AncienTrails

The Celtic calendar celebrates the cyclical, not the chronological.

Summer                Waxing Green Corn Moon

“Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.” - Jean Cocteau

French film-maker, poet, dramatist Jean Cocteau helps us make the transition to Lughnasa, the Celtic first fruits season, the first of the three harvest seasons and holiday.  He understands the language of the planet.  Time and all the measures we use to count it calendars, watches, birthdays, even geological eras get their underlying rationale from either the spinning of the earth or its orbit around our sun.

Chronological time marks the day and counts them one after the other, but in reality there is only one day, the one being created as we watch what we still insist on calling the sunrise or the sunset.  Chronological time marks the year and counts them one after the other, but in reality there is only one year, the year the earth creates right now as it flies apparently untethered through the dark vacuum of space.

The Celtic calendar celebrates the cyclical, not the chronological.  There is good reason to keep emphasizing the cyclical nature of time.  It literally grounds us, puts us back  in touch with the soil and the seasons, plants and animals in their ever recurring waltz.

Our sense of past and future is an artifact of the human mind and that most inexplicable wonder, consciousness.  Only in our consciousness does the past extend backward from the moment.  Only in consciousness does the future extend forward from the moment.  Without consciousness, the anthropic principle, there is only this day, this year over and over and over.  But thinking does not make it so.

The past is no more real than the future, nor any less.  The eastern religion traditions of Buddhism and Taoism insist on the now as the critical, only instance in which we can have effect.  We can act neither tomorrow nor yesterday, but only now.

Anxiety has the future as its locus; depression the past.  Both take us from the now, from the time when we are puissant.  We return to the season of  Lughnasa as this day closes.  Until then, live in this moment. And the next.  And the next.

Watch the Video

Summer                 Waxing Green Corn Moon’

Former Door County dairy farmer and Woolly Mammoth Bill Schmidt passes the Dairyland baton to northern Indiana’s Fair Oaks Farm.  Why?  They produce enough milk to provide for the dairy needs of an 8 million person city.  They have 25,000 acres and 32,000 cows, milked 3 times a day on a moving carousel.  Hard to believe?  Watch the video.

Kate and I spent the morning at the Minnesota Spine Center.  We met a confident and capable surgeon who gave Kate some possibilities she had not had before.  Whether any of them will relieve what has now been a 20 year 0rdeal that has caused a lot of pain and cost here 3 1/2 inches in height we do not know, but we will.

Vega the wonder dog continues.  Now she has found the netaphim running through the raised beds.  She has gnawed on some of it though she cut through none of them.  She’s an intelligent, active, inquisitive dog.

The Blackberry Storm I got at the Verizon store got terrible reviews when it first came out.  I have used it for a few days now and can say that the problems I’ve encountered so far fall the into the severely annoying class, frustrating but not crippling.  Example.  Like the I-Phone, the device it attempts to copy, it has an acclerometer that switches the orientation of the screen from portrait to landscape when you turn the phone.  Unlike the I-Phone the Storm does not always respond to the turn, at least not right away.  Likewise the internet link acts up sometimes, offering less than the full website for viewing.

On the other hand it has a full qwerty keyboard in landscape mode and two thumbed typing can  be accurate and fast.  It also has a smaller footprint than the I-Phone, something I appreciate.  It will work for my needs just fine.

I’m back to working out with the full routine:  flexibility, resistance, balance and aerobics.   Body and mind work better when exercised.

Quieter Dogs

Summer                        Waxing Green Corn Moon

Kate’s plane is in the air, but 30 minutes or so late.  I’ll leave in a bit to pick her up.  It’s a long hike to the airport from here.

The dogs have not been noisy today.  Daddy was home.

Yesterday, via Netflix, I finished the first season of TrueBlood.  My fascination with horror, monsters and science fiction has been lifelong and I imagine it will be with me when I head out on my 49 day journey to the next adventure.  As an HBO program, TrueBlood takes full advantage of a sub-genre of horror, the vampire romance.   There is sex, betrayal, monsters and demons of the night and a lot of Cajun country atomspherics.  The one  true Cajun speaker in the first year turned out to be a fake, however, and a murderer.  There was an audio tape, Cajun dialect for Actors, in his affects.

Sex and South Carolina. Again. But Different.

Summer                          Waxing Green Corn Moon

“In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.” - Robert Greene Ingersoll

SC man charged with having sex with horse

Shows  you where politics have gone.  I immediately thought, OMG, the Governor does it again.

Weeds. Less.

Summer                             Waxing Green Corn Moon

The majority of the weeds that were in the clover now lie baking in the afternoon sun.  This hand pulling of weeds is a chore, but it has its satisfactions.   Not having to do it again for a while is the chief one.  When it comes to the garden, I try to think of ways that I will only have to do certain tasks once or not at all.  Weeding is among those and the close planting in the vegetable and perennial gardens, plus mulch have been my best tools in that regard so far.

Ancora Imparo

Summer                        Waxing Green Corn Moon

Kate returns from the Grand Tetons this evening.  She will have a new wedding ring for me.  We may have a short ritual at the Woolly meeting to bless it.

All of the whippets are inside now.  I’ll let them out when the big dogs come inside.  This minimizes the total barking load on our acreage.  Hilo and Emma play with the big dogs, a good thing for the most part.  The only problem is that the whippets seem to find constant barking a necessary adjunct.  That’s where the problem came from yesterday.  So.

It’s another cool morning, so I’m going to finish weeding the clover in the orchard.  After that, I’ll start on the neglected perennial beds.  It will take a while to learn how to keep all these areas up at the same time.  We have, let’s see, four perennial beds in front that require regular attention, 5 in back with a good bit more square footage than the front, the orchard, larger than the others all together though not as many plants, and the vegetable beds.  Thanks to close planting and mulch the weeds in the vegetable beds are minimal and, thanks to integrated pest management, insect predation is minimal, too.  Insects are not much of a problem in the flower beds either, but the seasonal fluctuations of blooming and withering mean even close planting can’t control all the weeds.

The puppies have required new and constant learning as we have a five dog pack again.  That means changed pack dynamics and puppy energy.  The expansion of the vegetables and the addition of the orchard have, likewise, added new challenges to our garden skills.  There is, too, the learning curve for taking on the legislative process for the Sierra Club.  This is all good since without new learning we begin to die and I intend to live until I die.  As Frank Broderick would put it, I intend to burn out not rust out.

Barking Dogs

Summer                     Waxing Green Corn Moon

Oh, oh.  The neighbor called and said our dogs barked constantly from 3pm to 7pm.  He’s home all the time now with his m.s.  I empathize with him about barking dogs, even my own, because they drive me nuts, too.  I doubt they barked the whole time, but it did probably seem like it.  Have to manage them for noise again.  That means keeping the two mouthy whippets, Hilo and Emma, inside more.  They won’t mind that a bit.

On a sad note tonight was Max’s last night.  Tom said today that he and Roxanne had an appointment with the vet tonight.  Max was a sweet dog, a wounded soul from his previous owner, but with more depth of character because of it.  I’ll miss him.

Worked out and then went into the meeting of the Clean Energy and Renewable Energy Committee.  The first hour of the meeting was a presentation by Steve Taff, an ag economist/environmental economist, on low carbon fuel standards.  He advocates keeping the focus on reducing carbon build up rather than on the policy tool.

Another important part of his presentation involved the complexity of the various policy areas:  low carbon fuel standards, CAFE standards and cap and trade.  The tendency, he says, is to consider only one policy area at a time and to ignore the total field of policy initiatives.  Keeping the whole field in mind is key to the eventual development of effective green house gas reductions.

Over the upcoming weeks I’ll unpack some of this jargon.

The committee understood the need for taking the initiative with developing legislative priorities.  Makes my work easier.

My Congressional Representative Working For the 6th District

Summer                    Waxing Green Corn Moon

“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” - Jonathan Swift

OK.  I suffered through Jesse Ventura as my governor and Rod Grams as my Senator, but what did I do oh Lord to deserve this congresswoman?

Bachman blocks resolution declaring Hawaii to be Obama’s birthplace

“Today, Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI) introduced a resolution commemorating the 50th anniversary of Hawaii’s statehood. The resolution also proclaims the state as President Obama’s birthplace, a point the Plum Line’s Greg Sargent noted may “put House GOPers who are flirting with birtherism in a jam.” This afternoon on the House floor, Abercrombie spoke of his measure and specifically noted that Obama had been born in Hawaii. “It’s also going to be the birthday in a week or so of President Obama, born in Kapiolani hospital just down the road from where I lived,” he said. Just as the presiding chair of the House, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), was about to declare the resolution passed by voice vote, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) stood and objected:

BACHMANN: Mr. Speaker? I object to the vote on the grounds that a quorum is not present and make a point of order that a quorum is not present. [...]”

My favorite comment on this report:

noseeum says:

I want to see Bachman and Palin in a cage match for the Re-nut-ican nomination.
July 27th, 2009 at 5:53 pm

Queen Victoria Loved Nudes?!

Summer                       Waxing Green Corn Moon

“Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

Old Schopenhauer was a world class pessimist, yes, but he saw the world with clarity.  The Great Wheel turns on an annual basis, but it has an equivalence in the trajectory of a human life and an equivalence each day.  This cycling from newness to maturity through senescence then death has a deep reassurance.  After we die, spring will come again.  The flowers will bloom, the skies turn blue and gentle rains will fall.  Children will be born.  Young people will fall in love.  Mature people will achieve great things and live satisfying lives.  The cycle will continue with each person, each generation, each epoch until either we become extinct, the sun dies or humanity begins again in the stars.

There is a picture of Joseph which sets atop  an old desktop computer.  He is spring.  His children will be his spring.  Jon and Jen have Ruth and Gabe.  The coming of blue skies and gentle rains.  To them we hope children will be born and the line will continue, each birth a miracle.  The world is full of such wonders.

Which naturally segues to the second session of nude summer camp held this afternoon at the Black Forest.  We discussed the fact that Queen Victoria loved nudes and bought them for Prince Albert.  The Egyptians apparently wore diaphanous clothing and sometimes none at all.  17th century painters of Northern Europe produced provocative images of women. (pic:  Jan Gossaert. “Danae” (1527))  Thanks to Carreen.  China has little to no nudity in their traditional art.

The discussion, outside, seemed to attract police, ambulances and road construction equipment so nudity talk had to be shouted at times.  It made for an interesting ambiance.

Kate called today and said she’s found a wonderful replacement for my wedding ring at a jeweler in Jackson Hole, a friend of her sister, BJ.

I spent about an hour at the Sierra Club offices after the nude discussion group.  Margaret introduced me to Josuha Hodek and Joshua Low, organizers for two key committees:  The Blue-Green Alliance and the land use and transportation committee.  This month the preliminary work begins on developing the Sierra Club’s positions for the upcoming collaborative process with the Minnesota Environmental Partnership and for our own work in the 2010 session of the state legislature.

Becoming Native To This Place

Summer                        Waxing Green Corn Moon

The next meeting of the Woolly Mammoths will be here in Andover.  That means it’s theme and subject matter time.  The theme will be, Becoming Native to this Place, the title of a book by Wes Jackson of the Land Institute.  The subject matter will focus on the gardens, permaculture and the local food (slow food) movement.

At the Seed Savers Exchange conference held two weekends ago in Decorah, Iowa a commercial grower told of his change to the local foods idea.  A grower of greenhouse foods for various distributors who took his foods far from northern Iowa, he recounted attending a meeting sponsored by folks whose agenda was local foods.  They showed that, due to commodity based agriculture, northern Iowa was a net importer of food.  That astounded him.  He switched his focus then to growing vegetables for local consumers, working on niche markets like institutions, restaurants and grocery stores in the northern Iowa area.

He didn’t mention Michael Pollan by name but the subject matter was similar to Pollan’s recent work, In Defense of Food.  The Woollys have read the Omnivore’s Dilemma and the Botany of Desire.  We’ve also looked at the notion of Homecoming and the Great Work by Thomas Berry.  This August meeting, only 17 days after Lughnasa, the first fruits festival of the Celtic calendar, will celebrate the Woolly’s interests in home, food and continuity.   

Continuity?  Yes.  The Woollys have a 20+ year record of perseverance with each other and, by implication, an interest in this place we have  chosen to call home for those same number of years.

To the Woollys who read this:

Please choose one of the books or websites indicated and take a look.  While looking pick out two things:  what surprised you?  what would you like to know more about?   If you want, also look for something that seems off or misguided to you.