Notes From A Bear's Journey

    The world of wonder almost parallels the world of wander.  By exploring the world around and within us, we begin to see more and more.   The world will never starve for want of wonders, wrote G.K. Chesterton,  but only for want of wonder.  That quote stood out for the prolific author of both adult and children's books (with 20 million copies sold worldwide), Katherine Rundell.  Her recent book, Vanishing Treasures begins with this: A common swift, in its lifetime, flies about 1.2 million miles; enough to fly to the moon and back twice over, and then once more to the moon.  For at least ten months of every year, it never ceases flying; sky-washed, sleeping on the wing, or has no need to land (the swift, like the porpoise, can shut off half of its brain to sleep while the other half functions normally and stays alert; the swift also eats only what bugs are in the air and needs to find 100,000 such bugs each day  when breeding). ...

     Let's face it, there are too many of us humans.  Drive on most any freeway, at any hour, and wonder where the heck everyone is going?  Multiply that feeling if you're at an airport.  Or drive past any hospital parking lot and wonder how the heck are so many people ill or injured?  Big concerts, packed stadiums, large protests, all of them leave you scratching your head.  How do you feed and satiate all those people, much less get rid of their trash and poop?  We number in the billions, as in soon to be nearly 10 billion within 25 years, according to projections from a  United Nations report .  Put another way, if you could put away $100 per day, it would take you nearly 274,000 years to reach $10 billion.  Translate that to feeding 100 people a day and, well, you can see the enormous task ahead.      So it bears repeating of that recent poll from ReliefWeb  that showed that the continuing "p...

Icelandic lava flow: Mike Mazul II/NWF      Among the many bands of the 60s and 70s there emerged the mellow sounds of The Loving Spoonful asking: Do you believe in magic in a young girl's heart?  How the music can free her whenever it starts.  That was me, the stranger, the newly accepted old man who now had to look up trending terms such as "67" and who took much longer to figure out the nuances of a new car (so discovered when we rented one).  But even as I aged, how could I resist magic, or at least the allure of what appeared to be magic.   The sleight of hand illusions of Richard Jones or Justin Willman still brought me back to that wonder in children's eyes, that "how did they do that" amazement that left you wondering if magic could really exist.  The study of magic is not a science, it is not an art, and it is not a religion.  Magic is a craft ,  said one professor featured in the wildly creative Magician...