Category Archives: Nature

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What is Love?

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Yesterday, I read a travel post about a European romantic trend called Love Locks.  Apparently, an Italian novel whose title translates to “I Need You” has spawned the custom of lovers affixing padlocks to public fences, bridges, gates and whatnot as a sign of their everlasting love.  This idea really rubs me the wrong way, so I’m sorting out my thoughts to figure out why.  Of course, this is about me, not about judging any of the couples who have participated in this ritual nor about anyone else who thinks it’s romantic.  So, what do I know about me?

First of all, I worry about the accumulation of stuff.  Seeing all those padlocks encrusting a surface reminds me of the proliferation of manufactured gadgets and things that we humans often allow to run unchecked.  Apparently, many city officials also consider them “an eyesore”.  It occurs to me that if they were something natural or biodegradable (like flower petals or garlands?), I would probably not feel this instant repulsion.  This may be just the surface of the aesthetic mismatch, however.

Second, I think a lot about symbolism.  What does a padlock say about love?  In all fairness, I have not read the novel, so I am probably missing the finer points.  I understand the desire for security in a relationship.  I was married for 24 years, “until death”, and I positively flourished under the safety of that bond.  But now that Jim has slipped all surly bonds, I think that anything everlasting must be a bit more mutable than metal, more plastic than any tangible material.  The words of a song by John Denver keep floating to the surface of my consciousness.  The title of the song is “Perhaps Love”.  Here’s a bit of the chorus: “Some say love is holding on and some say letting go; and some say love is everything and some say they don’t know”.   I guess I have to say that lately I’ve been sitting in the “letting go” camp.  Out of necessity, obviously.  I did the struggle of holding on.  I found it to be an ego thing, ultimately unsustainable.  Letting go, opening up, imagining expansiveness is a way to include a lot more without confining it to an embrace.  I believe love wants to include a lot more by nature.

Two nights before my love died was Valentine’s Day.  We celebrated at home with champagne and salmon in the company of two of our daughters.  My oldest brought out a book of Pablo Neruda’s poetry and read this one (Love Sonnet #92):

My love, should I die and you don’t,
let us give grief no more ground:
my love, should you die and I don’t,
there is no piece of land like this on which we’ve lived.

Dust in the wheat, sand in the desert sands,
time, errant water, the wandering wind
carried us away like a navigator seed.
In such times, we may well not have met.

The meadow in which we did meet,
oh tiny infinity, we give back.
But this love, Love, has had no end,

and so, as it had no birth,
it has no death. It is like a long river
that changes only its shores and its banks.

Translation: Terence Clarke

I cannot imagine trying to put a padlock on a wheat field or on the desert sands, on the wind or on a river.  I cannot imagine putting a padlock on time, even though that’s a concept we made up, just like the padlock, as a way to try to control things.  I do know that the impulse to lock down an experience is very human and very old.  The ancient story of the Transfiguration of Jesus comes to mind.   Jesus and three of his disciples (Peter, James and John) climb a mountain, and there the disciples have an experience of seeing Jesus in glowing white raiment talking to Moses and Elijah.  Good old impetuous Peter gets all excited and bursts out with an idea.  “Let’s build three booths (or tabernacles)!  We can put each of you in one and hang on to this experience for a while longer, perhaps invite others….”   He is silenced by a booming voice from the clouds. “Listen!”  When the cloud lifts, Jesus stands alone, and they decide to keep quiet instead.

I am beginning to recognize a kind of flow, a yin and yang of contrasting energies, in myself.  I think it has something to do with my biological cycle, but it also manifests in a mood cycle.  I feel that expansive, fecund, open sense bubbling up in me, settling me down, inviting me to nurture and set free.  Then, a while later, I feel a feisty urge to grab hold and wrestle with my circumstances and force them to conform to some idea in my brain.   I could say that I am still loving with both energies.  I used to tell my children that I disciplined them because I loved them, and I believe that’s true, but I think there’s an ego love and a non-ego love.   They are both part of me.  One is not “right” and the other “wrong”, but I think that the non-ego kind is more beneficial in the universe.

Valentine’s Day is a few weeks away.  It’s a time when many people are thinking about love, romantic love.  I keep challenging myself to think bigger, to open up.  I hear the voice booming from the clouds, from the trees, from the water and the air.  It asks me to Listen.  So I guess it’s time to shut up.

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Let’s Make Tracks!

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It was tracking day at the Wehr Nature Center for a group of 24 third graders.  They made plaster molds of animal tracks and then went outside in the bright sunshine to find some animal evidence.  Those hearty species who stick out the Wisconsin winter without migrating or hibernating include squirrels, weasels & mink, deer, raccoon, opossum, fox, skunk, cottontail rabbit, pheasant, and a bunch of birds (cardinals, chickadees, woodpeckers, doves, nuthatches).  Of course, we didn’t see all these, but we did find clues: tracks, scat, and browse marks where they’d eaten branches and bark.

This is how we draw the kids' attention to a find

Whose little hands have been here?

And then, the sunshine creates lines and angles everywhere.

And the water that isn’t frozen ripples and sparkles, creating more textures of light and shadow.

I’m liking the black and white idea today.  Steve & I are planning to see “The Artist” this afternoon, a new silent film in black & white.  Sometimes, the world seems just too much to comprehend, so we break it down into stylized bits and patterns so that we can wrap our feeble brains around some part of it.   What would it be like to walk around open to everything at once, without compartmentalizing or simplifying?  Would we explode?

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Winter Photos

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So, here’s a pictorial view of my week.

I made almond cookies for Chinese New Year.  Extremely tasty with Amaretto and orange slices.

Honorable Almond Cookie

I supervised a bunch of 4 year-olds (68 of them, actually!) as they played in the Wehr Nature Center’s play space with spray bottles of diluted liquid watercolors.

Like a giant sno cone

I watched the sun setting in the west from my second story bedroom window.

"World turning on the burning sun...." (James Taylor)

And I felt the frost fly up on feathered wings into the morning light…and into my bones.

This morning, I took a group of Kindergarteners out on a nature hike.  One little boy walked beside me, counting excitedly.  “I found a hundred things!” he shouted.  Oh, there so many more than that, I thought.

—Say it, no ideas but in things—
nothing but the blank faces of the houses
and cylindrical trees
bent, forked by preconception and accident—
split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained—
secret—into the body of the light!

-William Carlos Williams (from “Paterson – Book One”)
Things…winter things…frosty filigreed, foggy white, cold-packed and angular,  distant and spare.

Ideas…winter ideas…hard and dense, insular, desperate, furtive.

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Winter Warmth

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A group of 68 pre-schoolers visited the Wehr Nature Center today.  I volunteered to supervise their play time outside.  Six groups rotated through my station, staying 15 minutes.  I spent an hour and a half standing in the snow, watching them spray diluted liquid watercolors onto that white, frozen canvas.  It ended up looking like a flavored snow cone playground.  I didn’t think to get a picture of it at the end, though, because all that was on my mind was getting feeling back into my toes.  Brrr….

The sky is gray, the bare branches are gray, the ground is gray, my gray matter is gray.   Suddenly, a flash of red whips over the roof and settles at the bird feeder.  A cardinal!  Oh, happy wings of fire!

We were hiking the Ice Age Trail, through a dark pine forest by the Oconomowoc River.  Through the trees, I saw a red barn with it’s face shining in the late afternoon sun.  It burned like a beckoning hearth.

I’m wearing a red sweatshirt, half wishing it would burst into flames and warm me up.  What I really wish….is that I had a fireplace.  I love building fires.  I love the smell of a fire.  I love watching the flames in their colorful dance.  I love the warmth.  When I was a child, I would pester my father to start a fire in the fireplace.  It made an otherwise ordinary evening feel like a holiday.

Alas, I have no fireplace, so I am going to attempt a simulation.  Mesquite incense sticks, flannel pajama pants, and several layers of blankets.  Maybe I’ll warm up enough to fall asleep for a little while.  For all you warm-blooded, hibernating, furry creatures out there, stay snug.  It ain’t over yet.

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Squirrely Post

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I have a rather social weekend lined up.  Tonight is our Chinese New Year celebration with Steve’s sister.  Tomorrow is the Lyric Opera (Die Zauberflote) with my youngest.  So, here’s a quick share…photos I took this morning as I watched my squirrel friend digging around in the fresh powder for the leftover popcorn I put out on his chair.

Sorry for the poor quality…the windows in the living room are pretty dirty!

More anon, good friends…..Happy Chinese New Year!

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Freecycling in the Family

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Transitions.  Stuff.  Accumulation and de-acquisition.   Now that I am almost 50 years old, I have seen a lot of cycles of hoarding and purging.  When I was a kid, my mother would periodically declare that it was time for “one great hour of swearing”, meaning it was time to clear out clutter and clean house.  She is a highly organized and tidy person, rarely sentimental about material things.  However, she is also an historian, an archiver.  Things that were deemed valuable were carefully stored.  Sterling silver was always wrapped in the proper cloth.  Her off-season shoes were in a zippered case, so were blankets.  Photo slides and correspondence were kept in carefully hand-constructed boxes of just the right size and shape.  Sometime in the 70s, recycling became a household habit.  She always had her glass bottles in separate containers, according to color, and everything perfectly sorted.  She’d load up the station wagon and make the trip to the recycling center about once a month.  I got to help her throw stuff on the appropriate piles or in the dumpsters.  Breaking glass can be fun!  She’s worked for the past few decades as a museum docent, cataloging the music collections.  She has my wedding dress stored in an archival quality box.  She keeps a full pantry (for earthquake preparedness), but she is not a hoarder.  I think she regularly updates her pantry and donates stuff she’s not going to use before its expiration date.  She’s a great example to me, and ahead of her generation’s learning curve.

Steve’s aunt is delightful and messy.  She thrills for a bargain.  She will go to great lengths to capitalize on a sale.  She knows that this creates problems for her, though, and is somewhat like a struggling addict, trying to quit.  She lives alone in the house in which she cared for her mother.  She’s never been married.  She solicits our help in taming the clutter she has accumulated in that house.  Steve is a willing worker, completely kind and patient, but always clear about his own limits.  He has some professional experience with estate sales from the book business, so he has worked with elderly strangers as well doing similar service.   He can assess and clear out an entire house in a weekend, if he must.  No one boxes more efficiently, in my opinion.

What do we do with stuff?

Rusted wire along the Ice Age trail

Reduce, reuse, recycle, freecycle.  Keep it out of the landfill, off the streets, out of the woods and wetlands.  Don’t buy it if you don’t need it; if you do anyway, give it away.  My mother has always had a habit of sending me “care packages” of stuff she acquired, often by mail order, that wasn’t quite what she wanted.  She was always on the lookout for a good home for something she didn’t want.   I would often end up taking some of that stuff to donate to Goodwill or the Salvation Army, but it didn’t get thrown away.   We’re working on finding good homes for Steve’s aunt’s stuff.  I’m fixing to give care packages to each of my children from what we brought home yesterday.   Beauty and cleaning products from her bathroom, mostly.   The unopened items will go to a local shelter.   A bottle of shampoo that was used once and turned out not to be to her liking can make some useful suds.  Would you just pour that down the drain?   Somehow, I can’t.

How long do you figure it would take to use up the stuff that’s already been made before we make more?  Depends on the stuff, of course.  But there must be categories of products that we could use up…and then, maybe, discontinue forever.  How many varieties of shampoo do we need?  How many varieties of cleaning products?  You could use Dr. Bronner’s Magic All-in-One Soap (made from hemp and essential oils) in peppermint to clean your entire body (including teeth), your clothes, your dishes, your surfaces, your car, etc., and we’d never need to make anything else.   Sounds like de-cluttering to me.  Of course, there are a million ways to disagree with me and get on your own soap box.  We like choices.  Depending on how old you are, you may be just beginning to explore all your options, and you’d hate to have anyone restrict you.  Wait 50 years.  Then you may be cleaning out your house and wondering, “Why do I have all this crap?!”   You’ll give it to your kids, who want to have stuff but have no money to buy it.  Some day there’ll be a story out there of a family who free-cycled the same object for 5 generations.  Why not?  I’m still using my grandmother’s electric mixer/food grinder.  But nowadays, things are built cheaply according to the economic principle of Planned Obsolescence and the landfills overflow.   It’s a sickening trend.

One great hour of swearing is not gonna cure the planet of its clutter these days.  (sigh)  We’re way out of scale.  Something’s gotta give.  I wonder what…and how… and when.

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Amusements

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It’s bitter cold and sunny outside today.  A crisp, bright world, intensely interesting.  Here are some things that have captured my attention:

frost on my bedroom window

I doctored these shots a bit, which I rarely do.  There’s so much to explore in photography, even when you don’t have the latest equipment.

My mother sent me this last night.  It evoked those happy tears I told you about.

Steve brought a book to breakfast that my mother and father would love.  It’s called The Superior Person’s Book of Words by Peter Bowler and includes such delightful entries as:

“CALEFACIENT — a.  A medicinal agent producing a feeling of warmth.  ‘Calefacient, anyone?’ you inquire as you pass around the cognac.”

I am creating, with Steve, an Art Trivia Game to be debuted at a dinner party at Steve’s sister’s house celebrating Chinese New Year.  I will also be baking almond cookies to bring to the affair.  The first effort is challenging me to be humorous and inventive.  The second will require that I follow instructions precisely.  I’ll let you know if I succeed at either of those.  I do know that I’m succeeding in keeping myself entertained!

Be warmed and be well, my friends.  It’s a wonderful world we live in!

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Friday the 13th – Rats!

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My daughter added a tidbit of info to my post a few days ago, stating that rats giggle and tickle each other.  I had to check that out and share it with you.  I found that the video at the bottom of that article didn’t work for me, so here’s a youtube clip of Dr. Jaak Panksepp playing with rats.  This is quite a happy little video of some well-behaved rates having a frolic in a nice, clean glass cage lined with AstroTurf.  I had quite a different picture of rats in my head this week.  I grabbed a book to bring to the laundromat on Monday; it happened to be a volume of selected short fiction by Charles Dickens.  I flipped to an entry called “Nurse’s Stories”.  These are not hospital accounts or memorials to field workers bringing medical aid, as I had imagined.  These are the nightmare-inducing tales that young Charles’ nanny told him!  He writes:

“The young woman who brought me acquainted with Captain Murderer had a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember–as a sort of introductory overture–by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan. So acutely did I suffer from this ceremony in combination with this infernal Captain, that I sometimes used to plead I thought I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear the story again just yet. But, she never spared me one word of it, and indeed commanded the awful chalice to my lips as the only preservative known to science against ‘The Black Cat’–a weird and glaring-eyed supernatural Tom, who was reputed to prowl about the world by night, sucking the breath of infancy, and who was endowed with a special thirst (as I was given to understand) for mine.

This female bard–may she have been repaid my debt of obligation to her in the matter of nightmares and perspirations!–reappears in my memory as the daughter of a shipwright. Her name was Mercy, though she had none on me.”

He then relates the tale of a family of shipwrights, all named Chips, who sold their souls to the Devil “for an iron pot and a bushel of tenpenny nails and half a ton of copper and a rat that could speak”.   This speaking rat, and a cohort of his friends, bedevils poor Chips, at last sinking the ship he crews.  In the end,

“And what the rats–being water-rats– left of Chips, at last floated to shore, and sitting on him was an immense overgrown rat, laughing, that dived when the corpse touched the beach and never came up. And there was a deal of seaweed on the remains. And if you get thirteen bits of seaweed, and dry them and burn them in the fire, they will go off like in these thirteen words as plain as plain can be:

‘A Lemon has pips,
And a Yard has ships,
And I‘ve got Chips!’

So that’s what I was thinking of when I heard about giggling rats.  And then Steve played a selection from a Schubert CD that’s made my blood run cold since I first heard it in college: Der Erlkönig.  The combination of narrative song and piano accompaniment is genius, as you’d expect with Schubert (who is Steve’s absolute favorite composer).  Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is a master at putting this German ghost story across.  You’ve gotta see this.

So, if you’re not creeped out by now and looking over your shoulder for rats and elves, then enjoy the rest of your Friday the 13th in blissful peace!

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Home Economics

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It’s ALIIIIVE!!!   It’s in the kitchen, and it’s growing!  I’m waiting for it to double in size, then I’ll screw up all my courage and give it a good punch!  I’m gonna break it in half, then I’ll let it alone for about an hour while the two halves grow again.  It sounds kind of like an amoeba, but actually it’s whole wheat dough.  Yup, I’m making bread.  By the time I get it baking, I’ll be making split pea soup as well, but I have to take a walk to the grocery store to get some dried mushrooms for that.

We have about 4 cubic feet of cookbooks in the dining room.  I often just look up a recipe online, but that makes Steve cringe.  He thanked me this morning for asking him to direct me to one of his books.  So I am celebrating my participation in lower-tech food preparation.  I will not get into my car and drive to Panera for bread and soup.  I will make it myself.  And I don’t want to pat myself on the back for this.  This is not a revolutionary step.  This is what almost every woman was able to do 100 years ago.

I’m not exactly sure what the comparative benefits are to this approach.  I haven’t researched the whole economic picture of Panera restaurant vs. homemade.  I just know that I’m not making an income (aside from being paid for giving one private voice lesson a week), and so I don’t want to spend much.  Is it possible in this day and age to live without spending?  Well, just yesterday, I ran across this news article about a grandmother in Germany who hasn’t used money for 16 years. http://wakeup-world.com/2011/07/18/happy-69-year-old-lady-has-not-used-money-for-15-years/     I really like that idea.  Capitalism isn’t my best friend.  WalMart makes me shudder.  I read about theft in my town paper every week.  What would happen if more of us were able to get off that treadmill somehow and live without using money or coveting goods?  Would we be able to scale back on damage to the environment?  Would we be able to scale back our population?  I know all these issues are intertwined, and I’m still wondering how they effect each other in the big picture and in my personal life.

Steve & I have been thinking about going to a conference on Population that will be held in Telluride, Colorado over Memorial Day weekend.  It’s called Moving Mountains Symposium: Population.  It’s a film festival as well, and features Dave Foreman (of The Rewilding Institute) as one of its keynote speakers.

So all this is just rising in my consciousness as the bread is rising downstairs.  I’m not quite ready to present it all sliced and buttered for this blog, but I like to think that IT’S ALIIIIVE in me in some way.  Stay tuned!

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The Power of Concepts

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Steve and I have been talking about concepts lately.  We humans think conceptually, like it or not.  Words, thoughts, concepts and the associations they suggest invariably bring with them emotional reactions and suffering.  Trying to leave concepts behind, or to do without them somehow, is what “enlightenment” points to…I think.  Maybe it’s not so much trying to eradicate them as it is to acknowledge their fabrication and refrain from investing them with a lot of meaning or credence.

The most troubling concept for me is death or mortality.  I have huge emotional associations with that concept that do tend to exert a lot of influence on me.  And yes, this causes suffering.  I suppose I can say that I come by this honestly, having had both my sister and my husband die at my side during my lifetime.  Consequently, I often feel the weight of a burden hanging around my head and shoulders, casting a shadow over my footsteps, causing me to be slow and rather plodding instead of eager and light on my feet.  You might call this a certain level of pervasive depression.  I find that, as I get older, I am more circumspect, less enthusiastic, and can easily convince myself out of an adventure.  I can never dismiss the danger of death with a casual “Oh, that’ll never happen to me!”  Instead, I tend to think: Why bother?  What’s the point?  Why start anything now, with the end so near in sight?  That kind of thing.

Let me direct your attention to Exhibit A:  Stephen Hawking.

As many of you know, Dr. Hawking celebrated his 70th birthday today.  When he was 21, and shortly before his first marriage, he was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and told that his life expectancy was about 2-3 years.  “Why start anything now?” was a question that occupied his thoughts to some extent as he wrestled with the idea of starting his doctorate.  Wikipedia reports that the turning point came with his marriage. “When his wife, Jane, was asked why she decided to marry a man with a three-year life expectancy, she responded, ‘Those were the days of atomic gloom and doom, so we all had a rather short life expectancy.”‘

We all still have a rather short life expectancy.  None of us has a guarantee on the next minute.  What do you do with that concept?  “Refrain from investing (it) with a lot of meaning or credence.”  What do you invest in?  Your passion.  Your bliss.  That’s what Stephen Hawking did.  The speech he would have delivered today in person included this admonition: “Remember to look up at the stars, not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.”

I took a walk along the Ice Age Trail at dusk.  Driving home, I asked Steve to pull over at a cornfield so that I could look up.  Here’s what I saw:

And this is just with my own myopic vision through some vari-focal glasses and a point and shoot digital camera.  I am curious about my experiences.  I am curious about how I think about them.  In the end, though, I think I want to concentrate mostly on being aware of being alive.