Lughnasa                                                         Honey Moon

The full Honey Moon has an amber cast tonight, appropriate for our work tomorrow and Wednesday.  Driving back from Wayzata it hung high in the sky, clouds passing before it.  It was warm, 80 degrees when I left the retreat center and the Woolly meeting there.

Tom showed a DVD from his trip to Svalbard.  It was a stark but beautiful land and sea and ice scape populated with curious polar bears, blubbery walrus and ring seals.  The ring seals only show up on this DVD as the meal of a large male bear.  The video of a polar bear suckling her cub was, according to a Swedish polar bear researcher, unique.  He’d never seen it before and, interestingly, said he never expected to see it again.

There was, too, the story of ocean open months earlier than normal, of the pack ice decline separating the polar bears from their main, almost exclusive food source, the ring seals and the staggering potential of upsetting the theromhaline cycle if Greenland melts. This could shut down the Gulf Stream with a cascade of unknown effects.

We went on from there to discuss superstitions and masculinity.  I had a sense that the conversation about masculinity per se, oddly a subject only lightly discussed among the Woollies over the years, might hold more for us at some other point.

It was, as always, good.