The leaves of 2011

The leaves of autumn are an extravagant gift nature gives to people who live with four seasons.

Two years ago I noticed three interesting leaves on the ground near my apartment and decided to scan them.

Last year,  the leaves were different but equally beautiful, so I scanned them, too, and wrote about them in a post titled "Arts & Crafts: Color by Nature." Now, two years in, I feel like an amateur scientist documenting the environment. What will the leaves look like this year? How do they correlate to the weather? 2011 has been exceptionally wet, with several record-setting rainfalls. Are the leaves somehow a record of this? Beats me, but they sure are beautiful.

The four leaves below came from adjoining branches of the same tree.

Below, more of this year's bounty.

"Winter is an etching, spring a water color, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all."

~ Stanley Horowitz

The prosody of gooseflesh

Today is the eve of All Hallow's Eve, and because it is a Sunday, it is the day of my neighborhood's annual Halloween parade for tots. Shepherded by their parents, dozens of tiny bumblebees, pumpkins, Thomas the Tank Engines, princesses, Jedi knights, Scooby-Dos and Madeleines will ramble down the street in a long, jaunty row, popping in and out of stores for treats.

But what is there for grown-ups who want a Halloween chill? I suggest this: William Butler Yeats himself reading The Lake Isle of Innisfree in a trembling, conjurer's voice.



The Lake Isle of Innisfree
by W. B. Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Ruminating about food and hunger

"There are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread."
~ Mohandas Ghandi

Today is Blog Action Day, when bloggers around the world take on a single topic. Since this is also World Food Day, the topic for 2011 is food.

While there are many ways to think about food, the one that matters most to millions of people right now is the lack of it. As this UNICEF video shows, millions of people in Africa — including some 2 million children — are facing starvation as I write these words.



The video talks about the almost miraculous food paste Plumpy'nut, which can save the life of a starving child as effectively as the right antibiotic can cure a life-threatening infection. You can learn more about Plumpy'nut here.

If Africa seems remote from your concerns, then look no farther than your own country and community. The World Hunger Education Service has a wealth of global hunger statistics on its website.

"Food insecure" is the term the U.S. government uses to describe households where one or more members must reduce their food intake or disrupt their eating patterns because they cannot afford sufficient food. That description applied to 14.5 percent of U.S. households in 2010. You can learn more about it in the publication Household Food Security in the United States in 2010.

In my hometown, the New York City Coalition Against Hunger is "the voice for the more than 1,200 nonprofit soup kitchens and food pantries in New York City and the more than 1.4 million low-income New Yorkers who live in homes that can't afford enough food." Is it ironic that, in the same city where the people who destroyed the economy still get six-figure bonuses, so many people are hungry? Actually, I think it's criminal.

One final word about hunger: "The F Word: Famine Is the Real Obscentity."





"If you can't feed a hundred people, then just feed one."
~ Mother Teresa