Penelope

I don't want to give it away, just watch the show on Netflix.

Composting

I've been fooled a couple times about composting, here's another article stating that "outreach" will begin in October in Queens. 

CBS News

Equinox

Yesterday September 22nd was the autumnal equinox. 

Sept 20th

The weaker trees and branches are beginning to turn color. 

I saw by the lake for a nature meditation. Maybe just sitting with my eyes open to look at the lake. You can see the branches a fisherman put in to hold his rods. Henry wasn't there. Looked like it would be too difficult to get past all the stuff.

There weren't birds on the lake. I wondered about fall migration. My friend in Portland went to watch Vaux Swifts go down a chimney as a planned stop on their migration, passing through. 

"We’ve been watching the Vaux Swifts most nights roost in a chimney at a high school a few blocks away. They are tiny birds which are in the process of migration from Canada down to Venezuela and hit Portland annually throughout the month of September. This year there have been fewer than most years for reasons unclear. Some years there have been up to 35,000 in a single evening all trying to roost for the night in the chimney. This year the numbers have so far maxed out at 5,430 for a single night. Hundreds of people show up each night at sunset with blankets and bottles of wine to watch and there is usually a fair amount of drama as Cooper’s Hawks hang out on the chimney ledge and nab the first Swifts that try to slip by. 

It’s pretty cool watching the massive swarm of birds that all fly in unison making really interesting patterns in the sky before deciding all at one to funnel into the chimney reminiscent of iwater going down a drain. Being stoned enhances the spectacle in my experience. The birds would normally roost in hollowed out trees, and the chimney apparently seems like an acceptable substitute. 

One year a long time ago the school custodian turned on the boiler by mistake and there was a massive tragedy. The school then decommissioned the chimney and installed a whole separate heating system so that the incident would never happen again. The school mascot is of course the Swift."

Good friends share nature experiences with you. 

I skipped a meditation online with friends in Iran to take my daughter to school this morning. They stopped by to drop something off and I hopped in the car to join in the short journey a few blocks, then walked down to the lake. 

I get nervous a critter will come up to me, there are racoons who seemed kind of ill who lurk around sometimes, and there are hobos who live under the bridge, but most likely is the Filipino fisherman. Haven't seen him in a while because I haven't been down there much lately. There's also a birder who walks around with his binoculars and guide. I've run into park rangers a few times and students doing some nature project. There was supposed to be construction of a run off pipe, but I don't see evidence of that anymore. 

I saw a posting that at 10 on Sunday they'll form a group to pick up the garbage. There are two spots where a garbage bag has broken and people just left it. Most likely the hobos or the people who go down there to smoke. Now that it's legal, I smell it in my apartment on the second floor quite often, but honestly when it was illegal, I smelled is just about as much. My upstairs neighbor his retired and smokes a lot. He has advanced stage COPD, so he doesn't smoke as much these days. 

Say what you want about the narcissism of blogging but I thought I had to get active and get down to the lake to update the blog. 

Nature in the city

The tree across the street that I look at a lot in meditation, the leaves turned a week or so ago, and it's turning more and more. Fall is here. I like the cooling but I want the trees to keep the leaves for as long as possible. I think a lot about vestigial and deciduous trees. When I pick up my daughter I can go by an area that has quite a few pine trees, and I like the pine trees around my house. There are two small Juniper trees under my window.

There was a spider the other day that caught a fly in his web while I was meditating. I mostly keep my eyes closed, but I open them occasionally. The web is on my shrine and I don't clean it away because I want spiders to eat all the flies in my room. I've killed about 10-15 flies a day, and it's been a weird fly filled summer in NYC this year for me in Queens. I thought it was just me, but a friend has a lot of flies inside somehow, despite all the screens. 

I've become a student of how to kill flies. You can't move to much and a big wind up doesn't work, you need quick wrists like Ted Williams. When they freeze, you han't move, but when they start walking you can move a little bit, they're less aware. And then trying to find them on a surface where you can really swat them is difficult, they like to explore everywhere. I can get them all in my bedroom, but they replenish from the kitchen, or maybe I killed them and they'd already reproduced. I want to learn more about the common house fly. It reminded me a little of Amityville Horror (1977) to have so many flies.

There's a mouse in my house too. He scuttled around my bed and I saw him jumping out of my garbage can. 

One time when I was cat sitting for Andandi, Ella the cat left me a mouse. But the next time he stayed over, he didn't catch any mice. 

My daughter said, there's a mouse in the garbage can. I emptied a garbage can that is kind of bigger, and the mouse couldn't jump out of it, and since it was empty there was no garbage to climb on to get out. So I put a lid on it, and let it go outside. I was quite happy to humanely (perhaps) release him outside. I don't know if he has a way back into the building and a way back to my floor. 

Oliver, Transcendentalism and ...

Today is Mary Oliver's birthday. Her poems are really important to me. I recently read her first book. I've read 15 of her books. I have a few pdfs of some hard to find books to read and I'm currently reading her final anthology. I really get something from her poems. 

Two days before was the birth of Transcendentalism anniversary on September 12, 1836, in 2 days. Oliver has some reverence for what may be the first literary movement in America, and references Emerson and Thoreau.  

Smack in between these two important days is 9/11, the day America had an illusion of isolation shattered. We could just remember we're all interconnected, there's interbeing, and that some disgruntled people are willing to wage asymmetrical wars that they can't win, just want some attention for their concerns. Not a great way to get things done, but it does get one's attention. 

There's a similarity to October 7th in Israel last year, but that surprise was more about an unwillingness to work for change through peaceful methods and Arafat walking away from peace accords in 2001.

I wish to draw my attention to positive things like Mary Oliver's poetry, and the birth of literary movements in America. 

What does that have to do with walking in nature? I suppose Mary Oliver's nature poetry and the transcendental movement are vital to walking in nature. 

Latest invasive species

Japanese Knotweed:

NY Post

Daily Mail

The Valley Reporter

Greenfield Recorder

Butterfly Bush

 

Bonus link photos from Penn.