I took a bath last night, immersed in hot water and guilt, listening to Louis Armstrong and wishing the world was a kinder place. That there were fewer strongmen running the (shit)show. That fewer schoolchildren were being bombed. That I didn’t feel as powerless as I do. Louis’ voice filled the steamy room. “The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky….” How, I wondered, can we allow space for moments of beauty and calm when there is so much horror in the world?

When did “A Wonderful World” come to be? When can an artist feel like they have the right to lavish in the wonder, when every age brings its traumas? I looked it up this morning. Apparently, Bob Thiele, (who wrote songs under the pseudonym George Douglas), co-wrote the song with George Weiss in the tumultuous mid-1960s. Thiele wrote about his inspiration: “[I]n the mid-1960s during the deepening national traumas of the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, racial strife, and turmoil everywhere, my co-writer George David Weiss and I had an idea to write a ‘different’ song specifically for Louis Armstrong that would be called ‘What a Wonderful World.’”

You nurture the light when it’s darkest. You aim to be “different” than the gestalt of all that is around you. It’s a way to keep something alive.

This is just about right, and a way in to share with you news of a new album, Spring Green by Mark Erelli, that makes room for recognizing the goodness of the world and people without shying away from the realities of the times in which we live. I am both friend and fan of the this talented singer-songwriter. Last summer, he invited me to write the introduction to the liner notes of his fourteenth solo album, Spring Green. Oh, yes. Yes and yes. I had a chance last summer to listen to it on repeat. Now you have a chance, too. It’s out today, and you can find it on Bandcamp.

Get the whole album so you revel in his music, his songwriting. You can also read all of what I said, but here are some snippets, which Mark put on these lovely graphics that brighten this drizzly, still snowy Cape Cod day…

I hope you’ll buy this album (and anything from his backlist, which is all good), and see if his tour is coming to somewhere near you. His shows will sustain you, and his music does, too. I’ll leave you with a line from Spring Green:

Journalists & writer friends, take note…

• A few years back, my husband, Steve Prothero, and I ran the Religion & Environment Story Project (on hiatus now), and had the great pleasure of spending time with RESP fellow Nina St. Pierre. She wrote an incredible memoir Love is a Burning Thing that deftly explores growing up with a mother both mystical and mad in a world where neither is accepted. Now, you have a chance to study writing with her as she teaches On Writing the Mystical, this spring, in Brooklyn. Sign up now!

And from the Department of Good News…

• A Better World Is Possible: Global Youth Confront the Climate Crisis is now out in the wild. Thanks to Sturgis Library in Barnstable, MA and Titcomb’s Bookshop for hosting the kickoff event. (Danica had her’s at Carmichael’s in Louisville.) And thanks to all who came out in the cold rain to share the celebration. You can learn more and get your copy here.
• Orion magazine featured an excerpt from A Better World, one of the interludes that are sprinkled throughout the story of the fourth youth climate activists that frame the book and offer a chance to learn more about the impacts of the climate crisis.
• Danica and I had a lovely conversation with Itto and Mekiya Outini about creativity and collaboration on the DateKeepers podcast. Have a listen here. More podcasts are coming soon.
• More book tour events here. Catch Danica or me, or—on April 14 in Brooklyn— both of us along with two of the youth featured in the book!

  

I’m reading…

• Birds aren’t doing well, populations declining faster and faster, especially in agricultural areas. (It’s part of why I try to eat organic, not just for my body but other bodies, too.) So these lines from The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, which I am reading very slowly, leapt out: “Magnificent vistas opened onto regions toward which they were slowly climbing, a word of ineffable, phantasmagoric Alpine peaks, soon lost again to awestruck eyes as the tracks took another curve. Hans Castrop thought about how he had left the hardwood forests far below him, and songbirds, too, he presumed; and the idea that such things could cease, the sense of a world made poorer without them, brought on a slight attack of dizziness and nausea, and he covered his eyes with his hand for a second or two. This passed.”
• I’ve been on Cape Cod for fifteen years now, but am still learning so much about its deep history. Nothing More of This Land by Joseph Lee is taking me into the lives of the Wampanoag of Martha’s Vineyard and indigenous people far beyond this corner of the world.
• If you haven’t picked up Neil Shea’s wonderful book Frostlines (you should), here’s a taste in his National Geographic piece “The Vikings who vanished.”

Coda…

The turkeys are brightening up with their breeding colors. They’re also getting closer…