We've come a long way ~

From a "shelf" in a marketplace on Cayuga Street, we are now several rooms on the main thoroughfare.

Thank you to our bookshop family and friends who have supported us, made this quiet corner a place to be.

We look forward to new adventures and more conversation.  "The coffee pot's always on..."  Thursday, January 17, 1:00 p.m. will be our first Round Table Reading in the new year.  There are more topics than hours!  Everyone welcome.  Admission:  A Smile.

~ John & Lorna

Anger, frustration, violence dominate our modern news media ~

Gavin De Becker writes in his book, Gift of Fear*:

"If we studied any other creature in nature and found the record of intraspecies violence that human beings have, we would be repulsed by it.  We'd view it as a great perversion of natural law ~ but we wouldn't deny it."

"As we stand on the tracks, we can only avoid the oncoming train if we are willing to see it and willing to predict that it won't stop.  But instead of improving the technologies of prediction, America improves the technologies of conflict:  guns, prisons, SWAT teams, karate classes, pepper spray, stun guns, Tasers, Mace.  And now more than ever, we need the most accurate predictions.  Just think about how we live:  We are searched for weapons before boarding a plane, visiting city hall, seeing a television show taping, or attending a speech by the president.  Our government buildings are surrounded by barricades, and we wrestle through so-called tamper-proof packaging to get a couple aspirin.  All of this was triggered by the deeds of fewer than ten dangerous men who got our attention by frightening us.  What other quorum in American history, save those who wrote our constitution, could claim as much impact on our day-to-day lives?  Since fear is so central to our experience, understanding when it is a gift ~ and when it is a curse ~ is well worth the effort."

~ *Gift of Fear - Survival Signals That Protect us From Violence, Little, Brown & Co., Canada, Ltd., 1997. De Becker is a three-time presidential appointee changing the way the U.S. gov't. evaluates threats.

(Apologies - Pictures currently unavailable through Blogspot.  Hopefully to be resolved.)

"Two Bald Eaglets home at Taquanyah" ~ Dunnville Chronicle, June 25, 1986

Two, six-week-old bald eagles were carefully released from crates at the top of a thirty-foot high tower.  "In two months they will be flying freely, huge and magnificent, above the marsh."

In the article, a photo of the late Bruce Duncan, interpreter at Taquanyah Nature Centre, proudly displaying the crates being removed from a Ministry of Natural Resources vehicle and hoisting them to the top of five telephone poles where the man-made eagles' nest would serve as the eagles new home.
There was a great effort in the mid-eighties to re-introduce the bald eagle, then an endangered species, to southern Ontario.  This was a combined effort by The Grand River Conservation Authority, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, World Wildlife Fund, Hamilton Naturalists' Club and Ontario Hydro.



Simcoe Reformer



That was Haldimand in 1986.  Sadly, in 2013 we ruthlessly destroy an eagles' nest built by these magnificent birds themselves.

Environmentalist David Suzuki encouraged and endorsed the Ontario Green Energy Act, 2009.  He stated in a recently televised interview that he believes that the intended job creations are happening.

Read Dirty Business, The Reality of Ontario's Rush to Wind Power, available at The Neat Little Bookshop. $12.99.

One wonders what Suzuki would say about the eagle nest that was destroyed under police surveillance on Sunday to make way for wind turbines in the Fisherville, Haldimand County, area.



(Apologies:  Only images previously posted are currently available through Blogspot.  We are working to remedy the problem.)

Thought for Today ~
by Emily Dickinson

Nature is what we see,
The Hill, the Afternoon ~
Squirrel, Eclipse, the Bumblebee,
Nay ~ Nature is Heaven.

Nature is what we hear,
The Bobolink, the Sea ~
Thunder, the Cricket ~
Nay, ~ Nature is Harmony.

Nature is what we know
But have no art to say,
So impotent our wisdom is
To Her simplicity.

~ Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems (American poet, d. May 15, 1886, age of 56.) Gramercy Books, Random House, 1993.

"Nature is Harmony"

(Photos from files, lbw ~ Hamilton Escarpment. Click on photo for larger image.)

Six Honest Servingmen
by Rudyard Kipling*

I keep six honest servingmen;
(They taught me all I knew)
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who
I send them over land and sea,
I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me,
I give them all a rest,
I let them rest from nine till five,
For I am busy then,
As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,
For they are hungry men:
But different folk have different views:
I know a person small ~
She keeps ten million servingmen,
Who get no rest at all
She sends 'em abroad on her own affairs,
From the second she opens her eyes ~
One million Hows, two million Wheres
And seven million Whys!

~ The World Treasury of Children's Literature III, Little Brown, 1985.
* Rudyard Kipling (Dec. 30 - Jan. 18, 1936) English author, poet.