Category Archives: Great Work

Family, Garden, Great Work

Earth Bound

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                               Emergence Moon

That Kate and Charlie gardening team have begun another year of plant wrangling. Kate planted the herb spiral, cut a space so we can more easily harvest raspberries in the fall and mended the flower bed wounded by Rigel. Meanwhile tomatoes, peppers, chard, collard greens and ground cherries found themselves spots for the growing season.1000Kate and Charlie in Eden

There is nothing more literally grounding than planting.  We move the soil aside, add some nutrients and water. All the time we have to consider the type of plant, what it needs, how the soil is (though that process here is largely over) and what its requirements for sun are. Most vegetables need full sun and we had the big ash in the midst of our garden cut down last year to open up more areas of full sun.  A seed (its package) or a plant (its plastic container) leaves a temporary home for a place it can flourish, reach its optimum.

Caring for a garden together is so much like raising a family, caring for dogs. Nurture. It helps us stay in touch with our home and as a by product we get nutritious food. A pretty good deal.

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home

Tender Planting

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                   Emergence Moon

Finally the temperature regime has begun to warm, making it safe for the tomatoes, peppers, egg plant, beans, cucumber and tomatillos. We drove to Green Barn this morning to pick up egg plant, tomatillos, blue berry plants, chard and collard greens. They’re already out of kale.

After getting my head straight about the international ag labs recommendations, I put together a batch of transplant water, 3 gallons. Then I poured Jubilate, a microbial inoculant into an old dog dish, tossed the urea in its jar on top and carried all this out to the vegetable garden. To get into the garden I had to step over the copper bird feeder pole I inserted just below the gate’s bottom to keep Rigel out.

Setting those things down I retrieved the tomato and pepper plants from the deck where they have been sitting since coming last Tuesday. Kate’s been taking them out and bringing them in at night since the weather was too chilly for them. Now it’s all good.

Putting two tablespoons of urea (small white pellets) and two tablespoons of Jubilate (a 670_0299brownish thick powder) into each hole, I put the midgets, the romas and the Cherokee Purples in their places atop the sun trap. Then, using an old Tide measuring cap, I spooned a pint of transplant water onto each tomato plant.

The peppers went into a raised bed and they received identical treatment except the amounts were one and a half tablespoons instead of two. Then the transplant water.

By that time the sun had come out. It was noon. Having just seen the dermatologist yesterday I decided to stop and return later in the afternoon, when the sun’s angle is more gentle. I want to get all the tender plants, including the beans and peas, planted today. Then we’ll be into maintenance mode for the next two and a half to three months.

Of course, with the international ag lab’s system, maintenance is more intensive than in the past, but that’s fine. The results are worth it.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Weather +Climate

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Climate

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                            Emergence Moon

A word about religious language. Though rooted in a metaphysics with which I no longer agree, much of the language developed by Christian theologians has earthly application.

Here are some examples. Atonement describes the process of reconciliation between one estranged and the one from whom they are estranged. Atonement is just what we need for a species estranged from its home, no longer aware of the rich and intimate love only footsteps away from most doors.

(Antonio Palomino. Saint Michael Vanquishing the Devil, 1700-14)

It is, I suppose you could say, the story of the prodigal son, the wastrel who fled parental care and set out wandering far from home. Only atonement, the return of the prodigal to his home, can overcome the estrangement.

But, before atonement comes repentance. That is, the estranged must come awake to the hamartia* that creates their current condition. Most of us know only vaguely (we see through a glass darkly) of our implication in the reduction in Arctic sea ice, the acidification of the oceans, the gradual warming of the temperate latitudes. We are even mostly ignorant of the web of decisions we make daily to draw more oil from the sands of Arabia or the fracking fields of North Dakotas, decisions that also push the coal trains out of the Powder River Coal Fields in Wyoming, snaking like a plague along our nations railroads.

(Peasant family returns home paint by the Belgian artist Eugène Laermans (1864-1940) – Boekarest:National Museum of Art of Romania (Romania)

Hamartia, in its classical understanding, results in tragedy. It is often related to hubris, that overweening pride that causes blindness. There is little doubt that our estrangement from mother earth is reinforced by our hubris and that the result of that hubris is humanity’s fatal flaw. The end will be not a triumphant Christ hurling sinners into hell but the sinners themselves creating hell above ground as temperatures and sea levels and extreme weather events rise.

The Great Work for our generation, as Thomas Berry describes it, is to create a sustainable path for humans on this planet. In religious language this means we must guide each other back home, to a home where we will be received by a loving mother and father (the earth and the sun). We prodigals must prostrate ourselves before our parents and end our estrangement. And, of course, the curious, paradoxical truth is that in doing so we will save ourselves, not the planet.

 

*Hamartia is a concept used by Aristotle to describe tragedy. Hamartia leads to the fall of a noble man caused by some excess or mistake in behavior, not because of a willful violation of the gods’ laws. Hamartia is related to hubris, which was also more an action than attitude.

 

Aging, Commentary on the news, Family, Great Work, Politics, Science, Sierra Club

The Grandchildren Project

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                       Emergence Moon

A shift in public opinion concerning climate change seems to be accelerating. We may be near a tipping point where acceptance of climate change science corresponds to acceptance of evolution. Yes, there will always be outliers, just like the Texas and Kansas school boards exhibit every once in a while on evolution, but the mass of us will finally hear the very clear science behind many changes impacting us already.

Proof? Jon Huntsman, former governor of Utah and a possible GOP candidate for President in 2016, wrote this remarkable sentence in an op-ed piece for the NYT: “If Republicans can get to a place where science drives our thinking and actions, then we will be able to make progress.”  Paul Douglas, local and national meteorologist and a conservative, too, has long observed the conundrum behind conservatives who refuse to conserve.

It may be that the long game for climate politics is about to bear fruit. For those patiently (and not so patiently) working on climate change related issues the era of solution based debates rather than denial and obfuscation might be coming near. This will be an exciting but also frustrating time as those only recently convinced try to digest the difficult realities ahead of us.  Those of us who’ve wanted to see forward motion will be in danger of refusing to listen to solutions that don’t fit our already existing paradigms.

It will be important to recall that our solutions have largely been developed among those of us who already agree with each other. Gaining political consensus for policy will require including those who don’t share many of our assumptions. Here’s a clear one. Nuclear energy may well be an important component of a transition to a non-carbon based energy regime. We need critical mass for the generation of electricity while renewable sources begin to catch up and storage technologies improve. We simply may not have time to ignore capable non-emitting nuclear power plants.

I’m excited that this push for solutions may happen in my lifetime and that those of us with grandchildren might help create the change. Call it the grandchildren project.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics, Science, Sierra Club

Not Hope, Grief and Agency

Leave a comment

Spring                                                                    Bee Hiving Moon

Wanted to say a bit about Paul Kingsnorth, the environmental activist who has given up on activism. If you want to read the NYT article about him, follow the link.

You might be tempted to dismiss his analysis, or you might not want to hear what he’s saying and deny it. But from what I learned in the climate change course recently completed he’s right in an important sense.

The goal identified at Copenhagen is to limit warming to 2 degrees centigrade or between 3.6 and 4 degrees Fahrenheit.* This amount of warming is baked in already.  That is, we’ve already loaded enough CO2 into the atmosphere to ensure it. So, the Copenhagen goal will be exceeded.  The question at issue now is by how much.  See below for a definition of RCP.**

The year to pay attention to is 2050.  That’s the year that the pathways begin to diverge, representing the amount of emissions in that year. RCP2.6 assumes a successful reduction in emissions worldwide of 80% by 2050 and 100% by 2100. This can be done. There are several different pathways that get us there. The problem is the politics of carbon emission control.

Most of the lecturers in the climate change course thought this was not going to happen. That puts us into the range of RCP4.5 to RCP8.5.  4.5C=8F and 8.5C=15.3F. I don’t agree with Kingsnorth’s word ecocide because the plant and animal world will adjust to all of these temperature ranges.  Yes, many species will not be able to adapt, but many will.

Still, and I think this is where Kingsnorth is right, the world as we know it is beyond saving. We will have to adapt and adjust to a dramatically changed reality, a new climate reality that may cause the death of billions of people from starvation, dehydration or heat exhaustion.

I also believe he’s right in saying that we need to accept dramatic change as inevitable and that we need to grieve the loss of our familiar world. Only in grieving will we touch the new reality.

Here’s where I think he’s wrong. There is still time and there are workable strategies that can limit the magnitude of the changes we face. With no action, the up ramp of CO2 that continues to pump into the atmosphere will ensure the RCP8.5 scenario.  Somehow we must combine working through our grief over a lost world that may seem like paradise in another 100 years with our determination to moderate the degree of change as much as possible.

If we stick to the 2C goal of Copenhagen, the world will see failure and failure cuts the nerve of political agency. We need to accept that goal as simply wrong and work now to do what’s possible. The future demands that we do everything we can, only much later will we know how well we did.

 

 

 

*”Fahrenheit (symbol°F) is a temperature scale based on one proposed in 1724 by the physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686–1736)”… wiki.  Just occurred to me that I didn’t know the origin of the word.

** Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) are four greenhouse gasconcentration (not emissions) trajectories adopted by the IPCC for its fifth Assessment Report (AR5).[1]

The pathways are used for climate modeling and research. They describe four possible climate futures, all of which are considered possible depending on how much greenhouse gases are emitted in the years to come. The four RCPs, RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6, and RCP8.5, are named after a possible range of radiative forcing values in the year 2100 relative to pre-industrial values (+2.6, +4.5, +6.0, and +8.5 W/m2, respectively).[2]

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home

It’s Beginning in Earnest

Leave a comment

Spring                                                                         Bee Hiving Moon

Scraping the mulch off the bulbs today, that scent, you know the one, decayed leaf matter mixed with the soil came up.  It says life is at work here, even in the midst of death. That smell alone brings me out in the early days of gardening. It was there when I raked off the mulch over the beds where I planted the carrots and the beets.

Then, under the leaves are pale green stalks emerging, starved for direct sun, happy to have their cover removed.  They’ll get a deeper green in just a day or two. We’re past the time for freezes of any serious sort now though frost is not only still possible, it’s still likely until around May 10, May 15.

The whole garden will gradually come back into full life.  The spring ephemerals shoot up now and will bloom soon. The carrots and beets will germinate and then in mid-May we’ll drop in the tomatoes, peppers, beans, chard, kale, melons, cucumbers and eggplants.  Meanwhile the fruit trees will bud, then flower, as will the currants and the elderberries and the gooseberries and the blueberries.

If the bees are alive, and I hope they are, they’ll be getting busy.  I’ll have a divide this year instead of a package, which means I’ll have to buy a queen for the divide. If they’re really going.  I’ll find out tomorrow.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

The Leaf In Place of The Cross

Leave a comment

Spring                                                                      Bee Hiving Moon

Final post on this series.  If you need a symbol of eternal life, let me refer you to the tree leaf and not the cross.  In this 74 degree day I just finished scraping the mulch from bulbs I planted last fall.  The mulch is tree leaves gathered in the same season.

The leaf works hard from early spring until fall capturing sunlight, drawing up water from the tree’s roots and combining them with CO2 in a true transubstantiation, photosynthesis. When the seasonal change indicates to the tree that conditions will no longer be good for photosynthesis, the leaf detaches from the tree’s vascular system and in so doing, its chlorophyll returns to the tree. This is the moment when the leaf changes color, revealing its other pigments.

As it withers from loss of water, the leaf changes color again and eventually detaches from the tree itself. That’s when I pick it up as a mulch. When I apply the leaf to the newly planted beds, the leaves perform two functions.  First, they insulate the bed, retaining the cold into the early days of spring so the earth won’t heave and throw the newly planted bulbs out. Second, they begin to decay and transfer their remaining stores of nutrients and fiber into the soil itself.

In this way the engine of transubstantiation, the leaf, even after it produces oxygen for us to breathe and glucose for the plant to use in its growth, gives up all of itself to the plant community in general, enriching the soil for the next generation.

So the leaf, a most ordinary miracle doer, does in fact what Christian’s claim Jesus can do, that is, give life through their death. You might say that in focusing on the cross Christian’s chose the wrong part of the tree.

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

Fencing Off Spring

Leave a comment

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.

 

 

Cinema and Television, Great Work, Humanities, US History

Wish I’d Known the Son-of-a-Bitch Wanted to be a Millionaire.

Leave a comment

Spring                                                                      Bee Hiving Moon

Kate and I saw Nebraska the other night.  This movie was pitch perfect for heartland small town dialogue.  The images it created of Billings, Montana, Hawthorne, Nebraska,  and Lincoln, Nebraska felt taken from my recent adventure driving between my surprise incursion point into Kansas and Highway 80 in mid-Nebraska.  Small rural towns in the midwest have suffered, a lot, over the last 50 years.  They’re run down and often sparsely settled though that trend has begun to ameliorate somewhat.

There were as well images of striking beauty, especially a wide-angle shot of a slightly rolling field with bales of rolled hay sprinkled throughout.  If not for the black and white, it could have been painted by Breughel.  The big sky and vast horizons of the drive from Billings to Lincoln are also beautiful, the stark aesthetic of the plains.

Not only because it was black and white, but because of its tight focus on family and strangeness (remember Mom lifting her skirt to the gravestone?), too, this film reminded me of Ingmar Bergman.  These were everyman characters dealing with everyday issues:  a desultory  job, American hucksterism and its unwitting victims, a long distanced father and son closing the gap, a slow revelation of Woody and David’s largeheartedness.

It will, unfortunately, only serve to convince bi-coastal sophisticates that the rural midwest is unredeemable, shabby and coarse, low-browed.  It cannot and does not try to show the agricultural culture that lies behind the small towns and cities and lives it portrays.  It also cannot show the slow but persistent erosion of rural life as farming has gone corporate and the kids leave home for Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, even Lincoln and Omaha.

This is not a criticism of the movie, but a wistful longing for an artful representation of growing food, tending livestock, some way of showing the heartland as just that, the heart of a great nation and a food producer for the world.

Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, World History

An Afternoon

Leave a comment

Spring                                                             Bee Hiving Moon

Moving deeper into Book I of the Metamorphoses.  Next week I’ll set a schedule for translating, so many verses a day.  Plus I plan to set a schedule for certain additional research that will go along with this task, things like comparing Ovid’s stories with other accounts of the same myth, investigating key grammatical or etymological points and, the big one, getting deep into Roman history of the late Republic and early Imperial era, Ovid’s time.  Over the last couple of years I have purchased books about Ovid and his poetry, Roman poetry and comparative literature between and among Ovid and his peers.

(Deucalião_e_Pirra   Giovanni_Maria_Bottalla)

I’ve not been too willing to get into these areas in any depth until I felt the translating had reached some point, though I didn’t know what that was.  Well, now I’ve reached it.  And I’m ready to go the next step.

I spent a half an hour today and translated 5 verses, so my speed is picking up, though to be fair the difficulty varies, usually with regard to the length of a sentence.

Also in the mail today.  The nitrogen for the vegetable garden and my new Lenovo laptop. This replaces my old Hewlett-Packard, a sturdy and reliable machine that has been outstripped by cheaper processors and memory and the retirement of Microsoft XP.  It doesn’t have enough juice to run Windows 7 or Windows 8.  Tomorrow I plan to start it up and see what’s what.