Monthly Archives: June 2010

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Weather +Climate

Rain

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Beltane                                                  Waning Planting Moon

Today I looked up at the sky while weeding.  Gray clouds covered it all and rain drops had begun to splash on the brim of my hat.  The sky and I, it felt, were sad and crying, both of us, on this June summer morning.

It was an odd sensation that did not last.  As the day has gone on, I’ve had a nap and feel refreshed, but  the rain continues.  A soaking rain, a kind we’ve had too little of of late.  Now we often get thunder, lightning and torrents, often producing more erosion than watering.

All the dogs have been subdued yesterday and today, adjusting to Emma’s absence.  Marking her passing.  Me, too.

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

Flat

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Beltane                                         Waning Planting Moon

Leeks and potatoes both need mounding around their growing plants, the potatoes to have more underground room in which to develop their tubers and the leeks to blanch the lower part of the stalk into the familiar white of the leek you see in the grocery store.  Did that.  At the same time I planted bush beans between the rows of the potatoes.  They help ward off bugs and provide something to eat.  A good deal.

Feeling flat today.  Negative.  Grief, probably.  I know I want Kate home.  I want to share the home here again.  She’s been gone almost two weeks.

You ever have that moment where you realize things have slowed down, inside?  Movement becomes a tad   more sluggish, thought a bit more difficult, like slogging through a marshland.  Sighing.  That’s me.  Overcast weather gets some credit, too.  Multiple vectors today, arrows pointing down.

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality

Emergence

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Beltane                                            Waxing Plating Moon

Her crate is cleaned.  Her body taken for cremation.  The bowl in which I fed her has joined the other big bowls, no longer needed for our smaller whippets.  Emma was a big girl, tall and ropy muscled in her prime.  There is still, or do I imagine it, a faint odor of death, a sweet sick smell, not decay.   Hilo and Kona, who’ve known only life with Emma, appear subdued, but it’s never clear to me how much dogs grieve, although I know they do.

Driving back from the vets this  morning, I realized, as I have before, but never quite like this time, that the moments of life are precious and fleeting.  When life ends, whatever, if anything (and I doubt it) happens, happens in a manner  out of conjunction with this reality.

I resolved to get out in the beautiful Anoka County parks more, to wander the back roads and wild areas here as I have in the past, but have largely given up.  Not sure why.  Emma may not have been human, but she was loved and loving, a mammal, warm blooded, feeling, a thinker, conscious of her own life, and her death reminds me of these gifts, the true and miraculous, the precious, and yes, the sacred gifts of life itself.

A thinker I’m becoming more acquainted with wants to redefine sacred as the emergent properties in the world.  Life is emergence at its most complex, its most mysterious, its most wonderful.  What is emergence?  It is the remarkable, unexpected something more when the sum of our body’s chemical components come together as a vital organism.  We’re not worth much, broken down into our chemical constituents, but with life we become a treasure, a unique contribution to the ongoing fabric of the universe.

To that understanding of the sacred I say, “Namaste.”

Dogs

Emma’s Last Adventure

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Beltane                                                Waning Planting Moon

Emma’s excursion yesterday gave her, as things turned out, her last chance to wander on her own, beyond the woods and backyard that have been her home for over fourteen years.  She died last night, in her crate.  It was probably an arrhythmia that did not convert like the one several weeks ago.

Emma has been old for a couple of years.  I mean bow-legged, wobbly old.  Her hearing had diminished and she didn’t eat well.  Dogs though, and Emma was no exception, take their infirmities in stride, as part of the way things are.  Really, are they ever anything else?

We got Emma and her sister Bridgit, dead now three years or so, from a breeder who had sought the perfect whippet.  Through line breeding, sort of the doggy equivalent of incest.  We didn’t know that at the time and were happy to have two new puppies.  Iris and Buck, our last whippet pair at that time, had both died.  We missed them.

As they matured, though, Emma and Bridgit were both peculiar, shy and reclusive.  Emma, for years, and I mean, like 10 years, wouldn’t allow us to come near enough to pet her.  She flinched and ran away.  We’ve had dogs always and many dogs so we could see aberrant behavior and not blame ourselves.  It was just the way they were.

Bridgit left us to live with Jon because he needed a companion.  In that one-to-one situation Bridgit took the turn toward a normal doggy life, running to you when you came and playing.  Emma, though, in a house with sometimes as many 6 dogs, didn’t get there until much later.

Same of my fondest memories of Emma came when she was 5 or 6.  We had a bad storm that toppled a basswood, a giant maybe 60 feet high.  The trunk lay where it fell and it happened to land with a clear path on its side to the sun.  Emma took to running up that trunk and standing, head erect and surveying the property, maybe 10 feet off the ground.  She looked grand.

The Wolfhound deaths, and I’ve seen 8, are wrenching, difficult because they die between 5 and 8 years old, in what seems like their prime.  Emma’s, and Iris’s too, are different.  These are deaths of old age, a life run its course.  I’m sad, of course, but not heart broken.

Em was a regal and quiet dog, who kept her own counsel and lived life as she wanted.  Would most of us could say the same.

Asia, Garden, Health, Humanities

Better…And Not

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Beltane                                   Waning Planting Moon

I’m still deep in the The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, following the exploits of Cao Cao, Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei among many, many others.  Still not a third of the way done with it.

Tomorrow, weather permitting, I’ll do more weeding. Weeding and pruning.  Those are the main tasks at this point in the gardening year.  That and finding some weedless straw for mulch.  It’s hard to find.

A week and a half past my colds onset I feel pretty good, back to normal with the exception of  remaining sludge.  I feel like an engine in need of an oil change.  I even went back to the ramped up work outs  today and had no repeat of the dizziness and nausea I experience a couple of weeks ago, the last time I did this workout at the new pace.

Feeling a bit of a let down, not sure why.  Maybe it’s just the push, push of garden, Latin, dogs, food or, more likely, it’s just a cycling through of a bit of melancholy.  Whatever it is sleep will help.

Dogs

Emma Elopes

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Beltane                                  Waning Planting Moon

Emma took off on a tour of the neighborhood.  Our housekeeper Lois opened the front door and Emma slipped out, using her fourteen years of observing human behavior, not speed, as her ally.  By the time I got to the front after Lois alerted me, Emma could not be seen.  I hollered a bit, mostly fruitless since Emma hears about as well as most nearing the end of their natural life.

I felt sure she would return on her own, but hearing Kate asking me if I did everything I could, I got in the car and drove around the neighborhood (which, by the way, uses the term very loosely).  No Em.

Came back home, made myself some noodles, came downstairs to get ready for Latin.  Halfway through the noodles Emma sauntered by garden patio doors.  Knew she would.

Faith and Spirituality, Writing

Compelling Writing?

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Beltane                                      Waning Planting Moon

Each morning I get up, let the dogs out, open the garage door, wander down the driveway, pick up the newspaper, open it and read the front page on the way back, make breakfast, read and finish the paper (a geezer thing to do if I read the cultural tea leaves aright), the come downstairs.  When I get downstairs, no matter what else I have planned, I end up here, writing in this blog.

(medieval blogging)

I read a quote from Carl Jung the other day which said that any addiction, no matter what it is, is bad.  As much as I admire Jung, I had to wonder.  Perhaps the question is where does habit begin to bleed over into  compulsion?  My exercise habit, strong enough now that I feel a push to do it rather than not, is that an addiction?  Writing here in the morning, is this habit compelling me?

My TV watching in the evenings comes very close to addiction, perhaps presses over the line.  In the Monty Python skit the comfy chair, a member of the spanish inquisition uses a comfortable chair with which to torture the suspected heretic.  “Seet here,  you scuum.”  My repose in my own comfy chair, literally, and in the pillowy bosom of broadcast television, occurs at my own doing, yet has a culturally activated and market reinforced quality, too.

The other two?  Not so much.  I say this, Mr. Jung, from the vantage point of a former smoker and a recovering alcoholic now 34+ years sober.

OK.  I can go now.

Weather +Climate

Cooler, But Dry

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Beltane                                           Waning Planting Moon

Ah.  Those of us who prefer the northern to the southern breathed a sigh of relief today as the weather pattern changed and the jet stream bowed to the south.  A dew point of 47 feels pretty good, too.

No one finds drought as interesting as tornadoes and hurricanes and snow, but nothing impacts those of us who garden and care about our landscape as personally as drought does.  The yellow on this US Drought Monitor Map covers all or almost all of Anoka County.

The state climatologist says:  “Portions of east central Minnesota are…depicted as experiencing Moderate drought. This is the result of long-term dryness that began in June of 2008. This long-term precipitation anomaly is responsible for very low water levels in larger lakes and wetland complexes across portions of Anoka, Ramsey, Chisago, and Washington counties.”

A large portion of the Arrowhead has extreme drought conditions.  In fact, streams up there are at the 5th percentile for drainage into Lake Superior for this date.  That’s low water.  Superior is six inches below last year and well below historic levels.

My vegetables have required some extra irrigation to keep them on schedule and able to endure the heat.

Dogs, Health

Off to the Warehouse

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Beltane                              Waning Planting Moon

A trip to the warehouse for the temple of Mammon, Costco.  Dogfood, dog treats and propel for Kate.  Escaped without extra items or involuntary confinement.vegarigel400

Felt great yesterday, today not so much.  That they left the shredded paper insulation behind in my sinuses feeling.  Anticipating thunderstorms this afternoon and a cool down tomorrow, I’m going to work inside today, outside the rest of the week.