Okay, now for a special treat.

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wiaa/a...&id=924451

Andrew York playing 'Letting Go' live on a radio station. This song, released at the same time as the Hauser Session recordings on Segovia's guitar, is probably my favorite piece of his, and certainly his most emotive. He calls it "a celebration of the common but glorious I-IV-V progression', but it is so much more than that. And to top it off, he begins singing near the end, and it blends so perfectly with the guitar, that you don't even realize it at first. I hope some day to be able to play with the emotion this man does.

Goodbye, Baji

I am reminded of the destruction we humans inflict on this planet by the loss of the Baji, the chinese river dolphin. A lineage that migrated from the oceans into the Yangtze river system 20 million years ago, 20 million years of biological development. Gone, lost to development of another kind.

To be truthful, I seldom get as choked up like this over mammals. My heart lies more with the invertebrates, with the stepped upon insects, with the plants that no one ever notices when they were around, and no one even blinks when they are gone. The Baji is only one out of thousands that are no more this week, so why should this one pull me so?

Possibly because it is a symbol to me, that I have not done enough, that I am guilty of ignorance, that I have failed to help conserve "every cog and wheel", as Leopold put it, a reminder of what humans have cast upon this world with our technology and "achievment". Perhapse it is some shallow identification as kinship, feeling for a fellow mammal that is no more. Yet, do I really need a reason for feeling loss? Shouldn't the loss itself be enough?

I don't know.