The last time I posted was last year at this time. So much has changed. At that time I started on a wild roller coaster ride of thyroid issues. I was sick, depressed, weak and dizzy. I could hardly walk, let alone blog, garden or any of the fun things that go with summer. On top of that, life was changing drastically. My son was getting older, starting college, spending more time on his own, pulling away from Mom and Dad, needed more help adjusting to life but at the same time not letting us into his life. I felt totally at the mercy of the current. Today is so totally different. Just as the irises and lilacs are blooming, the grass in knee-high, and the birds are nesting outside the window; life has circled around to a new beginning. My son is finishing his homeschool high school work. He has finished his college degree. My hubby is back to work full time after 5 years of work comp battles, college for him, followed by unemployment. I am medically stable, both thyroid-wise and seizure-wise. I am emotionally and psychologically stable again. What have I learned? Once again, that I am not the General Manager of the Universe. I keep applying, but they send my resume back. Most of the stuff I worry about doesn't ever happen. I will never get to know in advance what will happen and how it will turn out. My son is his own person and will learn best if I get of his way and let him thrash his way through, unless he wants help. My hubby needs appreciation and affection as much as I do. No one cares if I'm not perfect. Whew. Lots to process, but I'm in a good place. I hope to enjoy what I missed last summer.

Do Pharisees use CFLs?

We went to the recycling center the other day to pick up some finished compost. We had finally moved into place some retaining wall bricks around a shrub, and needed some back fill. We reclaimed the bricks from a neighbor who didn't want the flower beds the previous owners had built and offered them to us. Good recyclers that we are, we hauled them over. They made a nice border around the shrubs we dug up from an old farmstead that was being turned into a new development, the iris bulbs I got on Freecycle, and the lilacs a friend dug up for us on his farm. At the base of the shrubs I laid the branches I had trimmed from the red cedar, another rescue from a construction site. No sense in wasting good biomass, and a good drainage additive as well!

We loaded shovels and tarp into the Subaru (that's what we earth-friendly greenies drive, not because it's less carbon emissions, just 'cause it makes us look cool.) We brought home several loads of finished compost - rich earthy soil made from other peoples grass clippings and weeds. The county does a lot of work chipping it up finely, and turning it over so that it composts quickly. I'm not sure how they do that. Maybe a gas powered grinder? I bet they have a bobcat or even a backhoe to do the big piles.

It was hot and sweaty work getting it unloaded and into the bed. We took a break, headed inside where it was air conditioned, and cracked ourselves a couple of ice cold sodas and drank them straight from the aluminum cans.

It sure feels good using your muscles, "living off the land", and saving the planet. All that recycling and reusing we did today sure goes a long way toward keeping the earth safe.

Presenting the Bride

I watched the royal wedding yesterday, as did most of the world.
The most poignant scene for me, however was Kate being helped into 
the car by her father. He gently and carefully folded her gown's
train, and handed it in, to be placed on the seat beside her. 
He gingerly slide in next to her and smiled at his beautiful
daughter.

She sat enthroned in the yards of satin and lace, a jewel in a
setting of cream and ivory, waiting to be presented to a delighted
prince.

Her father gently lifted and smoothed the fabrics, so that none of
it would be creased or dirtied. He beamed at her, obviously proud and
pleased.



It suddenly occurred to me that is exactly how our Heavenly Father
feels. He protects and surrounds us, the Bride of Christ, keeping us
from soil and damage, so we can be presented as a perfect gift for
His son, the Prince of Peace. All we go through, our trials and
pains, are preparation for the that glorious presentation.
I am awed and humbled, once again, but the love the Father and Son
have for us, the Beloved.

Right brain, left brain, can't decide

As I continue to heal from my stroke and subsequent seizures I am constantly being forced to find new ways to do old things. I've had to learn to dress myself and not leave the house unbuttoned. I've had to learn to turn on a timer so I don't walk away from the stove and forget about it entirely. I've had to relearn driving routes I've know for 11 years, by re-driving and re-memorizing landmarks and street signs.

Now I've had to relearn how to learn. Before I was a "give me a fork and let me dig in" kind of learner. I set up a systematic approach; a step by step plan to tackle a new skill or realm of information. I can't do that now. The stroke has damaged the part of my brain that deals with sequential processing; step 1, step 2, etc. I also have a limited "working memory", the number of things I can hang onto in short term at one time.  This makes learning anything new difficult.

My hubby bought me a wonderful electronic keyboard a Christmas ago, thinking it would be good physical and intellectual therapy. It would be, if I could figure out what to do with it. I diligently look at the little black notes, count out "every good boy does fine", line up my fingers on the keys and then try to play. Some place between the treble clef and the keyboard all the notes and thoughts tilt off the page and out of my brain and nothing connects. I tried to play a little song I once learned as a child, and couldn't do it. I burst into tears and sat with my head in my hands and wept.

After I'd boohooed for awhile I mopped myself up and tried again. I would not let that black and white "thing" in the other room beat me. If I couldn't learn it by studying it, I'd learn it by sidling up close enough to spy on it and learn its musical secrets.  I put on one of the pre-programmed lessons, slowed it way down, and listened, plunking along when I thought I could guess which note was next. I actually hit a few. The computer told me I did "OK". Well, that's good enough for me. For now.

I've had to do that with other things. Just do one little bit. Let it sinter in my brain. Try it again later. Lather, rinse, repeat.

For someone who has always been very literal, mathematical, systematic, this is weird. What's weirder yet is that I have to let my "right brain" do all the work. Yes, it's my right side that's damaged. Maybe it's rejoicing over its chance to do some of the work. Jumping up and down shouting "pick me, pick me!"

So, I toddle along, dabbling, playing. Someday I will play a whole song. Which side of my brain gets to do it? We shall see.

A call to arms

Find something true. Find that truth and taste it. Roll it around in your mouth, feel it with your tongue, your teeth, the sides of your cheeks, then swallow it whole. Feel it there in your heart, warming and warning. Then, when you hear the lies you will know the truth; its flavor and texture and smell. When that knowledge is firmly in place, find another truth as well. Taste that truth and another and another. Fill yourself with truths to defend and protect yourself from the anorexia of lies.

Lessons from Loon Loop: Green Movement as Religion

Lessons from Loon Loop: Green Movement as Religion

I wrote this originally in April of 2009. I'm certain I had not read Boris Johnson's essay in the Sunday Times from London, but it seems as if we were both thinking the same thing. Read his article and see if you agree.

Climate Change as a religion?

Posted by Boris Office

on February 2, 2006 | 100 comments

the fear of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery

We’ve lost our fear of hellfire, but put climate change in its place

I used to have a mother-in-law called Gaia, so any book called The Revenge of Gaia is likely to cause a flutter of panic in my breast; and by the time I had finished the new best-seller by green prophet James Lovelock, I am afraid I was in a state of brow-drenched hysteria.

The good news is that the Gaia in question is not my ex-mother-in-law. The bad news is that she represents a chthonic deity even more capable of vengeance upon errant mankind. Gaia is the Earth herself; she is Mother Nature; she taps her foot in ever-growing impatience at the antics of our species; and, according to Professor Lovelock, she is about to exact the most terrifying punishment for our excesses. She is about to get carboniferous on our ass.

Lovelock has been studying climate change since the 1960s. He has been described by the New Scientist as one of the great thinkers of our age, and he was made a Companion of Honour in 2003. He knows his onions, and, indeed, how much moisture they require.

He has been around the world looking at the rising tidelines, sniffing the smoke from the burning rainforest, listening to the roar of the ice-melt from the glaciers, and he has come to the conclusion that the climate change lobby has got it hopelessly wrong.

We delude ourselves, says Lovelock, if we think that the global temperature is going to rise in small increments over the next century. We are like the blindfolded crew of a boat approaching Niagara Falls, and there will come a moment when the temperature will rise with all the equivalent vertical horror. Some time in the next hundred years, he says, it is suddenly going to get hotter and hotter and hotter.

“Billions will die,” says Lovelock, who tells us that he is not normally a gloomy type. Human civilisation will be reduced to a “broken rabble ruled by brutal warlords”, and the plague-ridden remainder of the species will flee the cracked and broken earth to the Arctic, the last temperate spot, where a few breeding couples will survive.

It is going to be a “hell of a climate”, he says, with Europe 8C warmer than it is today; and the real killer, says Lovelock, is that there is not a damn thing we can do about it. We are already pumping out so much carbon dioxide, with no prospect of abatement from the growing economies of China and India, that our fate is sealed.

We in Britain produce only two per cent of the world’s carbon output and, even if we closed down British industry overnight; even if we abolished the winter fuel allowance and ordered the pensioners to wear more sweaters; even if we forested the entire country with windfarms, it would make not a bean of difference.

It would be like trying to cool a volcano with an ice cube. The Kyoto protocol; the climate change levy; the windows and doors regulation – they are all as pointless as telling a patient with terminal lung cancer that he should give up smoking.

And when the Great Heat has destroyed our industry, and wrecked civilisation, it will get worse, says Lovelock. Because then we will lose the aerosol of dust and smog that has kept out some of the sun’s rays; and it will get hotter still.

There is nothing for it, he says, but to forget the piffling Kyoto-led regulation, and build nuclear power plants, so as not to be dependent on Russian gas, and send bodies of fit young men and women to East Anglia, there to build levees against the coming inundations. An international solution is now beyond our reach, he says, and we must look to Britain first.

Phew-ee. Is Lovelock right? I haven’t the faintest; but as I listen to his Mad Max-style vision of the coming century, I find my mind bubbling with blasphemous thoughts.

Wasn’t it pretty hot in the 10th century? Didn’t the Romans have vineyards in Northumberland? And is it really so exceptionally hot in modern Europe? According to yesterday’s paper, Lisbon has just had its first heavy snowfall for 52 years. What’s that about?

I feel I cannot possibly disagree with Lovelock, or with the overwhelming body of scientists who attest to the reality of climate change. I am sure that they are, in some sense, right; and it feels instinctively true that we are a nasty, over-polluting species; and there is something horrifying, when you look at those pictures of the world at night, to see the phosphorescent sprawl of humanity.

But the more one listens to sacerdotal figures such as Lovelock, and the more one studies public reactions to his prophecies, the clearer it is that we are not just dealing with science (though science is a large part of it); this is partly a religious phenomenon.

Humanity has largely lost its fear of hellfire, and yet we still hunger for a structure, a point, an eschatology, a moral counterbalance to our growing prosperity. All that is brilliantly supplied by climate change. Like all the best religions, fear of climate change satisfies our need for guilt, and self-disgust, and that eternal human sense that technological progress must be punished by the gods.

And the fear of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery, and you can never tell whether your acts of propitiation or atonement have been in any way successful. One sect says we must build more windfarms, and these high priests will be displeased with what Lovelock has to say. Another priestly caste curses the Government’s obsession with nuclear power – a programme Lovelock has had the courage to support.

Some scientific hierophants now tell us that trees – trees, the good guys – are the source of too much methane, and are contributing to global warming. Huh? We in the poor muddled laity scratch our heads and pray. Who is right? Who is wrong?

If Lovelock is only half-right, then we must have an immediate programme to pastoralise the global economy and reduce emissions. The paradox is that, if he is completely right, there is not a lot we can do, and we might as well enjoy our beautiful planet while we can.

Or is he completely wrong? To say that would be an offence not just against science, but against a growing world religion.

Range hood as a metaphor for life

Woke up in a cleaning mood today. Not having that happen very often motivates me to "use it or lose it." Tackled the stove first. Ran the burners and drip pans through the dishwasher,  wiped down the top and back. Turned my attention to the underside of the range hood. EE-yuck.
 Now I do not claim to be a good cook. I am proud, however, to call myself a messy one. I figure that what I lack in creativity and taste can be compensated for with volume and distance traveled. When I cook something, you  KNOW I've been there.

So it came as no surprise to find enough raw materials under the range hood to reconstitute into a passable campfire meal.  I sprayed everything down, and left it to soak.  There is something in cleaning supplies that triggers introspection in me.

I thought about why it is that I don't clean under there more often. I realized that it really is a metaphor for life. The places I am busiest, messiest, are those places I don't often contemplate. Most of living goes on in my mind and soul, but the externals, the burners and dials, get the most attention.  The filter for yuck, the fan filter, in this case, catches all the crud and keeps it there.

Do I spend more time on my body, my outward activities and belongings than I do to the filters in my mind and soul? Do they need cleaning?

Hmm.. Something to ponder.