The Sweet Potato

The sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) is a member of the bindweed or morning glory family, the Convolvulaceae, and only distantly related to the white potato.  It has long been revered for its medicinal properties, both in the ancient Americas where it was first domesticated and now worldwide.  It is rich in vitamins and minerals as as well as antioxidants called carotenoids.  As part of a healthy diet, it may reduce the risk of some cancers and help regulate blood sugar in type 2 diabetes.  Its high beta carotene content (which the body converts to vitamin A) may help to prevent ulcers and even aid in healing them, though overconsumption can cause mild digestive problems in some people because it contains the polyol mannitol.  Cooked or raw sweet potatoes can also be used externally as a poultice to reduce inflammation related to small wounds or insect stings.

     If you’ve only eaten canned sweet potatoes, you’ll find that dishes made from fresh sweet potatoes are a thousand times better!

A Philosopher's Viewpoint

The best writer is one who writes from a wide background of experience.  Plotinus didn't start until he was 50.

                                                        --Robert J. Kreyche, Love is a Therapy

Urban Wildlife (Besides the Feral Cats)

Arroyo with a permanent water source

 Although we live in the inner city, just a few blocks from downtown El Paso, there are several wild corridors that connect our neighborhood with the Franklin Mountains.  These mountains run like a spine through our city.  The South Franklins adjacent to us are rather barren, but the North Franklins, though still technically desert, really green up after the monsoon rains.  These wild corridors mean that a huge variety of wildlife can be found in the undeveloped portions of our neighborhood connected to these corridors.   Along with the resident foxes, coyotes, ground and grey squirrels, packrats, quail, roadrunners, turkey vultures, kestrels and hawks, the recent drought has increased the number of transitory wildlife visitors, which include mule deer, bobcats, ringtails, and (maybe) a puma or two as well (one was controversially shot by police in our neighborhood a few years ago).  There are sources of water and lots of greenery which attract them, especially a tiny stream created by runoff from a storage reservoir that is surrounded by a lush arroyo on undeveloped, city-owned land.  It’s quite wonderful to see groups of large, healthy deer casually wandering through the little strip of wild desert that divides our neighborhood from the more upscale Kern Place district.  Fortunately, this little reserve is pretty secluded and undiscovered—although it’s just blocks from our house and others houses and apartments—and the people who use it to walk their dogs (the only people I’ve ever seen up there besides water company employees and kids on their way to the nearby baseball and softball fields) seem mostly considerate and supportive of the visiting and resident wildlife, both large and small.

My wife, Libby, took this picture of a doe with two fawns on her phone

Another George MacDonald Quote

Then first I knew the delight of being lowly; of saying to myself, “I am what I am, nothing more.” “I have failed,” I said, “I have lost myself—would it had been my shadow.” I looked round: the shadow was nowhere to be seen. Ere long, I learned that it was not myself, but only my shadow, that I had lost. I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it. Indeed, my ideal soon became my life; whereas, formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal. Now, however, I took, at first, what perhaps was a mistaken pleasure, in despising and degrading myself. Another self seemed to arise, like a white spirit from a dead man, from the dumb and trampled self of the past. Doubtless, this self must again die and be buried, and again, from its tomb, spring a winged child; but of this my history as yet bears not the record.

     Self will come to life even in the slaying of self; but there is ever something deeper and stronger than it, which will emerge at last from the unknown abysses of the soul: will it be as a solemn gloom, burning with eyes? or a clear morning after the rain? or a smiling child, that finds itself nowhere, and everywhere?

                                                                                             —George MacDonald, Phantastes

Solitary Bees

Solitary bees are making their nests in the stump of an orange tree utilizing what appear to be abandoned beetle borings.

These tiny pollinators are always hard at work gathering food for their offspring and, when the time comes, collecting material that they use to seal the entrances to their nests. 

I suspect that these bees are Megachile (Subgenus Chelostomoides) bees because they look like ordinary leafcutter bees but don’t seem to be cutting or carrying leaf fragments to their nests, and they seal the openings of their nest cavities with resin and occasionally other organic material (leaf paste, grass blades, wood) and (possibly) sand and tiny pebbles.

Light Escapes the Street

I have a story—another novel excerpt—in the latest issue of El Portal Literary Journal, a publication produced graduate students and faculty at Eastern New Mexico University.  El Portal includes writing and art from Eastern New Mexico students as well as other writers far and near.  The quality of the writing in El Portal is consistently excellent, and that includes the student writers.  I am honored to be published with them.  I have a recollection of El Portal being one of the mainstays of the Southwest literary scene back in the days of my youth, alongside journals like Arizona Quarterly and (the now defunct) New Mexico Quarterly—a place that published many important writers with southwestern roots along with others who taught and lived in the Southwest.  It certainly has a long history and is still in the hands of exceedingly discerning and capable editors.

Pentecostés 2021

Siempre será Pentecostés en la Iglesia, pero mientras la Iglesia haga su rostro transparente a la belleza del Espíritu Santo. Cuando la Iglesia deja de apoyar su fuerzaen esa virtud de lo alto que Cristo le prometió y que le dio en este día, y la Iglesia quisiera apoyarse más bienen las fuerzas frágiles del poder o de la riquezade esta tierra, entonces la Iglesia deja de ser noticia. La Iglesia será bella, perennemente joven, atrayente en todos los siglos, mientras sea fiel al Espíritu que la inunday lo refleje a través de las comunidades, a través de sus pastores, a través de su misma vida.

                                                                               --San Oscar Romero, 14 de mayo, 1978