time, and one of those things is the “insomnia book.” This book remains at my bedside, and when I can’t sleep — perhaps I don’t feel well, perhaps something weighs too heavily on my mind — I open up that book.

Right now, it’s The Education of Henry Adams, the autobiography of Henry Adams (1838–1918). It won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize.

Four virtues make this a good insomnia book:

First, it’s calm and calming. Even when Adams shares his distress over the US Civil War or laments over all the time he wasted in his youth, he does so looking back with a mature, serene appraisal.

Second, it’s interesting but not enthralling. I want to turn the page, but I don’t feel compelled if I start to feel sleepy.

Third, it’s not complex. Adams does something, then next year he does something else. I don’t have to keep track of a large cast of characters or series of plot twists. I can go a couple of weeks without reading it (I usually sleep well) and not feel lost when I pick it up again.

Fourth, it’s distracting. The events occurred long ago and far away.

At other times, my insomnia book has been an explanation of the mathematics of game theory or a deep dive into English grammar. I find that non-fiction tends to work best.

I write this not to recommend Adams’ book but to recommend having an insomnia book. You should find an author who will help you feel that if you can’t sleep, reading this book is a good option — but if a little while later you can sleep, putting this book down is a good option, too. In fact, if you pick the right book, it will nudge you toward sleep.

I wish you sweet dreams.