Raw, windy day, trying to keep warm. Back to March clothing - mock turtlenecks, old jeans and a fleece. An oversize pan of sauce with turkey, stock, tomato and broccoli rabe is bubbling on the stove. Soon I'll stir in penne, already partially cooked. D is grilling cornish hens which we'll have tomorrow with couscous salad (remarkably like my taboulleh salad - only with couscous).

I survived the bee or wasp sting, though there's an inflamed patch below my wrist that is tender to the touch and itchy. Good to know I'm not fatally allergic. I've been stung twice in my life to my knowledge, the first time earlier this year in bed one unseasonable winter night.

Took a walk around here this morning. I came up the wooded footpath that brings me to the back of the church cemetery. Service at the lovely ancient church (built 1847) had just ended. The front door was ajar so I ventured inside and took a peek. I stood in the vestibule, a low, arching construction of wood, reminding me of wood boat construction. I would have stepped into the church proper but a formidable looking someone was straightening up at the altar, noticed me and of course I didn't wish to engage, I'm not looking to join the Episcopalian church and why wasn't I at the service. I thought of Emily Dickinson who, according to Judith Farr, worshiped not so much Madonnas as mountains that she viewed as her Strong Madonnas. I feel a kinship to that, certainly. But I have always enjoyed a beautiful church, built with love and spirituality and care by good carpenters.

Time to ramble. (1) Which reminds me of how I get annoyed driving down Joslyn Boulevard - there's a church along there that displays corny, commercial-slogan-based advertisements - emblematic, to my mind, of what's so deeply wrong about our culture. I hesitate to repeat them here because the sentiments are so stupid, such as "God is like General Electric, He brings good things to life," or something about Spring being God's way of "sending the very best." The parking lot was packed as I drove to the conservation area to commune with the strong blue mountains.

(2) Also reminds me of a recent, sweet youtube of Bill Murray in his inimitable comedic, offhand, yet profound way reading poetry - including a poem by Emily Dickinson - to construction workers on break from their work building a Poets House somewhere in Manhattan. (I'm not familiar with the project - must look into it further. Where in Manhattan is it?)

(3) Also reminds me of a review in the Times this weekend of a book that seeks to wholly discredit - nay, demonize - Martin Heidegger (maybe it's the review, or the book, or both - an exercise in confusion - I did glance at the review.) Obviously I'm no Heidegger scholar, and am not at all conversant on his political philosophy, or indeed on his biography. I'm prepared to believe that he held views that I would find objectionable. But I have a hard time with attempts to wholly discredit and take down his entire oeuvre (call it the Wagnerization or Ezra Poundation of Heidegger - we've seen it before). I studied Being and Time a long time ago and as I have recollected it more recently, in mature adulthood, found it to be an extremely illuminating philosophical work of - coming of age, in a way, in adulthood. Of his observing and thinking very, very closely to see how we actually experience.

The anti-Heidegger book was authored by a Descartes scholar, I read. Heidegger, in Being and Time at least, as I understood it, rejects and upends Cartesianism. But everything in our global capitalist system relies on a strict separation between subject and object, a result being unrepentant corporate actors determined to remain unregulated at the very same time they wreak a destructive course [insert name of whichever corporation here].

From a corporate-defense standpoint (Goldman Sachs, BP, & many others, with skyscrapers loaded with law firms whose partners in support of the system weekend in bucolic precincts here), there are of course political uses to endeavor to take down Heidegger in his entirety.

What a mess this post is.

This much isn't a mess. Je t'aime.