The meaning of this season of Lent in early English is simply “spring.” Paradoxically, Fr. Dan Kovalak, who lives on a small creek running into the Susquehanna in Faxon, recently described the season to a group of children in this way (you must imagine his deep James-Earl-Jones-style baritone tempered by singing with the Don Cossacks): [...]
Sitting at the really terrific Susquehanna Greenway Symposium yesterday I was oddly reminded of Sam Gamgee’s famous conversation with Frodo Baggins about “the stories that really mattered,” probably best known now from the Peter Jackson movie “The Two Towers,” but quoted here from the original Tolkien: “I don’t like anything here at all,” said Frodo, [...]
Phillip Blond, the current brains behind the so-called “Red Tory” movement in the U.K., will speak at Villanova U. on Monday evening (details at the bottom below). Whatever one thinks of Blond’s politics, it’s worth noting how his call for “local investment trusts” and locally investing post-office banks in Britain fits well in some ways [...]
The pre-registration deadline for the March 18 Susquehanna Greenway Partnership Symposium at Bucknell U. is tomorrow. The daylong conference will focus on “sustainable civic tourism” this year but involves many other topics including the federal “treasured landscapes initiative” as it can relate to the Susquehanna (and the proposed Smith Trail extension along the river corridor), [...]
James Fenimore Cooper and Joseph Priestley, and their legacies at the Susquehanna headwaters and Confluence, can be taken as exemplifying two different paths toward American community with nature. Cooper’s (and Cooperstown’s) was the less taken.
The main headwaters of the Susquehanna Valley form one of my favorite “thin places” (even to the extent that I list Cooperstown, NY, on my Facebook profile as one of my hometowns). My wife and I and our children respond to it much as our whole family does to the threatened old growth forest at [...]
The best environmental protection for the Susquehanna Valley in the 21st century? Try “thin places.” That’s a phrase from Scotland for landscapes where the veil between this world and the Otherworld seems sparklingly near-translucent. It’s probably of modern origin, but describes well early landscapes around the Irish Sea in stories of what modern scholars call [...]
I see you. In the changing world of post-financial-crash America, are residents of the Susquehanna Valley more like blue-necked Na’vi in the film Avatar than the rednecks they were often assumed to be by some “outsiders,” even in academic and environmental networks within Pennsylvania? About a year ago I was at a terrific rivertowns symposium [...]
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