Glimmer

It's tropical storm season in New York. Not real tropical storms, they are far off, but the rain from the systems are hitting New York and it's quite rainy. I love rain but my roofer friend can't work in it.

On a long walk yesterday, I heard the crickets and thought about that article I posted recently.

Then I read about glimmer, which is the opposite of a trigger, when you see something nice that you like. In a way crickets are a glimmer for me now. I think most psychology is "no shit sherlock" but I do like adding in new words.

Tomorrow in Thoreau’s journal he helped a runaway slave in 1851.

This woman's video about the 6 books that made her want to study literature. The 3rd book is Walden. She reads The Inward Morning: 

Packed in my mind lie all the clothes
   Which outward nature wears,
And in its fashion’s hourly change
    It all things else repairs.

In vain I look for change abroad,
    And can no difference find,
Till some new ray of peace uncalled
    Illumes my inmost mind.

What is it gilds the trees and clouds,
    And paints the heavens so gay,
But yonder fast-abiding light
    With its unchanging ray?

Lo, when the sun streams through the wood,
    Upon a winter’s morn,
Where’er his silent beams intrude
    The murky night is gone.

How could the patient pine have known
    The morning breeze would come,
Or humble flowers anticipate
    The insect’s noonday hum,—

Till the new light with morning cheer
    From far streamed through the aisles,
And nimbly told the forest trees
    For many stretching miles?

I’ve heard within my inmost soul
    Such cheerful morning news,
In the horizon of my mind
    Have seen such orient hues,

As in the twilight of the dawn,
    When the first birds awake,
Are heard within some silent wood,
    Where they the small twigs break,

Or in the eastern skies are seen,
    Before the sun appears,
The harbingers of summer heats
    Which from afar he bears.

News from Willow Lake

 

    Briars are a perfect seed delivery system. It attaches to clothes or fur and hangs on until you shake them off, and then they’re far away from where they originated. Cori got a little freaked out by them, it was kind of unexpected and funny, but I quickly wanted to ease her fears and took them off. I told the story to Ruby, without the sadism, and brought her some home so I could show her. Children learn by touch and sight of real objects. That's why nature is so important. Book learning is good too, not discounting that.

    Still a lot of aster. I so want to learn how to identify birds from their song.

    It’s raining the past three days, so it’s a little bit more wet down at the swamp. 

    Bushwhack to my not so secret spot by the lake. The geese noise scares me, they all flew off. I didn’t know there were creatures there. I’m not sure why I get so afraid in nature. I supposed its a healthy fear of the dangers of wild animals. Geese aren’t really known for being human killers, but I still was afraid when they all flew off suddenly. My heart was pumping, blood was racing and I was on high alert. I couldn't meditate, but I'd already meditated. I'm starting to have blissful meditation, entering the dhyanas. 

Plumeria

 

Balloon Flower

Persian Buttercup:

Hydrangea 

Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph, Red Cloud and Geronimo.

 

What Thoreau Heard in the Song of the Crickets

Lewis Hyde wrote an article for New York Times. It starts out:

"Beginning in August and well into the fall here in New England, the crickets take over the night, their song a chiming of little bells or a rhythmic ripple of falling water. There has always been folklore to tell us what that song means. In ancient Greece, Aesop took it to be a sign of careless joy. In China it still portends wisdom and good fortune. In Germany it may warn of danger."

I liked this line: "Thoreau may have become a master of fruitful leisure but that doesn’t mean he was a stranger to the urge to improve himself and his world."

I like the dialectical thinking: "One mark of a durable fable is its ability to contain a contradiction without resolving it. In this case we have conflicting ways to hear the creaking of the crickets and both are true: time is limited and time is endless; you must get to work and you may relax. Thoreau was clearly familiar with both states of mind."

He reports there were 7 drafts of Walden over 9 years. How do I keep track of my disparate interests. Soccer, and opera, Buddhism, literature and Shakespeare, hiking and Thoreau, jazz and new music, chess and politics. 

Interesting distinction between robust and antifragile. 

Amy Jane Beer

The change of season always makes me tired. I don’t know if it’s some sort of primordial downshifting, or I’m grinding my gears. I slept really deep last night, and late in the morning. My body is preparing for hibernation like it once grew gills briefly and tail. I don’t have a tail or gills, but the body goes through the evolution of the species, and there’s a great ancestral imagination that tells me faintly to hibernate, it’s getting cooler, it’s fall.

I started Rick Bass' memoir, read about his car coming off the truck hitch and taking a different route in Santa Fe, but switched to an adventure book about kayaking called The Flow. The woman writer is a badass, she's had a C-Section and she's waiting for her abdominal muscles to reconnect before she starts running again, but she can still kayak. Amy Jane Beer seems pretty cool on the back flap and the beginning keeps me reading unlike the Bass book, which isn't a putdown, it's just a putdown literally. I have a stack of books and I rotate through them and play the hot hand. Yesterday I read about sex addiction, the day before about the history of Barcelona FC, and the day before that about Titus Andronicus and race. Injecting a literary feel into my walking down to Willow Lake, injecting my spirituality and love of Green Tara into the man made body of water is perhaps a weirdness and affection, but I've become focused on a deity that works remove obstacles. It's all connected, compassion, wisdom, fearlessness. I meditate and it's both boring and a wild whitewater rafting trip. I've mostly done canoe stuff on rivers, the Sequatchie, the Potomac. I've done white water rafting the Nantahala and Ochoe, and a river in Ecuador. My friend bought an ocean kayak and I've done that on the sound. Kayaking is something I just never got to. It makes me feel like a piker. Her friend dies, and she keeps doing it, she keeps doing it after having a child, waiting for her abdominal muscles to reconnect.

Nature writing will always have to deal with jealousy. I wish I could take a caretaker job like Rick Bass that led him to the Yaak Valley Montana. I wish I could chase the flow. I'll join in on the adventure by reading the book, much more tame and perhaps lame, but admiring the great is what it's all about, I want to say, not really sure if I've ever had that thought before. 

I go to her twitter and like everything she's tweeted. I've only read a few pages, but I'm grateful to her. I used to read my sons Hatchet, they seemed to like that one. They stopped me from reading The Hobbit, because they were just too old. My father read it to me when I was really young, before I could really understand it. I've read and reread that one.

I watch the video of her getting the prize that's only existed for 10 years for nature writing. She lost her friend Kate, and I think about how Thoreau lost his brother, and how that got him writing a lot.

Showed Anandi my spot, and she pointed out the flowers were aster. The dog in the Thin Man movies with Myrna Loy is named Asta, not aster. I associate new names to help me remember.

Here's a kayak video I showed my daughter when she picked up The Flow, and said, "what's this?"

Green Tara

Kwan Yin cried tears of sadness, seeing the suffering of the world. Even though she is seen as getting off her meditation cushion to go help people, representing the quintessence of compassion, she still cries tears and tears of sadness at the suffering of the world. 

And those tears filled a lake, and out of that lake Green Tara was born, who works to remove the obstacles to ending suffering.

 21 praises of Tara

Dolphins

I'm reading Pod by Laline Paull, and I'm looking up things on the internet to help me understand. Spinner dolphins are smaller than Bottlenose. The heroine Ea is a Spinner who doesn't like getting sexual. She is unusual and an outsider, but a good hunter. She doesn't spin, she doesn't hear the music others hear. That made me think of Happy Feet (2006).

I read about how dolphins sleep. They sleep with one eye open and only half their brain sleeps. They switch after 2-4 hours. They call it unihemispheric sleep. One side of the brain sleeps at a time.

This is a Bottlenose dolphin:

I googled archipelagos in Indian Ocean and google lists 12. I'll see if Paull tips her hat at which one of the 12.  

Book Reviews of Pod:

The Book Stop

Out of the Crooked Timber

SF Book

Hurricane Lee

 

Larger forces. It's cooled off, it's quite pleasant, because the weather is coming from the north, now that the hurricane has such a power to change wind patterns. It's set to hit Maine and Halifax Canada, but it's coming close to us. And changing the wind patterns, weather, and there's an amazing line which I tell myself is the edge of the storm system. Might be true. Beautiful clouds. Beautiful woman not sure she's in the photo. 

I know it's small minded humans to hope it misses me, because it's going to hit somewhere, and people are going to suffer. I mean hitting NYC would potentially harm more people, I guess I hope it hits unpopulated areas, and does the least damage possible. I hope the people have hurricane proof type housing and infrastructure in general, as all coastlines should have. Did we learn the lessons of Sandy in New York and prepare for the next one?

Update: Lee passed NYC by and heads for Nova Scotia, Maine and Saint John Canada.

Leaving Walden

After two years and some odd months, Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6th, 1847. Emerson was going to England for his lecture presentations, and Lillian Emerson asked Thoreau to live with them to support the family. Thoreau accepted the request. 

Supposedly after his going to the top of Mount Katahdin, Thoreau was writing a lot more. He also read the Bhagavad Gita.

 

Came across this contrary wisdom today

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is part of the time of Transcendentalist, but she's too unique to box into a literary movement, she's in the group because of the time frame, but her genius is larger. She is the true titan of this literary movement, maybe with Whitman and Hawthorne, in terms of writing skill. I read through her poems regularly. There's a great show that is ahistorical, but still fun. 

Thoreau, Emerson, Ellery Channing, Hawthorne, Dickenson, Whitman, Fuller, Bronson and Louisa May Alcott, Jones Very, Peabody sisters, and  were all great individuals and to some degree resist being lumped as a movement. I'm less interested in the theological aspect of the moment, but I understand that is the trigger that switches things to natures, with Emerson's great works. There were more, that I don't really know well enough. Mary Olive to some degree carries on the love of nature, and cites Transcendentalists. I'm not really aware of people who follow the love of nature, except maybe Rick Bass. I just ordered 2 Rick Bass books, I haven't read him for a long time. I read the Wolves book, but he's got 4 new books I want to read.

The poem goes counter the idea that time heals all wounds. Perhaps you feel the emotional wound over more so you could say it's the largest, and perhaps we get more alive and sensitive as we age.

Emily and Sophie

They say that “time assuages,”—
Time never did assuage;
An actual suffering strengthens,
As sinews do, with age.
Time is a test of trouble,
But not a remedy.
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no malady.

End of summer

 

Opossum