Welcome to Litsy!

Katie Holten is an artist who collected poetry, recipes, excerpts from essays, thoughts related to trees. Some are philosophical, some scientific. Authors range from Ross Gay to Ada Limon, Robert MacFarlane, Richard Powers, Plato or Radiohead. I enjoyed reading bits and pieces but overall, I wonder: what is this? I don‘t understand what “a rewilding of literature and landscape” means and what the point of this book is. Not for me.

#Naturalitsy
@Alldebooks @TheBookHippie @Chrissyreadit

Absolutely adoring this one! My husband's even reading it along with me! 🌳💚🌳

“If you help a female across the road, you must handle her with great gentleness. A turtle who feels threatened will often release urine to startle or deter predators, but a nesting mother who has to do this on the way to the nest has to detour for another drink of water.”

I don‘t remember what this had to do with Jesus or the Bible, but when I was a kid my dad, who is a minister, taught kids how to help a turtle cross without getting peed on.

I have been loving reading A Tree a Day with #naturalitsy. I took my book with me on our hike today to photograph with our state tree, the Palo Verde. This is not her prettiest time of year (check back in March or April for yellow flowers) but you can still see what makes her unique, a green trunk and green branches.

🌳 Photo taken at South Mountain Park, Arizona

I always have a deep, deep feeling for the turtles. If I could take their pain for them I would. Caring deeply comes at a cost. The word “compassion,” contains within itself its emotion price. The prefix “com” means “with.” The Latin root “pate” means “suffering.” To feel compassion, therefore, is to enter into another‘s suffering. It is the knowledge that there can never be any peace and joy for me, unless there is peace and joy for you.

Turtles are a red-hot commodity in the worthless world of the illegal wildlife trade. Turtle trafficking is networked, clandestine, and lucrative. A single three-striped Chinese box turtle, whose powdered plastron is rumoured incorrectly to cure cancer can fetch $25,000…Sea turtles, box turtles, spotted turtles, snapping turtles—no turtle is safe. Poachers mine scientific data and scour books and newspapers for clues on where to find them.

This isn't book related, but I have to share my newest obsession. I got a birdfeeder with a camera for Christmas. So far, it has "caught" 14 different species. Here are a few of my favorite pictures so far.

Most of us think of turtles as being silent but no, some of them are quite talkative. Various species croak, squeak, belt, whine, and whistle. For the velociraptors park in “Jurassic Park,” filmmakers used the sound of turtles having sex. Some species of Australian river turtle nestlings communicate vocally with each other and with their mothers while still inside the egg.

#FirstLineFridays #FLF @ShyBookOwl
Amid all the other homes on the suburban street—white, grey, beige, pale blue, light yellow—this two-story saltbox stands out.
(My first #AuldLangSpine read from @Chelsea.Poole !)

I‘ve had this forever and finally gave it some the time it deserved. It is lovely, unique and quietly powerful. The cadence of the prose is hypnotic and the way she crafts a sentence! I moved between my print copy and on #audio and can see why this won the Pulitzer prize, well deserving of all the praise. #Roll100 @PuddleJumper