Is it perhaps Mother’s Day on Sunday, May 10, 2020?
Are you perhaps neither a mother, nor a parent, nor a woman, but yet you have a birthday on Sunday, May 10,2020?
Are you perhaps a mother with a birthday not on May 10,2020, but within some such several days on either side of this date?
If you could answer “Yes” to any of these, even if it’s only because lying comes naturally and easily for you, then this post is for you, if you’ll have it.

[Probably best to at least skim over the expanse before clicking on links. There’s many links to choose from.]

In the Garden of Eden, sometime directly before the Great Fall, young families with flowery bonnets and summer dresses, neatly pressed slacks and button-up white collared shirts with pearl cuff-links went strolling, enjoying fresh air, bright blooming buds, and a pleasant, drifty, carefree ignorance of Good and Evil.

Those halcyon days are perhaps lost, but here’s something:
Garden tours for the mind to wander through, beautiful garden mindwalks to relax it’s uneasy fidgeting and fumbling about with the heavy certainty that it actually does matter what we say and do:

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is not the very greatest botanic garden in the world, but it’s pretty great and it is my botanic garden; so it gets the first mention. On that link you can take a long stroll through the Cherry Esplanade, or hang out a half an hour at the Sakura Matsuri festival of our forgotten youth, when strangers gathered together in large groups for shared endeavors without medical-grade masks or gloves, sometimes even putting their arms around each other for giggly group photos in costumes and with music in the background.

This article in The Spaces links to virtual tours of gardens from around the world (France, Italy, England, Hawaii, DC, Buffalo (yeah, Buffalo, NY), Brazil).

The United States Garden in DC has a couple google-maps-style self-directed tours, as well as videos of a great orchid show they once held and their famous cherry trees. At the bottom of the page is historical photos from the gardens.

There’s more and more of these that can be found by any but the most busted-down search engines, so we’ll just mention one more here: Dutch Flower Gardens.

Sometimes when concerned by the world and one’s place in it, with one’s faith in humans — including oneself and one’s own ways and means — shaken, it helps to watch flash mobs on Youtube.

Like this version of Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds sung on morning commutes around the world.

The Library of Congress belongs to everyone, and is a great repository of every free thing. Music, Books, Films, and so on.

Old Time Radio is now also free and there it is, up for anyone to peruse. Take a historical tour of the evil of advertising with Old Commercials (for a long ad for Pure Love that doubles as a long essay on the inherent evil of marketing, see Love for Sale? on this site). Or remember The Shadow? All kinds of stuff.

There’s so many free books at Project Gutenberg! Like, for example, and I don’t know if this is a good choice for Mother’s Day, but just as an example, here’s an Anthology of Stories About the Devil.

Why did Edward, Earl of Derby, believe in 1860-something that he needed to improve upon Pope’s Illiad with his own version? Because, you see, “admirable as it is, Pope’s Iliad can hardly be said to be Homer’s Iliad; and there may be some who, having lost the familiarity with the original language which they once possessed, may, if I have at all succeeded in my attempt, have recalled to their minds a faint echo of the strains which delighted their earlier days, and may recognize some slight trace of the original perfume.” So that’s why!

Can a human justify the way’s of God to humans? Maybe, maybe not. But at least Milton gave it a shot.

And so many books for so many occasions, doubtless including Mother’s Day. OK, well here’s something: A Mother’s Year Book: every day of the year has a quote from a famous author about babies.

OK, wait, wait, wait! Here’s a murder mystery by Dorothy Sayers, and here’s a bunch of books by Jane Austen.

Or, well, here’s this strange children’s book by the adamant Hillaire Belloc Cautionary Tales for Children, consisting of poems, each of which features the death of a child who broke this or that important rule. Or you could try GK Chesterton’s The Innocence of Father Brown if you were in the mood for a gentler and better-written Catholic fiction.

Anyway, readers are invited to search the site.

And what about this?
Travel & Leisure has collected twelve online Museum Tours, and Good Housekeeping has a very long list of Museum & Zoo Tours. That’s something! Journeys for the mind. A passport for exploration and growth.

Wait! There’s also the Public Domain Review, which collects, organizes, and engages with the so many works now in the giant public domain, from which anyone can draw.

Oh, I’m sorry, you only like public domain Golden Age comic books? I didn’t realize; but that’s Cool.

There are so many people in the world and have been for so many years, and their collective activities add up, and before too long you have the internet, overflowing with the most diverse and wondrous ideas developed in the most diverse and wondrous ways. Strange, strange indeed! But not all bad.

Another good flash mob song is An Die Freude from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.
I don’t know how it is that so many Japanese seem to be able to sing it in the original.

You can study the English and German side by side here.
Or not, you know, whatever you want to do with that.

Compilation & Notes: B. Willard / A. Whistletown
Original material copyrighted by AM Watson