Monthly Archives: July 2013

Myth and Story, Writing

End in Sight

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Summer                                                                        Moon of the First Harvest

I will finish the third revision of Missing this week.  There are putzy things to do after that like mark all scenes as 3rd draft revised, note all place, object and characters in the notes section of scrivener, change headings for consistency and monitor transitions.  I will also spend a bit of time considering the new draft from the standpoints of narrative coherence, focus on John and Graham and John’s disappearance and action.

(Fáfnir guards the gold hoard in this illustration by Arthur Rackham to Richard Wagner’s Siegfried.)

At that point, probably two weeks from now, possibly less, I’ll turn it over to Kate for a careful read, i.e. grammar, spelling, logical consistency, continuity.  When she’s done, I’ll see if any of the beta readers want a crack at version III.  In the interim I’ll go back to research and plotting for Loki’s Children.

 

Dogs

Dogs

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Summer                                                                    Moon of the First Harvests

OK.  Late July and the temp outside this am is 59 degrees.  And I approve this message.

Only one outside chore for this morning. Hardening the orchard fence against a Rigel invasion.  She periodically checks all the points where I’ve closed up the base of the fence. On occasion she finds one that has come undone.  Kate’s found her in the orchard twice in the last week.  I found the spot and wired a log across it, crude but reversible solutions.

(Rigel and Gertie)

She used to climb over the fence.  That’s when I added the electric fence.  She no longer does that.  Now her snooping follows the line where fence meets ground.  You might wonder why we want to keep her out of the orchard.  Both she and her sister Vega love to dig and when in the orchard they dig up soil mounded around the fruit trees.  Since this is where plant guilds beneficial to the trees live, we see the digging as unwanted behavior.

It’s been a bright full moon the last couple of nights and the dogs have been restless.  No, I don’t think moon rays make dogs crazy.  I do think they make navigating easier for night time critters and the dogs notice.  Then they whine to go outside.  Two nights ago in the wee hours for example.  We heard them bay in the woods not long after we let them go.

In other dog news Kona’s mass continues to grow.  We have her on two tramadols three times a day which seem to manage her pain very well.  She’s eating, moving around.  It’s hard to tell how long she has, but for now she seems mostly comfortable.

(Hilo)

Kate and I counted up the dogs we’ve had since our marriage in 1990.  17.  6 whippets:  Buck, Iris, Emma, Bridgit, Hilo and Kona.   8 Irish Wolfhounds:  Celt, Sorsha, Scott, Morgana, Tira, Tully, Orion and Tor.  Two Irish Wolfhound/Coyote Hound mixes:  Rigel and Vega.  1 German Shorthair:  Gertie.   The Wolfhounds are short lived, sadly.

Kate already had Buck and Iris when we married.  Buck, like Hilo and Bridgit, died early, around 10, while the others lived into their teens, as has Kona.

We don’t know yet the lifespan of Rigel and Vega, but since they’re hibreds I’m hoping for at least a few more years with them.  Gertie should live into her teens.

We’ve learned many things from having this many dogs as life companions, but the most telling one of all, to me, is the remarkable differentiation in personality.  Iris was a princess who didn’t like insects and chose to watch other animals rather than hunt them. Buck was a little daffy.  He loved to pick up somebody else’s kill and run around with it in his mouth, very proud.  Celt knew us, knew the pack and kept the other dogs in line.  He was our only true alpha, a regal dog who accepted all praise as his just due.

The others, all different, too.  Sweet Tully, who developed a predator/prey relationship with the whippets.  Tira, whose fear of thunderstorms led her into serious injuries more than once.  Sorsha, who took down a deer all by herself and loved to hunt.  Also stubborn.

 

GeekWorld, Memories

A Closet Luddite

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Summer                                                       Moon of the First Harvests

More limbing.  Removal of weed trees, escaped amur maples.  An attractive tree but one prone to wander too freely.  I like using the limbing ax.  Internal combustion engines I don’t like using.  My dislike of them precedes but gets reinforced by my ecological consciousness.  My feelings about them come in part from an inability to work with them well.  Wrenches, screw drivers, fluids, pistons all that never leapt to my hands.

Like the house, I learned all my father knew about them.  Nothing.  For example.  Car. Mower. Weedwhacker.  Lawn tractor.  Snow blower. The chainsaw is a limited and unusual exception.  And yes, I admit it, I never did anything to improve my knowledge or skills, at least not anything that worked.

On another level I fantasized about those engines, read about them, watched and applauded people who did things with different versions.  Fast things.  Like formula 1.  Indianapolis 500.  Drag racing.  Sports Car Graphic and Road and Track were two of my early magazine subscriptions.  Summer nights on Madison Avenue saw Alexandria kids drag racing.  A dangerous pursuit then, seen as the acme of juvenile self-destructiveness.

So there was this duality in my feelings: admiration and loathing.  As I’ve gotten older, the admiration has diminished and the loathing increased.  The Toyota folks at Carlson Toyota take care of our vehicle and I’m very glad for it.  They’re good at what they do and I can’t escape driving.  I’m left with a paradox, a contradiction, a necessary dilemma.

For those of you who love them, my admiration side understands.  Totally.  For those of you like me who would not be sorry to see them go.  I’m with you. 100%.

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home

Cherry picking low hanging fruit

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Summer                                                                      Moon of First Harvests

Cherry picking.  This morning.  Blueberry picking, too.  Also pears from two trees, their entire crop.  First, the low hanging fruit, then up the ladder.  A lot of cliches come from the world of the orchard and the garden.  Let’s wait til it bears fruit.  He planted the seed on fertile ground.   In the not so very long ago, maybe one or two generations, perhaps three depending on your age these sayings were not culture; rather, they were everyday experience, or, every appropriate season occurrence.  Now, with increasing urbanization, the rapid decline of the family farm and a rush to do all things with technology the hand in the tree which picked the cherries is on the keyboard checking Facebook or more likely on the iPhone checking Snapchat.

Delivering vast numbers from the mind numbing toil of subsistence agriculture is a good thing.  No doubting that.  Even having agriculture and horticulture done by the few is not necessarily a bad thing.  We need food and flowers.  If they come to our table full of nutrients and vibrant, well then.  If however, we create a system where the food we eat has been modified not for its nutritional value but for the positive economics of its growing, harvesting and processing, well then.

Somewhere a tectonic plate of public opinion has begun to shift.  I can feel it in the newspapers, the magazines, the websites I read and visit.  That shift is toward action against global warming.  My hope is that this shift, which will ride over the continent of fossil fuel and through subduction bury it in the mantle below the crust where it belongs, will include within it a return to the tree, the wolf, the tomato and the onion.  May it be so.

 

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

A Wabi-Sabi Soul

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Summer                                                                             Moon of the First Harvests

The first yellows and browns began to show up in the gardens a couple of weeks ago.  One dicentra has turned completely.  A few hemerocallis have yellowed leaves.  The process of maturation leads on past fruiting bodies to the dying away either of the whole plant, counting on seeds to carry its generations forward, or of its above ground components stalks and leaves after sufficient energy has made its way into the root or tuber or corm or bulb, sufficient energy to ensure a new beginning in the next growing season.

In this sense you could say humans are more like annuals.  We die away, leave the field entire and only our seed lives on.  There are though those artists, poets, painters, playwrights, architects, writers, composers, musicians, engineers who store energy in their works, works which often disappear for a season or a century or even a millennia only to be unearthed in some latter day renaissance (rebirth, after all).

Not sure what it says about me but my sentiment, my inner compass points toward fall and winter, toward the longer nights and the shorter days, toward the cold as opposed to the heat.  A part of me, then, a strong and dominant part, sees the yellows and the browns not as grim harbingers but as the colors of the inner season only weeks away.

I don’t have quite the patience right now to explain, but I believe I have a wabi-sabi soul, a soul made content by the imperfect, the accidental, the broken and repaired, the used, the thing made real by touch and wear.  Fall and winter are the wabi-sabi seasons.  Their return gives me joy.

World History

Vestigiality

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Summer                                                           Moon of the First Harvests

Every birth brings new royalty into the world just as each birth brings new divinity into the world.  Not many will have the definite opportunity to move on up to, say, King, though.  I suppose the excitement from a monarchist’s point of view is that steady governance now stands assured for three generations in England, barring trauma or disease.  So in some sense this birth is equivalent to a presidential election in the U.S. in that in presages a peaceful transfer of power from one leader to another.  Important.

Though how important in a constitutional monarchy may not be so clear.  A curious form of governance those.  Kings and Queens with their power checked by elected leaders.  Better than the reverse I’m sure and better than the prior arrangement, too.  Still, it does make me think of sinus cavities, appendix and the coccyx.

 

Great Work, Our Land and Home, Third Phase

The Land

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Summer                                                              Moon of the First Harvests

One with the land.  A cliche perhaps, though little used today.  I hope it has again some of the powerful connotation it had long ago.

On a fine cool morning like this one, not even really cool, 68, to step outside with tools in hand, tools for working with plants, and feel the morning air surround you, to see the plants green and the flowers vibrant, to step into the vegetable garden and see tomato blossoms, fruit, eggplant fruit, cucumbers vining up the bamboo, the carrot’s feathery leaves, the brave leeks tall and proud and to know, know in the biblical sense, that is, to have direct sensory knowledge unmediated by book or story, but present and available, that you and those plants share the workload.  To know further that the bees buzzing and dipping into the flowers are likewise colleagues, not just insects, but partners.  Yes, I know it’s overwritten, sorry about that, but it hits the feeling tone I want to convey.  Over the top.  Not overwhelming, maybe, but certainly whelming.  Intimate.  Holistic.

It’s a feeling, come to think of it, or come to feel it might be better, that synchs up with the mystical moment I had back long ago in college.  I’ve written about it here before so just a synopsis.  After a philosophy class I experienced a sudden moment of integration with the whole, with everything, with the cosmic.  I was in it and of it, as it was in me and of me.  This feeling I have, this oneness with this land, this particular place, is a discrete yet parallel feeling.  I am in this land and of it, as it is in me and of me.

Our Land and Home

Out on a Limbing

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Summer                                                                Moon of the First Harvests

Sprayed brix-blaster and qualify this morning.  Breakfast. Then limbing the ash trees I cut down over the weekend.  As the dewpoint and the temperature rose, my inclination to do that work inverted.  I have one tree fully limbed, the four sapling ashes limbed and pulled away from the fence and a brush pile organized, ready to move.  Tomorrow limbing the second ash and either moving the brush pile (which will be a big job) or cutting the limbed trees into fire pit sized logs.

Yes, I’m doing as much as I can with my felling ax and my limbing ax.  I like the direct work with no engine in between me and the task.

In the summer the cliche about wood seems to mock.  You know.  Wood heats you five times.  When you cut it.  When you move it.  When you split it.  When you stack it.  When you burn it.  No splitting or stacking now, but the first two, cut and move, yes. They do generate heat.

 

Dreams

Oneiroi (Dreams)

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Summer                                                                      Moon of the First Harvests

Dreams last night.  Once again a farm with outbuildings, a farm where I had land, but in this case land I couldn’t access because the owner was a drunk and wouldn’t let anyone on the property.

(Edward Robert Hughes, Dream Idyll)

This was outside Fuller, Minnesota where I had gone with two friends.  We couldn’t make it back to the cities so we decided to stay in a hotel.  I’d stayed in the hotel before, but couldn’t recall Fuller.  In the hotel the rooms had beds in alcoves, private baths and when I ordered dinner it was on dirty table clothes in the hallway.  Other guests came and dined, too.

They spoke of Bill, the poet, who was going to present his work at a local congregation.  I met him.  He seemed like an interesting guy so I offered to go with him.  “No,” he said, “It’s a closed congregation.” Oh, I said.   As if that made sense.  “Lutheran Brotherhood.”  Oh.

I often go north in my dreams.  Still heading north after all these years.

 

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Summer                                                                 Moon of the First Harvests

Did brix readings for onions, beets and cherries using friend Bill Schmidt’s refractometer. Beets average plus.  Onions good.  Cherries good plus.  Work to do, but starting in a reasonable place.  Will continue as the harvest goes one.