Don's Blog Lenten Poem 2-28-26

It is a beautiful Saturday in Lent. Here is a poem for your enjoyment.

Blessing the Dust

All those days you felt like dust, like dirt, as if all you had to do was turn your face toward the wind and be scattered to the four corners

Or swept away by the smallest breath as insubstantial--

Did you not know what the Holy One can do with dust?

This is the day we freely say we are scorched.

This is the hour we are marked by what has made it the through the burning.

This is the moment we ask for the blessing that lives within the ancient ashes, that makes its home inside the soil of this sacred earth.

So let us be marked not for sorrow. And let us be marked not for shame. Let us be marked not for false humility or for thinking we are less than we are

But for claiming what God can do within the dust, within the dirt, within the stuff of which the world is made and the stars that blaze in our bones and the galaxies that spiral inside the smudge we bear.

Jan Richardson 

First Flower for the Year2-26-26

Jan noticed our first flowers for the year, two beautiful yellow crocuses. The crocus is in the iris family and displays  the general characteristics of the family Iridaceae, which include basal cauline (arising from the aerial stem) leaves that sheath the stem base, hermaphrodite flowers that are showy, the perianth petaloid with two whorls of three tepals each and septal nectaries. The flowers have three stamens and a gynoecium of three united carpels and an inferior ovary, three locules and axile placentation with fruit that is a loculicidal capsule. Other than that it is a relatively simple flower.

It closes up at night.

There was an apple tree in the yard —
this would have been
forty years ago — behind,
only meadows. Drifts
of crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor's yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from the tennis courts —
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory. 

— Louise Gluck

Don's Blog Will We Be all Right? 2-19-26

Here is my editorial from Missouri Medicine from February 1992. It is the last editorial that
I wrote as Editor. The problems have not changed. AI will help in some areas and in other areas
not so much. I suggest that the answer will be the same.
I'm on a new computer and have not figured out yet how to enlarge the print. Suggestions?

Don's Blog Advanced Directives: Beginning the Process 2-12-26

Here is my Missouri Medicine editorial from January of 1992. This is an area where I say we

have made some progress. Although like finances it is still an uncomfortable discussion in families

it is more readily discussed than 30 years ago.

Along these lines here is another Borges poem from Katy.

And yet, and yet… 

Denying temporal succession, 

denying the self, 

denying the astronomical universe, 

are apparent desperations and secret consolations. 

Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; 

it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. 

Time is the substance I am made of. 

Time is a river which sweeps me along, 

but I am the river; 

it is a tiger which destroys me, 

but I am the tiger; 

it is a fire which consumes me, 

but I am the fire. 

The world, unfortunately, is real; 

I, unfortunately, am Borges.

Jorge Louis Borges

Don's Blog The Quality of Care 2-5-25

Here is my Missouri Medicine editorial from December 1991, 35 years ago. Looking at the quality of care is 

even more important now with the impending takeover of medical care by AI robots. It cannot be stopped.