SHANKAR ~

It's finally raining! Overnight!

I awoke and read a poem by Queneau about the rain.

A fine and silly and fully Parisian poem for a later BH.

We were climbing the mountains over the weekend

and noticed the exhaust and thirst of the trees, the earth.

Leaves that should have rotted into good soil compost last spring

with a rain that never came, are left, dry and out of place.

Trees are losing their leaves now, thirsty and spent.

Leaves shriveled falling to the ground, not quite August.

All wanting this rain.

I watch rain drip well off the steel roof I just put down.

Time to turn over side A to side B.

Shankar: double violin

Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman, mridangam

Zakir Hussain, tabla

V. Lakshminarayana, conductor

Compositions by Shankar

Recorded November 1980

This album is dedicated to John McLaughlin

STORIES FROM THE LEOPOLD SHACK ~

"In 1934, conservationist Aldo Leopold and his wife

Estella bought a barn — the remnant of a — farm and

surrounding lands in south-central Wisconsin. The entire

Leopold clan — five children in all — worked together

to put into practice Aldo's "land ethic", which involved

ecological restoration and sustainability. In the process,

they built more than a pleasant weekend getaway; they

established a new way of relating to nature. In 1948,

A Sand County Almanac was published, and it has

become a beloved and foundational text of the

conservation movement."

Leopold's youngest daughter's own memoir

can now be placed comfortably beside her father's

classic.