Lughnasa Honey Moon
In the now long ago a spiritual director told me that the key component of spirituality is gratitude.
Let this first post after our hiatus be one of gratitude. Bill Schmidt, thank you! This wasn’t easy as it turned out and I’m grateful for the perseverance and skill.
I’ve known Bill for over 25 years as Woolly Mammoth and friend.
Summer Moon of the First Harvests
While exploring Saturn, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft took the…image of Earth from a distance of about 1.45 billion kilometers (898 million miles) away.
The Cassini view is the third-ever image of Earth from the outer solar system. Views of Earth from distant planets are rare because our planet is so close to the Sun. Sunlight would damage the spacecraft’s sensitive imagers, so they are rarely pointed homeward. On July 19, however, Cassini was positioned so that Saturn blocked the Sun’s light while Earth was within the spacecraft’s field of view. Sunlight glimmers around the giant planet’s limb and lights its icy, dusty rings. The sunlit Earth is light blue. The Moon is a faint white dot to the side, but is more clearly visible in the narrow-angle camera view.
(nasa)
Summer Moon of the First Harvests
how cool is this.
Summer Moon of the First Harvests
More limbing. Removal of weed trees, escaped amur maples. An attractive tree but one prone to wander too freely. I like using the limbing ax. Internal combustion engines I don’t like using. My dislike of them precedes but gets reinforced by my ecological consciousness. My feelings about them come in part from an inability to work with them well. Wrenches, screw drivers, fluids, pistons all that never leapt to my hands.
Like the house, I learned all my father knew about them. Nothing. For example. Car. Mower. Weedwhacker. Lawn tractor. Snow blower. The chainsaw is a limited and unusual exception. And yes, I admit it, I never did anything to improve my knowledge or skills, at least not anything that worked.
On another level I fantasized about those engines, read about them, watched and applauded people who did things with different versions. Fast things. Like formula 1. Indianapolis 500. Drag racing. Sports Car Graphic and Road and Track were two of my early magazine subscriptions. Summer nights on Madison Avenue saw Alexandria kids drag racing. A dangerous pursuit then, seen as the acme of juvenile self-destructiveness.
So there was this duality in my feelings: admiration and loathing. As I’ve gotten older, the admiration has diminished and the loathing increased. The Toyota folks at Carlson Toyota take care of our vehicle and I’m very glad for it. They’re good at what they do and I can’t escape driving. I’m left with a paradox, a contradiction, a necessary dilemma.
For those of you who love them, my admiration side understands. Totally. For those of you like me who would not be sorry to see them go. I’m with you. 100%.
Summer Moon of the First Harvests
What a wonder. A black president speaking as a black man about the lived experience of young black men. Trayvon Martin, he said, could have been him 35 years ago. A young black man in hoodie, suspected of, what? WWB? Walking while black. Maybe about to do, something. And something, wrong. Bad. Hearing clicks on car door locks as you walk by. Being followed in stores. Indelible and seemingly inevitable.
Yet, of course, he is not Trayvon. No, he is the president of the most powerful nation the world has ever known. Maybe the most powerful it will ever know. And even he, with all that power at his disposal, literally at his command, can imagine himself into the life of a young man seen, paradoxically, as both powerless and invisible and all too visible and dangerous.
Racism and its even more evil progenitor, slavery, stand out as the original sin, the stain on this city on a hill, this beacon of freedom and hope. We white folk have done this and that, but not too much and now the time of our dominance is passing. This nation will become a colorful quilt with white as one shade among many rather than the shade against which all others stand inferior. May that day come soon.
There are many things I feel privileged to have witnessed. The civil rights movement. The anti-war movement. Feminism and the rise of women. A world in which the whole planet must be taken into account when making decisions. A man walking on the moon. Routine space flight. The discovery of extraterrestrial planets. The discovery of DNA. The global recognition that the people can challenge their government. And win. So many things. These and more.
But, this one, a black president speaking about the lived experience of being a young black man. This one is a miracle.
Summer First Harvest Moon
Tom Crane, Mark Odegard and I passed over $13.00 each for a senior citizen ticket to the show Maya! at the Science Museum. This show offers a thoughtful approach to this complex and still often misunderstood culture, especially its classic and post-classic periods. The show combines technology from a tabletop computer to a museum goer manipulable microscope to excellent effect.
With areas on astronomy, the underworld, making a living, the ball game, architecture, religion and daily life the exhibition offers up to date scholarship in a diverse number of areas. Sprinkled throughout the exhibit are actual artifacts, plaster replicas and photographs to supplement the label copy.
In fact my only criticism of the show is the display of the artifacts. They are often set back in a case with a lot of shadow making the artwork difficult to see. Also, not all of the artifacts seem carefully selected. But this is a trivial point.
New information to me was the impact of enemy civilizations on the decline of the Maya. I had known before about crop failure, drought and environmental degradation. Although, come to think of it, I do recall an argument about rebellion by peoples selected for slavery and ritual sacrifice.
Maya culture is not dead; it lives on in Central America and the Yucatan. There is today a revival of interest in Mayan culture among Mayans. This is good to see and receives some treatment in the show.
I’d say 4 stars.
Summer New (First Harvest) Moon
We just had a gully washer. We called’em that back in Indiana though I didn’t know what
a gully was for a long time. The rain was intense, coming down in sheets from a black sky. Some thunder. Looked like a hurricane. Good for the crops. We said that back in Indiana, too.
Kona, our oldest dog, now 12 years +, has begun a decline due to a cancer lodged in her right shoulder. I looked outside today, watching the rain pound the orchard and our flower and vegetable gardens, and thought of the close bond between caring for animals and caring for plants. They go together, and raising a family does, too. Nurture is part of nature, not separate, as the false dichotomies of science and popular wisdom have it.
There is nature without nurture, but there is never nurture without nature. And there is never good nurture that is not part of nature, that is, nurture that takes with total seriousness the lived way of another being and attempts to provide some guidance, some aid, some assistance so that that nature might be fulfilled. At its best nurture leads the other to become the richest and most it can be on its own terms, that is, in its nature.
Kona, like all the sighthounds with whom we’ve shared our lives, has gone her own way, decided what suited her best, and she’s done it with our support: annual physicals, regular medications, good food, shared naps and nights on the couch, a sister to grow up with (Hilo, who died three years ago) and other dogs to form a pack. This is, or at least I like to think it is, nurture in support of nature.
When nurture opposes or distorts nature, then terrible things can result. To stay in the dog world, look at Michael Vick and dog fighting. In the human world think of the despair of all those students taught to the high stakes tests who fail. Or, the soils burned and leached and flogged by agriculture methods that nurture only to destroy.
Summer New (First Harvest) Moon
I found this delightful article by Oliver Sacks a couple of days ago. The whole is well worth reading. I’ve just copied an excerpt.
The Joy of Old Age. (No Kidding.)
“LAST night I dreamed about mercury — huge, shining globules of quicksilver rising and falling. Mercury is element number 80, and my dream is a reminder that on Tuesday, I will be 80 myself.
Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers. At 11, I could say “I am sodium” (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold. A few years ago, when I gave a friend a bottle of mercury for his 80th birthday — a special bottle that could neither leak nor break — he gave me a peculiar look, but later sent me a charming letter in which he joked, “I take a little every morning for my health.”
So, in addition to 66 being my age and the age of the UFO phenomenon, 66 is also the element number of dysprosium. It’s an interesting element, and not in a great supply, “dysprosium comes from the Greek dysprositos (δυσπρόσιτος), meaning “hard to get.” Like many of the rare earths and metals it is found mostly in China, 99%.
“…the wide range of its current and projected uses, together with the lack of any immediately suitable replacement, makes dysprosium the single most critical element for emerging clean energy technologies.” Wikipedia
I have not, so far, dreamed of dysprosium, but who knows.
Summer New (First Harvest) Moon
66 years ago today news began to leak out about an incident at Roswell, New Mexico. Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF). The UFO incident and later reporting of more and more sightings has never fully abated. Classed with conspiracy theorists and aluminum foil hat guys for most of that time, there has nonetheless been widespread public interest as signified by the number of Hollywood movies on the theme: Close Encounters, E.T. and many, many others.
Even Carl Jung wrote a small book on the UFO phenomenon, characterizing it as a contemporary search for the numinous, a spiritual yearning at its heart.
It struck me today because, well, I’m 66. That means the UFO story and I share a common chronology. It even got intertwined when in 1957, at the age of 10, my friend Mike Hines (mentioned earlier in regard to explosions) looked up in the sky one clear August evening, we were standing in my backyard on Monroe Street, and saw three cigar shaped objects in the sky. Sure, cigar shaped objects were popular then, exactly the same of passenger planes, still pretty uncommon at the time. But here’s what got Mike and I reported in state and national newspapers: we saw these cigar shaped objects go behind the moon. And come out the other side! And yes, in retrospect, I can see it still. The blue dark sky, the full moon, the objects slowly moving toward the moon, then disappearing, only to reappear a bit later.
Here’s something else. My life span also covers the golden age of space travel, when men dared for the first time to fly in rockets out of the atmosphere, when they orbited the earth and eventually both went to the moon and landed on it. That time is in the past now with space travel reduced to expensive rocket-powered trucks delivering and retrieving guests from an international space hotel.
Summer New (First Harvest) Moon
When we installed the landscaping, we asked for low maintenance. I still remember 
the skeptical look on Merle’s face. “Well, I can make it lower maintenance, but there’s no such thing as no maintenance.” In those first years I deadheaded, sprayed Miracle Gro, pruned the roses and planted a few bulbs.
Gradually, the land drew me in and I got more interested in perennials of all kinds bulbs, corms, tubers and root stock. Fall became (and remains) a ritual of planting perennials, most often bulbs. Fall finds me on a kneeler, making my prayer not to the Virgin Mary but to the decidedly unvirgin earth. Receive these my gifts and nourish them. And yes, I agree to help raise them.
Kate always planted a few vegetables but at some point we merged interests and expanded our vegetable garden. That was when organic gardening, permaculture and 
now biodynamics began to interest us. We futz around using some organic ideas like compost and integrated pest management, some permaculture design with plant guilds and productive spaces closest to the building that supports them and now some biodynamics (or whatever the right term is).
As I understand it, biodynamics works to produce the highest nutrient value in food by moving the soil towards sustainable fertility. This requires applications of various kinds of chemicals, yes, but in such a way as to increase the soil’s capacity to grow healthy, nutritious food and to do that in a way that maintains the soil’s fertility from year to year.
This is very different from modern ag which has a take it out and put it back approach to soil nutrients. In that approach modern ag focuses on nutrients that produce crops good for harvest and the farmer and food company’s economics, not the end consumer’s dietary needs. Biodynamics works at a subtler level, looking at the whole package of rare earths and other minerals necessary for healthy plants and the kind of soil conditions that optimize the plants capacity to access them.
Today I did a nutrient drench called Perk-Up. A nutrient drench goes onto the soil and 
encourages optimal soil conditions, a large proportion is liquified fish oil and protein. I also sprayed on the leaves and stalks of all the reproductively focused vegetables a product called brix blaster which encourages the plants to focus their energy on producing flowers and fruit.
The whole vegetable garden got Perk-up. The reproductive vegetables in our garden are: tomatillos, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, sugar snap peas, cucumbers and, for some reason, carrots plus all the fruits. I only sprayed the vegetables since the strawberries have just finished bearing and I haven’t decided whether or not to spray the orchard this year. Since I made up more than I needed, I also sprayed all the lilies which are heading into their prime blooming weeks just now, plus a few other miscellaneous flowers blooming or about to bloom.
Tomorrow I will spray another product that encourages vegetative growth on the appropriate vegetables: kale, onions, chard, beets, garlic and leeks.
This year my overall goal has been to jump up a level in the production of vegetables, increasing both quantity and quality without increasing the area planted. Next year I’ll continue what I already think is a successful program for them and expand to the fruits and, maybe, at least some of the flowers.
As I’ve said elsewhere, horticulture is a language and it takes time to learn. The plants and the soil speak to me all the time. I’ve had to immerse myself in a lot of different disciplines to learn their language. I’m not a native speaker, nor am I completely fluent but I’m well past the beginner stage.