Daily Archives: June 20, 2014

Colorado, The Move

Little Boxes

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                            Summer Moon

One bookshelf of DVD’s sorted into red (go), green (move). Boxes piling up. We’ll need the Sort Toss Pack folks next Friday or we’ll need a second house for the contents of this one. Hey, Warren! (a friend known for the number of homes he either wholly or partially owned)

The process of getting ready to move, living the move as I think of it, has been good for our relationship and it was already excellent. The process of unstripping one identity and its physical trappings and creating a new identity in a new place has a surprising amount of vulnerability attached. The familiar no longer soothes in quite the same way as it used to. The ease of doing our banking, visiting a pharmacy and going out for  lunch, all of which we did today, will require thought and planning a year from now. A little thing, yes, but add up the little things and they become big.

But, we are doing this together, removing our Minnesota identities while getting ready to put on Colorado ones. Of course there will be continuities, even Minnesota constants, but all will be changed. In the process our relationship is the main constant, the stable spot, yet even it will change, is changing, has been changed. This is what brings us closer together, the journey, one of our own choosing. We have made this decision and bear the consequences as well as the potentials.

Woolly Mammoths

Evoking Gifts

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                              Summer Moon

To my Woolly brethren and anyone else interested. I found this on the website Watching as the Lights Go Out (link under Third Phase to the right here.)

It occurred to me that this might be a good activity for us. One person a night for the next year. This is a group method used by this man’s small church to discern talents, character traits useful for a new work they intend. It seems to me it would be useful, too, for us (the Woolly Mammoths) as a group since we know each other so well now.  Let me know what you think.

“…we spend over an hour per person in evoking their individual gifts. By “evoking gifts” we mean discerning each person’s specific characteristics and abilities…  This past Saturday was my turn.  We went around the circle, and each person described the gifts they saw in me.  It’s an amazing experience!  How often do we affirm the value of one another?”

Art and Culture, Humanities, Letters, Translating Metamorphoses

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                         Summer Moon

Got to thinking about the standing on the shoulders of giants meme. It’s a great contribution of Isaac Newton, a quotable polymath and giant like last century’s Albert Einstein. The more I thought about it though the less satisfied I was with it.  [Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun (Poussin, 1658)]

It introduces a necessary humility to any advancement in human thought, emphasizing the debt owed to the past. But. It seems to me a forest works better.

The giants of the past remain just that. The General Shermans, the Methuselahs of the forest, but they protect the growth of new, younger saplings and smaller giants who grow up among them. They are nourished from the same soil, in the case of Newton and Einstein, western civilization, and they don’t disappear under a long chain of legs and heads and shoulders, but remain in their place, already tall, eternal and the guarantors of the forest itself.

Too, I can easily imagine my own journeys into these groves, wandering among woodlands growing since the days of classical Athens, old kingdom Egypt, republican Rome, the Renaissance. And consider Newton. Perhaps the mythical apple tree of his life might have been the Islamic scientist Averroes.

This ancestral forest lies just beyond the edge of this material reality, its sylvan nature dependent no longer on the laws of physics but on the memories of the future. We are its caretakers, responsible for its continued health.

 

Garden, Great Wheel

Beltane’s Last Day

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                            Summer Moon

The last day of Beltane. The growing season comes reliably during Beltane, if not by the more ancient date of May 1. We’ve had a weird Beltane this year with rains and more rains. Wet. Drought out. Water in. I’m not unhappy with the amount of wet yet since no fungus or other wet related diseases have shown up.

The peppers still look a bit peaked, but I anticipate both they and the tomatoes will pick up once the heat starts to come in earnest. The garlic has thrown up scapes, so we’ll have a nice dish with garlic scapes and greens, the first harvest of the new gardening year. Some strawberries, too. They dot the ground and the raised bed with their bright red.

 

Garden

Here and There

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                     Summer Moon

Whoa. Up early. Like a farmer. Getting outside to drench and spray the crops. Later today 500P1030729Kate and I are going to do some sort toss packing, stuff we need to make decisions about  together.

Still in a here and there mood with the garden. Here, I’m following a rhythm of treatments to optimize the food quality and soil improvement for this year’s crop (and next year’s, too, with the soil improvement). There, after this growing season, or part of the next, we’ll be gone, the care of the soil and the crops it is willing to produce will go over to someone else. An unknown someone. That’s a strange feeling.