Samhain New (Winter) Moon
This snowstorm has the slows. The Updraft blog says it’s on its way, but will show around midnight now, rather than 6 pm. There are some impressive numbers reported already for the northern part of the state: “Up north, some epic snowfall totals approaching 2 feet are already down near Two Harbors, and totals will likely exceed 30 inches to 3 feet along the North Shore ridges by Thursday.”
(High waves at the Duluth Lake Superior harbor)
Samhain New (Winter) Moon
Today I finished translating the story of Lycaon in Ovid. Most of it anyhow. Some still awaits consultation with Greg. I plan to go back and forth through this story until I have a clean, idiomatic and interesting text. That’s the next couple of days, maybe more. Probably more. Lycaon’s tale is the origin of the word Lycanthrope, a coined word for werewolf. Lycanthropy is the study of werewolves.
In this story Jupiter, angered by an Arcadian king’s (Lycaon) human sacrifices, comes to earth to investigate. When Lycaon tries to serve him human flesh, a test to see if he is truly divine, Jupiter in a rage turns King Lycaon into a wolf, but a wolf with human feet, eyes, grayish hair and the former king’s wild and fierce countenance.
Translating it word by word, line by line, idea by idea and then going back to create a polished English version is the task I set myself so long ago, producing a translation of Metamorphoses so I can embed these stories in my own consciousness. Yes, there are over 15,000 verses in total, and I’m only at verse 235 (plus several hundred other verses I translated, stories I chose to keep me interested) but I’m now beginning to see myself as a translator and not only a student. That’s a big transition.
I will post the text when I finish.
Samhain New (Winter) Moon
As some of you know, I’m fascinated by the concept of home. As we age, we fight with what powers we have to remain in our home. Not only do we want to live in our home, we want to die in it, too. That’s a pretty strong commitment. What is it about home? Why is this such a powerful idea?
A friend who has written for years about aging says it’s about what we know and especially in old age not wanting to trade what we know for what we don’t. I imagine he’s got a good chunk of it. Home is not only where the heart is; it’s where your pillow is and the living room and the kitchen you know. It’s a place of memory and a place of projected peace, or at the very least projected familiarity.
Much as I respect my friend’s work and his thinking, his explanation doesn’t satisfy me. Familiarity is powerful, but the notion of home goes beyond that. At it’s root, I suspect, is the nomad’s intimate relationship with a certain territory that could provide roots and berries in one season, tubers and fruits in another and game in another. The linkage, the primal linkage, lies, in other words, with place and not just any place but the place that gives us sustenance.
As the neolithic revolution took hold and the hunter/gatherers began to stay more and more in one specific spot, no longer wandering throughout the year, but tending gardens and fields and livestock, the larger definition of home territory got whittled down to the village, perhaps to a small farm.
Then, when urbanization began its slow, inexorable rise home territory became associated in a diffuse way with a city, but the more particular sense of personal territory shrank to a few rooms, perhaps a house. Note that now the territorial definition at the most intimate level is no longer related to the land, to the place that gives sustenance but to a human artifice, a built object and, in all likelihood, a built object over which you have no control
Urbanization passed the 50% mark worldwide sometime ago and the centripetal attraction of cities only grows as time goes on. Thus, for many if not most of the world’s population the terrain of home shrinks year by year and recedes further and further from its natural roots.
Even so we don’t want to leave our condos, our apartments, our townhomes. Home is that one spot in the vast vacuum of space and on this tiny patch of life-sustaining rock that we call earth that is ours. It is the remnant of the hunter/gatherer’s territory, and it is the one to which we belong. And note please, it is not it which belongs to us.
Samhain New (Winter) Moon
4 females, one human and 3 canines, one male. All present and accounted for. The house 
is full again.
On the cold and snow coming. Yes. Yes. Three times yes. We live here in the north and for many of us our northerness gets defined in these three months when the snow and the cold come. What it will be like here when the boreal forest has fled further north and the winters have become like currently more southern climes I don’t know, but I know I don’t want to be here then.