Lughnasa Honey Moon
BTW: Kate finished bottling this afternoon and we have 85 pound jars of honey with two supers and some honey still on the colony.
Our hive patroness, Artemis.
Daily Archives: August 27, 2013
The Voice of Autumn
Lughnasa Honey Moon
Even though the heat blazed down like mid-July today, the twilight comes much earlier. The wind moving among the trees in our woods sounds like the voice of autumn, not the return of mid-summer. May it be so.
My heart has already begun its turn inward, the work of Loki’s Children and Changes, a novel after the trilogy is done, beginning to dominate my early morning and post-nap moments. No, I’ve not made the complete transition yet, the bells have not yet rung, but soon, soon the night will begin falling earlier, the state fair will be finished and Michaelmas just around the corner.
September 29th is daughter-in-law Jen’s birthday and Michaelmas. Michaelmas was the date that began school terms in England and can be seen, as a friend once noted, as the springtime of the soul. It is the holy day of St. Michael, the archangel, the warrior of god. A complicated day with many threads woven into to its tapestry. All this is within a month or so now, the year has begun to change.
Darwin
Lughnasa Honey Moon
Darwin has a clear, strong voice in On the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man. After reading three chapters of his work, I came away with my jaws far apart in amazement at this guy’s mind. He looks at things to which we all have access, but he sees them. In this quote he does fall prey to a bias of his British Imperial time, but the point is brilliant: “He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation.” (Chapter xxi, p.1, Descent of Man)
(Punch, 1882)
Also, I loved this from a couple of pages further along: “I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to shew why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower form, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction. The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events, which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance.”
(Editorial Cartoon, 1871)
When on the voyage around South America, I read some of Darwin’s journal entries from the voyage of the Beagle. The more I learn about him the more he seems to belong to the category of inexplicable genius, a quantum step forward in human understanding: Newton, Einstein, Aristotle, Confucius, Siddhartha Gautama, the early Vedic thinkers, those sorts of folks.
Garden Diary: 8.22.2013
Lughnasa Honey Moon
Perk-up soil drench and showtime for insect protection this morning. Got up too late to do the brix blaster and qualify. Tomorrow. As the gardening season moves toward its end, I feel less urgency. We’re on top of the tasks right now; we’ve already got a substantial harvest in and preserved.
BTW: A lot of this gardening info is for my reference next year and in years to come so I apologize if it seems repetitive.
Cut down the broccoli this morning and picked a few more tomatoes. We have 17 pints of tomatoes canned already with many more on the vine.
Kate’s taking advantage of her birthday present this morning and learning how to use the long arm quilter, a three-hour, one-on-one class. When she gets the quilting side of quilting down, she’ll be able to take a project from start to finish. Many can’t because the long-arm quilters are expensive take up a lot of space.