A more mystical concept of animals

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

- Henry Beston, The Outermost House

This quotation was on a poster at our vet’s office in Atlanta, and it stuck with me so that I eventually read Beston’s book, which is a wonderful piece of nature writing that documents a year he spent in a tiny cottage at the very tip of Cape Cod.

It’s much on mind today because I am going to the vet later on today, but will leave that place alone. It sucks  – hard – that we outlive our animals, but that’s the deal we strike when we bring them into our homes and lives.

We say to God, “I will take your creature to our home, provide for it and together we will grow and learn about each other. We will make each other happy and fill voids and we will all be better for it.”

And God replies,  “So it shall be, but only for a little time of years.”

We sayd “Deal!” and dive in. Then our time is up, and we’re sad, but it must be, for the final boon the steward grants to those in his care is relief from pain, darkness and confusion.

And then, what? I really don’t know. Animal heaven. Warm grass, cool shade, and endless hamburger.

Another comes to take that place, and we begin again.

The beginning and end and midpoint of times

Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.

- Hippolyta, I.ii.8-12

Yesterday I finished Infinite Jest, but I think it’ll be awhile before I can form a full opinion of it. Parts of it are brilliantly funny, but it’s a long, long book and even the footnotes have footnotes.  There is no real ‘end’ to speak of, and several things are left unresolved. Wallace’s writing style is infectious. Last night I was drifting in and out of twilight sleep while trying to make sense of the book, and found that I was doing it in his long sentences and characteristic expressions (cf, “the howling fantods”).

I’ll probably be revisiting the book every so often, since it very definitely seems like the sort of book in which you discover (or re-remember) new things at each go-round.

Work is slowing somewhat as we reach the end of this quarter. The technical stuff is pretty much done and the various teams are in closing mode. My job, at this point, is to answer any remaining little questions but mostly to stay out of the way and let the account managers manage accounts. July begins the next quarter for us. The circle of life continues.

We had a very good Father’s Day around here – strawberries and homemade pastry (!) for breakfast, Mass, a long day on the couch reading (see above), burgers on the grill and pie for dessert. We played with the cat, watched fireflies and tried to stay cool.

Our oldest girl is traveling with her grandparents out west to Colorado and Iowa. She seems to be having a good time, but is calling home every other day or so. Make of that what you will. Her brother will be going with the other grandparents out to the Arkansas/Oklahoma/Missouri quadrant next month and is looking forward to that, since most of that time will be at the lake. The others are flitting to and from friends houses and generally having a pretty good time of it all. One of them opines aloud that since we have a dog, a cat, two rats and a handful of fish, the time is ripe for a chinchilla; these wonderings generally go unremarked-upon.

Smallest girl and the cat chase each other around. The baby is starting to eat a bit of cereal, and the dog abides.

The garden is doing quite well. The tomatoes that I thought were dying have actually come back quite strong. I pull them off as they start to blush and we stick ‘em in the kitchen window to finish off. The real success story, in terms of pure vitality, are the zucchini plants which have complete taken over their part of the patch and are on the verge of swallowing up the two squash plants. Whatever it is that cucurbits need as regards soil, sun and moisture, we seem to have it.

Most of the sunflower seedlings got eaten by the rabbits, as you may recall. A few managed to survive and one of them is topping out at about six feet tall. It’s got a nice looking bud forming in the middle, and everyone’s looking forward to see it gyrate slowly as it follows the sun.

Speaking of the sun, I got some celestial geekery in on Father’s Day, since it fell on the summer solstice this year. It was plenty bright and hot, and I made the most of my day off by parking it on the couch to read and recover from the prior day’s bike ride and a little niggling head cold that we’re passing back and forth. Right sunset, something along the horizon formed a very nice crepuscular ray pattern in the sky. Whatever it was cast a long shadow in the sky that went right down to the horizon, which was ultimately obscured by trees and houses.  I’ve never noticed it before, so maybe it only happens on the solstice. This would be nifty as can be, and I’ll be looking for it next year if the weather is clear enough.

The quote at the top is from Act 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I dropped it in here because we’re about 2 days from Midsummer and also because we’re in a new moon as I write this, so it makes good lunar sense. Little by minuscule little, the days are getting shorter. They’re not going out quietly, mind you. It’s well nigh 100 here today. But they are starting to diminish, to decrease a little. In a sort of celestial liturgy, the days begin to decrease with the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, who also had to decrease. The days will shorten, and night will fall, and it will keep falling until the next Feast of Nativity, when the rising sun retakes the sky and the daylight wins again. The shadows beneath the trees, moving in slow arcs across the ground, the analemma, solstices and equinoxes, the

…organization of the universe and the force of its elements, the beginning and the end and the midpoint of times, the changes in the sun’s course and the variations of the seasons. Cycles of years, positions of the stars, natures of animals, tempers of beasts, powers of the winds and thoughts of men, uses of plants and virtues of roots – such things as are hidden I learned and such as are plain; for Wisdom, the artificer of all, taught me.

These things all play out, for me, in the ever-changing shapes of light and shadow on the ground, the thick green smell of the countryside in its peak and the slow wheeling of the sun, moon and stars. They’re a slow celestial liturgy – majestic and quiet, and but sometimes also silly. Chesterton noted in Orthodoxy that joyous repetition is the delight of a child’s game. The thing repeated (“Do it again!”) is done for the sheer happiness of it, whether it’s making a funny horse noise to amuse a three-year-old or creating thousands of little daisies on a roadside. He may have made the mountains and set limits for the ends of the sea, but He also seems to be quite fond of thistles and goldfinches, at least around here.

A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

Gardening update. Moby Dick. A tiny update on the children. New bike.

Welp. Our tomato crop is blighted or something. Maybe they got too much rain, or the aphids did more damage than I thought. In any event, half of them are now composting. The others look like they’re hanging on for now, but we put together 3 new tomato plants in deck containers as a hedge (ha, ha) against a total in-the-ground loss. Of the two peppers, one looks pretty good. The other looks a little anemic. The yellow squash is already blooming and setting little 2″ baby squashes. The zukes have seriously bushed out, but no blooms as yet.

To our herb plantation, I added lavender and mint. The mint is in a container, that it might not take over the yard, which it will if given half a chance. The kids got used to having a patch of it near the deck of our old house, and I’d been looking for it off-and-on for a few weeks. Lowes finally had some, so I brought it home. We’re drying a few of these in the kitchen to see how that goes: thyme, rosemary and oregano. They smell pretty good at any rate.

The compost heap seems to be slowing down a litte, which is good. I think the brown and green ratio is getting a little more manageable. The whole thing has certainly shrunk down considerably, which is a good sign. It doesn’t reek (as much) either, which is another good sign.

Over last weekend, we stopped by a local nursery and went all moon-eyed over some of their stock. Rather than just plant stuff pell-mell thoughout the yard, we’ve asked one of their guys to come over and give us a little help with some planning. There are things that we’d love to have (gardenias, for one), and I’ve read some mixed reviews on them for our zone. Ditto for azaleas. Pachysandra, my favorite evergreen groundcover needs more shade than I think we can offer it,  E. wants a garden entirely of the color blue, and so on, and so on, in my best Yul Brynner voice: et CETera, et CETera, et CETera.

What I hope to get out of this little visit is: plant this, not that. That will die here. The fee is pretty modest, and it’s easily worth it so that we don’t torment any more hibiscus bushes.

I’ve put Moby Dick aside for a bit to re-read King Lear. Someone on a message board I frequent dropped a reference to Lear the other day and I was reminded of how much I’d forgotten about it.

The constant asides from Melville on the minutiae of the whaling industry were interesting at first, but OK, yeah, I get it, please get back to the action already. I really don’t want another detailed exploration of The Natural History Of  Cetaceans From Pliny To The Present Day.

Am I missing some sort of point? Probably. I’m about halfway through and loathe to shelf it after this long.We wound up our scouting year, our oldest girl swept her gymnastics meet, two of the children are still off on adventure and the the babies abide. Work continues apace.

I’m being fitted for a new road bike – a Specialized Allez -  tomorrow after work and can hardly wait. I took it on a test spin over the weekend and was gobstruck by it’s relative lightness compared to the hybrid. The change in posture will take some getting used to, as will the shifters. But tomorrow can’t come soon enough!

Outsideness, rabbits and Alice Cooper

We’re now in our third year in this house and yard and it’s only just now starting to feel like our place, if you know what I mean. We’ve done quite a bit of painting and so on inside the place, and we have most certainly spread ourselves (and our stuff) into every available corner. The outside has been a little behind, though, and this is the year that we started fixing that: vegetable garden, herbs, and so on. It’s nice, occasionally, to slip outside during the day and take a look at things – maybe pluck a weed or two. Working from home does have this perk, unwilling though I may be to take advantage of it. There are plenty of days where I go into my office at around 7:30, emerge for about 10 minutes at lunch, then disappear again until 5 or 6 in the evening. Other days I’m on the road seeing prospects and customers, and may be gone for a day or two at a time.

Yeah, I know. Cry you a river. After all, I’m still not commuting on a daily basis.

In any case, my point is this: it’s too easy for me to see the outside as someplace as a destination for escape, rather than as The Real World that I have to leave periodically in order that I might work. It ought not be so, especially when the weather has been so agreeable of late. My job, like many, has a fair amount of nonsense associated with it, and it’s clear to me that an occasional re-rooting outside is essential. It might be just a few moments of studying the sky – I’ve become pretty good at predicting coming rain by watching cloud patterns. Or it might be a few minutes turning – blech – the compost mound (which is still over-hot and over-green, and so it smells pretty bad at the moment).

Our landscape is rich with opportunities for nature studies and observation. True, we live in a suburb, and while it’s not as wooded as our last place, our home is near the edge of town, and so we’re on the cusp of some of the area farmlands. The buffers between the fields, along with the streams and river forks, form a sort of webwork of ecological boundaries. I’ve seen deer, turkeys, rabbits, skunks, turtle, snakes and all manner of songbird on my occasional bike rides. What might be seen at a slower pace – or even standing still – beggars the imagination. Cultivating the habit of mindful observation of natural and built landscapes is something that we – I -  need to work on.

In other news, the tomatoes had aphids. I sprayed them all with soapy water and that seems to have knocked them all out for now. We’ll see. I’m still catching the occasional rabbit in the yard, though I think it’s because the wee ones are leaving the gate open. The neighbors (and my spouse) are occasionally subjected to my suddenly breaking out in a screaming arm-waving  run, and there’s  be some rabbit, sitting there and chewing on a leaf, not taking the least notice until I’m just about on top of him. Then he bolts, and I chase him around our yard widdershins until he can find the gate and make an escape. Great fun for everyone except the rabbit, who crosses the road then resumes eating, nonplussed.

The almanac says that tomorrow will be one minute and thirty-seven seconds longer than today. Use the time wisely. Use it to say an Ave, a Salve Regina or an Alma Mater Redemptoris – May is the Marian Month. The current moon is waning gibbous. The next full moon is the Full Strawberry Moon – go eat some strawberries! We bought some as part of a Mother’s Day brunch around here and they were gigantic. Since I know you’re wondering, the children are fine. Two of them are off with my parents, so we’re down to only five right now. The house seems a little too quiet, but we know they’re having fun.

Finally, an absolutely, positively random item. I listened to Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies all the way through for the first time in 20+ years and was surprised at two things. First, it holds up pretty well. Second, the songs came off like the soundtrack of some modern theatrical musical. Something about the production quality and the lyrics. Just need a quick libretto and a few million in financing. Hey – if they can do it for ABBA, I can do it for Alice. Any angels out there? Call me.

Happy Mother’s Day

Assorted gardening related photos (updated with labels, which I couldn’t seem to do with the iPhone WordPress app).

Herb patch – parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme (!), oregano and basil:

Our Lady’s butterfly garden:

Vegetables-in-the-making. Back to front: tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and yello squash. Way way in the back are what’s left of the sunflowers, which isn’t much.

Compost. Mostly green, so a bit on the stinky side right now.

On locales

The April showers came all at once and spent the better part of today soaking our area. Which is good, since we’re still feeling the effects of last year’s drought in some places. Certainly the area farmers ought to be happy – the hayfields ought to be in good shape, which means better winter feeding for livestock, and so on.

We have some good friends locally who raise some of their own beef. Late last year, we bought part of a side and it was delicious. We’re down to the last dozen or so oddball cuts and haven’t had a stinker yet (well, except for the ribs – they were a bit on the fatty side). They’ve upped the ante and gone to three head this year. Last week, the kids got to go over and feed them. From big bottles. We didn’t belabor the fact that we will probably be eating one of them at some point. The cows, I mean. Our friends always name their food animals after food (“Big Mac”, “Whopper”, “Chocolate”, “Steak” and so on). Seeing their place outside of town renewed the itch I’ve had to buy a real piece of property somewhere Out There where there are no covenants or city ordinances to prevent, say, a beehive or a chicken or two.

On the other hand, at the 2 year mark in this house, I think we’ve finally just unpacked the last box recently. Certainly I’m in no hurry to try to stage and sell a place that\’s still full of small kids. Ugh. We got lucky when we moved up here from Atlanta – put our place on the market and had an offer in the first week. Not sure we could pull that off again. Maybe in a few years. Our neighborhood is great, and we’ve finally reached a point where the insides and outsides are Our Own Place: paint, some landscaping changes, vegetables, compost bin. All the little things. We’ll see. Meanwhile, we scan the real estate classifieds and daydream about some of these 10 and 15 acre lots that are out there. Mmmm. I, for one, miss being surrounded by mature wooded areas. Most of the area around here is reclaimed pasture, so you can imagine that it’s a bit on the bare side. There are whole populations of birds and critters that go along with the trees, and I find myself missing them.Most of them. Not the roof rats. I don’t miss those little bastards at all.

Now everyone’s in bed and we have some movies to watch. Disc 1 of Season 4 of BSG and Munich. Have to pace ourselves, you know. Tomorrow, if there’s a break in the rain, I’ll unwrap the statue of the Blessed Virgin that we brought with us and install it near the butterfly garden. May is the Marian month, you know.

A note to the children: I found another one on the upstairs door frame. Hear me well: one of these days, I\’m going to catch whoever is doing this. When I do, that person is going to have two problems: a bloody nose and a broken finger.

Friday

…and the end of another busy week. At some point I may cease to point that out; all my weeks are busy these days. I was all over town like fertilizer this week, which included a trip to Memphis to do some client support during their maintenance window which, sadly, was from midnight to 5 AM. I rolled back to the hotel, went back to the room and passed out for a few hours. Got up, hit the road in time to join a 10AM conference call, drive for a few more hours and join up with my account manager, change into a company shirt and visit yet another client. I begged off the trip to Birmingham this morning, joining by phone instead.

This is basically how all of my weeks go. Client visits, conference calls, livemeetings and web-xes, demos, evaluations and occasional schmoozing. I wake up and it’s Monday. I wake up again and it’s Friday. It’s not a bad deal at all. I also have a bunch of training lined up for late July and August. It might be a good idea to know something about the products for which I consult.

I picked up a couple of books for vacation reading: Desolation Island by Patrick O’Brian (book 5 of the Aubrey-Maturin novels) and Sharpe’s Tiger, the first book in the Richard Sharpe series, which came highly recommended by a customer. E is still reading Mansfield Park. Netflix brought us BSG and Meet the Fockers. I think V for Vendetta is up next.

Other things going on: we bought a big ol’ pool for the backyard from Wally World. It’s basically I giant bag with an inflatable collar. You fill the collar with air, the bag with water and you’re Ready To Swim in 30 Minutes! Well, not quite. It took about 12 hours to fill the thing up and that water was darn cold for a day or two. This thing even came with a pump/filter/skimmer system and we have to regularly treat the water lest it become sort of…you know…funky with microbes, algae and whatnot. Among other things, it’s given us a supreme bit of leverage over the children. Not finished helping clean up? Still not quite done with school? Well, if you want to go swimming later…This should last us until fall, with any luck. Still riding my bike in the mornings, if I can. I’ve gone up to a 20 mile loop, which I can knock out in just under 2 hours. If my schedule permits it, I try to do this first thing in the morning. If time is tight, I shave off a few miles or just use the stationary upstairs. Today would have been my day to do it, but I had some early morning calls and still felt like doo-doo from yesterday’s 24-hour work/driving session.

That’s about it, I think. Kids are just about done with school for this year, the grass is getting tall and it’s getting hotter every day ’round these parts. But the fireflies have come out, we’ve grilled a couple of times, and Bluebell spotted a hummingbird the other day near the butterfly bush. There’s still some homemade peach ice cream in the freezer and the frogs are out at night. A rabbit has taken up residence in the back yard and doesn’t seem to mind the children a bit. He (she?) galumphs around the yard generally ignoring them unless they get within 10 feet of him. In the hottest part of the day, he sometimes stretches out in the shade under the trampoline. He’s pretty cool, actually. Like a pet you don’t have to feed, or even name.

So summer seems to have  landed, and not a moment too soon if you ask me.

Breaking The Galilean Spell

Stuart Kauffman writes about the shortcomings and ultimate failure of reductionism in science.

If no natural law suffices to describe the evolution of the biosphere, of technological evolution, of human history, what replaces it? In its place is a wondrous radical creativity without a supernatural Creator. Look out your window at the life teeming about you. All that has been going on is that the sun has been shining on the earth for some 5 billion years. Life is about 3.8 billion years old. The vast tangled bank of life, as Darwin phrased it, arose all on its own. This web of life, the most complex system we know of in the universe, breaks no law of physics, yet is partially lawless, ceaselessly creative. So, too, are human history and human lives. This creativity is stunning, awesome, and worthy of reverence. One view of God is that God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures.

Because of this ceaseless creativity, we typically do not and cannot know what will happen. We live our lives forward, as Kierkegaard said. We live as if we knew, as Nietzsche said. We live our lives forward into mystery, and do so with faith and courage, for that is the mandate of life itself.

[...]

Across our globe, about half of us believe in a Creator God. Some billions of us believe in an Abrahamic supernatural God, and some in the ancient Hindu gods. Wisdom traditions such as Buddhism often have no gods. About a billion of us are secular but bereft of our spirituality and reduced to being materialist consumers in a secular society. If we the secular hold to anything it is to “humanism.” But humanism, in a narrow sense, is too thin to nourish us as human agents in the vast universe we partially cocreate. I believe we need a domain for our lives as wide as reality. If half of us believe in a supernatural God, science will not disprove that belief.

We need a place for our spirituality, and a Creator God is one such place. I hold that it is we who have invented God, to serve as our most powerful symbol. It is our choice how wisely to use our own symbol to orient our lives and our civilizations. I believe we can reinvent the sacred. We can invent a global ethic, in a shared space, safe to all of us, with one view of God as the natural creativity in the universe.

via aldaily.com

Catholics – cf. CCC, 31-35. This is interesting writing. As a Christian, of course, I also believe that it’s seriously deficient, but interesting nevertheless. A god of strictly vegetative spirit is no god at all, but rather instead a convenient shorthand. A spirituality centered on it worships the painting at the expense of the artist. Prof. Kauffman gets a little close to Anselm’s ontological proof, but this is still a long way from the idea of Emmanuel, God-with-us. Still, he is to be commended for continuing to seek and knock. The section at the end about the “four injuries” bears particular scrutiny.

Guests and clouds.

Today, our guests returned home. The house is a little quieter, and a little emptier, and we are a little sad. But we had a good time and are all looking forward to another gathering of cousins soon. It’s supposed to rain here all weekend, which actually works out fine for me: I need to finally get started on a certain someone’s Pinewood Derby car before the race in a couple of weeks. Right on the heels of that is the first camping trip of the year and we have one more piece of gear to acquire. Namely, a gigantic cooler – one large enough to hold enough food and ice for los ocho Hobnottles. A few other cooking tools remain as well, but we can knock those out at the dollar store or thrift shop.

I’ve been having quite a bit of fun watching the clouds of late. I finished The Cloudspotter’s Guide, and am now fairly well equipped to tell the Altocumulus from the Cirrostratus. I can’t swear to it, but I thought I spotted some Lenticularis the other day, too.  This new place we live – it’s considerably flatter and less wooded than our old haunts in north Atlanta. There are humongous, wide-open spaces that afford some great views of the sky. Unfortunately, we’re not so far out as to escape the urban glow, but the wider vistas make up for it a little bit.

Out of the cave

The caving trip was a lot of fun, though I picked up quite a few things that should serve us well next year, namely: bring an air mattress or two. The new foam pads were OK, but not great. I shudder to think of how bad it could have been without them. We camped out on the cave floor, along one side of a long gallery. Noise, comfort and lightwise, it was comparable to sleeping in a parking garage. We did two tours – a walking tour which is offered to everyone who shows up during their normal operating hours, and a second spelunking-type tour that had the adults squeezing through some very narrow passages on our stomachs. The kids, of course, zipped right through. The dads (and a few moms)…not so much. It was slow going in some parts, and especially insane when the line got backed up exactly as I got into some weird position for negotiating a tight turn. But it was a lot of fun, and everyone had a great time. I took some pictures, and really, really promise to post them soon. I get lazy about pictures because we use Picasa to manage them locally, but host them on Flickr. As Picasa and Flickr are locked in mortal combat, there isn’t an easy way to upload pictures. There is a nifty plugin, but it’s not working for the most recent version of Picasa. Yet. Or maybe I’ll just move them all to a Google web album instead. Meh.

Anyway, it got me (temporarily) interested in caving. The bits about packing out waste (all waste) turned me off a little. Garbage is one thing. Schlepping around a freezer bag full of, uh, poop is something else entirely. Maybe some other time. Next stop: the pinewood derby.

Our tank has finished cycling, with both nitrite and ammonia levels at 0. Huzzah! I’ll probably start adding back fish to replace the ones we lost during the process, and the plants are already needing to be pruned down a little.

Tulip had a nice little party the other night, with cupcakes, ice cream and some new books to read. Everyone else (including your scribe) is battling some annoying little chest-tickling cough. The weather has warmed up here for a little while, giving us all a brief taste of spring. As I wrote the other day, it really can’t come fast enough for us.