Category Archives: Weather +Climate

Family, Feelings, Travel, Weather +Climate

Winter Storm Warning. 6-8 Inches of Snow. Oh, joy.

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Spring                                                                 Bee Hiving Moon

A cool morning in Wall, South Dakota. 37 and wet. Last day on the road for this trip. About 8 hours to Andover. Last posting for this trip. Just looked out the window. The Rav4 is covered in, of all things, snow! Winter just will not let go this year.

Traveling puts us in a liminal zone, neither at home or settled elsewhere. Liminality has long interested me. The liminal zone between ocean and land, lake and shore is often where the most abundant life thrives. The liminal zone between forest and meadow provides refuge for predator and prey alike. The ‘burbs are a liminal zone between rural and urban.

We’re most familiar of course with the liminal zones of dawn and twilight, but fall and spring are actually long liminal zones between the cold fallow time and the warmer growing season. Those strange interludes between sleeping and waking are, too, liminal.  The Celts believed the liminal times of day and night were the most potent for magical working.

Liminality puts us between familiar places, neither wet nor dry, city nor country, day nor night. In these spots we have the most opportunity to discern the new in the old, the possible in the routine. It’s not surprising then that Kate and I will approach the question of where we will live our third phase life from a different slant while on the road.

From this vantage, neither Minnesotaheim nor Mountainheim, we investigate the terrains of our heart, let the rational mind float, or stay tethered perhaps in Andover. The heart says family. It also says friends. It says have people close to us when vulnerable, which argues for both Minnesota and Colorado. It says memories; it says grandchildren. The heart pulls and pushes. We’ll mull our decision over the growing season, see how it flourishes or wanes, see what the heart says at home. Listen to friends and grandkids. And each other. Those dogs, too.

Weather +Climate

Mountains and Oceans

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Spring                                                                New (Emergent) Moon

Dark clouds over the Rockies this morning, rain and 57 after 78 yesterday. The horizon line shows bright just above the peaks, then another two degrees or so, the clouds point down toward the mountains, as if mirroring them. Virga falls in the distance.

(Rain Clouds Gathering-Scene Amongst the Allegheny Mountains  George Harvey 1840)

The weather changes quickly here, katabatic winds from the mountains meeting moist air from the gulf and cooler, drier air from the north. Depending on which one can be a weathermaker, Denver gets rain, heat or snow and cold.

The mountains have the same sort of presence as the ocean. They dominate the skyline to the west just as the ocean dominates the sight line to the curvature of the earth. Their difference from flat land is as dramatic as the ocean’s, too. Both remind us two leggeds that not all the earth was made for us. Or, better, that we were not made to enjoy all the earth.

That’s not to say we don’t venture onto and into the ocean, onto and up the mountains, we do; but, we make those treks with safety gear and attention for we are not on our element. Knowing their indifference to our welfare makes their presence nearby slightly unsettling, a reminder of the all to narrow slices of this planet on which our species can thrive.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Weather +Climate

Fencing Off Spring

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Spring (Ostara)                                                       Bee Hiving Moon

Friend Bill Schmidt found a helpful exposition on Ostara, an early fertility goddess, and her regular appearance in Christian households (among others) at this time of year. Here’s a link to this short, but well-researched piece.  After reading it, an odd thought occurred to me, perhaps because I also read this NYT piece this morning:  Saving Minds, Along With Souls.

The odd thought is this.  The church captured the renewal and invigorating power of spring as a metaphor for the resurrection, then demonized (quite literally) and punished pagan observances of the season, like those related in the linked piece Bill found.  The effect was to put a theological fence around the power of spring in Western culture, confining it within the garden of Christian orthodoxy.

By making church membership and belief a prerequisite for experience its power-through the Easter holiday-the natural celebration of a Great Wheel holiday, a real and joyous one, became dangerous, sanctioned as blasphemy.  The church accomplished this in fact through the burning of witches and the intentional extinguishing of earth focused traditions wherever it spread its missionary power. It accomplished it in theory through making spring only a metaphor for the resurrection.

Enough of that.  A temperate latitude Spring is a wonder, a life renewing, hopeful time when the earth shows that life comes again, and triumphs over the fallow time.  And more.  In doing so it assures life for the human race and all the animal kingdom that absolutely depends on its gentle, but unyielding power. It is an animal’s birthright to gambol when the grass greens and the trees leave out.  The joy is innate.

Business cycles come and go.  History rises and falls. Nations become great and then wither.  Religions prosper and die away. Note this, though. If even one spring failed to happen, it would cause a worldwide catastrophe more damaging than the failure of any of these. If two springs failed to happen in a row, there would be no need for business cycles or nations and history would record a near apocalypse.  Three springs? Well, just imagine.

(A Vision of Spring – Thomas Millie Dow)

So give me a bunny rabbit and some colored eggs. Let’s take off our shoes  and walk barefoot on the soil as it warms the seeds. I’ll dance with you as the shoots come up and starvation is banished once again.

 

 

Weather +Climate, Writing

Short Story Collection

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Spring (?)                                                               Bee Hiving Moon

Two more rejections have come in on this decidedly unspringlike day.  I can’t tell how much we have now, but when I went out at 7 pm to retrieve the trash container I walked in snow that came over the top of my Sorels.  In one day the advance of the sun has been pushed back, nullified by white, a covering more mid-winter than Easter.

Right now I’m going through a curious process of trying to collect all the short stories I’ve written in one spot though it has proved difficult.  I’ve had several computers over the years and transferring files from one to the next has not always been seamless.  All my novels and parts of novels are in one file, but until today the computer files I have of short stories were all over the place.  The computer files now have a home.

However.  In going through my paper files I’ve found many stories no longer extant as computer files.  That’s ok, because I can just reenter them, but it makes centralizing my cache of stories a bit more complicated.  I’m not sure I’ve located all the paper stories yet since I have three file cabinets plus bankers boxes, but over the next few weeks I’ll get all I can find in one physical location.

This is important to me because I’m editing and revising them in preparation for sending them out to magazines.  I want to have a reasonable idea of what my trunk looks like.

I edited one today, “I Found An Altar, Black With The Ash of Sacrifice,” that I like a lot, but it’s one of the paper only stories so I’m entering it now into Scrivener.  This process will take some time.

Art and Culture, Family, Garden, Weather +Climate

Saturday

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Spring                                                                Bee Hiving Moon

Business meeting.  Money continues to come in and go out.  Life in advanced stage capitalism.  Third life, that is.

The rain today waters in the nitrogen I put down yesterday and soaks the seeds, giving them that first shot of liquid and snugging them in their rows.  The chill, raw temps are why I did that yesterday afternoon.  This is the next week’s weather, roughly, according to the weather forecasts.

Kate and I see Mountaintop at 1 pm today at the Guthrie.  Bill Schmidt’s description of it made it interesting to me.  Also, in all these years of theater going, I’ve never seen a Penumbra presentation.  Looking forward to this one.

A kind thought to all those recovering or about to begin recovering from one medical intervention or another.  Especially Tom’s thumb and Frank’s back.

Dogs, Garden, Weather +Climate

The Wolf Came Out

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Spring                                                                 Bee Hiving Moon

The sun is as high in the sky now as it is at Labor Day.  That means warmth is coming. Today we’re supposed to hit 70.  Then, maybe get some snow on Sunday.  Back and forth. With the sun high, the snow from winter will be gone by then, except for those heroic dirty mountains that rose up in large parking lots.  I remember a few years back when they hung on until well into May.

The dogs heard something this morning around 2:30.  And set to howling and barking to get at it.  Kate finally got up and let them out.  She later heard a high pitched scream and a while after that the dogs retching.  Whatever it was, they caught it.  She also said the owl was in fact hooting last night.  It was, however, quiet when I wrote the post below this one.

Not often these days, but on occasion, we get reminded that these gentle loving creatures remain red in tooth and claw.  Underneath that indoor sweetness lie genes borne of wolves, most often not aroused, but last night.  The wolf came out.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Weather +Climate

Solar Lighting

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Spring                                                           Bee Hiving Moon

sun calendarThe days are getting longer.  The large calendar I have with the yellow egg-yolk like mass in the center and the months around it in a circle grows closer to the calendar’s inner circle day-by-day. The yellow mass represents hours of sunlight, thicker and closer to the calendar as we grow close to the summer solstice, then gently beginning to pull away until a large gap exists by December 21st, the winter solstice.  It’s a clever way to visualize a prime seasonal driver, hours of sunlight per day.

My order for nitrogen is on the way and I’m hoping the soil will at least be workable enough to plant the cool season crops before we leave for Denver.  Kate and I look forward to the gardening time, though we’re also glad for the break during the winter.

I moved further into Book I of the Metamorphoses today.  Deucalion, the son of Epithemus, the sole male survivor of the deluge, says, “Earth is the great mother (and)…the bones in the earth’s body are stones.”  He and Pyrrha, daughter of Prometheus, and the sole remaining female after the flood, will repopulate the earth by throwing stones behind themselves as they walk and the stones will become humans.

[Deucalion and Pyrrha Repeople the World by Throwing Stones Behind Them, c.1636 (oil on canvas)  by Rubens, Peter Paul (1577-1640)]

Her bones are still turning into people today.

 

Great Wheel, Weather +Climate

The Dance of The Seasons

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Spring                                                               Bee Hiving Moon

Coon Rapids has 9.0 inches and Ramsey has 8.0.  We’re between them so our snowfall must be somewhere in that range.  Minnesota’s weather always surprises.  I know many people live in areas where the weather changes only from dry to wet, never from hot to cold, but I find that sort of climate just as difficult to imagine as I figure they do ours.

It’s not like I haven’t experienced the sub-tropical, tropical climates.  I have.  What I can’t imagine is a whole year where the temperature doesn’t change and where one season is dry and the other wet.  Living in it, I mean.  From my vantage point it appears boring, but I know people adapt to it.  Brother Mark and sister Mary both live in climates very different from ours here in Minnesota:  Arabia and Singapore respectively.

I don’t know how much of the world’s food production occurs in the temperate latitudes…stopped to look it up.  “Most food is produced in the temperate Northern hemisphere, with the US by far the largest total and surplus food producer.”  IPCC, 2007 So, while we humans are by body a tropical to sub-tropical species, we are now fed by those regions that have a fallow season as well as a growing season.

This is the world I know best, being a midwesterner by birth and continued residence, changing location only slightly (by global standards) from the lower to the upper midwest. This agricultural area-the heartland of U.S. as well as world food production-is my home.  It is no surprise then that the Great Wheel has come into prominence in my way of viewing the world.  It is a temperate latitude agriculturally focused calendar, one that weaves together the rhythm of spring emergence, summer growth, fall harvests and the winter’s cold, growthless time into a whole.  With the Great Wheel we understand the necessary interlocking components of seasonal change for food production and more, how those components also serve as metaphor for our own lives.

The best thing about the Great Wheel is its insistence on the whole, celebrating the distinct seasonal changes as elements in a cycle, all required.  We cannot become summer people, or winter people because we know the summer as the hot, growth enhancing aspect of vegetative growth, not just the time of swimming suits and summer vacation.  I suppose this underlies my inability to imagine those other climates.  One season, extended, made permanent, upsets the dance.  At least from the perspective of those between 30 degrees and 50 degrees north latitude.

Our Land and Home, Weather +Climate

Ugly

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Imbolc                                                                      Hare Moon

Out to lunch celebrating the submission of Missing.

An often unremarked aspect of the thaw is how ugly things become.  The pristine whiteness that softened and reshaped the landscape becomes gritty, pocked with an icy crust.  Then, when it recedes, like a glacier retreating up a mountain valley, there is a debris field.  The difference of course is that in this case the debris is cigarette butts, condom wrappers, rubber bands, bottle tops and other objects discarded, perhaps back in November near the spot where they resurface.

This is why an early public services task here is street sweeping, since no one likes the looks of our road sides filled with the litter of three plus months.  Then in the lawns there are small tunnels and nests of dead grass where the voles have lived under the snowpack. Too, there is often a mold on the faded lawn, as if Miss Haversham had taken over in the neglect occasioned by winter.

All this though gets swept aside and forgotten as the lawns green, the trees bud and the first flowers begin to emerge.  The streets are clean, the lawns growing.  Soon it will time to get into the garden.

Anoka County, Garden, Weather +Climate

Melting

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Imbolc                                                                Hare Moon

It’s melting! It’s melting!  Yes, like the wicked witch in the land of Oz the snow built up and preserved for so long has begun to melt.  It runs down gutter spouts, leaves crusty holes in the various hills of snow around the house.  The sun smiles and as it has grown higher in the sky its smile has increased in warmth.  The Great Wheel may have been slowed a bit this winter, but it seems to have gotten better purchase.

This does not, though, for those of you far away in warmer lands, release us from the grip of winter.  The ground stays frozen as long as there is snow on it and after the snow leaves it takes a while for the soil to warm up.

Outdoor gardening work won’t start for at least another month, maybe a bit longer.  Some forestry tasks might get done after I get back from Arizona.  The momentum has shifted and the new growing season is struggling to get born.