Monthly Archives: June 2013

GeekWorld, Our Land and Home

GFI!

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Summer                                                                  Solstice Moon

We are in the realm of the sun.  Heat and light.  Green and growing things.  Long days and short nights.  Glad to be here and glad it’s a short time.  Heat oppresses me much more than cold, which goes a long way to explaining why I continue to live here.

Captured energy from the sun comes in many forms:  sugars, carbohydrates, meat, gasoline, heating oil, wind, hydrological.  Among humans a favorite form of storing and dispersing the sun’s energy is the generation and distribution of electricity.

Even in the heat and light though access to electricity can vanish.  Be cut off.  Just ask the folks in Minneapolis after last weekend’s storm.  We rely on regular electricity for our air conditioner, refrigerator, freezer, computers, kindles, televisions and various other small appliances and lights.  It’s an important part of our life.  I couldn’t write and distribute this blog without it.

And it works well nearly all of the time.  But when it doesn’t.  Uh-oh.  That’s why we wentto the expense sometime ago of installing a natural gas powered generator connected to the gas line feeding our home.  We would have no water. (We have our own well.) No A.C.  No lights.

The electricity was not flowing along the circuits necessary for our irrigation clock and out to the machine shed aka honey house and the kid’s playhouse a ways beyond it.  Had to be fixed, especially the irrigation clock.  The white haired guy who ran electricity to the playhouse and installed some lights for us came out.  We wandered around, guy time you know.  Hmmm.  Head scratching.

In both cases thank god it was g.i.f. related, that is, ground fault interrupters had tripped.  I didn’t know there was one in the garage; it’s hidden under shelving.  One fix.

The sheds. I know about the g.i.f.s.  There are two, one in the garage and one in the shed.  I had reset both of them and still couldn’t get power to either shed.

“It’s confusing,” he said.  Each building has to have its own cutoff switch, a switch that turns off power to the whole building.  The switch in the honey house has only that function, but you can turn the light off in there by either the pull chain or the switch.  However, once the switch is thrown all power is off the honey house.  So, if you use the pull chain, the light won’t light.  And, if you turn the bulb off with the pull chain, even restoring electricity to the shed with the switch won’t turn it on.

And.  The playhouse gets its power through the same line as the honeyhouse.  So, shut the switch off in the honeyhouse and no power to the playhouse.  Plus.  The playhouse, as a separate building, has to have a main power switch.  Which it does, sitting right next to the light switch and looking identical to it.  Can you see the confusion here?

So.  I went out to both sheds and put blue masking tape over  each of the main power switches.  This will reduce the likelihood of anyone using them as light switches.  Which starts the whole cascade over again.

And all this just to distribute what the sun offers free to us all.  Strange, isn’t it?

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings

Eudaimonia

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Summer                                                                     Solstice Moon

 

A word about pursuing happiness.  Or meaning.  Yes, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  I know.  Right there in the founding documents.  An ur-right.  One equivalent to survival and liberty.  Well, who wouldn’t be pleased to find happiness?  I doubt I would.

Now this may be because I have a northern European genetic predilection to dysthmia, could be.   And, in fact, I think that’s the case.  This is not, however, my point here.

Happiness doesn’t strike me as a desirable state, at least not for any length of time.  Why?  Because it has the flavor of arrival, of sufficiency, of finished, of done.  Happiness comes to the human life like the finish line model of retirement, once we get there that’s all we need. After that, we coast.  Play golf.  Smoke cigars.  Travel.  Watch TV.

No, I’ll go for a more Greek idea, eudaimonia.  Composed of two Greek worlds, eu (good) and daimon (spirit) Aristotle and the Stoics after him promoted it as the end of human life. As such it has often been translated as happiness or welfare, but perhaps a better phrase is human flourishing.  Or, without getting fancy, why not good spirit?  Both have an active turn, taking us toward enrichment, fullness, striving within a humane ambit.

Now there you have an internal state worth cultivating.  It’s the difference between a noun and a gerund.  Happiness vs. flourishing.  I would much rather flourish than be happy.  Much.

Garden, Weather +Climate, Writing

When the heat is on

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Summer                                                                                 Solstice Moon

Wandered out to the garden, picked a few hot strawberries, felt the Solstice sun on my bare head and retreated.  Dew point is down to 68, but the temperature was at 87 earlier.  Hot for us.

Working on Missing.  Still plugging my way through the revision.  Sometimes it’s fun; sometimes it’s work.  Sometimes it’s just something I’m doing.  Today was the last.  Having to add in some material I fail to expand will be more fun.  Gonna do that now.

 

Garden, Weather +Climate

A Thinnin’ and A Mulchin’

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Summer                                                                        Solstice Moon

After the cold and the gray comes the bright and the damp.  81 degrees already at 9:30 am with a dewpoint of 75.  That’s well beyond uncomfortable, which begins at 60.  Mulching the new lily and iris bed along with the areas Kate weeded last week followed by thinning the beets on the third tier left me with as much outside exposure as I wanted.

Looks like we’ll get some rain today.  A good thing since the electricity outage in the garage has crippled my irrigation clock.  No clock, no water other than rain.  That’s on the get it fixed list.  Soon.

We’ve entered the rapid growth phase of the growing season, with the nectar flow ready to begin next week.  The compressed season makes for exaggerated rhythms, a feature of the northern garden. Like Chinese cooking, preparation is 90% of the ingredients needed to succeed.

Javier will come by some time in the next few days to price out mulch and weed suppression for the orchard and mulch for the vegetable bed paths.

Writing

5,464 entries since 2005

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Summer                                                                             Solstice Moon

Just checked, out of curiosity, the number of posts on Ancientrails.  A somewhat mind boggling 5,500.  That’s rounding up from 5, 464, but not by much.  I have no idea what I’m doing here, why I’m doing it, yet I certainly seem to have kept at it.  At one level this is not surprising as my shelves of hand-written journals would attest, on the other hand that’s a lot of entries.

Quantity, of course, does not equal quality.  Hardly.  In fact you could argue a reverse correlation, but it certainly means that I’ve attended to this blog.

If you’re a reader, I appreciate your following along on this erratic journey, one guided by inner winds more than anything else.  Thanks.

Third Phase

Stand Up

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Summer                                                                                            Solstice Moon

Been trying to figure out what I’ve stood for and stand for.  This is different than what I believe in since beliefs and actions don’t always match up, but actions remain after all thinking is done.

One thing I’ve stood for, or rather sat for, is learning.  Ever since I started school and learned to read, I’ve been on one long ride, most of it in the presence of words.  There is admit, something profligate, unguided, voracious about my desire to learn.  It has taken me down unexpected roads, but then it would not be learning if it didn’t, would it?

Early on I took the idea that we are responsible for our own education, not the teachers or the schools or the curriculum.  We had to decide how to focus, how to integrate and eventually how to guide our own learning.  It was clear to me from around the fifth grade or so that schooling was temporary, while learning was lifetime.

Another thing I’ve stood for is justice.  Injustice rankles me, gets under my skin, especially if people aren’t doing anything about it.  Or, if people feel life is set up to give them a raw deal.  Again, from very early I opposed things done for the sake of tradition, because somebody said we had to do it that way, because somebody said there was nothing else to do about it.

This pushed me into politics since power and its wielding often determines how just a given circumstance is or can be made:  class president, university senate, student rights, anti-war politics, civil rights, feminism, neighborhood based economic development, a jobs response to unemployment, a bank for the poorest of the poor, Sierra Club legislative politics.  We can’t do it is not a phrase that makes any sense to me.  Never will.

Art.  Painting, sculpture, prints and drawing, literature, poetry, theater, dance, classical music, jazz, blues.  Not sure you can I stood for it, but I can’t get enough of it.  It’s always at my side, on my wall, in my head, pushing out the boundaries of my heart.

Family.  Even though the path has been dotted with failure and often laden with pain family continues to be a lodestar in my life.  Never more so than now.

The Ways of Mother Earth.  This was slow coming on, but it has occupied more and more of my time and thinking as we pushed into perennials, then vegetables, finally fruit.  And explored various methods for caring for the plants.  And the bees, of course.

Dogs.  They are in my life and have been and will be.

Creativity.  I believe in it.  I do it.  I work to support others in it.

Travel.  Being the stranger in a strange land.  Seeing how others solve the puzzles of human life.  How they build and love and cook and sell and live.

So, let’s see.  I stand for learning, justice, art, creativity, family, the ways of Mother Earth, dogs and travel.  These are the primary things, that I can think of now, that have occupied my time and energy.  And I’m ok with them.

Family, Feelings

The Sweetest Sound

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Summer                                                                        Solstice Moon

Apparently this decompression thing will take a bit longer than one day.  Slept in this morning, late start.  Worked out last night and that often means a longer sleep the next day.  I’m pushing myself now, more reps with lighter weights.  Taking a weight until I can do 20 reps twice, then moving up.  That means more work per set and a longer time with the body at a higher heart rate.  All for the good of the team.  Team Self.

There is a feeling of satisfaction, a deep joy.  Though they differ from culture to culture, there are certain basic roles that define us.  Raising children is one.  Being a grandparent is another.  These are old roles, ancientrails common to all cultures.  Who does them may change from place to place, but in our culture it is usually the core couple of a nuclear family that fulfills both roles.  Blended families bring nuances to those roles that are real, but they don’t change the roles themselves.

Cries of grandpop! in the small voice of children has to be one of the sweetest sounds the human ear can hear.  Better than Mozart or Led Zepplin or I do or here’s your diploma.  Why?  Because they come from innocence, unfiltered and largely unexamined.  They are an unconditional affirmation.  I know this because I here these words from Ruth and Gabe with whom I have no genetic link.  That’s one of the nuances from the blended family.  Yet even Ruth, who wanted to meet her Dad’s real (biological) father and therefore her real (biological) grandfather, greets me with the same lack of reserve.  I fill the role, am the role.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Third Phase

the moon

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Summer                                                                    Solstice Moon

The super moon has come and gone, the moon only its normal lunarity tonight.  Deciding that each moon at perigee is a super moon strains the adjective too far.  The marginally larger and closer moon would be truer.

The lead up to the super moon did reignite my never far dormant moon watching passion.  This Japanese ritual seems very well suited to life’s third phase.  Quiet, dignified, can be done without glasses at home.  No money changes hands.  A glass of tea, or a shot of single malt, a beer.  Some cheese and the moon beside us on the deck.

As our closest neighbor in the overwhelming emptiness that is our universe, the moon has a special place, a unique place in our lives.  It illumines the night, goes through its phases each lunar month, defining tides and creating romantic moments.

I’m finding it hard to describe why the moon fascinates me so much.  Not about astronomy.  Or moon walks.  Something about its floating, silvery presence.  A silent partner to the dark its moods changes with the seasons.  The floating harvest moon, round and large and orange differs from the white full moon that passes through the cold skies of the winter solstice time.  The moon of the summer can preside over long evenings outside, a dim lantern providing just the right amount of just the right kind of light.

It also figures in story and myth.  The goddess Diana and her crescent moon, which appears in so many portraits of the virgin mary, especially our Lady of Guadalupe.  Lon Chaney’s version of the Wolfman:  “Even a man who is pure at heart, and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”

Not quite getting there and I’m tired.  Will try again soon.

Family, Travel

Coming Up From the Deep

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Summer                                                                                   Solstice Moon

In the decompression zone.  Visits from family, any family, are occasions for renewal of ties and creation of new memories.  Further sticky material for the mysterious field that defines often faraway people as belonging to each other.  Both Mark and the Denver Olsons were here this last week.  Now they’re both gone.

Introverts like Kate and I have a doubled experience each time.  That is, we greet visitors and embrace them, eager to hear the latest news and have some new experiences together; but, too, we find our quiet and our routine disrupted.  Even our physical space.  That creates a tension, overlaid by the unusual such as cooking for 8, getting a driver’s license test, building bonfires, navigating to new destinations.

That means leave taking has a doubled sense, too.  Sadness at good-bye, but also relief as the quiet returns and the day’s rhythms return to their norm.  Of course, feeling relief when loved ones go can generate guilt, but for introverts that guilt has to be parsed with the knife of one’s true nature.  Sadness is just that, sadness.  And relief, well, that just means we are who we are.