Hope is the Thing with Feathers: A Meditation about Empathy on a Dying World, by Kenn Orphan

Image by Tanya Hart via Flickr

by Kenn Orphan
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Halifax, Nova Scotia
March 29, 2023

Recently, I’ve been listening to The Lost Birds: An Extinction Elegy, by American composer Christopher Tin. [Video below] It is an arrangement based on the poems of Emily Dickinson, Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Christina Rossetti. It is sung beautifully by Voces8 with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Tin composed this marvelous arrangement as a memorial to various bird species that have been driven to extinction by habit loss, pollution and encroachment. The pieces soar and dive in a powerful rollercoaster of emotion, especially when one has been a student of extinction for as long as I have.

The Final Dance: A Conversation with Cheryl Deines on Death and Dying, the Pandemic, and Living Our Best Lives, by Kenn Orphan

Image by Marcela via Flickr

by Kenn Orphan
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Halifax, Nova Scotia
February 17, 2021

KO: I wanted to begin by disclosing that I had the great honour of working with Cheryl in hospice care as medical social workers and grief counselors for several years. Her compassion, intuitive empathy and healing manner taught me invaluable lessons on how to approach death and grief.

Bearing Witness at Aeon’s End: The Wound Becomes the Womb by Phil Rockstroh and Kenn Orphan

Image by RANT 73 – Visual Storyteller via Flickr

by Phil Rockstroh and Kenn Orphan
Writers, Dandelion Salad
September 13, 2019

PR: Kenn, this question haunts me: Is it still possible, amid constant inundation by the mass and social media simulacrum, for literature, poetry or a music to rouse the heart and foment rebellion against one’s complicity in what amounts to a bondage of sensibility? Naturally, we are given to outrage but, for the most part, it is directed, if we are honest, at our own sense of powerlessness against the mind-stupefying roil of events.

Fires in Arctic Ice, Exposed on Mountains of the Heart by Phil Rockstroh and Kenn Orphan

Image by John Englart via Flickr

by Phil Rockstroh and Kenn Orphan
Writer, Dandelion Salad
August 4, 2019

PR: Recently, the temperature in Paris rose to 108.7 F (42.6 C) surpassing the previous record by 4 F (2.2 C) set on July 28, 1947 of 104.7 F (40.4 C).

Black Oak Down, by Shepherd Bliss

Image by Scott Hess via Flickr

by Shepherd Bliss
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Santa Rosa, California
June 26, 2014

A loud, crashing sound startles my young farm-hand Emily Danler awake in the dark of the night. She camps out in order to start picking berries at sun-up. My dog, inside, barks. After a physically-demanding day farming, I sleep through it all.

Looking down the boysenberry field to the bottom of Kokopelli Farm the next morning, tears come to my eyes. The tall, old black oak had split right down the middle of its deep, wide trunk. I would never again see its crimson leaves announcing the beginning of Spring.

Clif Grubbs’ Memorial Service by Daniel N. White

by Daniel N. White
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
April 6, 2010

Clif Grubbs was an economics professor of long standing at the University of Texas at Austin, and I was fortunate enough to take a class from him many years ago. Clif was a truly extraordinary person and an outstanding instructor, one of the very few that made a real impression on me and one of the two or three instructors I ever had who I still remembered fondly years after. One day in 1996 I saw an article in the paper about his death, and I called out to UT and got the details about the memorial service, held about a month later out on the UT campus. I attended the service, and it still lingers in my memory, and it and my reaction to it tells a lot about us as a society and myself as a person. Don’t know how much good it says about either.

Letter of Condolence I Never Wrote, and Should Have by Daniel N. White

by Daniel N. White
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
April 3, 2010

Clif Grubbs was an economics professor of mine out at UT in my days there, more than two decades ago now. I took an intermediate economics course from him, don’t remember if it was micro or macro, those details are now lost to memory. What isn’t lost to my memory is what an outstanding teacher Clif was, how he kept the class somewhere between mesmerized and spellbound the entire hour, lecturing on economics, and how skilfully he brought the fairly dry and technical material to animated and useful life with his lectures. I wasn’t his only fan–Bill Moyers, who was a student of his in the late 50’s, did one of his Bill Moyers Reports shows on Clif in the early ’80’s on him entitled “The Volcanic Professor”, and in it treated Clif with a mixture of admiration and affection, attitudes that most all his students had towards him.