Samhain, again

I have spent, in the basest sense of that word, hours
of my God-given life working on a document required of teachers here in Jersey.
That I do these things speaks to a cultural insanity, and mine as well.

And here it is a year later, and I'm doing it again.

Do ghosts exist?

I've lived  long enough to know that they don't.
I've lived long enough to know that they do.

That odd, inexplicable events happen, and happen daily, is evident to anyone paying attention. The shame is that so few of us are paying attention to the natural world, we miss the rhythms and the mysteries that  envelop our modern minds every moment.

Tomorrow is All Saints Day, to celebrate the sanctified among us, as though following some moral order could save us from the coming dark, a world in which wasp larvae eat hornworms alive, from the inside out, and humans die monstrous deaths lying in ICUs with multiple tubes pierced into the body, hoping that like St. Sebastian, we will miraculously recover.

If you need a video to be convinced ghosts exist, you don't truly know what it means to know that the dead are among us.

The question of ghosts is not an idle one. We follow spirits of our own making all the time. We follow rules and rhythms of our own making now, wrapping ourselves in a sad cocoon of  hubris, wiling away our hours fulfilling nothing more than deadlines upon deadlines without a hint of irony.

I'm headed out to a mudflat in an hour or so, under a wet and wild early winter sky, to rake up a few clams, alive as I am, and as alive as I am, I will be as dead as those clams will be tonight in less than a lifetime.

Until you believe in the ghost you will be, you cannot truly live.
Originally posted 3 years ago. I like rhythms.

Mid-October

The number of years I have of days growing shorter is growing shorter, true for everybody, I suppose, but still surprising to me.

The sun has gotten lazy, the night more bold.

Monarchs will land on my shoulder now, and a hummingbird buzzed inches from my ear a couple of weeks ago. Other beings no longer see me as a threat, though I still have most of my teeth.

I continue to teach, hope to do so for some time, and some time is all we can ask for. As the stridency of the college-ready, career-ready corporate crowd rises to octaves above this old man's range, the reason I teach, and the reason public education matters, gets down to empathy and the pursuit of happiness.

As we head to darker times, knowing (and remembering) what matters matters.

I think I am a happier creature than many (if not most) of my lambs. I'd like to make that untrue.

So I teach.

I trust I make a difference.

I hope I makes a difference.

Samhain, again

I have spent, in the basest sense of that word, hours
of my God-given life working on a document required of teachers here in Jersey.
That I do these things speaks to a cultural insanity, and mine as well.

And here it is a year later, and I'm doing it again.

Do ghosts "exist"?

I've lived  long enough to know that they don't.
I've lived long enough to know that they do.

That odd, inexplicable events happen, and happen daily, is evident to anyone paying attention. The shame is that so few of us are paying attention to the natural world, we miss the rhythms and the mysteries that  envelop our modern minds every moment.

Tomorrow is All Saints Day, to celebrate the sanctified among us, as though following some moral order could save us from the coming dark, a world in which wasp larvae eat hornworms alive, from the inside out, and humans die monstrous deaths lying in ICUs with multiple tubes pierced into the body, hoping that like St. Sebastian, we will miraculously recover.

If you need a video to be convinced ghosts exist, you don't truly know what it means to know that the dead are among us.

The question of ghosts is not an idle one. We follow spirits of our own making all the time. We follow rules and rhythms of our own making now, wrapping ourselves in a sad cocoon of  hubris, wiling away our hours fulfilling nothing more than deadlines upon deadlines without a hint of irony.

I'm headed out to a mudflat in an hour or so, under a wet and wild early winter sky, to rake up a few clams, alive as I am, and as alive as I am, I will be as dead as those clams will be tonight in less than a lifetime.

Until you believe in the ghost you will be, you cannot truly live.
Originally posted 2 years ago. I like rhythms.

Summer's end is coming

Danse Macabre, Michael Wolgemut, 1493 woodcut

Summer is winding down. The shadows shift, the dead start to stir again, knowing their clans will soon grow, fresh stories from the world of light. Samhain is coming.

I gathered my last handful of beans, nibbling a few right off the vine. Though their leaves are mostly gone, the pods had the exceptional sweetness beans take on in their dying days.

I picked the last few leaves of basil--most have gone to seed, their reason for existence. A tired honeybee plopped herself into the bowl of basil leaves and started licking the wet edge of a torn leaf. No reason to shoo her away.

A few minutes later she flew a foot or two away, then became too heavy to fly. I doubt she made it back to the hive. Samhain is coming.

I found an eastern black swallowtail cat on some parsley--I'm usually less than kind to caterpillars, but this one was not actively munching on the plant, perhaps it just molted, and there was only one this time. It still has a way to go before becoming a butterfly, and it better hurry before the first hard frost. Samhain is coming.

Along the beach I stumbled upon a blue crab claw, almost as big as as my hand. The claw was fresh, its owner still possibly alive within a few yards. While I prefer my fingers to the pincer-grasp of the crab, I have seen crabs do delicate work, picking off tiny pieces of food to eat.

But this claw will no longer feed its larger being--Samhain is coming.

I wandered a bit further down the beach to the ferry jetty, walked to its end, and just as I was headed back to shore, I saw the first dolphin, one of many, chasing a school of fish. The fish were a foot or two long, and they were not jumping for joy.

The shadow underneath is a dolphin.

I doubt that this particular fish made it through the day. Its Samhain has already come.

Dolphins always bring us joys, so I called Leslie and asked her to join me at the jetty, She drove, and I'm glad she did, because I was tired, and the spring had left my legs. I needed a lift home. My Samhain is coming, too.

Photos taken yesterday.

November harvest

The sun may be dying, but its energy rests in the bonds around us, enough to keep most of us alive until the sun returns.

We are almost a week past Samhain. The bonfires have been lit, the dead done wandering. In the olden days, each clan took flame home from a shared bonfire to carry them through the winter. Animals were slaughtered for the coming winter.

Time to hunker down.

Here near the coast, the air tempered by the warmth of the sea, we get to stretch summer a few more days.

Today we harvested tomatoes and basil from the garden, and clams from the mud. The water is still warm enough for me to walk through the ripples, looking for keyholes that betray the quahogs below.

Tomorrow we may cull the kale and the Brussels sprouts. I may nibble on the few leathery beans hanging from the near dead vines--a reminder of what's past, and hope for the future.

Tomorrow I will gather dead flowers, harvesting seeds.

I will bring some of the seeds to class. A student has asked for a clam shell, one from a creature I have eaten.

Seed by seed, I hope to show my kids what lies outside the windows.

Photos ours, taken today.