Lughnasa Full Harvest Moon
A butterfly in the orchard
A Guatemalan blue squash and an open blossom
A vegetable man Grandma made for Ruthie
Our entry in the 4-H veggie naughty bits competition
Who says we don’t pamper our dogs?
Look. In the Sky. It’s A Woodpecker. And a Moon!
Lughnasa Full Harvest Moon
What a beauty! This moon blazes its soft light, a gentle luminosity, inviting us to look. It does not make us turn away or shade our eyes, no, this moon says come on, look at me! That big planet Jupiter puts a sparkle in the sky at about 4 0’clock beneath the harvest moon, for me and my gal.
Right now I wonder why I would ever do anything more than write about woodpeckers and the moon. They require no historical research, no elaborate mental gymnastics. They are. Woodpecker. Moon. As I experience them, they have no past and no future. There is the woodpecker and the moon.
They are part of my world and I part of theirs. I’m more aware of them (I imagine.) than they are of me, but it does not matter because there is me, the woodpecker and the moon. We three, a trio of quite different entities, all unique and occupying a never again to be occupied spot in the vast web of spacetime. A wonder. A true and unmediated miracle.
This would be a good time for Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.
Woodpeckers and The World of Ideas
Lughnasa Waxing Harvest Moon
All afternoon as I have wandered the precincts of Enlightenment thought a pileated woodpecker has drilled one of the dead trees in our woods. The sound compels attention, a drummer of a truly ancient tribe with a steady and resonant sound. Each time it comes I’m drawn away from the abstract world of ideas and the delicate process of translating thought into words.
The woodpecker sounds push me away from the desk, here where I now have three desktop computers, two monitors, two large external hard drives, a router, a cable modem and a weather station in front of me, two printers and a phone off to my right.
When I turn toward the sound, my gaze lights on the purple blossoms of clematis, a fragrance worthy of tiny glass stoppered bottles selling high and it’s mine to enjoy for free. This plants is special, because it’s plant of origin was in the garden of a woman who died from breast cancer. We got our plant several years ago and I have divided it many times.
Then I notice the late afternoon sun, so low now. By September 20th the earth will have moved enough along on its orbit that the angle between us and the sun will diminish to 46 degrees, a decrease of 23 degrees from its high at the Summer Solstice. By December 20th it will decline another 24 degrees to its low of 22. The angle casts interesting shadows, illuminates the clematis and a late hemerocallis bloom, a golden orange set on fire by our one and only true star.
Both of these places, the abstract world of thought, nestled in that small yet infinitely large space between my ears, and the cabaret set with a woodpecker drumming and Sol doing the lights exist, yet the relationship between them has felled many trees and spilled gallons of ink. In what way can my conception of reason, a chunky idea studded with links and nested in a web that includes Europe, the mind of God and the Lake Minnetonka Unitarian-Universalist Society, be like the woodpecker, its lattice combed skull vibrating with each pile driver punch driven in a quest for food?
Its equivalence to the liquid, dying sunlight is more accessible, more plausible. But why? How does that sweet clematis fragrance fit? It is all a mystery, yet here I sit writing about it. Another mystery.
At Work.
Lughnasa Waxing Harvest Moon
Writing. Writing. Go to meeting. Come back. Write. Go to meeting. Write. That’s it right now.
In to an 8 am Sierra Club meeting of the Blue/Green Alliance. Back to work on the sermon. Out again at 7:00 tonight, then back to write tomorrow. This liberalism project has challenged me, forcing me back into philosophical modes of thought, struggling to make it straightforward for an educated audience and, also inspiring, since this will be a religious service. The combination proves difficult. It’s so easy to get bogged down in historical and intellectual minutiae, which, no matter how interesting, can obscure rather than clarify.
Still Thinking Out Loud
Lughnasa Waxing Harvest Moon
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein
Einstein’s notion reminds me of the definition of insanity: trying the same thing over and over expecting different results. Of course, any one familiar with computers knows that sometimes this works just fine.
It also gives me some pause before I write my liberalism series. An article in this month’s Dissent asked, “Does liberalism have enough resources to re-energize itself?” I like this question because it focuses my thinking. This is why I’m interested in pursuing liberalism. Does it have enough historical and philosophical oomph to make a difference in this and tomorrow’s world?
10 years ago I would have said no. Absolutely no. As a card carrying member of the New Left, liberalism was as much the problem as conservatism, perhaps even more since it was liberals who got us into the war in Vietnam, who ran corporate america and the government, aka the System and, BTW, Ike Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex. Hard to recall a time when the liberals were in power at this point in recent American history, but I grew up under a liberal hegemony.
Now, I’m older and less convinced of drastic, sudden change as either possible or workable, too much risk for too little reward. At least right now.
If we’re not gonna have a revolution, then we have to consider the hand we’ve been dealt and it’s our peculiar brand of American liberal democracy. That means looking for all the possibilities in likely and unlikely places.
At night the trees dwarf the houses, their bulk massing up against the sky. During the day we can pretend they are just plants, but as dark falls their true nature emerges. We are the Lilliputians in their Brobdingnagian world.
Writing Can Wait
Lughnasa Waxing Harvest Moon
Geez. Took the whole day to organize my notes and quotes, tweak the ideas and find a thread. Now the intellectual journey about liberalism has to contend with the Vikings 3rd pre-season game. The starters will play the first half at least. Hmmm. What to do?
Writing can wait. The y chromosome has its mysteries and football is among them.
Not Yet Ready
Lughnasa Waxing Harvest Moon
I wanted to start writing this morning. But I could not. The piece was not ready. I had to do more work, winnowing ideas and quotes, looking for contra arguments. Now, I’m almost done, should be ready to write sometime after the nap. This work tires me out as much as working outside.
When my eyes glazed over, I got up and helped Kate a bit in the garage. She’s boxing up the last of the garage sale stuff or pick-up by the Salvation Army.
While doing that, Paula Westmoreland of Ecological Gardens came. She’s finalizing plans for some additional work on an edge to our woods. We’ll be getting plants that attract birds away from the orchard and to themselves. Plus, the look out the kitchen window will finally have a finished look, except for the small shade garden that we decided to postpone. Those big clompy feet of the pups would have made its life difficult right now.
We’ll also get some trees in the area where we have prairie grass, a sort of screen for the neighbors.
Up at 6:30 with the dogs, very sleepy.
More on Liberalism. Not there yet.
Lughnasa Waxing Harvest Moon
Another day spent happily with my nose in The Contested Enlightenment, parsing out threads of intellectual history that I can then weave together into a new tale, one that clarifies liberalism in the United States today and, also, the place Unitarian-Universalism, a liberal faith, has in that larger context.
Liberalism proceeds from three high-powered engines: reason, liberty and individualism. It is the individual who is central in liberalism in all its forms and liberty creates the protected space around the person that ensures expression of their individuality. The source of the break away from the old monarchical, aristocratic, traditional and ecclesiastical authority lay in a newly aroused faith in the ability of human reason as the key to truth. Logic, evidence, skepticism and radical investigation of such matters as revelation, the divine right of kings, the feudal caste structure, and precedent peeled away their nakedness. They simply did not make sense.
The enlightenment itself stands for the light of reason casting off the darkness of the ancien regime. Its roots lay in the new empirical methods of Galileo, Copernicus, Francis Bacon. These men and their brethren advanced the now commonplace notion that one must gather evidence, data from the world before making a conclusion about scientific fact. Thus, consulting a theological or scholastic assumption of human priority in the great chain of being and using that conclusion to place the earth in the center of the solar system, indeed, the universe might well be true, but if it is true then data gathered from telescopes and manipulated through mathematical formula should confirm it. If they don’t, and they didn’t, it is the traditional conclusion that gets shelved among yesterday’s ideas.
Further back in time even than the emergence of early science and the philosophical work of Descartes and Spinoza, however, was critical work, for liberalism at any rate, by Petrarch and his humanist buddies, the development of a nascent individualism, a notion of the worth of the person and their unique qualities.
The End of Sin and Salvation
Lughnasa Waxing Harvest Moon
Sin and Salvation has ended for me. It will leave without another tour on my part, though I may go check it out once more on my own. One of the most pleasurable tour experiences I’ve had in what is now 8 + years of volunteering at the MIA, this show brought together a number of interests of mine, including the PRB.
With most things I do I hold myself to a very high level of expectation, a curse left over from days as a good student. Maybe I should say, as they do often in the Hebrew Scriptures, a curse and blessing. The blessing usually comes in the preparation which always gets my full attention. I love research. The curse begins to strike soon after, that is, when any work has to go beyond my study and into the world.
First, there is the anxiety. Have I prepared well? Have I prepared enough? Have I focused on the right material? If these questions sound familiar from finals week, you know what I’m talkin’ about. Then, there is the time just before and sometimes in the very beginning of a presentation or tour when the same questions come flooding back, always in a place where there is no more hope of doing more.
At some point, usually after an introductory moment, the anxiety subsides and the presentation takes over on its own. Sometimes, a critical look or remark can throw me even then. That’s the worst, to be thrown off after having found my stride.
Sometimes then, at the very end, when the preparation and the presentation is over, if people make a substantive show of appreciation, the blessing returns. At this time it is a great boost, a confirmation of what I always wish for, the coming together of content and audience for an aha moment, or a huh! I hadn’t thought of that.
Today, on this last tour of the Sin and Salvation show, I experienced a double blessing: a show of support with good questions, interaction, clapping, people shaking my hand, others staying behind to discuss their insights, even a woman who went on the very same tour a week ago and returned with a friend to do it all over again. This was a double blessing because as a special exhibition I had given my tour over and over. Most of the time it was well received, but this affirmation at the end gave all the research and other tours a positive glow.
Sin and Salvation can have that effect, I guess.
Life Busting Out All Over. Much Better Than the Alternative.
Lughnasa Waxing Harvest Moon
My thoughts on Enlightenment were cut off mid think by this world, Rigel on an adventure outside the gate. Now I’ve secured the gate (I think.) until it can be repaired and I’m about to return to research for the Liberalism series.
We have many tiny strands of life breaking out: Kate’s spine, Rigel’s venturesome spirit, Vega’s big gallumphing crashing presence, a gnarly conceptual piece that needs to be written by September 6th, the oncoming harvest, driveway seal coating on September 8th and the next round of Ecological Gardens work starting on September 9th.
I also have a tour today at 1:30. Thank God, it’s only Sin and Salvation. Ha, ha.