Daily Archives: September 17, 2013

Great Work

Jelly Fish. They’re Back! And After 550 Million Years, Returning to Prominence

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Lughnasa                                                          Harvest Moon

Here’s an ecological problem I’ll bet you’ve not heard about unless you’ve traveled by Linblad ships recently.  Maybe not even then.  Read the whole review, well worth it, at New York Review of Books.

(Box Jelly, aka, the most poisonous creature on the planet.)

“From the Arctic to the equator and on to the Antarctic, jellyfish plagues (or blooms, as they’re technically known) are on the increase. Even sober scientists are now talking of the jellification of the oceans. And the term is more than a mere turn of phrase. Off southern Africa, jellyfish have become so abundant that they have formed a sort of curtain of death, “a stingy-slimy killing field,” as Gershwin puts it, that covers over 30,000 square miles.”

quote from:  Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean
by Lisa-ann Gershwin, with a foreword by Sylvia Earle
University of Chicago Press, 424 pp., $27.50

Garden

The Sweet Scent of…Bugbane?

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Lughnasa                                                          Harvest Moon

Bet you’ve never heard of a perfume called bugbane.  It’s no name for a fragrance and IMAG0960probably not a familiar plant, but it is one of the joys of early fall.  It’s fluffy white racemes give off a scent that brings to mind gardenia and jasmine, scents of a late night drive along the Kona coast with the top down, coming back from a day exploring Hilo and Volcanoes National Park.  Yet here they grace a plant named like a weed.  If you see one somewhere, stop a moment.  The bugbane will transport you somewhere, somewhere pleasant.

One more run at the creeping charlie this morning, utilizing that fall plant habit of storing food in the roots.

To be outside in the morning, a cool morning, in the dying garden, rejuvenates me.  The deaths of the plants follows a long and, should I say it, fruitful life, so no unusual grief, just the bracing sense death gives to those of us who continue to live.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Myth and Story, Writing

The Springtime of the Soul

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Lughnasa                                                               Harvest Moon

This northern soul breathes easier when the mornings are cooler, even cold.  The bright blue Canadian skies or the dark gray roof of low cumulus clouds make me happy, too.  As we tilt toward September 29th, Michaelmas, the springtime of the soul holiday in my sacred calendar, my inner life revs up, or perhaps better, cycles down.  The humus built up over the growing season sees the first shoots of ideas sowed either long ago or just yesterday.

Right now I’m in the grip of Loki, trying to wrestle a believable and exciting villain from his myth and legend.  He and his kids get their own book, this next one, Loki’s Children, so Dad is important.  He’ll come clearer to me as the fall progresses.  (Death of Balder)