Aging, Humanities

Curiosity

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Fall                                   New Blood Moon

“Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.” – Samuel Johnson

That may be, but I can tell you from experience that it can also lead one astray.  Since I was old enough to trek off to the library on my own, I’ve followed so many different paths, walked so many ancientrails.  The problem is this.  Each one leads to another one, or, somewhere in the midst of searching for material on liberalism I might find a remark about Greek ideas about justice.  That leads me in thought back to the Greeks, but instead of pursuing Plato I may wander off to the Iliad or perhaps to the  idea of the classics in general which might push me over to Ovid or, aware of the vast chasm between our Western knowledge of the Greek classics and any knowledge of the Asian equivalents I might get shunted off to, say, Confucius or Lao-Tse.  By that time I may recall a tour of Asian art I have on October 16th, feel a slight twinge and decide to  prepare for that.  And, where did all this start again?

This sort of meandering (I have seen the Meander River which gave rise to the Greek symbol so often seen in decorative arts.) does accrete knowledge.  It’s a slow process and the linkages may not become apparent for years, but I find now that associations, not obvious ones, come more easily.  Perhaps all those ancientrails had secret or frequent intersections that were not apparent the first or even the second or third times I used them.  I’m not sure, but there is a richness to thinking now that I don’t believe I had access to when I was younger.

Any of you have a similar experience?

Faith and Spirituality, Garden

Fall Tasks

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Fall                                    Full Blood Moon

The hunt takes on a seriousness in the fall, especially in the temperate climates like Minnesota.  Even if summer game had kept the family or clan fed then, fall has to do double, even triple duty.  It has to feed the family through the fall itself and sustain the family through the leaner winter season.  It also has to last into spring, when the animals begin to fatten up again.  Yes, this was in the time of the hunter/gatherers, but their rhythms are ours and in honor of them, consciously or not, thousands go into the woods in blaze orange.  This is a ritual as much as it is an activity, a time when we honor the traditions of our ancestors long dead.

The wild hunt has a particular place in my own developing ge-ology and it relates directly to the hunt as we still know it.  The wild hunt rides the skies at all times of the year though you may hear them more in the fall.  The wild hunt harvests souls, taking them from bodies as they ride.  It is said that if you hear the wild hunt that your time is near.  So listen with care to the storms of late fall if you dare.

Squash vines, tomato vines, left over bean plants, wilted potato plants all went into the compost pile this morning.  Now is the time to think about the spring garden, prepare the beds for a new gardening year as this one comes to a close.

In short summary this was a better year than I thought.  We have many potatoes, squash, carrots and a few garlic to last over the winter months.  We’ve eaten many meals already from the garden.  Kate has conserved tomatoes, grapes, green beans, turnips and greens.   There are still pole beans to harvest.  Even though it was a good year, it is still not where I want it.  Next year.

Bees, Dogs

Rigel Redux

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Fall                                            Waxing Blood Moon

After reviewing the stats for ancientrails, I learned something old.  During the time when Rigel and her sidekick Vega staged their break-outs readership went up.  My assumption is that conflict drove the rise.  Can man outsmart dog?

Chapter 14 or so.  Vega and Rigel have not escaped the yard since the electric fence went up with the one exception I orchardfence709mentioned where Rigel opened the truck gate.  There is, though, a follow-on.  While gnashing my teeth  about the escapes and to allow Vega and Rigel some outside time, I reversed field and put them inside the fence we put up to keep them out of the orchard.  Did you follow that?

This  only lasted for a few days while Kate and I gathered our strength and solved the larger problem, then we let them back out into the larger backyard.  Now, however, Rigel yearns for those days in the orchard.  So what does she do?  Yes.  She climbs into the orchard.  Do you hear those teeth again?  Right now I don’t know how she does it.

On another front.  The bees.  Mark Nordeen graciously set me in bee-keeping this spring with the loan of a bee suit as well as hive boxes and supers (for the honey).  He came over frequently at first, then gradually let me handle the bees on my own.  We are, however, in the fall and I need to make the bees comfortable for winter.

Since bees are warm climate critters, not even native to our shores, winters alone can kill an entire hive.  As  you can imagine, our winter puts a good deal of stress on a hive.  That stress plus some disease and pesticides contributes to Colony Collapse Disorder.

Elise, Kate’s colleague and Mark’s wife, got a new horse, an heirloom breed and a black mare.  While putting the horse in a trainer (Elise rides dressage.), the horse kicked Elise on the chin, threw her fifteen feet and knocked her out.  The kick separated skin from bone around and below her jawline.  She’s better, but still suffering head-aches and neck pain.  As you might imagine.

Anyhow that means the bees and I are on our own on this getting ready for winter deal.  A learning experience for me.

Art and Culture, Weather +Climate

Dull Gray Day

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Fall                                   Waxing Blood Moon

Another dull gray day as my Aunt Roberta used to say.   The morning so far has been doing work for the Sierra Club, organizing issue briefs and selection criteria, moving our process along.  That’s done now.

Today I’m going in to the MIA for some interesting education about photographs.  I’ll also pick up my Louvre catalog.  Yes, at the last minute I got added to the list of docents touring this show that focuses on the concept of masterpiece.

Need to feed the dogs and get a nap in before the drive into the MIA.  Later.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Myth and Story

It’s About Time

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Fall                                      Waxing Blood Moon

On the I-Google page there is a widget that shows the progression of night and day across the globe.  In Singapore it is Friday already, 12:30 p.m. Lunch time.  Here in the middle of North America we have blackness.  This is another of the rhythms of nature, the one so familiar it can come and go for weeks, months, even years with little remark.

Yet imagine a 24 hour period when the day/night cycle changed in some unexpected way.   What if at 12:30 p.m. it became night?  Or, what if, at midnight the sun came up?  No, I don’t mean the poles, I mean right here on the 45th latitude halfway between the equator and the pole.  Earthquakes challenge a core assumption we carry unknowing, especially those of us in the relatively quake quiet Midwest.  The assumption?  That the earth beneath our feet is solid, unmoving.  The regularity of day and night is also a core assumption, one we carry unaware.

It is these rhythms, day and night, the changing of the seasons, the growth of flowers and vegetables, their constancy that gives us stable hooks on which to hang the often chaotic events of our lives.  Even if a death in the family occurs we say the sun will come up tomorrow.  Flowers will bloom again.

Bringing these changes into our consciousness, the moon phases for example, can give us even firmer anchors.

They give me a feel for the continuity that underlies the messiness of human life and the apparent vagaries of time.  It is a continuity of positive and negative, yin and yang, dark and light, the dialectical tension between these opposites which cannot be without the other.  Taken all together they can give us a confidence in the nature of the 10,000 things.

They make understanding space-time possible for me, in spite of my lack of mathematical sophistication.  That space and time create a matrix which holds everything makes sense in a universe where day follows night and winter follows fall, then happens all over again in the next cycle.  This is not a linear model, it is not chronological, it is deeply achronological.

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family

Surgery, Money and the Electric Fence

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Fall              Waxing Blood Moon

Saw Ruth Hayden again, today.  She has guided us since a stressful period in our finances over 7 years ago.  As Kate’s retirement comes closer and closer, Ruth helps us with fine-tuning our retirement budget and preparing our holdings to manage the inevitable ups and downs of the market.  Her help is practical and wise.  Everyone should have a Ruth in their life.

Kate has scheduled her back surgery.  It will take place on October 19th.  She plans for 8 weeks of recovery, 4 of pretty low key activity.  That means extra care and nurturing.  I look forward to it.

The electric fence has become part of our property.  I check the l.e.d. two to three times a day and walk the property after heavy winds.  Thanks to the fence, Vega and Rigel now run and romp, tumbling over and over in the way puppies will.  The electric fence teaches a strong life lesson about freedom within  constraint.  Once our limits are clear, we are free to act as we are.  This seems like an oxymoron, but in fact life has limits at every turn.  Like Rigel you may be inclined to climb the fence and run free.  Like Rigel you may find that exhilarating.

Consider this, however.  She has a secure place in which to play with her sister, get fed and hang out on the couch in the evenings.  She risked losing that when she climbed the fence.

Not a conclusive argument and I don’t mean it to be, but it’s worth thinking about.

Faith and Spirituality, Weather +Climate

Spelunking

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Fall                                           Waxing Blood Moon

Rainy and cold, October has come.  Though most don’t realize it, the rain of early fall is as important to spring as April’s showers.  The plants drink deep, ready themselves for the dry, desert like conditions of winter.  Without adequate moisture in the fall a plant can die of thirst even while the earth is white, covered with frozen water.

These days come as elixirs to my soul.  The outer becomes the inner.  Spelunking the caverns within has  a seasonal aspect for me, one I wrote about a week or two back.

Gotta go meet with our financial adviser.   Later on.

Faith and Spirituality, Family

Live Your Own Life

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Fall                                      Waxing Blood Moon

“There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.” – Christopher Morley

It’s not the only success, but it’s sure right up there with love and family.  Self-direction has always been at or near the top of my list and I’ve been lucky enough to find significant folks, Kate especially, who’ve honored the way I choose to live my life.

Long ago, before college, I decided I would never do anything that violated my own values.  Never was a young man’s word, but the spirit of that vow has guided me well enough for over 45 years.  Have I violated my own values?  Of course, I have.  Life happens.  The essence of that commitment though is what Morley says, the ability to spend life in my own way.  That means accepting the consequences, bad and good.

Sad news tonight.  My aunt Barbara, my mother’s sister, had one child, Melissa.  Barbara suffered from bipolar disorder and spent most of her life in state hospitals.  She had a run of stable years during which she gave birth to Melissa.  That was 40 years ago.  Melissa died a a couple of days ago.  She had re-entered family life only recently, we didn’t know where she was, so I did not know her well, but she was a first cousin and the first of us to die.  There were 12 of us, now there are 11.

She leaves behind a son, John, and husband, Paul.  Her mother’s life was difficult from the very beginning and my sense from the brief contact I had with her is that Melissa’s life was not easy either.

Bees, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Great Work, permaculture

Fall Clean-up

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Fall                                         Waxing Blood Moon

Out in the garden this morning taking down plants that have finished their labors.  Large cruciform vegetable plants grew from the seeds I started inside, but they never developed any fruits.  They’re in the compost now.  All the tomato vines save one have come down.  The last tomato harvest went inside today, too.  A few straggling yellow and orange tomatoes and a cluster of green tomatoes for a last fried green tomatoes.

A new crop of lettuce, beets and beans are well underway, lending an air of spring to the dying garden.  While examiningdieback091 carrots I have in the ground awaiting the frost, I discovered golden raspberries large as my thumb.  A real treat at this late stage in the year.  They await the vanilla ice cream I’m going to buy when I go to the grocery store.

The 49 degree weather made doing these choirs a pleasure.  Odd as it may seem, I like the fall clean-up part of gardening as well as I do any other part, perhaps a little bit more.  Most of these plants I started as seeds in February, March or April and they have matured under my care, borne their fruits and run through their life cycle.  From some of them I have collected seeds to plant for next year.  The clean up then represents a completion that goes one step beyond the harvest.  It honors these living entities by caring for their spent forms in the most full way possible:  helping them return their remaining nutrients back to the soil.  I want no less for myself.

Got a new toaster and a new ladder in the mail yesterday from Amazon.  Boy, shopping has changed.  I rarely go to a big box store anymore, once in a while to Best Buy to check out DVD’s or for some computer accessory.  I still go to hardware stores and grocery stores, the things you need weekly or right now or fresh, but everything else I buy online.

The bee guy, Mark Nordeen, had to cancel again today.  His wife, Kate’s colleague, got kicked in the head by her brand new black mare.  E.R. and a concussion later she’s home off work.  Guess I’m gonna have to figure out how to over winter my bees all by myself.