Approaching Samhain

This Friday morning past, the wind was finally calm after a hard frost night. I watched the maple trees in front of the house drop leaves like oversized snow flakes. Soon, what passes for our front lawn was colored yellow. Today we mulched the lawn's leaves. Yesterday and today we had collected windrows of leaves along the south side of the driveway and dumped several garden cart loads at the wood's edge behind the house. Most of the oak leaves are still hanging on. Autumn is my favorite season except for leaf fall.

While emptying one cart load of fallen leaves, I tripped over what at first I thought was a dead branch that turned out to be a mouse-eaten four-point antler, shed from a white-tail buck that would have been an eight-pointer. First time in my life I've come across an antler shed. It's now a keepsake.

may only friendly spirits visit you

Photo by J. Harrington

From what I've noticed during my recent drives, all of the soy beans and most of the corn has been harvested. Fields and treetops are looking more and more bare by the day. As we approach Samhain at month's end we recognize we're entering the dark half of the year. The cycle continues through the Circle of the Year. I was contemplating some of those kinds of thoughts and accompanying feelings when my Jeep's music system started playing Joni Mitchell's fantastic song The Circle Game. All the thoughts and feelings mixed together were enhanced because our granddaughter had recently celebrated her fifth birthday.

It seems to me that we would do well to live so that we are more aware of the passing seasons and what's seasonal. Such an adjustment might help us to more readily live in the moment. Ms. Mitchell captured the essence of that in her song Big Yellow Taxi. "Don't it always seem to go / That you don't know what you've got / Till it's gone...."

You''re right, I've stayed away from politics and world events in this posting. remember the old advice about not saying anything if you can't say something good? Now is the time for me to share below these much better than good lyrics and thoughts from Ms. Mitchell and wish US all a Happy Halloween and Blessed Samhain.

The Circle Game

by Joni Mitchell

Yesterday a child came out to wonder
Caught a dragonfly inside a jar
Fearful when the sky was full of thunder
And tearful at the falling of a star

Then the child moved ten times round the seasons
Skated over ten clear frozen streams
Words like when you're older must appease him
And promises of someday make his dreams

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now
Cartwheels turn to car wheels thru the town
And they tell him take your time it won't be long now
Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty
Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There'll be new dreams maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

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Please be kind to each other while you can.

Welcome Yule

Druids celebrate today as Alban Arthan.

Joni Mitchell has written beautifully about an aspect of the solstice cycle in The Circle Game.

May the coming year fill your life with warmth and love, beauty and wisdom, and peace.

winter’s “bluebirds” of happiness

Photo by J. Harrington

The Shortest Day by Susan Cooper

    And so the Shortest Day came and the year died

    And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world

    Came people singing, dancing,

    To drive the dark away.

    They lighted candles in the winter trees;

    They hung their homes with evergreen;

    They burned beseeching fires all night long

    To keep the year alive.

    And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake

    They shouted, reveling.

    Through all the frosty ages you can hear them

    Echoing behind us—listen!

    All the long echoes, sing the same delight,

    This Shortest Day,

    As promise wakens in the sleeping land:

    They carol, feast, give thanks,

    And dearly love their friends,

    And hope for peace.

    And now so do we, here, now,

    This year and every year.

    Welcome, Yule!

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The shape of time

More and more acorns are dropping from the bur oaks, and being joined on the ground by ripened fruits and berries. Signs of impending autumn increase by the week. “And the seasons they go round and round,” as Joni Mitchell tells us in her wonderful lyrics to The Circle Game. Six months from now, some of us will be praying for a prompt end to winter, but first we have to harvest and store the products of the current growing season. Those who make it through the winter will be able to plant again next spring. The circle continues, though we age as it does. Is our passage through time a straight line? Do we pass through our own seasons as we age? Is there another universe to which we will pass at the end of our time on earth?

bur oak acorn

Photo by J. Harrington

Einstein tells us that space-time is a continuum. I have as much trouble picturing what that means as I do picturing an oak when I look at an acorn or a butterfly when I look at a chrysalis. If a continuum never ends, what was there before the big bang? If the universe is all that exists, into what is it expanding? Can we ask “how big is a light-year?” Or, do we need to stick with how far light travels in a year? Got a headache yet?

I got pulled into thinking about these kinds of questions when I tried to follow a simple direction this morning, “travel sunwise.” My first thought was: Is that clockwise or counterclockwise? Then, I was on to the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, but that’s not actually the sun moving, that’s the earth spinning on her axis. The seasons are caused by the earth’s orbit around the sun, neither days nor seasons are clockwise or counter. See how all of this circles around like a game?

By now you may be feeling as I did the first time I realized that Joni Mitchell’s lyrics from Woodstock aren't simply a metaphor, they're also literally true.

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief excursion through space-time as much as I have. Now, let’s put on our gloves and get back to work. We have a garden (earth) to tend. It’s time to shape up.

Squaring the Circle

By Philip Fried

It’s a little-known fact that God’s headgear — 

A magician’s collapsible silk top hat,

When viewed from Earth, from the bottom up — 

Is, sub specie aeternitatis,

A pluperfect halo, both circle and square,

And a premonition of this truth

Spurred on an ancient philosopher,

Anaxagoras, to make numerous vain

Attempts to approximate the circle

Of his concerns with the square of the cell

He was jailed in for impiety.

Doomed calculations which God acknowledged

By doffing then pancaking his topper.

He was still bareheaded millennia later,

When he learned of von Lindemann’s proof that pi

Is not the root of a polynomial

With rational coefficients, hence

Squaring the circle’s impossible.

God un-collapsed, re-donned his hat!

But — it was 1882,

Progress was a juggernaut

And the public had no patience for “proof.”

From below, God’s gesture looked like a signal

For all hat- and cap-wearing men,

Proper in their headgear, for nations,

Well-stocked with helmets for delicate brainwork,

To take up “the compass and straightedge”

And prepare for a singular all-out attack

On this seductive conundrum, so men 

Enlisted en masse in Geometry’s army,

Tossing up and away all hats

Of cloth, opaque haloes, hurray!

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It’s heel-dragging time

“There is more to life than increasing its speed.”  Mahatma Gandhi

Often, I drive township gravel roads rather than city, county or state paved ones. “Why?” you may ask. Have you heard of slow food? How about slow water? Each is premised on slowing down and  working with nature’s systems more than engineering a quick profit. In a similar vein, I’m working on slow travel, trying to learn how to enjoy the trip as much as arriving safely at the destination.

It’s rare that I drive less than the speed limit on a paved road or highway. On a gravel road, I’m more likely to slow down, put the windows down, and watch for roadside wildflowers. Not every rural road in Minnesota has prairie plants blooming between a cornfield and the ditch, but enough do that it’s worthwhile to enjoy the black-eyed Susans, bee balm/bergamot and occasional cluster of purple coneflowers. Sometimes there are even butterflies on the flowers and swallows on the telephone wires as further enticements to let beauty and pleasure, not speed, be my driving force.

a field of wild bergamot and ???

Photo by J. Harrington

One soy bean field I drove past this morning had a whitetail doe toward the back edge and her adventurous  fawn close to the road. As I approached, the fawn looked up, saw the Jeep, turned around, and started bounding toward mom with a whitetail flag waving and the fawn yelling: “Mom, mom! Did you see it? Why didn’t you warn me about those big, shiny monsters? I promise I’ll never go near the road again!” (Until the next time.)

Wise people from cultures much older than ours have advised us to slow down. The above quote by Gandhi is one example. Another is “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”  Lao Tzu

I was delighted the other day to learn that Joni Mitchell, who has written much of the soundtrack of my life, closed out this years Newport Folk Festival with a performance, her first in about two decades. Joni knows a lot about the problems going too fast can cause.

The Circle Game

by Joni Mitchell

Yesterday a child came out to wonder
Caught a dragonfly inside a jar 
Fearful when the sky was full of thunder 
And tearful at the falling of a star 

Then the child moved ten times round the seasons
Skated over ten clear frozen streams 
Words like when you're older must appease him 
And promises of someday make his dreams

And the seasons they go round and round 
And the painted ponies go up and down 
We're captive on the carousel of time 
We can't return we can only look 
Behind from where we came 
And go round and round and round 
In the circle game

Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now 
Cartwheels turn to car wheels thru the town 
And they tell him take your time it won't be long now
Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down 

And the seasons they go round and round 
And the painted ponies go up and down 
We're captive on the carousel of time 
We can't return we can only look 
Behind from where we came 
And go round and round and round 
In the circle game

So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty 
Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There'll be new dreams maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through

And the seasons they go round and round 
And the painted ponies go up and down 
We're captive on the carousel of time 
We can't return we can only look 
Behind from where we came 
And go round and round and round 
In the circle game

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Please be kind to each other while you can.

Nature loves a circle

As a recovering planner, I long ago learned there is truth in the premise that "no amount of planning will ever replace dumb luck." In fact, during the past few days I've experienced the kind of serendipity that supports the premise. Today, I want to share that beneficial coincidence with you  because I believe there's a number of lessons we might learn from the juxtaposition of two "essays" available on the internet.

Today's Star Tribune has an opinion piece by Timothy Egan of the New York Times. It's titled:

U.S. is becoming a generally mean country

Tribalism, long simmering in the shadows, has surfaced noticeably in our daily interactions. 

Without getting into a quibble about whether "is becoming" is the correct tense, let's focus on the  reality that the piece concludes with these two paragraphs:

It may be, as writer George Packer says, that the U.S. is headed for "a cold civil war that continues to erode democracy." No nation can survive for long without some self-evident truths as a lodestar.

There's an old saying, attributed to the Sioux: A people without history is like wind on the buffalo grass. What may be worse are a people without a heart, unable to see half their countrymen and countrywomen as anything but the enemy.

Just yesterday I had read something that struck me, after the fact, as lodestar that suggests a course that could allow us to respond positively to Egan's "old saying." In the sidebar to the right is a link to a blog I usually find both  enjoyable and rewarding to read (as if enjoyment isn't reward enough), Nina Munteanu's The Meaning of Water. Yesterday's posting there is titled Find Something To Love in Nature … And Save the World. When I first read it, I promptly identified as one of those cynics referred to in the following:

Find something to love in Nature, and you can save the world. It’s really that simple. Cynics will consider this naïve. But at its root is the very notion that Itzak Stern argued in Schindler’s List when he quoted the Talmud: “whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.” Ecologists understand the foundation of this notion. Ecologists study relationships, after all. How animate and inanimate things interrelate in a web of existence and change. We are all connected. And because we are, any being can serve as a sentinel (a representative) of their functioning ecosystem and world. By saving one, you help save the whole. This is because every part of an ecosystem plays a role in that whole.

Further along, Nina Munteanu offers an insightful comparison that offers a vision of how we become less tribal and forego some of our meanness. It's captured in the following graphic:

Today, let's close with a tripartite request. Please follow the links and read each of the pieces mentioned above. Then, think about whether moving from a viscious circle to a virtuous circle offers an achievable  framework for a viable response to some of the major issues we're facing in this country and on this planet, such as some sort of civil war and near term extirpation of the  human race from the only home it  knows. Third, find something to love in Nature and follow through.

In yet another bit of serendipity, it seems that  the incomparable Joni Mitchell has captured lyrically much of what we've considered here and in the linked pieces. See what you think after you look at her wonderful lyrics to

The Circle Game

by Joni Mitchell

Yesterday a child came out to wonder
Caught a dragonfly inside a jar 
Fearful when the sky was full of thunder 
And tearful at the falling of a star 

Then the child moved ten times round the seasons
Skated over ten clear frozen streams 
Words like when you're older must appease him 
And promises of someday make his dreams

And the seasons they go round and round 
And the painted ponies go up and down 
We're captive on the carousel of time 
We can't return we can only look 
Behind from where we came 
And go round and round and round 
In the circle game

Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now 
Cartwheels turn to car wheels thru the town 
And they tell him take your time it won't be long now
Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down 

And the seasons they go round and round 
And the painted ponies go up and down 
We're captive on the carousel of time 
We can't return we can only look 
Behind from where we came 
And go round and round and round 
In the circle game

So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty 
Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There'll be new dreams maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through

And the seasons they go round and round 
And the painted ponies go up and down 
We're captive on the carousel of time 
We can't return we can only look 
Behind from where we came 
And go round and round and round 
In the circle game

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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.