"The world is too much with us..."

Nature doesn't like "neat."  Think about beaches strewn with marine debris, forests full of fallen leaves and branches, dead trees, moldering plants and soil swarming with worms and insects.

A stroll down the pesticide/insecticide aisle at Home Depot shows the expense and trouble humans go to fighting battles they can't win.

One of the sad things (and there are many) about seeing our neighborhood transformed into a big city are the number of modest homes being demolished to build glass and steel apartment boxes and monster houses. Click HERE for a Seattle Times article.

I have nothing against modern architecture, but these places don't feel like real homes.  For one thing, there's no "wasted" yard to play in-- or trees, grass and shrubs.  For that matter, there's no outdoor work for the people who must work somewhere else like dogs to afford these expensive piles.

This is the first fall I haven't been particularly fussy about garden clean-up. For starters, I mulched with nice free leaves instead of buying compost made from our ghastly municipal garbage. I used to pull up the annuals and whack the perennials off in October, but why?  The birds love branches to perch on, and seed heads to pick over. The reward for this laziness is a garden teeming with wildlife in December.  A couple of messy sunflower feeders and a birdbath doesn't hurt either.

There's more incomprehensible gun violence news.  Our poor country, what have we done?  They did a poll this morning on the local TV station, and 60% of people said they preferred to "arm themselves" as the best response to mass shootings.
Really? In Seattle? 

I woke up today thinking of these lines from Wordsworth's famous sonnet:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune,
It moves us not...