I know I haven't been posting, or commenting, all that much lately but you're just gonna have to cut me some slack. It's hot as hell and I've got some (hopefully minor) health concerns to deal with right now. So, here, have some Beck. He mentions pagans in this song but, as with most Beck tunes, I have no idea what the fuck he's talking about. Feel free to cuss and discuss. This is a live version of Jack Ass. The original, from Odelay, is much more mellow and trippy but this is great too. Enjoy.
I been drifting along
In the same stale shoes
Loose ends tying a noose
In the back of my mind
If you thought that you were making your way
To where the puzzles and pagans lay
I'll put it together:
It's a strange invitation
When I wake up
Someone will sweep up my lazy bones
And we will rise in the cool of the evening
I remember the way that you smiled
When the gravity shackles were wild
And something is vacant
When I think it's all beginning
I been drifting along
In the same stale shoes
Loose ends tying the noose
In the back of my mind
If you thought that you were making your way
To where the puzzles and pagans lay
I'll put it together:
It's a strange invitation
26 June 2009
19 June 2009
Punching a Hole
Click image(s) for larger version(s).
Another image from the storms of over a week ago.
Weather Weirdness
Have you ever had a moment, or moments, when something outside or otherwise nature-related that normally brought you joy not only gave you the willies but maybe scared the holy shit out of you? I had a moment like that last week during one of several storms systems that passed through our area. I call our little spot of land Windy Hill for obvious reasons. And we take full advantage of our often blustery weather i.e. we have zillions of wind chimes. Okay, maybe not zillions but dozens.
Almost every corner of all four buildings has a set of chimes hanging from it and the big covered back porch has at least a dozen of its own chimes. So, even when it's just a bit breezy we have the blessed, joyful, uplifting song of wind chimes filtering through the air and the trees. At any point on the property one can always hear wind chimes. The rare occasions when the air is completely still usually occur in the dead of winter. There's also a weird thing that happens just before, sometimes during, or after a thunderstorm hits: sometimes the wind abruptly dies. This is most likely to happen at the freaky time when cigar clouds are trying to stir up tornadoes.
This is what happened one evening last week. I was back by the barn, the front end, not the back end that our last tornado ripped up, and I was joyfully taking pictures of all the freaky, gorgeous and frightening clouds moving past. Say what you will about thunderstorms and tornadoes, and I have, but they make for great photography. Anyway, the wind had been picking up and the clouds were spiraling and turning and churning like they do sometimes before a tornado drops down when everything went dead.
Our near-constant breeze suddenly stopped. It was as if the local spirits, or fairies or Those Who Are in Charge of Air got a punch in the gut and lost their breath. For a few minutes the atmosphere stopped breathing. And just before everything went still and got stuffy the wind chime right behind me gave a small and sad little tinkling of sound as if trying to defy the danger of the storm. It was chilling. You ever have a moment like that?
Almost every corner of all four buildings has a set of chimes hanging from it and the big covered back porch has at least a dozen of its own chimes. So, even when it's just a bit breezy we have the blessed, joyful, uplifting song of wind chimes filtering through the air and the trees. At any point on the property one can always hear wind chimes. The rare occasions when the air is completely still usually occur in the dead of winter. There's also a weird thing that happens just before, sometimes during, or after a thunderstorm hits: sometimes the wind abruptly dies. This is most likely to happen at the freaky time when cigar clouds are trying to stir up tornadoes.
This is what happened one evening last week. I was back by the barn, the front end, not the back end that our last tornado ripped up, and I was joyfully taking pictures of all the freaky, gorgeous and frightening clouds moving past. Say what you will about thunderstorms and tornadoes, and I have, but they make for great photography. Anyway, the wind had been picking up and the clouds were spiraling and turning and churning like they do sometimes before a tornado drops down when everything went dead.
Our near-constant breeze suddenly stopped. It was as if the local spirits, or fairies or Those Who Are in Charge of Air got a punch in the gut and lost their breath. For a few minutes the atmosphere stopped breathing. And just before everything went still and got stuffy the wind chime right behind me gave a small and sad little tinkling of sound as if trying to defy the danger of the storm. It was chilling. You ever have a moment like that?
12 June 2009
Mismatched Horizon
Click image(s) for larger version(s).
More clouds from one of the storm systems that provided some cool wind and great images.
Pink Rainbow
Click image(s) for larger version(s).
It was 8:30 at night, just about a half hour before the sun goes to bed around here. And I looked out and the entire sky was pink. All around, from every window, pink. So, I grabbed the camera and hightailed it out the back door. And what did I find? This rainbow bathed in pink light. I'd never seen such a thing. Nor had I ever seen a rainbow so late in the evening. Gorgeous.
Dark Storm Clouds
Click image(s) for larger version(s).
We had two days with storm systems moving through, or mostly past, us in as many days. We didn't get any significant rain or wind but some nice, cooler temperatures for a while. I did take nearly a hundred photos of some spectacular clouds. This is just the first of many nice shots to come. These clouds almost look like cloudy, contaminated water, don't they?
P.S. I'm going to be heading back into the craft room this weekend, so look for some new collage or creative journal projects.
10 June 2009
The Great Mother Goddesses
Or, How Our Own Death Wish is Causing Many of Us to Return to the Old Ways.
Let me preface the following by saying I know nothing of genetics and very little of hardcore science in general. I'm probably going to use various, or many, terms incorrectly and miss the intended point of an important theory. So, if any of you science-y people out there spot errors I encourage you to correct me. Okay, on with the wild ramblings.
Have you heard of the Toba Catastrophe Theory? It states that roughly 70,000- 75,000 years ago a volcano on what is now Sumatra, in Indonesia, blew the Hel up and set in motion a series of environmental effects that caused a pretty drastic bottleneck in the human population. What's a bottleneck in population? That's when something pretty big, nasty and scary, like a plague, earthquake, ice age, volcanic eruption, etc., brings about the deaths of so many beings of a certain species that the descendants of the survivors are incredibly close genetically because so few were left to perpetuate the species. In the case of the Toba eruption it's estimated that perhaps as few as 1,000 breeding pairs of humans survived. There are also estimates that go as high as 10,000 pairs but either way, it was a pretty big damn drop in population. And it got me thinking.
It got me thinking about how many people look to religion and spirituality in hard times. Before I started learning about population bottlenecks, and the Toba disaster is just one of many, I had always wondered about the Great Mother Goddesses. Why were they so important to our ancestors? Why were they most likely the first to be crafted into statuettes? Why were they among the first divinities to be worshiped? Why were they, in many lands, cultures and times, the most loved? Why did they, above so many others, spread out from their homelands and find adherents over many continents? What's so special about them? And the most obvious, and somewhat unsatisfying, answer was that they were in charge of the continuance of human life. They were in charge of sexuality that led to conception, pregnancy, birth and growth leading eventually back to sexuality. They were the ultimate creators, the supreme progenitors, they were the mothers of us all.
Seems pretty simple, right? Why then, I ask you, did the worship of said Great Mother Goddesses die out and eventually become despised? What made them so important and then, at best, meaningless and, at worst, evil? I know, I know. It's the fault of the Judeo-Christians and their comparatively new religions. But things must have changed to allow for such a male-centric mythos to take hold. What could it have been? Answer: The population had long since stabilized and the need for Great Mother Goddesses had waned. Which means something major must have happened long, long before that to make the production of children an extremely high priority for nearly everyone alive. But what could that have been? Answer: An extraordinary drop in the population and the resultant desperation.
Now skip ahead a couple thousand years. People began returning to the old ways and the old gods about the time of the Industrial Revolution. Just about the time factories began spewing poison into the air, the water, earth and the bodies of every living creature on the planet a few folks here and there started looking back to the ancient religions. The Great Mother Goddesses become more and more important just as pollutants, pesticides and other chemicals started invading every aspect of life. It's not the same as a massive volcanic eruption, a meteor plowing into the Earth or the plague but we may be creating our next population bottleneck. As the human-made problems of global climate change, industry-induced cancer and infertility, and our own medicines poisoning our drinking water begin to weigh on us more people are turning back to the ancient ways. As our human situation grows ever more precarious the number of Great Mother Goddess, and other pagan, adherents has risen. Coincidence? I think not.
I don't think it's about simple fear either. If it were then many people would just turn to whatever religion is handy, whichever religion is acceptable i.e. the dominant religions, that of the Judeo-Christians. No. More and more people are turning to a form of religion and spirituality that is very much not acceptable to the majority of our fellow citizens. Why? Why would this current threat to our race cause such a thing? It's because the situation is radically different this time. It's something that hasn't happened ever before in the history of our race and our planet. Instead of a volcanic eruption or a plague or other disaster that we have no control over we are putting ourselves at risk. We are killing ourselves.
Our own technological advancement, our "progress" is putting our very existence as a race at risk. And because said progress involves a would-be domination of the Earth, untold and unnecessary cruelty, unparalleled waste and monumental greed many of us are not just turning away from the mainstream way of living, eating, consuming and working. We are returning to the ancient ways because we feel and know, at least subconsciously, that the ways of the Great Mother Goddesses, and their cohorts, are the only things that can save us. If we don't return to living in balance with the land and learn to embrace life, and all its joys and indignities, as sacred then we are doomed to destroy ourselves. If we don't return to the Great Mother Goddesses we are doomed to create the next human population bottleneck.
Let me preface the following by saying I know nothing of genetics and very little of hardcore science in general. I'm probably going to use various, or many, terms incorrectly and miss the intended point of an important theory. So, if any of you science-y people out there spot errors I encourage you to correct me. Okay, on with the wild ramblings.
Have you heard of the Toba Catastrophe Theory? It states that roughly 70,000- 75,000 years ago a volcano on what is now Sumatra, in Indonesia, blew the Hel up and set in motion a series of environmental effects that caused a pretty drastic bottleneck in the human population. What's a bottleneck in population? That's when something pretty big, nasty and scary, like a plague, earthquake, ice age, volcanic eruption, etc., brings about the deaths of so many beings of a certain species that the descendants of the survivors are incredibly close genetically because so few were left to perpetuate the species. In the case of the Toba eruption it's estimated that perhaps as few as 1,000 breeding pairs of humans survived. There are also estimates that go as high as 10,000 pairs but either way, it was a pretty big damn drop in population. And it got me thinking.
It got me thinking about how many people look to religion and spirituality in hard times. Before I started learning about population bottlenecks, and the Toba disaster is just one of many, I had always wondered about the Great Mother Goddesses. Why were they so important to our ancestors? Why were they most likely the first to be crafted into statuettes? Why were they among the first divinities to be worshiped? Why were they, in many lands, cultures and times, the most loved? Why did they, above so many others, spread out from their homelands and find adherents over many continents? What's so special about them? And the most obvious, and somewhat unsatisfying, answer was that they were in charge of the continuance of human life. They were in charge of sexuality that led to conception, pregnancy, birth and growth leading eventually back to sexuality. They were the ultimate creators, the supreme progenitors, they were the mothers of us all.
Seems pretty simple, right? Why then, I ask you, did the worship of said Great Mother Goddesses die out and eventually become despised? What made them so important and then, at best, meaningless and, at worst, evil? I know, I know. It's the fault of the Judeo-Christians and their comparatively new religions. But things must have changed to allow for such a male-centric mythos to take hold. What could it have been? Answer: The population had long since stabilized and the need for Great Mother Goddesses had waned. Which means something major must have happened long, long before that to make the production of children an extremely high priority for nearly everyone alive. But what could that have been? Answer: An extraordinary drop in the population and the resultant desperation.
Now skip ahead a couple thousand years. People began returning to the old ways and the old gods about the time of the Industrial Revolution. Just about the time factories began spewing poison into the air, the water, earth and the bodies of every living creature on the planet a few folks here and there started looking back to the ancient religions. The Great Mother Goddesses become more and more important just as pollutants, pesticides and other chemicals started invading every aspect of life. It's not the same as a massive volcanic eruption, a meteor plowing into the Earth or the plague but we may be creating our next population bottleneck. As the human-made problems of global climate change, industry-induced cancer and infertility, and our own medicines poisoning our drinking water begin to weigh on us more people are turning back to the ancient ways. As our human situation grows ever more precarious the number of Great Mother Goddess, and other pagan, adherents has risen. Coincidence? I think not.
I don't think it's about simple fear either. If it were then many people would just turn to whatever religion is handy, whichever religion is acceptable i.e. the dominant religions, that of the Judeo-Christians. No. More and more people are turning to a form of religion and spirituality that is very much not acceptable to the majority of our fellow citizens. Why? Why would this current threat to our race cause such a thing? It's because the situation is radically different this time. It's something that hasn't happened ever before in the history of our race and our planet. Instead of a volcanic eruption or a plague or other disaster that we have no control over we are putting ourselves at risk. We are killing ourselves.
Our own technological advancement, our "progress" is putting our very existence as a race at risk. And because said progress involves a would-be domination of the Earth, untold and unnecessary cruelty, unparalleled waste and monumental greed many of us are not just turning away from the mainstream way of living, eating, consuming and working. We are returning to the ancient ways because we feel and know, at least subconsciously, that the ways of the Great Mother Goddesses, and their cohorts, are the only things that can save us. If we don't return to living in balance with the land and learn to embrace life, and all its joys and indignities, as sacred then we are doomed to destroy ourselves. If we don't return to the Great Mother Goddesses we are doomed to create the next human population bottleneck.
08 June 2009
Plantings and More Plantings
We've spent an obscene amount of money at local greenhouses lately and have been very busy planting. To begin with, I got 3 dozen impatiens put in the front bed. I decided against reviving my old herb garden and, instead, will have a few potted herbs around my shiny new outdoor altar. So far, I've got two pots of sage, one eucalyptus, my 3-year-old San Pedro cactus and a few wave petunias and princess feathers around my altar. On the back porch there are two pots of basil, another eucalyptus, regular petunias and wave petunias and a brilliant purple ornamental globe amaranth. I also put together one washtub of marigolds and another of gold, confetti and lavender lantanas. Along the fence we've got four window boxes of wave petunias. I also put in a good start of spearmint along the fence well away from anything else so it can spread and grow to its little greedy hearts content. I put in a dozen or so dianthus in the bed way out to the left of the house. We've also got some scarlet begonias in three plastic hanging bags which I think looks tacky but everyone else outvoted me. Still to pot up is another big flat of wave petunias.
We also brought out our plants that overwintered under the grow lights in the back bedroom. The two Christmas cacti and the ten or so other cacti are in place and looking well. All three of the big sprengeri's need to be transplanted into bigger pots as does the schefflera, the peace lily, the tree philodendrum and the Norfolk Island pine. Unfortunately, all of the aforementioned plants are already huge and larger pots would run into many hundreds of dollars so I'm not sure what we're gonna do with them. We have a bunch of big old metal washtubs that we usually keep outside for flowers but I'm afraid we'll have to use some of them for the larger plants. Even so, they're not really big enough to accomodate these big plants, so I'm stymied.
Still to procure are another dozen or so impatiens to finish the front bed, two or three flats of begonias for our regularly begonia-filled washtubs, lavender, thyme, rosemary, dill and I'd like an aloe since kittens killed all of mine a couple of years ago. There was a nice, big aloe at one of the greenhouses we visited but they wanted $8 for it and I just couldn't go that high. If we had the money we've also got a dozen or so washtubs and hundreds of pots in all shapes and sizes. But as far as flowers and herbs go we've gotten almost everything we want.
As for the vegetables: our radishes are already done and our lettuce is gonna get eaten this week. We bought jalepenos and cayenne peppers and they're in the garden already. There are about a dozen tomato plants in the ground and a nice spot for the cucumbers to grow around as soon as they sprout. Still to plant are the okra seeds and we also hope to procure some banana peppers. We've taken advantage of the wreckage that the storm blew off the barn and now have a unique method of limiting weed growth. The big pieces of metal roofing now serve as an ugly, if useful, form of weed control. They completely block sunlight from reaching the ground between the rows. So, the storm may have scared the holy hell out of us and ripped up the barn and our roof but it's also helping us grow some veggies. It might not be an even trade but it's something, ain't it?
That's the gardening news from these hills, how are the green growing things doing in your neck of the woods?
We also brought out our plants that overwintered under the grow lights in the back bedroom. The two Christmas cacti and the ten or so other cacti are in place and looking well. All three of the big sprengeri's need to be transplanted into bigger pots as does the schefflera, the peace lily, the tree philodendrum and the Norfolk Island pine. Unfortunately, all of the aforementioned plants are already huge and larger pots would run into many hundreds of dollars so I'm not sure what we're gonna do with them. We have a bunch of big old metal washtubs that we usually keep outside for flowers but I'm afraid we'll have to use some of them for the larger plants. Even so, they're not really big enough to accomodate these big plants, so I'm stymied.
Still to procure are another dozen or so impatiens to finish the front bed, two or three flats of begonias for our regularly begonia-filled washtubs, lavender, thyme, rosemary, dill and I'd like an aloe since kittens killed all of mine a couple of years ago. There was a nice, big aloe at one of the greenhouses we visited but they wanted $8 for it and I just couldn't go that high. If we had the money we've also got a dozen or so washtubs and hundreds of pots in all shapes and sizes. But as far as flowers and herbs go we've gotten almost everything we want.
As for the vegetables: our radishes are already done and our lettuce is gonna get eaten this week. We bought jalepenos and cayenne peppers and they're in the garden already. There are about a dozen tomato plants in the ground and a nice spot for the cucumbers to grow around as soon as they sprout. Still to plant are the okra seeds and we also hope to procure some banana peppers. We've taken advantage of the wreckage that the storm blew off the barn and now have a unique method of limiting weed growth. The big pieces of metal roofing now serve as an ugly, if useful, form of weed control. They completely block sunlight from reaching the ground between the rows. So, the storm may have scared the holy hell out of us and ripped up the barn and our roof but it's also helping us grow some veggies. It might not be an even trade but it's something, ain't it?
That's the gardening news from these hills, how are the green growing things doing in your neck of the woods?
04 June 2009
Mystery Shrubbery: Solved!
Can you identify this mystery shrubbery? This was already here when we moved in over five years ago and has nearly doubled in size since then. If you don't know it could you ask Roger the Shrubber? Ni!
Thanks to Nettle, Maebius, Marion and Riverwolf I have learned that this shrubbery is a spirea. It's spirea douglasii to be exact. My mom and I have been arguing back and forth about this and, after much research, we've discovered that the spirea she knew as a child is the old-fashioned, traditional white "bridal wreath" spirea introduced in 1845, which is very different from our current flashy, purply-pink variety. There is somewhere between forty and eighty varieties, from multi-sized shrubs to ground cover plants. They grow pretty much all over, according to most websites, but are evergreen in warmer places like California and the deep south.
Thanks to everyone for chiming in and helping me solve this mystery!
02 June 2009
Big Ship Passing By
Click image(s) for larger version(s).
A thunderhead that passed by, rumbled a bit, but didn't obscure our glorious spring sunshine.
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