55 bar falls 30.08 0mph NE dew-point 30 sunrise 7:12 set 6:51
Waxing Crescent of the Blood Moon
A brilliant day. One with all the wonderful marks of fall: cool, blue sky, sun, falling leaves. October is my favorite month. Right now.
So the bail-out has passed. The market continues to slump.
Sarah Palin, they say, is the GOP’s gal in 2012. OMG
More bulbs in the ground. Many hemerocallis lifted. Next is the Friday night workout.
52 bar rises 30.15 omph N dew-point 43 sunrise 7:11 set 6:52 Autumn
New Moon (Blood)
The orchard installation completed. Here are some photographs of the finished result in its earliest moments. Next spring we should have some very expensive apples. Later the cost will amortize over more and more years and more and more fruit.
Feels good to have this as our view out the kitchen window.
Cherry, Plum, Pear and Apple trees in their mounds. The colorful bush is a sandcherry. Mulch is down and the clover seeded.
Hazelnuts, coral bells, currants, gooseberries and lead plants.
One of two blueberry patches.
55 bar rises 30.09 0mph NEE dew-point 54 sunrise 7:09 set 6:58 Autumn
New Moon (Blood)
More mulch. Two more loads. 3 cubic yards. 4.5 total. This is a lotta mulch, 3 trailer fulls. The good news is the trailer has not exploded a tire since Wednesday.
The pitchfork is a useful tool and I’m glad to have occasion to use one.
My chicken noodle soup always has a slightly different recipe, but the result tastes good. Today I left out the carrots and peas (we didn’t have any) and added garlic. This is a hearty soup, great for cool weather.
Swapped out the nutrient in the hydroponics while watching the Vikings under perform. It’s weird to me that so many different combinations of players and coaches can yield similar results.
Kate had a busy, tough weekend. But she’s on the flipside now.
70 bar steady 29.83 0mph NE dew-point 61 sunrise 6:18 sunset 8:16 Lughnasa
Full Corn Moon
There are times when the Olympics seem to drone on and on. Especially gymnastics. It’s hard to remember that the individuals have spent at least four years, in many cases more, preparing for these few seconds.
There was another addition to the age revolution. A Russian gymnast performing for the German national team, 33, won a silver medal. Something’s going on here.
Sport and sports develop a strange, distorted look from a distance. Let me show you what I mean. 26 miles. Get there as fast as you can following the path we lay out. Grab the other person, twist them. Stay inside the circle at all times. Do this over and over. We’ll decide whether you did it well. Jump in the water. Swim with your arms sweeping forward, together, over and over, for two lengths of the pool. Touch the pad at the end. Run down this path. Dive forward onto your hands, then leap onto this. Twist or turn in the air. Land. Again, we give you points. Take this heavy metal ball. Stand here. However you can, throw it as far you can within this area. Oh, don’t step outside the circle.
Pull back another level. At age 11 a coach spots a young boy with an unusual physique and dedication. A swimmer. Another, with fast twitch muscles predominant. A Jamaican. Run. Run. Run. 100 meters. An Ethiopian. Run. Run. Run. 26 miles. Slow twitch.
Sport finds human beings who excel in a particular physical activity, then polishes them for a chance to perform against others of similar excellence, all to see who is best. I know this competition gets a lot of ink as a salutary, wonderful concept that “brings out the best in our young people.” Isn’t it the opposite? Doesn’t it lead to a focus on the short term. On winning at all costs. Is it any surprise that doping and cheating of many kinds follows this kind of ethos like a bad scent follows a skunk?
Sport itself, the kinesthetic intelligence at work, has obvious beauty and requires, like art, years of discipline and study. The competitive aspect of sports, which I enjoy, has a certain doomed inevitability. I don’t know whether the culture of sport has a way of being that would not force competitors, at least some competitors, to choose shortcuts. I don’t think so and that leads to this element of the tragic, especially in an Olympic setting where the tone matters so much.
Just thinking out loud. This just is, it seems to me.
79 bar falls 29.96 0mph NE dew-point 56 sunrise 6:10 sunset 8:25 Lughnasa
Waxing Gibbous Corn Moon
I got this off the Permaculture listserv.
“(I find this is a good reminder to recite every morning.)
Diadra
A Prayer for Gaia by Rose Mary O’Malley
As I breathe in your air, eat your fruits and drink your water, let me be sustained and nourished so that I may serve.
As I use your resources for clothes, shelter and warmth, let me be strengthened so that I may give back more than I have taken.
As I drink in the beauty of your oceans, flowers, blue sky and stars, let me be so filled with beauty that I will bring only love and joy to your inhabitants.
As I am nourished, taught and loved by your inhabitants, let me so filled with love and knowledge that I joyfully work to assure a fair distribution of your treasures.”
It is an example what I believe to be true, that is, many many people consider the earth a sacred place and have the intention of reverence and worship toward her. The whole neo-pagan movement with its mix and match invocation of Europe’s ancient pantheons and perhaps some Egyptian influence does not reflect the rootedness of this sentiment in American soil. (That is, the American manifestation of it. I believe this is a global phenomenon.) It is also not the case that the Native American reverence for the earth is other than a salutary reminder since their experience is so different from that of us boat people.
We need a way of following the seasons that respects our American experience of this vast and wonderful land. We need a way of honoring mother earth that borrows, yes, from other cultures, but does not presume to make their ways our ways. We need, as Emerson said, a religion of revelation to us, not the history of theirs. And that revelation comes from two sources: our experience of the outer world–this land, its peoples and our experience of other peoples and other lands; and, our experience of our inner world and its own universe, added to our resonance with the outer world.
This is the pagan lovesong that I hear in the hearts of so many people, one that needs articulation and expansion. This is like Brian Swimme’s work, too.
This faith, this reverence and worship of the earth, as in Ms. O’Malley’s prayer, is an ur-faith, or a proto-faith, a faith that comes prior to others, a faith whose acceptance does not contradict the Mulism or the Buddhist, the Taoist or the Christian, but complements, supplements them. For some, like me, it is an adequate faith, enough to sustain me on my journey and as I contemplate the life after this one, or others, it is not enough, but one that needs some salvation instrument or some philosophical cleanser. That’s all right.
A note to alert any interested that there is now an entry on Lughnasa in the Great Wheel pages. Here’s an excerpt:
This year Lughnasa falls on a new moon, the dark time associated with the Corn Moon. In moon lore the new moon, the dark moon affords a time for travel inward along the ancient inner trails of meditation, contemplation and ritual. New projects, new fronts on old projects can linger in our thoughts since the dark energy will not quash them, rather it provides a womb in which incubation can occur. On the one hand then this is a time that focuses on the night and on the night without illumination, on the other it is the first day of the harvest and summer’s fading presence.
80 bar steady 29.97 2mph W dew-point 64 Summer, cloudy with possible storms
Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon
“Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices — just recognize them.” – Edward R. Murrow
My dental hygienist told me I had an “open contact” between two back teeth. When I questioned her on this seeming oxymoron she replied with a giggle, “I don’t know. We just always say that.”
Mesial drift is a term I learned the last time I visited the dentist (over a year ago. I missed my last appt. Bad boy.). It seems as we get older our teeth drift toward the middle of our jaw. My hunch is that it comes from increasing brain size squeezing the outer jaw further apart, but I might be wrong about that. When Dr. Mahler, my new dentist since the old dentist decided to hit the links full time, came in he told me it was also because those teeth have nothing to stop them from drifting apart. Guess where it is not happening? On the right side where I still have my wisdom teeth. Get it?
George Carlin would nod and say, see, if he drove along France Avenue. Before Centennial plaza, where Dr. Mahler grinds on, there used to be a space, then the Dayton’s Home Store. Many changes later it is now the Macy’s Home Store. The open contact between Centennial Plaza has a filling. It is a very large two story store, The Container Store. If Nicole, the dental hygienist has it right, this is a very large where you can buy stuff in which to store your stuff. In the First Book of George the Prophet we have his famous dialogue on just this topic.
Before I sign off here, a comment on the Edward Murrow quote. I fully agree with him and in that agreement recognize my own racism, sexism, classism and agism. I would go further than Murrow though to this: We must recognize them and choose not to act on them. Easier said than done, but the great project of any age.
62 bar rises 30.09 0mph N dew-point 51 Summer, cool and pleasant
New Moon (Thunder Moon)
Great day.
We’re going in to St. Paul today to see one of our financial advisors. She’s been very good for us. After that, lunch and home.
Hopefully, the red car will have had its head restored and be driveable sometime later today. That will make life simpler.
Garden work over the holiday weekend.
Thoughts on patriotism come later today.
The tab, Superior Wolf, is a novel I’ve had underway for over six years. On again, off again. In an attempt to finally finish it I’m going to present it (write it, actually) at the rate of a chapter a week, like the serialized novels of the Victorian era. I will post on Sunday nights. Due both to space limitations and creative considerations I will leave three chapters up at once, taking down the fourth, or oldest one to replace it with the next chapter. If you get interested and want to read what came before, send me an e-mail.
These are excerpts from a Washington Post article on the PEW survey of religious beliefs. The title is a link to the full article.
More Than 90 Percent of Americans Believe in God, Study Finds
More than 90 percent of Americans — including one in five people who say they are atheists — believe in God or a universal power, and more than half pray at least once a day, according to results of a poll released today that takes an in-depth look at Americans’ religious beliefs.
Majorities also believe that angels and demons are at work in the world and that miracles occur today as they did in ancient times.
Two-thirds of Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists are Democrats or lean Democratic, compared with 22 percent of Mormons. Also, 77 percent of historically black churches are Democrats or lean Democratic, while only one-third of evangelical churches are Democrats or lean Democratic.
But most Americans — even many of the most religiously conservative — have a non-exclusive attitude toward other faiths. Seventy percent of those affiliated with a religion believe that many religions, not just their own, can lead to eternal salvation. Just about one-quarter believe there is only one true way to interpret their own religion’s teachings.
“Even though Americans tend to take religion quite seriously and are a highly religious people, there is a certain degree of openness and a lack dogmatism in their approach to faith and the teachings of their faith,” said Smith.