{"id":20683,"date":"2022-01-25T11:58:55","date_gmt":"2022-01-25T16:58:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20683"},"modified":"2022-01-25T11:58:55","modified_gmt":"2022-01-25T16:58:55","slug":"when-the-plow-comes-through","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2022\/01\/25\/when-the-plow-comes-through\/","title":{"rendered":"When the Plow Comes Through"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>It\u2019s Burns  Day, and for the first time in many years I read the famous \u201cTo a Mouse\u201d poem, or more fully <a href=\"http:\/\/www.robertburns.org\/works\/75.shtml\">\u201cTo A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough\u201d<\/a>. It\u2019s totally a different poem that I remember it being.\r\n<p>I remember the beginning, of course, with the tiny timorous beast running away. And then the plowman feels bad that the mouse is scared of him, when he bears the mouse no ill-will, bearing no grudge for her tiny thefts. But then, the turn that I didn\u2019t really remember, when the plowman-poet thinks about the mouse building her nest:\r\n<blockquote>Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,<br>\r\nAn' weary winter comin fast, <br>\r\nAn' cozie here, beneath the blast, <br>\r\nThou thought to dwell-<br>\r\nTill crash! the cruel coulter past<br>\r\nOut thro' thy cell.<br><br>\r\n<p>That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble, <br>\r\nHas cost thee mony a weary nibble! <br>\r\nNow thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble, <br>\r\nBut house or hald, <br>\r\nTo thole the winter's sleety dribble, <br>\r\nAn' cranreuch cauld!<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>All that effort for nothing. The mouse\u2014not the somewhat comical mouse of the beginning but a perceptive and persistent mouse who has carefully planned and laboriously executed a quite well-laid plan\u2014is suddenly a really good character. Tho\u2019 of course, the plan goes a\u2019gley, when the plow comes through. But it\u2019s not a bad plan! It\u2019s not like there was really a better plan, and she completely screwed up. There wasn\u2019t an available mostly-buried cinder block for the uplifted rats to move with a pulley system. Given the situation, the mouse did excellent work. And was still facing a brutal, homeless, probably deadly winter.\r\n<p>And the thing is, for me, that I have been spending a lot of time feeling like that mouse. My various institutions\u2014my household, my town, my employer, my synagogue, my nation-state\u2014cobble together the best plan they can, and just hope that we\u2019ll figure something else out when the plow comes through.\r\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I><br>-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger canna see forward, but only guess an\u2019 fear!","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[199],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-litchrachoor"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20683"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20687,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20683\/revisions\/20687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}