Monthly Archives: July 2013

GeekWorld, Memories, Politics, US History

This One Is A Miracle

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Summer                                                            Moon of the First Harvests

What a wonder.  A black president speaking as a black man about the lived experience of young black men.  Trayvon Martin, he said, could have been him 35 years ago.  A young black man in hoodie, suspected of, what?  WWB?  Walking while black.  Maybe about to do, something.  And something, wrong.  Bad.  Hearing clicks on car door locks as you walk by.  Being followed in stores.  Indelible and seemingly inevitable.

Yet, of course, he is not Trayvon.  No, he is the president of the most powerful nation the world has ever known.  Maybe the most powerful it will ever know.  And even he, with all that power at his disposal, literally at his command, can imagine himself into the life of a young man seen, paradoxically, as both powerless and invisible and all too visible and dangerous.

Racism and its even more evil progenitor, slavery, stand out as the original sin, the stain on this city on a hill, this beacon of freedom and hope.  We white folk have done this and that, but not too much and now the time of our dominance is passing.  This nation will become a colorful quilt with white as one shade among many rather than the shade against which all others stand inferior.  May that day come soon.

There are many things I feel privileged to have witnessed.   The civil rights movement. The anti-war movement.  Feminism and the rise of women. A world in which the whole planet must be taken into account when making decisions.  A man walking on the moon. Routine space flight. The discovery of extraterrestrial planets.  The discovery of DNA.  The global recognition that the people can challenge their government.  And win.  So many things.  These and more.

But, this one, a black president speaking about the lived experience of being a young black man.  This one is a miracle.

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home

The Arc of Summer Begins to Bend Toward Fall

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Summer                                                            Moon of the First Harvests

A light rain falling as I went out this morning.  The garden continues to look strong, the tomatoes are about to enter their bearing and ripening phase, maybe a week, maybe a little more, then Kate will have the stove filled with canning and the counters with canning equipment.  Later on the raspberries, which is a bulk harvest, too, and the leeks, even later, will also be a bulk harvest.  Around the time the leeks are ready, the apples should begin to ripen.

I’m especially pleased with my new lilies from the Northstar Lily society:  the dark purple, the trumpet of white with yellow, the cream colored vase shaped, bright yellows and pinks. Their colors are vibrant.  They pulsate.  Mid-July is my favorite flower season.  Well, mid-July and early spring.  I also love the spring ephemerals.  The rest I enjoy, but these flowers make my flower growing season.

Sprayed again this morning, this one an oil based spray to strengthen the plants against insects.  It does seem to be the case, with the exception of the beets and the cabbage that insect predation is down from years past.  This has been such an odd year, especially compared to last year–hot and dry, that it’s a little hard to generalize.  It does seem to be the case that stronger plants equal better insect control, by the plant.

While the Woollies were here, I commented on the amount of money we’ve put in the outdoors.  Initially, the landscaping by Otten Brothers.  Then clearing the land for the vegetable and orchard areas. (cost here mostly stump grinding and renting the industrial strength wood-chipper.) The raised beds.  Then the ecological gardens work with the orchard and some in the vegetable garden.  Fences around the orchard and the vegetable garden and the whole property.  Irrigation zones.  The fire pit.  Mulching the orchard and the vegetable garden.  Bulbs in the fall for many years.  We’re raising expensive tomatoes.

But, this kind of accounting leaves out the most significant parts of all this work.  It keeps us outside, using our bodies.  The whole grounds are a joint effort, in work, planning, and hiring.  It also allows us to produce a good part of our vegetables at quality we effect and flowers for our tables.  Fruits, too.

Best of all it keeps us focused on the rhythms of the earth.  Winter puts the garden to sleep and relieves us of its care (for the most part).  Spring sees our fall bulb planting rewarded and our earliest vegetables planted.  Summer finds us intensely involved with weeding, thinning, managing the various crops for the year.  Fall finishes the harvest and brings senescence.

 

Dreams

Morpheus

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Summer                                                                Moon of the First Harvests

Today started out busy, but turned slow.  I stayed up last night until almost 1 a.m. finishing a novel I had started only the day before.  Not a usual thing, but it hooked me.  Since I woke up around 7:00 and tried going back to sleep until 8:00 when I gave up and got up, I spent the day with that loggy feeling, not quite there.

(Thee I invoke, blest power of Oneiroi (Dreams) divine, messengers of future fates, swift wings are thine. Great source of oracles to human kind, when stealing soft, and whispering to the mind, through sleep’s sweet silence, and the gloom of night, thy power awakes the intellectual sight; to silent souls the will of heaven relates, and silently reveals their future fates.  Orphic Hymn 86 to the Oneiroi)

My nap helped a bit but it was the usual length so I still had sleep deprivation and after I got up I was still foggy.  So at 5:00 I took another nap.  Better now, and believe I’ll sleep the normal time tonight.

Having been a poor sleeper, bothered with both insomnia and difficulty getting to sleep, I’ve worked hard to get my sleeping routine into one where I can get adequate rest.  I stopped reading in bed.  That helped a lot.  I read before I go to bed now, though that can present its own problems as last night shows.

I try to go to bed around the same time every night, usually 11:30 and get up around the same time, usually between 7:30 and 8:00.  Sometimes, like tomorrow I’ll get up at 7:00 because I have spraying to do or because I have an early skype time with my brother and sister, early for me, that is, but otherwise I’m pretty regular.

 

 

 

Woolly Mammoths

Aw, Mom

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Summer                                                           Moon of the First Harvests

Friend and polar plunger Tom Crane took this on his recent trip to Svalbard, Norway.

(I did crop his original to fit Ancientrails.)

Our Land and Home

Chain Saw and Ax

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Summer                                                         Moon of the First Harvests

Chain saw and ax.  The ash is a prolific tree, much like the black locust, spreading itself with some vigor.  Two especially large young ash had grown up in the area where we originally planted prairie grass.  I cut one down today using the felling ax and the other, too close to the chain link fence for my skill level with the ax, I cut down using the chain saw.  The chain saw also took out saplings grown close to the fence.  Now the orchard will have the benefit of the sunlight previously blocked by these trees.

These ash were on the west side of the house, which creates an additional problem since derechoes and tornadoes come out of the northwest.  In a nasty storm they could be blown into our garage.  They needed to go.

Over the next few weeks, picking up the pace as fall arrives I’m going to continue clearing the forest and stacking up firewood for our bonfires.

Having the time without the guilt for these chores has me leaning toward setting aside Latin for the growing season, later April through late September.  This is, oddly, the old schedule which most public schools still follow, letting the kids out for farm and other agriculture work that 99.9% no longer have to do.

Poetry, US History

Technology

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Summer                                                                  Moon of the First Harvests

What’s the railroad to me?

What’s the railroad to me?

I never go to see

Where it ends.

It fills a few hollows,

And makes banks for the swallows,

It sets the sand a-blowing,

And the blackberries a-growing.

 

About This Poem

Henry David Thoreau was cautious about the effect of technological progress on mankind, feeling that it often could be a distraction from the inner life. In his book Walden he famously writes, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”
Aging, Third Phase

Third Phase Cinema

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Summer                                                                  Moon of the First Harvests

As the third phase filter got added to my lens, certain books, art works and movies began to pop up, unbidden.  They had been there all along of course, but now I see certain works as pertaining to this new moment of my life.

To Wit.  Wit, the long decline and death of the professor of English literature starring Emma Thompson raises many quality of life issues for chronically or terminally ill people and couches them in the poetic context of the metaphysical poet John Donne.  Definitely worth seeing.

Last night Kate and I watched Buena Vista Social Club.  It’s a 1998 documentary so you’ve probably seen it, heard the album and moved on, but from a third phase perspective it’s worth another look.  Ry Cooder, American guitarist and champion of American roots music as well as traditional music from another the world, went to Cuba in 1997 to record Cuban music.  When he got there, the folks who had agreed to play either couldn’t come (West Africans) or couldn’t be found.  So he began asking around and found musicians, many associated with the Buena Vista Social Club which closed in 1944.

The musicians he found were legends of the Cuban music scene who had passed into obscurity.  The group, which called itself the Buena Vista Social Club, put out the best selling album of the same name and toured, playing the Netherlands and Carnegie Hall.  Here’s the third phase connection.  Many of these resurrected musicians were in their 80’s and 90’s.  They had, most of them, given up music for one reason or another, i.e. too little money, arthritis, boredom.

Brought together they reignited in each other the passion, love and craft they shared, making music.  It is a remarkable story of gifts found, nurtured and revived, just as it is a story of men and women found, nurtured and revived.  What can we do, I found myself asking, to retain the gifts, the passion, the loves we have so they vitalize and revitalize us as we grow into the further reaches of the third phase?

Garden, Writing

Jigsaw

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Summer                                                           Moon of the First Harvests

Much of the afternoon spent on a single scene, had to backfill some storyline, keep the narrative coherent.  Trying to make the whole fit together feels like working a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces change shape as they go into the others.  It will all assemble, but it takes reshaping old parts to join the new.

Also picked cherries and blueberries this morning and took a video of the bees.  I’ll get it posted over the weekend.

Garden, Great Work

High Brix Gardens

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Summer                                                                          Moon of the First Harvests

I’m almost one and a half months into the  International Ag Labs supplement program called High Brix Gardens.  This morning I sprayed a product for general plant health, fish oil, mainly.  When I look at the tomatoes, eggplants, tomatillos, peppers, carrots and beets, I see healthy, vigorous plants with lots of fruit or roots.  The healthy, vigorous look seems to have come from the supplements.

Over the weekend I’m going to use friend Bill Schmidt’s refractometer to measure the brix value of fruits and vegetables from our garden and orchard.  “When used on plant sap it is primarily a measure of the carbohydrate level in plant juices.”

“…mineral composition is not the only component of nutrition to be found in plants. It is the cheapest to analyze and is the foundation of al the other nutritional components of plants such as vitamins, amino acid profile, enzymes, sterols, and essential oils among many others. Since all these components contribute to the total dissolved solids we use the brix readings as the general indicator of quality and the mineral composition as the specific indicators of quality.”  High Brix Gardens

 

Poetry, Writing

75%

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Summer                                                                Moon of the First Harvests

Today was an inside day.  9o degrees, 73 dewpoint.  Definitely a writing day.  I’m at the 75% revised point, so I’m looking at the end of revision III in a matter of a week, two at the most.  There are still futzy things to do after that.  Connect up separated sections, change some section and chapter headings.  That sort of thing.  Not a lot of time, but some.

Then, I’ll be ready for my beta readers, if they want, to go over this revision.  I’m asking Kate to give it a thorough reading for grammar, spelling, other technical matters.  She’s very good at that and this is, I hope, the last revision before submission to agents.

As they tackle that task, I’ll set it aside completely.  I’ll signal Greg to turn the Latin back on for the week after Labor Day and I’ll start writing Loki’s Children, the second novel in the Unmaking Trilogy.  I have a good start with material cut from Missing and a good deal of research I did while the beta readers were at work.

I’m also taking two MOOC’s at the end of the summer, one new historical methods for a new china and another on modernism and post-modernism.  Both are core interests of long standing.  Also, in September, a MOOC I’m really looking forward to, Modern and Contemporary American Poetry.

With end of the gardening and bee season chores there will be no moss growing on this rolling stone.

The poetry course will include 19th-century proto-modernists Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.