AncienTrails

Like the Velveteen Rabbit, A Real Home

23  bar rises 29.69  4mph  N  windchill  17   Samhain

Waxing Crescent Moon of Long Nights

A dusting of snow, the most we’ve had so far.  Kate bought some holly and ivy (plastic) and a vertical wreath, all for outside.  She’s done a bit of decorating and it looks pretty here.   The holly leaves with their red-berries are on our deck and now a scene setting of fresh snow.

I have about 1/3 of the black plastic, mulch down.  I have almost enough plastic for the rest of the wood’s edge, but I underestimated the amount of straw needed.  I’ll need at least double what I have right now, maybe more.  Weed free straw is hard to find and I may have to drive a considerable distance to find it.  It’s worth it in the spring, though, because the weed problem is less.

Tomorrow moves us into December.  It is 2008.  Can you believe that?  2008.  In my lifetime I’ve seen two millennia, a man on the moon, computers at home as fast as the ones that used to take up whole rooms.  I’ve also seen the span between Martin Luther King and Barack Obama.  There has also been the counter culture and the long conservative spasm against it.  Kate and I have grandchildren.  Grandchildren.  Whoa.

Another note on home.  I moved a lot in the pre-Kate years of my life.  A lot.  We have lived here in Andover for almost 15 years now.  This is home, but not just because of the years but also because of the labor, the care, the thought.  Home is also where memories have happened.

When I worked for the Presbyterian Church, I often thought about sacred space in terms of congregations.  It was not a ritual or a blessing that made a church holy, I said, but the people who worshiped and believed.  Likewise a home.  It is not a real estate closing or a construction crew that makes a home, rather it is the life that is lived there.  Gradually a house changes from construction material to sanctuary.  It becomes, like the Velveteen Rabbit, a real home.

Ex-Pat Life in Troubled Times

37  bar falls 29.69  0mph NW  windchill 36   Samhain

New Moon (Moon of Long Nights)

As many of you know, my brother Mark lives in Bangkok.  Thailand is almost invisible in the American press, so you may not have noticed the protests that have been going on there since early in the year.  The politics, even to Mark, a long term resident of Thailand, do not make much sense.   One school of thought believes it is the Bangkok royalist elite facing off against the more rural and populist base of recent prime minister and now exile, Thaksin.

Difficult to say, but this Buddhist country has a lot of unregistered guns and the protests have taken a nasty turn.  Apparently the goal of the yellow-shirted PAD protesters is a coup by the military which they hope would turn the government back to more traditional  royalist influenced politics.

Mark and Mary, both ex-pats, live out their lives as foreign nationals in cultures far removed from the West.  Even English speaking, British spawned Singapore has a Chinese government and a citizenry made of up of Malays, Chinese, Indians and a few Caucasians.  As non-citizens, even though well established, their daily lives can get upset when the politics turn nationalist as ex-pats are often visible reminders of the other.

In Mark’s case, as an American and a white man, he is culturally and physically obviously other almost every where he goes in Thailand.  When jingoism gets cranked up, no matter what the cause, the tendency is to notice strangers/farangi when at other times they may well be invisible.  He feels understandably a bit nervous, but he also says, “It’s a rush to be here.”  The politics are an alive moment, a culture trying to sort out its future and its present, searching for the mix of groups that can govern.  We just had such a moment in the last year here in America.

I respect and sometimes envy my brother and sister.  They have access every day to the unique and the different, to the daily lives of persons who respond to different customs and values than those we learned in Alexandria, Indiana.  Like them, I value those kinds of interactions and find their willingness to stay admirable.

A Holimonth Filled With Holy Days

Kate and I will head over to Beisswingers in a few minutes.  The lawn tractor has had a checkup, gotten set up for winter storage and had its blades sharpened.  It will go in the machine shed, the one back on the wood’s edge.

After that, we will start laying the black plastic.  I cleared the area of standing weeds, trees and brush over the last three weeks.  I want to get the plastic down before it snows.

Though by my reckoning we’ve been in Holiseason since Samhain, the pace does pick-up between Thanksgiving and New Years.  A real holimonth filled with Holy Days.  The sacred puts itself before us in so many ways over the next few weeks.

The article I posted yesterday from the magazine Orion points to a key locus of the sacred:  home.  At some point over the weekend I’m going to post some thoughts about home and ge-ology.

The Most Radical Thing You Can Do

From the Faraway Nearby
The Most Radical Thing You Can Do
Staying home as a necessity and a right
by Rebecca Solnit
Published in the November/December 2008 issue of Orion magazine

LONG AGO the poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder said, “The most radical thing you can do is stay home,” a phrase that has itself stayed with me for the many years since I first heard it. Some or all of its meaning was present then, in the bioregional 1970s, when going back to the land and consuming less was how the task was framed. The task has only become more urgent as climate change in particular underscores that we need to consume a lot less. It’s curious, in the chaos of conversations about what we ought to do to save the world, how seldom sheer modesty comes up—living smaller, staying closer, having less—especially for us in the ranks of the privileged. Not just having a fuel-efficient car, but maybe leaving it parked and taking the bus, or living a lot closer to work in the first place, or not having a car at all. A third of carbon-dioxide emissions nationwide are from the restless movements of goods and people.

We are going to have to stay home a lot more in the future. Continue reading The Most Radical Thing You Can Do…

Dis and Dat

Quick note:   Finally, after over 4 years I’ve cleared obstacles between garage bays, set up during and just before the renovation.  Much better.

Today I also changed the nutrient solution in the hydroponics and tried again to the encourage the eggplants to fruit.  I now have several peppers at various stages of growth.  Very cool.  At least to me.

Last I got out the chain saw and cut up the trees I cut down last week.  They went on the extra large Varmint Hotel.  You might know it by its other name, brush pile.

That seemed enough for the morning, so it’s nap time now.

Quotes

Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.—Aldous Huxley, Island

“Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. Seize the day, trust not to the morrow.” - Horace

Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap, lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.—Alan Watts

WTS Writer’s Saving Time

29  bar rises 29.97  2mph SSE  windchill 28   Samhain

New Moon (Moon of Long Nights)

Day after.  No turkey hangover.  But.  I have begun to reset my clock for a 10:30 bedtime.  Soon I’ll be able to get up early again and write for my usual four hours in the AM.

A bit more work outside, but the heavy lifting is done.  Now it’s putting down the black plastic, straw on top of that.  Final stroke is mulch over the vegetable beds (to add organic matter) and over the bulbs I planted.  That should all get done in the next week or so, then it’s inside time for at least four, maybe five months.

Over the course of that period I want to restart my writing routine and, sigh, work on edits and revisions.  I say sigh because my last 12 years has the litter of so many good intentions in this regard and so little to show for it.   Maybe this will be the decade.  Not that many left.

Kate has a Hanukah piece underway and some Christmas knitted and crocheted items, too.  She’s a whir of activity, a real equivalent to a woodworker in a shop.  A creative gal.

And Again, Thank You

“If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.” - Meister Eckhart

Here is a Zen koan on thankfulness:

The Giver Should Be Thankful

While Seisetsu was the master of Engaku in Kamakura he required larger quarters, since those in which he was teaching were overcrowded. Umezu Seibei, a merchant of Edo, decided to donate five hundred pieces of gold called ryo toward the construction of a more commodious school. This money he brought to the teacher.

Seisetsu said: “All right. I will take it.”

Umezu gave Seisetsu the sack of gold, but he was dissatisfied with the attitude of the teacher. One might live a whole year on three ryo, and the merchant had not even been thanked for five hundred.

“In that sack are five hundred ryo,” hinted Umezu.

“You told me that before,” replied Seisetsu.

“Even if I am a wealthy merchant, five hundred ryo is a lot of money,” said Umezu.

“Do you want me to thank you for it?” asked Seisetsu.

“You ought to,” replied Uzemu.

Why should I?” inquired Seisetsu. “The giver should be thankful.”

An Afternoon of Joy, An Evening of Wonder

38  bar steady  29.89  1mph SW  windchill 37  Samhain   Thanksgiving

New Moon (Moon of Long Nights)

Thanksgiving out.  I like it.  Kate and Annie and I had a meal at the B.A.N.K.  Thanks to Kate’s 60-minute Thansgiving dinner last night, I had steak.  So-so.  The appetizer, Rock Shrimp with Prosciutto and Melon, on the other hand, was worth a return trip. 

The meal made me think about joy, again, and its role in our life.   Without joy and wonder life can become an endless series of gestures, futile and without grace.  Where do we find joy?  I saw an 8-year old girl skip through the restaurant, a pumpkin on her shirt. Kate she did the same in the bathroom.  Skipping just because, that’s joy.  Kate’s meal last night, a surprise and a joy.

Wonder?  Ruth, our granddaughter, says, “Huh?” when she does not understand what you have said, that is, when she can not comprehend its meaning.  Her “Huh?” begs for more, for a way into the world of your words.  Her inquisitiveness is the definition of wonder.  The space station, adrift in an ocean of emptiness, a place where a worker can lose a tool bag just by not tethering it is wonderfull.

So, today, this very day of very days, I wish you an afternoon of joy and an evening of wonder.  Let them in, they just might save your life.

A Long Way From Pygmies In A Cage

34  bar steady  29.92  0mph WNW  windchill 34   Samhain  Thanksgiving

Day 9h 05 m

New Moon (Moon of Long Nights)

Otta Benga on display at the Brooklyn Zoo in 1906

Kate and I watched the Macy’s parade for about a half an hour.  The amount of vapid commentary interspersed with minor celebrities talking about their thanksgiving plans laced with liberal amounts of commercials and very little parade led me to come downstairs.

I may get out and work on the black plastic this morning, at least for a while.

A random thought on the zoo.  The new zoo philosophy relies on climate related collections, thus the Grizzly Coast, also at the 45th latitude, just as we are.  This makes sense for a number of reasons, the chief one being the congruence between our climate and the animal’s original habitat.   It also allows us to see the variety of animals that can live approximately where we do.

The new philosophy also involves maintaining and supporting genetically diverse populations of animals either endangered, like the Amur Leopard, or already extinct in the wild.  This involves sharing breeding pairs among zoos and making sure line breeding does not happen.

Both of these purposes  make sense to me and they are a long way from the Brooklyn Zoo of 1906 that had a pygmy on exhibit.

The third purpose the new zoo markets is helping zoo visitors stay in touch with nature.   I’m not sure about this one.  I’m not sure seeing animals in exhibits,  out of their native habitats, in settings with only their own kind or a small number of other animals, encourages more than ecologial voyeurism.  Yes, the grizzlies, sea otters and Amur leopards led me to look up the Amur river region in far eastern Russia.  They encouraged me to think about the fate of orphan grizzlies in Alaska. (I will not mention Sarah Palin.  I will not.)

The attitude though is passive.  Getting in touch with nature, it seems to me, has a necessary literal component, one that goes beyond looking, hands on plexiglass or rail.  The natural world is not a passive realm, it is a chaotically energetic, interlocked dance.  When I came home from the zoo, I needed to hold, touch our dogs, animals with whom I can interact in a tactile way.  An hour in our garden gives me more contact with the natural world than the day at the zoo.  Why?  The soil and its organisms end up on my gloves. I eat produce I planted.  Here I take an active role, planning, cultivating, attending.  The zoo works in the same way for the keepers of the animals and the clean-up crews, but not for visitors.