A Walker in the Suburbs

Yesterday I found myself with a windfall, a three-hour window without meetings or interviews.

I also found myself in Patan Durbar Square. Durbar squares (I’ve just learned) are plazas opposite old royal palaces. The Patan one is, according to the guidebook “a marvel of Newari architecture.”The Newaris are the original inhabitants of the Kathmandu Valley.

The square was filled with stupas and temples … and rubble. The 2015 earthquake is still very much in evidence here, with piles of gravel, half restored buildings and blue tarps everywhere. The town is also getting a new water supply, which means even more digging and dust.

None of this stops anyone, though, least of all the ubiquitous and death-defying motorcycle taxis, which whizz around corners with complete abandon.

Luckily, I found a car taxi to take me home. All I  had to do was share it with the driver’s brothers and a 100-pound bag of concrete.

It was the perfect way to wind down a wander.

Yesterday we learned about some agricultural innovations. There’s the nutritious spirulina (aka algae), which is being grown on a Thai rooftop, collected, semi-dried and added to pastas, puddings and more. It tastes like whatever it’s in, but it packs an impressive amount of protein into a tiny package. Maybe it will help feed the world’s burgeoning population in 2050. Or at least that’s the hope of its producer.

Spirulina is much more appetizing than another idea we heard about today: black soldier flies. Though no one was proposing that we start eating them — yet —the critters are being dried and used for fish food. So if you eat the fish … well, you know.

One more drying story is that of Rhino beads, ceramic beads that absorb moisture, keep seeds fresh and reduce spoilage, where farmers lose an impressive percentage of their crops.

As I sat there taking notes, my mind was full to bursting with the possibilities of it all. After the presentations and interviews, I walked down the street to a nearby park, where runners were making the circuit. From mental energy to physical energy.

It was an energetic whirlwind of a day. I want to capture and store it — not unlike seeds or spirulina —and save it for another day.

National Geographic is one of those magazines that comes into the house, lands on the coffee table and stays there. When the pile of glossy magazines is tall enough, I take it to the basement. Every so often, I read one of them. This time, it’s “Why Birds Matter” from the January issue. I unearthed it this morning after hearing its author, the novelist Jonathan Franzen, talking about it on the radio yesterday.

Turns out, National Geographic and the Audubon Society have proclaimed 2018 the “Year of the Bird.” It’s the centennial of the 1918 Migratory Bird Act, the nation’s oldest conservation law, and in its honor the magazine has given us a rapturous piece about raptors, hornbills, parrots, owls, doves, crows, you name it.

“When someone asks me why birds are so important to me, all I can do is sigh and shake my head, as if I’ve been asked to explain whey I love my brothers,” Franzen writes. Birds are diverse as the world is diverse, they are also a link to our evolutionary past. They are smart and beautiful and playful (you can apparently watch a Youtube video of crows sledding). They sing, nest and raise their young and, most of all, they fly.

“The radical otherness of birds is integral to their beauty and their value,” Franzen writes. “They are always among us but never of us.”

In the words of Henry Beston, who I’ve quoted several times in this blog: “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of time and life.”