Monthly Archives: September 2014

Cooking, Our Land and Home

Nocturne

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Lughnasa                                                                          College Moon

It has been a full week so far and we’re only to Thursday. The front porch looks so good, painted and new cedar flooring, steps. New windows on the shed and it gets painted, too, probably tomorrow. (note. these were done by our handyman, Dave Scott.) The firepit’s repaired. The bookshelves are empty. The Rav4 had it’s oil changed and tires rotated. Learned that it will not tow much at all, 1,500 pounds, so that’s not gonna work for the live stock trailer. Picked raspberries and tomatoes. Made chicken noodle soup. Worked out a couple of times. Translated several lines of De Bello Gallico. And all this while retaining my status as a retired person.

Glad it’s quiet. Silent night. Silence is holy in my world, so holy night, too.

Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Down, In

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Lughnasa                                                                          College Moon

Something I haven’t done since Tucson. Meditate. Thought I would, but, like every other Journal workshop I’ve collected and acted on the insights, then shelved the process.

Got back at it this afternoon for a bit. Had an interesting interior journey. I walked into an ancient building made of stone, maybe a castle, and inside it I found a spiral stair case, stone, that went straight down into the earth. There were no rooms around it. A pit the size of the stair case was dug, then the stair case was built inside it. The stair case went down hundreds of feet and ended in a domed room with a mosaic roof, stone walls and benches around its circular walls.

In the center was a holy well, the water bubbling gently. I knelt before it, why I don’t know. Tilting over my body fell into the well and swam out of the well into the deep ocean.

The deep ocean was the cosmos itself. At one point I feared finding my way back, would I be consumed, depersonalized in this vast oneness. The Brahman, I suppose. No, it came to me, no matter where I was in the wholeness, I could be no other than me.

Sure enough, when I swam back I found the well easily and leaped out of it, drying before I landed on the stone floor. There were others there now, all in capes. We acknowledged each other, then I climbed the stairs, went out of the ancient building into the room where I sat.

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Memories, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The Move, The West

A Milestone

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Lughnasa                                                                                College Moon

Well. A milestone. Every bookshelf except the one beside my computer, stacked with books I use frequently, has been cleared, sorted and boxed. I thought I would be done in late August, early September works, too.

(New Harmony as conceived by Robert Dale Own in 1833)

As I passed these last books from shelf to box, new arrangements for them cropped up, new reading projects and writing projects, too. I have, for example, a collection of historical documents about New Harmony, Indiana. They are records of the Harmonist era 1814-1824 and documents from the Robert Owens era soon after that. There are, too, maps, Indiana Historical Society monographs, photographs and notes of my own journeys there.

(stone labyrinth in current day New Harmony)

New Harmony features in my novel, The Last Druid, and continues to interest me, both as the site of two utopian communities, one very successful, the other a successful failure and as a present day historical site with an emphasis on spirituality. Reading through those would definitely spark something.

There are, too, a collection of books, stacked up on each other, concerning the west and Colorado. These are the first tools I’ll use to get up to speed on our new home and the historical context that made it what it is now.

Now I move to file sorting, magazine culling. After that, objet d’arts.

Weather +Climate

Wide-eyed Amazement

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Lughnasa                                                                           College Moon

The winds howled last night like a winter storm. It’s wet and 50 degrees here in Andover. The Denver forecast has the possibility of snow showers on Thursday. Phoenix had 3-5 inches of rain and streets flooded. September is a month of transition. California would like a transition with an astounding 58% of the state in the exceptional drought category, the highest. 95% of the state, that’s 95% is in severe drought and 82% in extreme drought.

Intensity:

  • D0 – Abnormally Dry
  • D1 – Moderate Drought
  • D2 – Severe Drought
  • D3 – Extreme Drought
  • D4 – Exceptional Drought

We’re a big country with a lot of natural variation in weather. That’s true. But there are climate change signals in a lot of these extremes.  Even our cool weather, caused by the stuck polar vortex, may have its root cause in the melting of Arctic sea ice.

No, not another climate rant here. Just a bit of wide-eyed amazement at the differences in this nation’s weather.

 

Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Something Swims Up

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Lughnasa                                                                                   College Moon

Something is swimming in the deep ocean of my Self, circling higher and higher, moving toward the surface. It’s tempting to view it as a condor, swooping in wide circles, riding the thermals, seen by my mind’s eye, but that’s an illusion. In fact what I see with the mind’s eye is only a clue, a reminder to look down, into the interior.

( at the foot of Wu Shi Mountain (Five Lion Mountain), located beneath the spectacular Qiandao Lake)

There in the Holy Well that connects me to the All That Is the waters bubble slowly, often still for moments at a time, then roiled a bit by the artesian pressure the cosmos brings to bear on all its creations. It is in this water that something swims, something big and commanding, I think though I can’t be sure. This is where the novels live, somewhere in the benthic realm. Could be a novel moving around.

Or, it could be, well, I don’t know what. But I can feel it riding the change in the seasons. It’s sensitive to the decreasing daylight and to the increasing weakness of the Sun’s light. Might be melancholy. This is its season.

Whatever it is, it keeps pressing up, sending small waves to jolt the surface of the holy well. I look forward to its arrival.

Cooking, Health

A Small Thing

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Lughnasa                                                                               College Moon

Kate’s got some kind of malady that made her want my chicken noodle soup. It’s my signature dish. And the recipe is an old family recipe, maybe. The soup recipe is on the Golden Plump chicken label.

Making it is a small thing. Cut onions (ours) one cup. Cut carrots (ours) one cup. Put in a full clove of garlic cut and smashed (ours). This last is my addition. A cup of celery. Some olive oil. Sautee for five minutes. Then add the chicken and the corn (frozen). Bring to a boil, reduce to simmer and cook for one and a half hours. Remove chicken. Remove skin. Cut chicken meat into small pieces and restore it to the pot with the egg noodles and peas (frozen). Boil for ten minutes. Freezes well and since there are ten cups of water, makes a bunch.

Growing the onions and the carrots and the garlic is a small thing, too. These sort of small things are our lives. Yes, there are the grand gestures: winning an election, bringing home a fat paycheck, building a business, designing a house, getting a degree. Yes, there are these. But without the small things, done by someone, there is no body, no energy, no health for the grand gesture. And the small things must be done every single day while the grand gestures occur only occasionally.

So this is a nod to the small things that make our lives.

Dogs, Family, Garden, Health

Fire and Raspberries

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Lughnasa                                                                          College Moon

Finished the fire pit repair this morning, spreading mulch over the landscape cloth. The IMAG0751landscape cloth covered the sand that filled the hole. The cobblestones from an old Minneapolis street in front of a former Kenwood mansion are clear of soil. We can now summon fire.

Picked raspberries, too. The golden berries have begun to ripen and they are abundant. Fewer red berries, but they are large and fat, juicy. Most of the garden is in now, a few tomatoes, all the egg plants, some peppers, the third planting of beets and carrots and the leeks are all that remain. When the leeks come in, I’ll my chicken and leek pies which we’ll freeze for over the fallow months dining.

Vega has returned to her tail wagging, bouncy self just as the vet feared when he wrote guarded on the prognosis. We have to keep her from running. She’s supposed to go out on a leash, but we never leash our dogs except for trips to the vet and the kennel. Otherwise they have free roaming rights to our woods. This means  that keeping a dog quiet whose surgical wounds need to heal can be difficult. So far, though, the wound has begun to close.

Kate’s down with a stomach bug I had last week. Used to be she shared all the illnesses she contacted at work with me, now I’ve done it to her.

Humanities, Translating De Bello Gallico, World History, Writing

A Celtic Neo-Renaissance?

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Lughnasa                                                                                           College Moon

Two matters Celtica in my life right now, causing my early writing interests in things Celtic and ancient to resurface. The first is Caesar and his commentary on the Gallic War. There is, in fact, a Roman gauze thrown over the lives of the Celts, first by Caesar and Tacitus, then by that other world dominating super power, the Roman Catholic church. After the Romans left around 400 or so A.D., the Roman church filled in behind them.

It was these two literate oppressors who recorded both the religion and folkways of the Celts. There is, as you can imagine, considerable disjunct between the likely reality of the Celts and their description by people looking down from positions from authority. Especially in the case of the Catholics who combined power with a demand to change the old ways.

The second is the upcoming vote, on September 18th, on Scottish independence. The English, in some ways the political and national extension of both the Romans and the Roman Catholics into the contemporary world of the British Isles, overthrew Celtic lands (Wales and Ireland) and later merged with Scotland.

They first took Wales, which never managed to govern itself as a nation, divided too much by its steep mountains. That was Edward I, Longshanks, in 1284. In 1536 Henry VIII took Ireland and, ironically, tried to supplant Catholicism by sending over Protestants. That is, members of the Church of England, a church created by his famous conflict with the Papacy over his failed attempt to find a wife who would give him a son. Then, in 1707, through a dynastic inheritance by the Scottish king, James Stuart, of the throne of England, Scotland joined England.

Over the course of the last century and this one those bonds have become loosened, first by the Irish struggles, not entirely over even today, and the independence movements in Wales and Scotland. The Welsh movement has not got much momentum, but the Scottish one seems to be gaining favor with the country. If Scotland shakes loose, we might see again a more recognizable Celtic culture with both Ireland and Scotland looking both back to their roots and forward to their own, independent futures.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Memories, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Sounds Pathological, But Feels Blessed

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Lughnasa                                                                              College Moon

Understanding of more than the motives of the moment seem more and more elusive as the third phase of life wraps itself around me. The deep reasons for liking, say, the classics and dogs and reading are lost in the fog of memory darkened by time into near opacity. There was a time when understanding felt more accessible, more relevant, perhaps as a lever with which to change personality, to affect a less tangled future.

Now though the past, my own past, not that long a time by historical reckoning and none at all in the sweep of geological time, not only seems to recede faster than the clock’s ticking, but happily so. It’s as if the meaning of the past, my intimate past that is, has begun to detach itself from my present, floating off like Sandra Bullock in Gravity, untethered and weightless.

This sounds pathological, but it feels blessed. This man that I am now is just who he is, not explainable by his past nor excused by it, but who he is either in spite of it or to the side of the past. Perhaps it is always like this: that the person we are now seems only distantly related to the person we were ten years ago, forty years ago, even an hour ago. That untethered feeling comes with a sense of liberation, of not being bound to the threads, the strings, the ropes, the cable of yesterday; not being bound and free to go where today goes, not captive to yesterday.

Oh, this is not to say that the past does not still have its effects. Of course it does. Just that they are no longer determinative, destiny creating. They are, after all, in the past.

Dogs, Feelings

Dogs

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Lughnasa                                                                          College Moon

Dogs. Vega clunks around, unable to navigate easily with the wide plastic e-collar (Elizabethan collar) attached to her neck. The e-collar keeps her from opening up the surgical repair of her cut, now stapled closed. It does not prevent, however, one of the other three from doing it for her, so we engage now in considered logistics as we move dogs from one room to another, always keeping Vega separate.

This is not a new situation for us, or for Vega.

Animals, be they cats or dogs, birds or fish, have special places in the homes of many people. It’s easy for an outsider, a non-pet lover, to wonder why. Pets, especially dogs, are expensive, time-consuming (we spent five hours with Vega yesterday), often messy and can make other life activities more difficult (think traveling, in particular).

What do they offer, these animals lodged somewhere between the wild and the domestic? Do they take the place of children? No. Do they take the place of friends? No. Are they vanity accessories? In some instances perhaps.

They are always life companions. No, they’re not children and mostly not even child substitutes. No, they are companions in their own animal way. Not a human friend, but, a canine or feline friend, under the particular terms of that sort of arrangement.

Each one comes with their own temperament, their idiosyncrasies, some breed determined, but most that same combination of genetics and experience that shape differences in humans. Rigel, Vega’s sister, on the first day at our house got her head stuck in the gate leading off from the deck. She wanted to see what was on its other side. I had to dismantle the gate. Her first day. Since then she and Vega have escaped numerous times, dug into the vegetable garden and the orchard and dug many deep holes.

On her own, though, Vega would do neither, escape or dig. Vega is a sweet follower outside. Inside she rules, outside she’s Rigel’s kid sister. Vega, on the other hand, finds thunder a non-event while Rigel goes back to her safe place by the garage door until the storm passes.

Celt, our first Irish Wolfhound, took a regal quality into his interactions with other humans. I.W.’s attract admirers. Their size and non-threatening demeanor encourage people to greet them. Celt took all this attention as merely acknowledging his special role n life. He would lie down, head up, paws crossed and allow people to pet him. When he was done, he got up.

Early on we thought Celt might like lure coursing, a racing event where sight hounds chase a lure around a course. When on the starting line, yellow vest with his number around his huge chest, Celt watched as the other dogs released yelping after the lure, turned and walked over to a donut stand. Much more interesting to him.

Each one Scot and Morgana, Tira and Tully, Sortia and Iris, Buck and Emma, Bridget and Kona, Hilo and Vega, Rigel and Gertie, Kepler and Simon brought their own unique personality to our home. It’s the ongoing relationship, the companionship that counts.

Dogs are pack animals, so we always try to have enough dogs to achieve some sort of pack. I imagine our true benefit from them is that we get to become part of the pack, too.