Easing into a new year

This morning's sun rise was spectacular. Did you see it? On the other hand, the Christmas tree is starting to look a little shopworn. Petals and leaves are dropping from the poinsettias. Today we deleted the Christmas playlist from our phone until next November. For reasons that will probably never be clear, both dogs have been shedding pounds and pounds of hair, during December and January? We're getting lots of practice with our new vacuum. At least the mid-Winter blahs have been tempered by the beginning of what looks to be a real January thaw, combined with sunshine! And, have you noticed that the days are getting longer? Later this month, on the twentieth, we have a super moon total lunar eclipse of what the Ojibwe call the Great Spirits moon (gichi-manidoo-giizis). By then we'll be up to about 9 hrs 20 min of daylight.

a spectacular sunrise

Photo by J. Harrington

The bread we baked yesterday did turn out to taste as good as it looked, maybe a little better. Next time we'll use just a little less of the organic flour we bought at River Market on the advice of the potter and fellow bread baker Guillermo Cuellar. We still haven't managed to create a crumb as open (full of holes) as we'd like, but we seem to be making progress in that direction. We're even starting to believe the old saying that "happiness is found along the way and not at the end of the road."

learning to create an open crumb

Photo by J. Harrington

The stock market is way down again today. Much of the decline is attributed to Apple computer's reduced projection of revenue for this year, especially in the market in China. We've been a user of Apple products for quite a few years now and we find ourselves wondering if the devoted fans are starting to get tired of planned obsolescence. We know we are and are starting to consider alternatives to enforced upgrades. The messages we keep getting on our iMac and MacBook Pro, informing us that our current productivity applications won't work the next time Apple updates their operating system, are pushing us away from Apple to ...? Having moved to OS X after depending on Windows for a number of years, we're wondering if it's time to consider Linux. Or, maybe it is time to reconsider becoming a twenty-first century Luddite, or, perhaps, just a lot more like Wendell Berry.

2008, XII

Wendell Berry, 1934

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge…
Hosea 4:6

We forget the land we stand on
and live from. We set ourselves
free in an economy founded
on nothing, on greed verified
by fantasy, on which we entirely
depend.  We depend on fire
that consumes the world without
lighting it.  To this dark blaze
driving the inert metal
of our most high desire
we offer our land as fuel,
thus offering ourselves at last
to be burned. This is our riddle
to which the answer is a life
that none of us has lived.

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