“Observe the paramecium,” she said,
                And suddenly I’m dizzy with the line:
                The softness of the “s” and “v,” the sweet
                Shakespearian rhythm circles in my head.

I don’t recall the rest of the sonnet, composed for a college class more than half a century ago. A poem was due the next day, and I couldn’t think what to write. My roommate looked up from her biology text and read the three-word imperative aloud. Something about “Observe the paramecium” must have tickled her too. I settled in to write.

Most of us have dry spells. My professor said writing about failure to write (as I did in the sonnet) was a stale cliché, and clearly his comment stuck. Writers writing about writing continually discuss the tension between inspiration and discipline, schedule, or routine. Columnists, commentators, and cartoonists under contract to produce on a regular schedule can’t sit out a dry spell while they wait for inspiration to strike.

For the rest of us, turning to creativity only when we feel creative is an option. Some find this satisfying. Others find nothing gets created. There are always distractions. Perfectionism gets in the way. For me, the commitment to produce a blog post every week—every Monday since March 2016, without exception—pushes me over the speed bumps that might give me excuses not to start.

Most surprising, to me, are the times when the very act of writing generates new ideas. For twenty years or so, I handwrote three full “morning pages” daily as proposed in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. On uninspired mornings, I might start with a concern or question and repeat it in circles. About the middle of the second page, my mind would take hold and break out of the circle, racing toward a resolution by the end of page three. Routine and inspiration can work together if we don’t let the speed bumps deter us.

Image: Photo by the National Cancer Institute.

My literal, human mother never made my nose run or my eyes water for weeks on end. She never sent a swarm of wasps up from the grass to sting my arm and legs, as happened last month.

Don’t get me wrong. I love to walk a forest trail or weed the garden. I love to watch deer cross the lawn or wild turkeys peck at the grass. I know humankind evolved on this planet and depends on its bounty for survival. So much on Earth inspires our gratitude. “Mother Earth” is a fitting metaphor, if we remember it’s only a metaphor.

The problem comes when we take it literally and expect Earth to give us maternal love. The “appeal to nature fallacy” equates natural with safe. Sometimes it is; sometimes it isn’t. Picture spring wildflowers and clear mountain streams. Picture arsenic, cyanide, and deadly avalanches—all natural. Yet people will pay a premium for “organic” or “natural” over synthetic products that are chemically identical.

The fallacy grows dangerous when parents trust “natural immunity” to protect their children better than vaccine-induced immunity. Before measles vaccine came to market in 1963, measles infected some three to four million Americans a year. Though only a fraction were formally reported, the disease was far from harmless. Each year about 48,000 measles patients were hospitalized in the U.S., 1,000 developed encephalitis (swelling of the brain), and 400 to 500 died. Vaccine changed all that. By the end of the century, the U.S. was measles-free. Recently, alas, the appeal to nature fallacy has fed vaccine hesitancy and led to an epidemic. More than 3,500 measles cases have been reported in the U.S. this year so far.

Call Earth “Mother” if you wish, but don’t think “she” loves us or hates us. Earth doesn’t care. Nature doesn’t have intentions for us. It’s up to us to study the facts, consider the consequences, and make our choices with intention for ourselves and our human family.

On the first day of his second term, January 20, 2025, the U.S. President signed Executive Order 14172, “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness.” It designated North America’s highest mountain Mount McKinley (formerly Denali) and the sea between the U.S., Mexico, and Cuba the Gulf of America (formerly Gulf of Mexico). A further executive order (#14422), signed last month on August 27, was titled “Honoring the American History of the Great Lakes and Renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America.”

What makes a place name official, and who gets to change it? People refer to places long before officialdom gets involved. Anyone in my rural area could recognize Big Hill or Goose Pond. After the U.S. Civil War, westward exploration and settlement boomed. Inconsistent names and spellings proved a challenge for planning maps, mines, and railroads. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN) was created in 1890 to standardize usage throughout the federal government. Today the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with BGN, maintains a database called the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS).

Executive Orders 14172 and 14422 direct the Interior Secretary to implement the place name changes, remove the former names from GNIS, and have BGN work with federal agencies to update maps, contracts, and documents accordingly. The orders are binding on the U.S. federal government only. Cities, states, foreign nations, non-governmental agencies, and private companies can use whichever names they choose, and so can you and I.

Image: Ontario Beach Park, Rochester, New York. Photo by Andre Carrotflower, 2020.

Parked at the border on the way to my grandparents’ home in British Columbia, we children pranced back and forth between American and Canadian soil. No one stopped or questioned us. No one asked for our passports. Our parents told us this was the longest unfortified border in the world. My Canadian cousins quipped that Canada should annex the U.S. as an eleventh province.

A state park to the south and a provincial park to the north comprise the international Peace Arch Park. The arch stands on the exact national boundary. Its U.S. side bears the words:

     “Children of a Common Mother.”

On the Canadian side is inscribed:

     “Brethren Dwelling Together in Unity.”

Like many siblings, we've sometimes squabbled. We took opposite sides in the American Revolution and the War of 1812. In 1859 in the disputed San Juan Islands between Washington Territory and Vancouver Island, an American farmer shot a British-owned pig he found rooting in his garden. British authorities threatened to arrest him, American settlers asked the U.S. Army for protection, and both sides landed troops on the island. Fortunately, diplomacy ended the “Pig War” with no casualties except the pig.

With World War II, Canada and the U.S. became close allies in military production and defense. Their strategic cooperation continued with the creation of NATO in 1949. An early-warning radar system against Soviet missiles in the 1950s evolved into the bilateral North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). NORAD continues to monitor North American air space for post-Cold-War threats like terrorism and drugs.

The U.S./Canada economic policy pendulum swings between protectionism and free trade. After the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930 hiked the U.S.’s already high import duties, Canada retaliated. International trade collapsed. Later tariff reductions culminated in the bilateral Free Trade Agreement of 1988; its trilateral successor, NAFTA (1994), which added Mexico; and a NAFTA update, USMCA (2020). Whether new U.S. 50-percent tariffs on specific Canadian goods in August 2026 are legal under USMCA is above my paygrade. This trade war is another swing of the pendulum.

We’ve heard these issues will disappear if we eliminate the border by making the U.S. and Canada one country. Eleventh province, anyone?

Image: Peace Arch monument, Peace Arch Provincial Park, British Columbia.