Daily Archives: July 22, 2013

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.