Daily Archives: May 14, 2012

Dogs, Family, Feelings, Literature, Travel

A Thought, A Sigh

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Beltane                                                                            Beltane Moon

All day.  A thought comes.  A sigh, hoping to delve into, oh, say, renaissance humanism.  Dive in and just stay there until all there is to absorb crawls inside my skin and remains.  Or, maybe Romania.  Wondering just how the Slavic countries ended up north and south of Romania-Hungary-Austria.  Here’s another part of the world about which I know almost nothing.

Later, watching Kate, seeing her sinking back into a life without paid work, a sense of relaxation, of being at home.  At last.

Looking at the Google art.  A kris.  A southeast Asia blade with a wavy, not straight edge.  Indonesia.  Again, a country with a population comparable to the US and lots of islands, but, again, not much is in my head about it.  A little.  Bali.  Krakatoa.  Suharto.  My god, it has 17508 islands.

Lyndon Johnson.  In the first volume of Robert Caro’s four volume (so far) biography.  He dominates, pushes, acts out against his parents.  The hill country of texas.  A difficult place, a trap for the unwary.  Most of the people who lived there.

The dogs.  At the vet.  18 years to the same vet.  Many dogs, all panting, all nervous.  Rigel, Vega and Kona today.  Rigel and Vega, sweet dogs.  Kona more aloof.  A grand dame.

Irrigation overhead busted in the southern vegetable garden.  Pulled loose from the pcv that feeds it water.  Have to fix it.  Plant more collards and beets.  I’ve touched most of the plants here, memories.  Buying them at Green Barn.  Digging a spot for them.  Pouring water on them.  Over the years, 18, lots of plants, thousands.  One at a time.  In the soil.  Maybe pick it up and move it or divide it.  That sense of a deep, long connection.

Dream of the Red Chamber.  Chinese literature, the third classic of the four major ones.  Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  Monkeys Journey to the West. Sinking into the rhythms of another culture.  Reading it on the Kindle.  Odd juxtaposition of past and present.

original by Ivan Walsh)

Now, tired.  Smelling the lilacs Kate brought me.  Thinking of sleep.

 

 

Garden

A Nod to Flora

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Beltane                                                          Beltane Moon

“Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly–and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.”
–  Omar Khayyám

When we began life here in Andover, we decided we would like cut flowers in our home as often as possible, especially during the growing season.  We’ve not always cut them, but we sure have grown them.  Kate brought me two vases just a moment ago, one with fragrant lilacs and the other early purple iris and late, yellow daffodils.

To do this over the course of the growing season, that is, cut flowers for inside, requires planning for perennials that bloom throughout. (I’m not much of an annual guy, though Kate buys some each year.) Not always an easy task.  I still have some lacunae, late June and late July.  Finding fall bloomers that would survive here was a task for a while but asters and monkshod and clematis fill in with the help of the occasional fall-blooming crocus.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Retirement, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Changes

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Beltane                                                                       Beltane Moon

Received a second invitation to a going away party for two friends moving to Maine.  They’re part of the Woolly change, the moves and deaths, the losses that accrue as we head past 65.  They seem pretty energized by this move to a home in Robbinston, a spot near the Atlantic and New Brunswick.  And why not?

Change can give us a fresh perspective, a place to begin again or to continue, but in a different direction.

Over the last several years I’ve chosen to embrace change as a deepening process, crossing thresholds into the unknown in areas with which I have substantial familiarity:  literature, arts, gardening, politics, family, religion.

In literature, for example, I moved into a different kind of book, a fantasy epic instead of the one off novels I’ve written up till now.  This change exhilarated me, made me stretch, thinking about the long arc rather than the shorter one handled in one volume.

The Latin learning and translating I’m doing is in service of deepening, too.  Deepening my knowledge of Greek myth and Roman culture.  I have, also, now peaked behind the veil of translation, learned something about the kinds of choices translators have to make.

In the arts I’ve chosen to focus most of my learning in Asian arts, probing deeper into Chinese history and the role of context for the art we have at the MIA.  This part year didn’t see as any Asian tours as in the past, but I’ve continued studying, reading Chinese literature and learning more history.

My grasp of photography has increased considerably, too, as has my understanding of contemporary art.  Going deeper.

As Kate and I have gotten wiser about our garden and how we actually use it, we’ve gone deeper into vegetable and fruit growing and preserving.  The bees increased our appreciation for the engagement of insects in the plant world.  And for honey, too.

In religion I’ve stepped away from any organized groups or lines of thought, trying now to penetrate how changes underway across the world might demand a new way of faith.  This one’s proving difficult.  But, that’s where the juice is, right?

Finally, I’m learning, still, how to be a grandparent with my two instructors, Gabe and Ruth.  Also, I’m learning the role of parent in children’s mid-life, where demands of work and family consume them.  Again, a deepening and a change.

Emerson said long ago that we do not need to travel to Italy to see beauty.  Beauty is where we see it, not only, perhaps not even primarily, where others see it.