Daily Archives: August 15, 2008

Friends, Garden

Men Always Need Help

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61  bar steady 30.14  0mph N dew-point 57  sunrise 6:16  sunset 8:19

Full Corn Moon  moonrise 2014    moonset  0554

Whoa.  Did you see the 7th gold medal race for Phelps?  His long, long arms came out of an arcing stroke, reached for the touch pad and, by .01 of a second, arrived ahead of the silver medalist.  To the naked eye it looked like Phelps did not make it.  A later interview with Mark Spitz, also winner of 7 gold medals, showed Phelps a humble and more realistic viewer of his own accomplishments than others.  Others wanted to make him the greatest Olympian; he said he was happy to be among the ones considered great, like Jesse Owens.  All this and modesty, too?  A great American to represent us in a country which understands the value of modesty.

With the Woollies here on Monday Kate and I have begun to get into preparation mode.  We don’t entertain often, hardly at all, but fortunately she’s an experienced suburbanite.  She can throw a party.  Best of all, she’s doing it on her birthday.  I’m lucky and the Woolly palate will be lucky.

The garden will get a spruce up.  I’ll dead-head all the day lilies and pull the obvious weeds if there are any.  The weeds growing up between the patio bricks will come out, too.  They could have come out a while ago, but we’ve had other matters.  The fire-pit can hold a fire, though its not pretty, nor finished, but the pit itself exists.  A bit of shuffling papers upstairs,  some art to the living room, turning furniture in a group friendly circle and we’ll be ready.  I’m looking forward to having the guys over and discussing what it means to be an America.

Kobe Bryant tonight on TV said he was proud to have USA on his team jersey. We’re the best, he said.  Not sure what that means, but that’s the question for Monday.

Apropos of none of the above is a story from the last Sierra Club political committee meeting.  We decided the three Minnesota house races we would target and a male committee member looked at the list after we’d congratulated ourselves on sorting out a complicated task, “Yeah, except we picked all the guys.”  There had been six races, three with men and three with women.

As his comment settled on the group, Katarina, the Sierra Club intern from Lentz, Germany looked up, smiled, and said, “That’s all right.  Men always need help anyway.”  Ooofff.

Faith and Spirituality, Literature, Writing

Dark Energy

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67  bar rises 30.17  0mph NNE dew-point 58  sunrises 6:15  sunset 8:19

Whole Corn Moon

“We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter, we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of the beauties of Emerson is his immersion in the rhythms of the natural world.   Any farmer, any gardener, even any denizen of the farmer’s markets has a visceral sense of the way human activity changes with the seasons, at least in temperate latitudes.  Once the growing season begins, and for a bit before it does, our attention begins to move outside.  At first we watch temperatures, frost dates and the warming of the soil.  Then, we begin to watch for plant emergence, the ephemerals.  Once spring is in full gear with last frost date past, the growing season begins in earnest.  This means we are outside, working.  In this work we express, as Emerson subtly suggests,  our confidence as changers of the world.  We plant corn here and corn grows.  We plant tulips there and color blossoms.

Then, when the all the plants save the ancient firs and pines have begun to die back and the vegetables have given their harvest, we turn back toward the inside, reading and crafts and puttering in the workshop perhaps, or focusing on our work for pay.  As the nights grow longer, as they do even now, we light our fires and gather in our modern caves, lights on against the dark.

Still, I part company with Emerson a bit at the end of this quote.  The night, as it grows longer and deeper, heading toward the winter solstice, the heart of mid-winter, encourages creativity.  The metaphor of the day goes from verdant field to fecund womb.  As we slow, pull in our senses and live more in our interior, seeds planted long ago begin to sprout.  The novel we muttered about while weeding the tomatoes begins to demand a place in our lives.  The child we wondered about in the spring begins to insist, pushing us toward family.  The painting influenced by the play of light on brown and withering plants takes on shape and color.

Hecate. Persephone. Jesus in the tomb.  Osiris scattered among the reeds.  The rebel angel in Pandemonium.  The shadow within our own psyche.  All these are night time, dark energy forces.  Their energy often sublimates when the external world draws us; but when winter or melancholy strikes,  they can draft upward, burst out into full awareness and with their explosive power drive us either toward self-destruction or acts of creation.