Lughnasa                                        Waxing Artemis Moon

The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself
balks account,
That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.    “I Sing the Body Electric,” Walt Whitman

Coming to the end of another round of this summer bug, or rather virus, an intracellular interloper replicating at my expense.  Even though I’ve felt decentered, defocused and dis-eased, my body has gone on working, repelling these bad actors and throwing up barriers to their return.

Do you ever think about the daily miracle that is your body?  All the parts of it that have to work in homeostasis, levels of creatinine, thyroid hormones, testosterone, potassium and the gut with its legion of foreign bacteria working to aid our digestion and the lungs stealing oxygen from the atmosphere which has just enough that we can live and the ear which not only helps us hear but keeps us upright and steady; the nervous system wheeling electricity throughout the body turning this on, that off, moving this muscle, contracting the other, moving my fingers for example in the dance learned long ago in Alexandria-Monroe High School typing class; all that blood moving, moving, moving pulsing, delivering oxygen, energy to muscles and organs, pulsing through the heart, that fleshy pump working night and day, year in and year out, an organ we take notice of most often when it begins to fail or flail; not to forget the only organ connected directly to the brain, the eye with the optical nerve taking information back to the occipital lobe where it converts to actual images of what the eye has impressed upon it.  Amazing.

Let me say thank you to whatever long and distant chain has led from the foamy oceans of mother earth’s origins up through the one-celled, the multicelluar, the strange moving ones who finally made land and who went on to be dinosaurs and woolly mammoths and lions and tigers and bears oh my and me, too.  Each of us sit as the particular and current end-point of one line of protoplasm that could,  if we were god-like enough, be traced to its unique origin in, say, a small amoeba-like creature floating at the time in a place that would someday be called Australia.  Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles.

Having said that what do you think of Mark Dayton?  I confess, I voted for him, in spite of my doubts, because he seemed the best bet to beat Emmer, a strange duck to have representing anybody except say, Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin if they constituted the whole of an odd sub-set of Minnesota voters.  We so need a Democratic governor and legislature over the next four years.  Without them budgets will get balanced on the backs of the poor, just witness the cock-up in GAMC that Warren Wolfe has covered so ably in the Star-Tribune.  Without them budgets will get balanced by trading short term gain for long term environmental degradation.  So, if you’re of the Democratic persuasion, give money, knock on doors, help them.  If you’re a Republican, take a really good long look at Emmer.  He’s a weird one and not right for this state.