Monthly Archives: September 2013

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Darkness Approaches

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Lughnasa                                                            Harvest Moon

The night takes on a different quality as fall approaches.  In my study I’m half below ground with windows opening out at waist level, the lawn sweeps toward me.  An animal safe in a warm burrow, protected from the storm and cold, or, I would be if there were any storm and cold.

(Giovanni Battista Ciolina – Melancholy Twilight (1899)

The change in light, the lower night time temperatures, the scudding clouds like there were today change the seasonal tone from brightness and beaches and growing things to  darker and more forbidding shades.  As this shift deepens and the night begins to overtake the day, as happens at Mabon, the Fall Equinox, most of us feel a bit uneasy, perhaps even a good deal.

By late November and well into December this uneasiness has intensified, perhaps that paleolithic fear that the sun would no longer rise at all, or that it would remain in its pale and weakened state, never again to warm us and encourage the plants.  So we fight back with bonfires and candles and festivities, lamps and decorations, gifts and food, celebration in spite of the vague menace.

Thus, by some wry twist the darkest and bleakest days of the year have the most joy, the most song, the most brave gestures we know.  We will move, around Thanksgiving, into Holimonth, a season stretching from then until Epiphany that features many of the best loved days and nights of the whole year:  Hannukah, Christmas, Posada, Winter Solstice, New Years, Deepavali.

Perhaps I would even go so far as to declare a Holiseason beginning on September 29th, the feast of the archangel Michael and lasting from then right through Epiphany.  All of October, November and December months of special observance with holidays as peaks lifted up from a plateau of enhanced sensibilities that lasts the entire time.  Why not?

Asia, Faith and Spirituality

Sunday Matters

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Lughnasa                                                                             Harvest Moon

Song of Myself, excerpt from Stanza 6

What do you think has become of the young and old men?

And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the

end to arrest it,

And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

 

Revised my presentation for Groveland UU this morning.  It was better than I remembered, but still in need of some fiddling.  It also needed some readings so I poked around on Poetry.org for poems on aging.  Several good ones in addition to this piece from Whitman’s long poem, Song of Myself.  I’ll post the others on the third phase page for poetry.

After finishing that, I took out my toothbrush, toothpaste and my newly acquired yixing tea pots.  And scrubbed.  With the toothpaste.  The teapots.  Odd, eh?  Yet it’s the first thing to do in seasoning.  Scrapes off the wax used to make them look good in a showroom, that new teapot look, you know.

After that they get rinsed off, wrapped in soft cloth, lid and pot separately to avoid damage and boiled for 30 minutes.  Allow to cool.  Rinse with lukewarm water.  Then, if you want to do a professional seasoning, and of course I did, I mean why start the whole process without going all the way, you put three scoops of the tea you’ll be making in the teapot in yet another pot of boiling water.

Let it sit for 30 minutes, making a strong tea, then rewrap pot and lid in soft cloth, boil, you guessed it, 30 minutes, let them cool down and rinse off in the lukewarm water.  Now I’m ready for some gong fu cha.

They’re still cooling down so I haven’t made my first pot yet.  But I will tomorrow.

 

Weather +Climate

Calendar Dysphoria

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Lughnasa                                                                 Harvest Moon

Once again in the strange land of incoming fall in my mind and on the calendar with 90 degrees on the thermometer.  The angle of the sun has changed; it rides lower in the sky, and the quality of light has become different.  Some leaves have begun to fall, though probably driven by drought more than seasonal shift.  It’s calendar dysphoria and I’ve felt it a lot this year.  That wonderful cool May and early June, even the apparent return of a normal winter.

It’s like starting a yawn but not being able to complete it.  The heart wants to turn to walks in golden leaves, chilly mornings, sweaters perhaps, and hot chocolate.  The body, however, demands shorts and an umbrella drink.  We’re stuck halfway through a motion, unable to release ourselves fully into autumn.

Asia, Bees, Garden

Gong Fu Cha

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Lughnasa                                                             Harvest Moon

Kate and I were out before 8 am today harvesting raspberries, tomatoes, cucumbers and IMAG0898ground cherries.  The tomatoes and cucumbers are in their last week +.  The ground cherries seem set to keep on producing through the first heavy frost and the raspberries have only begun to ripen.  We still have peppers and leeks, a few greens left.

During our weekly business meeting we melted more bees wax and this time attempted to fill the mold.  Only I had not melted enough wax so I had to melt some more.  That means the molds which didn’t fill ended up with two layers of wax.  That worked out ok in a couple of cases, not in two others.

Discovered that the wax has to be washed since the remnant honey, which has a different specific gravity than the wax, gathers and in two cases created a plug of honey between two layers of wax.  Those two have gone back in the bowl for remelting.  I have seven beautiful sweet smelling candles and will have a few more, probably made this time in half-pint canning jars for gifts.  Rendering some more wax as I write this.

After the business meeting, I drove into Verdant Tea and bought two yixing tea pots.  This Zhu-ni-teapot_is a present to myself for finishing Missing and getting ready to write Loki’s Children.  They’ll be in constant use.  Yixing teapots are perfect for the Chinese way of tea, Gong Fu Cha.  Each teapot goes through a seasoning process (at home) and then makes only one type of tea.  The porosity of the yixing clay fills up with the oils of that particular tea and enhances the flavor.  This is a centuries old tradition in China.

 

 

General

Rest?

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Lughnasa                                                           New (Harvest) Moon

“The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room,  not try to be or do anything whatever.”   May Sarton

Let the psyche rest.  Wander.  What a thought.  It hit me hard.  A rest, stop pushing.  Slow down a bit or, perhaps better, let up a little.  Or, maybe, completely.  For awhile.  Vacate.  Contemplate.  Meditate.  Rotate.

Rest.  As the gardening season begins to wind to an end, soil tests next week and the last of the harvesting over the next couple of weeks, at least most of it, after the bulbs get planted, the garlic placed in its new bed and the fertilizer broadcast, the candles all made, then we need to take some time, just Kate and me.  Go somewhere, even if for only a weekend.  Maybe Lutsen or Grand Marais.  A few days.

(Alphonse-Osbert-Les-chants-de-la-nuit)

Instead, I’m starting my Modern Poetry class tomorrow, my Scrivener class on Monday and Modern/Post Modern is only half way done.  There’s Loki’s Children to get started and I’ve got an October 4th date with Ovid.  Gotta squeeze some time in for letting the psyche rest.  Wonder how?

Writing

Yep. People keep writing.

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“It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.”
— F. Dostoyevsky
“History is the distillation of rumor.”
— Thomas Carlyle
“Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.”
— W. Whitman
“I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete,
The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.”
— W. Whitman
“Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.”
— Albert Camus
“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
— Albert Camus
“Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.”
— Albert Camus
“Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.”
— Albert Camus
“Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate – and quickly.”
— Robert Heinlein
“When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.”
— R.W. Emerson
“It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.”
— R.W. Emerson
“It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.”
— R.W. Emerson
“It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.”
— R.W. Emerson
“»It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, “with the flower of the mind;” not with the intellect, used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life; or, as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse’s neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible.«”
— R.W. Emerson
“I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.”
— Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield
“Magic exists. Who can doubt it, when there are rainbows and wildflowers, the music of the wind and the silence of the stars? Anyone who has loved has been touched by magic. It is such a simple and such an extraordinary part of the lives we live.”
— Nora Roberts
“The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no thirdclass carriages, and one soul is as good as another.”
— George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion & My Fair Lady)
“The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, 
occasionally, is to let it rest, 
wander, live in the changing light of room, 
not try to be or do anything whatever.”
— May Sarton
“There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.”
— Henri Matisse
“Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.”
— Alberto Manguel
“Fictions exist because of this fact. Because we have only one life, and our desires and fantasies demand a thousand lives. Because the abyss between what we are and what we would like to be has to be bridged somehow. That was why fictions were born: so that, through living this vicarious, transient, precarious, but also passionate and fascinating life that fiction transports us to, we can incorporate the impossible into the possible and our existence can be both reality and unreality, history and fable, concrete life and marvelous adventure.”
— The Temptation of the Impossible, Mario Vargas Llosa
“The pursuit of truth and beauty
is a sphere of activity in which
we are permitted to remain children all our lives.”
— Albert Einstein

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bees, Garden

Candles

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Lughnasa                                                 New (Harvest) Moon

Sprayed Enthuse on all the remaining crops this morning.  Next week I’ll take the soil md240asamples from vegetable beds and orchard, get them sent off to International Ag Labs.

Kate got out the double boiler and the meat thermometer.  After I cleaned rust off the candle molds, she threaded the wick through the two molds we’re using for a test run.  With the double boiler I melted the beeswax, got it to 160 and poured through a plastic funnel.  A bit messier than desirable, I imagine, but we got it done.  Now we’re waiting to see how the mold releases the candles after they cool off.  We used a chopstick to hold the wicks in place.

 

MOOCS

The MOOC. It Comes.

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Lughnasa                                                                  New (Harvest) Moon

Didn’t get to the candles yet.  Tomorrow morning.  Kate’s going to make wild grape jelly and I’ll do the candles.  A crafty morning.

Loki’s Children has not received much attention this week, but it will.  The Modern class is on review week and Monday sees the start of the Modern Poetry class.  I’m excited about that one.  I’m auditing both of these so I don’t feel pressure to perform.

MOOC’s will change the nature of education, I’m sure of it.  With patience and discipline it will soon be able to get a baccalaureate degree in the comfort of your own home and for a minimal amount of money.

I’m not sure how the mentoring side of teaching will adapt to thousands of students.  Perhaps there will be month long intensive sessions on campus, the opposite of J-terms or terms abroad.  The students will come to the campus for one-on-ones, group discussions, build friendships, then disperse back to their homes or wherever they connect with the online university.  Or, perhaps the students will come to a central location, geographically or content focused.

It’s not hard to imagine that advancing multi-person onscreen technology could facilitate small group discussions live.  Or, it might be that a student takes two years of classes at home, then comes for six-months of on-campus work, then back for another couple of years.  Or, it might work to do, say, two years of classes, a year on campus, then the remaining courses over a longer, but determined time while in a work setting.

Then, too, it might work like I understand Oxford and Cambridge do, where the focus is on reading and student papers with once a week or once every two week sessions one-to-one online.  The mix and match of these options are all possible and we’re at the very front end of this astounding change in what has been settled custom since the middle ages: students come to live at a central place, attend classes in physical structures and have access only to the teaching staff available there.  None of that will be necessary anymore.

Pretty exciting, I’d say.

 

Commentary on the news

Short Takes

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Lughnasa                                                             New (Harvest) Moon

Short takes:

Syria:  Stop the chemical weapons wielding tyrant by helping the increasingly Al-Qaeda led rebels?  Seems no would work.  But learning to say no is so hard.

Dennis Rodman:  Makes me wonder if Kim (his buddy, Kim) has any tats.  What would they be?  Firing squads?  Underfed peasants?  Ballistic missiles?  Rodman wants to set up a basketball league in North Korea.  Gosh.

(US Ambassador to North Korea)

Anthony Weiner for Mayor:  “Gosh.  Learning to say no is hard.” Carlos Danger

Obama and Putin:  Maybe we should have Rodman to go to Moscow.  Kim could go along.  Rebound diplomacy.

Areil Castro suicide:  As the Onion said, “Ariel Castro failed by system.”