We have two mildly thunder phobic dogs, Gertie and Rigel. Rigel barks at the thunder, yet also likes to curl up in protected space. Gertie whines. So, last night Gertie slept in our bedroom and Rigel went to her safeplace, an enclosed spot by the door to the garage. With the banging thunder and somewhat anxious dogs, sleep was at a premium last night.
May you live in an interesting June. Old Minnesota proverb. And this is one. As we near the solstice,
Beltane Garlic Moon
Here there be giants. Fin de siecle Europe. We’ve not recovered yet from the explosion of ideas that erupted there: quantum mechanics, relativity, Marxism, symbolists, dada, surrealism, the airplane, electricity, lights, antibiotics, cubism, expressionism, fauvism, psychoanalysis, world war.
Just finished watching A Dangerous Method with Vigo Mortennsen as Freud, Michael Fassbender as Jung and Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein. To my taste Cronenberg’s focus on Jung’s mistress tilted the film away from the revolutionary work Freud and Jung had created. But, perhaps my approach would lead more to documentary.
Still, what I got was a clear sense of the frisson between them and the astonishing, breath-taking really, courage it took to think the thoughts and engage in the work they did. That’s what led me back to the fin de siecle.
There were radicals alive. It must have been in the water. Seeing visions. Looking inside the mind. Down inside the atom. How to lift humankind into the air. How to cure disease.
The audacity and daring inspires me, makes me want to tread as far out on the pier as I can go, to risk falling into the void, the abyss. To see. To feel. To embrace.
Beltane Garlic Moon
I’ve got lilies blooming. They’re early. By about a week, maybe a bit more. Lilies are my 
favorite flower, Asian lilies and Martagons. Their colors are deep, rich, luminous. I don’t know what it means that they’re out so early. Might be the peculiar combinations of heat, cool and lottsa rain.
pic is from 2010, June 28
Beltane Garlic Moon
The garlic may not be harvestable under the garlic moon. I took a guess, but it looks like I’m going to be off by at least a week if not more. So, retrospectively, I’ll have to go with a traditional name for this moon, The Strawberry Moon. We’ve had a lot of strawberries in the last three weeks.
Beltane Garlic Moon
I edited this photo in photoshop but the gut reduction filter just laughed at me. Scott Simpson has the camera.
Beltane Garlic Moon
Sauteed garlic scapes, olives and bit of yellow bell pepper in olive oil and butter, used over a large bowl of spaghetti. Didn’t come quite like I imagined, not enough garlic taste, but still tasty. Kate’s made several strawberry rhubarb pies, one of which we ate at the Woolly’s last night after our meal at Jack O’Connors Irish Pub. The garlic itself should be harvestable soon, when three of the outer leaves have gone brown. One and a half right now.
We’ve already had asparagus and onions. The garden begins to produce fairly early in the growing season and continues right through though the crescendo hits in early September.
It’s been rainy to check on the bees but I put second hive boxes on both colonies this week, so they should be fine for the near term anyhow. Plenty of expansion room, no need to swarm. Still building up workers and the nectar flows on us. I’m beginning to wonder about my new strategy of buying new bees each year. Takes a good bit of time for them to grow colony. An overwintered colony would have been making honey for almost a month now.
Diving back into Latin today. I need to stay at the Latin with substantial work each week to keep myself fresh. My learning leaks away, takes time to regather if I step away for longer than a week.
Sometime in the next week or so, I plan a deck-clearing. Pile sorting and re-filing, re-shelving, discarding. Getting things in what passes for order in this work area. When I do, I’m going to start Loki’s Children, Book II of the Tailte Trilogy.
Haven’t done much work on the reimagining faith project in a while. Need to get back at it sometime this summer, too.
Beltane Garlic Moon
Two tours, very different. Older women from South Dakota on a culture junket having something to do with a bank where some of them used to work. Then six kids from a Lino Lakes Y art camp.
The South Dakota group wanted big names of European art. Say what? I went with Monet, Picasso, Kandinsky, Van Gogh, Gerome, Chardin, Canaletto and Poussin.
The camp wanted an introduction to the museum. We started with the naked Olympian, Doryphoros, pondered Lady Teshet and her journey to the afterlife, saw photographs of Minnesota sports. “McHale! He’s my neighbor. Oh, he looks funny.” A photograph of Kevin McHale playing for the Gophers. The Tatra got the usual oohs from the boys and we talked about design. Then over to the Armiajani as my favorite piece in the museum. It always get thinking from adolescents. Looked at the Murakami and Frank and ended with the Borghese Gladiator.
Lottsa rain.
Beltane Garlic Moon
Almost done with The Hundred Days, a novel about the last months of the Ceausescu regime in Romania. I read it of course with my recent trip in mind, hoping to gain perspective on this country which seems so far away from the world seen from a North American perspective, invisible like Bulgaria and Montenegro.
The novel paints a bleak picture, playing up the gray monotony of the apartment blocks thrown up on the perimeter of Bucharest, like rings around Saturn the author says. It paints, too, a picture of life under a security state, an oxymoron of stunning power.
Overall, it portrays a country torn by admiration for collective values, fear of the state’s surveillance and pushed down by material lack, a country with little confidence and little sense of itself.
Lay this image against what I saw. Nicoleta’s town of Mihailesti has many, perhaps most, 
of its citizens living in what we would call severe poverty. Yet, the emphasis seems not on lack but on abundance: family, extended family, neighbors, the food they have–not what they don’t have. In two evening meals and a few conversations with Nicoleta I did not learn what their dreams are, though Nicoleta clearly wants family, wants to have what she already has.
The assistant manager at the Best Western, his dream was to come to America, saw Romania as lacking, in beauty, in wonderfulness, in those things he sees in the U.S. There were in the time of Ceausescu many who wanted to 
leave Romania and paid a terrible price when trying to do so, so his dream is not unusual, I imagine.
Romania is a country in need of discovery. Its own citizens need to discover it; its intriguing and deep past; its fertile farm lands; its picturesque Carpathians; its Black Sea shore in the Slavic influenced Dobruja region. This is a country of which a person can be proud and a place that has rich possibilities.
I’m not saying what I want to here. I’ll try again. Later.
Beltane Garlic Moon
…To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Mary Oliver’s In Blackwater Woods
Things of metal and gears. Engines and oil. Brake cylinders and transmissions. These are not mortal things. They are inanimate. Without feeling or care. Whether they are here or there does not matter to them.
So we say.
And yet. I just watched the tow trucker driver hook up my 1994 Celica, red and still shiny, a car the like of which I’ll never own again. He has taken the red car, as I always called it, away.
A rational decision. 273,000 miles, not quite to 300,000 which I wanted, irrationally, to reach. We can’t afford two cars anymore. And it had begun to do this and that. Though it always had, some. But now, we didn’t need it.
The boy is gone. Once in junior high and high school the boy and I rode in that car ten times a week, back and forth to St. Paul, every two weeks. It carried us and kept us warm, safe.
He’s been gone, of course, for years. He went off to college in 2000 and at that time the red car was 6 years old. I drove it to the Sierra Club, to the Woollies, to the MIA. I drove it to Denver and down to Florida to see the boy after he went off to the Air Force.
There did come a time, five years ago or so, when I no longer trusted it for long trips. So those ceased. Then, its winter performance began to lag, the engine knocking sometimes, sometimes tires blowing out. So I drove it less and less in the winter. It could no longer climb the driveway in icy weather. Much like me.
It had become old. Not feeble, never feeble. It could still take the big curve off 35 at 70 
mph, laying flat in the lane, as if on a city street. Its engine always had plenty for passing, for getting in and out of traffic. But it wasn’t the car it used to be.
And now it’s gone.
Beltane Garlic Moon
source: Climate Central
WHAT WE KNOW