Postcards Dropped in Flight In Praise of Avian Companions

“Charming, enigmatic, often humorous, these half-poetic, half-philosophic vignettes condense a lifetime to its essential images. They sent me searching for my own.” –Steve Webb, Seattle writer and Emerson scholar, author of “A Notebook on The Inward Morning” TO CATCH THOUGHT UPON THE WING CATCH POSTCARDS DROPPED IN FLIGHT. AND ATTEND THE FEATHERED MESSENGERS. EVEN PLATO KNEW THE SOUL AS RAMPANT AVIARY. HE IMAGINES HE’LL FLOAT UPWARD AT HIS DEATH LIKE A WILD SWAN ELUDING ALL WHO WISH TO CORNER HIM IN ANY CAGE OF PROOF OR FINISHED PORTRAIT. ONLY THOSE WHO RISE TO SOAR WITHIN HIS ELEMENT ENJOY HIS COMPANY. “Those who love water, evening flyers, and early fog will love these poetic nests meant to lure the roaming philosophic mind.” –Will Johnson, scholar of Indigenous Religious & Buddhism, Cal State San Diego, author of “Riding the Ox Home” Poet, Writer, Musician and Professor. Ed Mooney tilts his ear to catch these avian intimations intercepted in Boston Venice, Berkeley or other sites of utter surprise. He writes on Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Cavell, and the great Montana thinker, Henry Bugbee. He’s rowed the San Francisco Bay and now teaches religion and philosophy at Syracuse University. A skim of those meditations appeared in Terra Nova, the journal of deep ecology, and were acknowledged in The Best American Essays, 1998.