Alberta’s Environmental Appeals Board was set to review the application to infill some wetlands, alter others

  Would that I could find Burton's detachment, although he seems to have a very comprehensive list of what has happened for someone who is so zen.

"I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villanies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of Princes, new discoveries, expeditions; now comical then tragical matters. To-day we hear of new Lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another breaketh: he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps &c. Thus I daily hear, and such like, both private and publick news. Amdist the gallantry and misery of the world: jollity, pride, perplexities and cares, simplicity and villany; subtlety, knavery, candour and integrity, mutually mixed and offering themselves, I rub on in a strictly private life."

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy 

Contentious $500M motor sports racing park near southern Alberta hamlet seeks environmental approval

https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/contentious-500m-motor-sports-racing-park-near-southern-alberta-hamlet-seeks-environmental-approval-1.5320641

"Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on."


from IN THE SECULAR NIGHT
Margaret Atwood

Somewhere in the Badlands Dec. 2019

 "And from the study of things underfoot, and from reading and thinking, came a kind of exploration, myself and the land. In time the two became one in my mind."

John Haines

Dorothy Badlands

"out there, inaccessible
to grammar's language the 
stones curve vastnesses,
cold or candescent
in the perceived 
processional of space."

Stone's Secret
Margaret Avison

“At dreaming - at what dreaming is an aspect of. They’ve done it for a long time. for always, I guess. They are of the dream time. I don’t understand it. I can’t say it in words. Everything dreams. The play of forms, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams and the earth changes. “ (143)

from The Lathe of Heaven

by Ursula K. LeGuin 

“Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, 

that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons.” 

from My Antonia

 by Willa Cather

My latest photos are from a trip to visit our friends that live in Southern 

Alberta. They live in the true prairie in an area fringed by the nearby 

Drumheller Badlands. And while I love the Aspen Parkland where we 

have built our cabin among the sloughs and the poplars. I will always

 love watching the movement of the clouds, the wind, the shadows,  

the seasons and the migrations that move across the endless sky and 

the vast fields of the open prairie. These photo stem from 

a trip to explore a road cut on the edge of the Badlands.

I am bound to the earth by a web of stories,

just as I am bound to the creation by the very substance and

rhythms of my flesh. By keeping the stories fresh, I keep the places

themselves alive in my imagination. Living in me, borne in mind, these

places make up the landscape on which I stand with familiiarity and 

pleasure, the landscape over which I walk even when my feet are still."

 from Telling the Holy

    by Scott Russell Saunders

 

 

 

"We could go there and live, have a place,
a shoulder of earth, watch days
find their way onward in their serious march
where nothing happens but each one is gone.
Some people build cities and live there;
they hurry and shout. We lie on the earth;
to keep from falling into the stars we reach
as wide as we can and hold onto the grass."

from East of Broken Top

William Stafford

We have been on a short trip to the cabin to build a dog run

so Shaun and Whateley can join us on our next trip. Our 

journey took us thru a short stretch of the Badlands along

the Red Deer River.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badland

The Badlands are a type of dry terrain where softer sedimentary rocks and

 clay-rich soils have been extensively eroded by wind and water. ( from link above )

The Badlands around the Drumheller area are especially well known for the extensive

 fossil beds that have been found there and is home to the Royal Tyrrell Museum.

http://www.tyrrellmuseum.com/

Then we stopped in the HandHills to visit our friends Laraine and Tim.

A visit as always characterized  by great hospitality, beautiful vistas, 

happy white dogs Andi below and Yogi a pair of Akhash-Maremana 
crosses,

and of course Laraine's beautiful horses.

One of my favorite flowers the Prairie Crocus were in evidence.

Here in a bad photo Yogi walks thru a bed of them on top

of a nearby esker.

They had so much snow this winter Tim had to extend

the fences to keep the horses from walking over them on the

drifts.

The snowdrifts also allowed the Snowshoe Hares and the 

Mountain or Nuttall's Cottontails to climb over the fencing

and get at the fruit trees.

Here in a low area Tim indicates the damage 

they were able to do to the poplars, yes the 

snow got very deep.

The White Crowned Sparrows were in evidence 

and the prairie landscape was  stunning. 

 

 

"Now, in the middle of a limpid evening,

The moon speaks clearly to the hill.

The wheatfields make their simple music,

Praise the quiet sky.

And down the road, the way the stars come home,"

 

from Evening

Thomas Merton