Bi-Weekly Topics for May 15, 2004
In the month of small flies
By Via Negativa
In the month of small flies and the sharp & bitter leaves of wild mustard, a hair fell from heaven & flipped & spun & turned by stages into the first hornbeam tree. But not right away: for a time it slipped in & out of small clearings, walking with a bit of a limp. The people at that time were living in lean-tos made from hemlock boughs & old, yellowed newpapers. Easy come, easy go, they used to whisper whenever a hard rain brought the roof down on their heads. Half-forgetful of his origins, the old man took to carrying stones from the creek, mixing grayish mud with sand. He had fallen in love with the song of a sparrow no one had ever noticed before, and had decided to devote the rest of his life to its study. Meanwhile, pink lady's slipper orchids in mossy thickets exposed themselves to deluded bees. Black cherries bloomed with a scent as cloying as prom queens. Wherever one stepped, something hopped out of the way & looked back over its shoulder with a reproachful gaze. One heard the peepers down by the pond, the toads around the spring & up on the hill the solitary tree frogs, trilling as if it meant something.
Around this time somebody noticed that none of the calendars showed the days of the week the way they always had. It was as if a long-ago ramp festival-cum-revival meeting took off like a hundred helicopters and swept every last Monday into the forgotten corners where only children playing hide-and-seek ever go. Unless, in fact, the calendars had simply begun to look a great deal like weathered boulders, all decked out in clubmoss and rock tripe. The old man's skinny arms grew hard as antlers, and his skin turned gray because he shunned direct sunlight. The sparrow - if that's what it was - had taken to nesting behind his left ear, because it was warm there & out of the wind. There was an almost inaudible rhythm, a pulse that could've been the sound of the surf or a woodpecker thinking about his next composition.
Ultimately, the decision to put down roots is more than mere decision, said the hornbeam tree as its nondescript buds unfurled nondescript leaves. We would all do well to heed such a sense of urgency more wordless than love. A true spirit guide never says what you want to hear, & sooner or later leaves you on the lurch. That night, they say, will be a dark one. But is it too much to ask for, this feeling of intimate involvement in the unfolding of others' destinies? You wake up from a dream in which the only two women you have ever loved have found each other, lose themselves like mirrors turned face to face with nothing, not a speck of dust to come between them: that bottomless ocean.
You wake up & it's all true, tears of joy - if that's the word - run down your cheeks. And you remember how every hundred years a mischievous bodhisattva brushes the side of the mountain with a fly whisk, anticipating its ultimate disintegration into the everythingness of Nevermind. We might well expect a different kind of measure to drive the mountain's own slow symphonies.
The old man's unfinished house should serve in the meantime - not that anyone needs very much where founding myths are concerned. A sharp digging stick & the ears of a night watchman, little else. But this day that used to be a day of rest has brought the finest weather we've seen in a month of Sundays. There's no time, no time for this foolishness! The pancakes will be on in two minutes!
Submitted for the Ecotone Wiki topic, "Time and Place"
permalink posted by Dave @ 5/16/2004 08:02:23 AM
Tempus fugitive
By P.
Long before I made a career of meeting deadlines, I learned to count seconds. Lazy as I am, I learned a game early on that I called "five more minutes," in which I would check the clock, close my eyes and go back to my daydream, or my snooze, or just resume reading for five minutes. When I looked up again, I'd either have hit it close and have to get up, or I'd have missed, and then I could authorize myself to wait for another five, or until someone yelled at me to get a move on.
If you think about it, the odds of my missing are pretty good, which is why it was a rewarding game.
As an adult, I find that I steal a lot of my time. Twenty minutes is enough to sit and turn a few pages; 30 will get the kitchen clean; an hour will pay the bills; 40 minutes will mow the lawn. In between are moments to read or snack or work a lick on some small project or other. Sometimes it's enough to just loaf. Eventually, I have to go to work, after all.
I like to imagine a place without time. 
Years ago, I liked to climb hills and look across the valleys I had left and imagine how they were for long centuries before we began to shave and carve mountains for highways, before our great-grandparents stripped them of trees and let them grow up with trees again, when there were chestnuts and elms in among the maples and hemlocks. The reverie usually made me more conscious of time, not less.
The sea is timeless, and yet it isn't. The pulse of the planet beats in the steady crash of the swells, and the bits of land eroded away are changed forever, even if they've been eroded away before and will someday rise to be eroded again. I supposed that if you distance yourself from the process, the dynamic itself is unchanging. From orbit, the Earth is always itself, big and round and blue. But the white patches won't sit still -- and who would want them to? And to be in orbit at all, you have to have achieved enormous speeds.
I've known a few moments in the woods, when the wind falls quiet and the stillness endorses my decision to pause on a hike or after the campground chores, when the minutes don't tick so loudly. But, chronophile that I am, I can't stop noticing for long: That shadow has grown; the sky's not the same color; that industrious beetle is actually EATING that fungus.
Maybe I think too much. Here in the back yard are my maple tree, 80 years old and still apparently hale; the flower and herb gardens planted by some ambitious amateur landscaper, age indeterminate; a fox squirrel, less than 3 years old, certainly; a juvenile robin with white patches on its wings; shabbily kept heirloom roses; lilacs and honeysuckle in great profusion, blossoming a week or so early to celebrate the sudden hot weather; a second story of trees and barely visible beyond them, the sheltering walls and roofs of my neighbors' homes. In this green and quiet spot, if anywhere, I should be able to hold still and let go.
Or maybe not. It's 2 o'clock, and the laundry is waiting ...
Source: http://my.core.com/~pzicari/text/Time.html
Timing Planetary Light Shows
By Feathers of Hope (Numenius)
A post for the Ecotone Wiki topic on time and place.
When you think about it, we don't need to know the exact time for the vast majority of events. If you have a 10 AM meeting, it's okay if you enter at 10 o'clock and 47 seconds. Baseball games never begin exactly at 7:05 PM in the evening (make it 7:06 or even 7:11), and movies always have trailers when they begin. Oddly, the class of events that I've encountered in the course of my life that requires the most precise time lies not in human affairs, but in nature.
Celestial mechanics is one of those amazing triumphs of science, and the ability to precisely predict where solar system bodies will be when is what makes solar system observational astronomy a lot of fun. Is tonight the night when three of Jupiter's moons will be eclipsing the giant planet? Time to set up the telescope then. And solar eclipse chasers know exactly when to book their special cruise ship on the other side of the world. But there is a solar system observational game that though a bit more obscure, is quite entertaining in its own right.
I refer to occultations. An occultation occurs when a solar system body moves through the line directly between an observer on Earth and another solar system body or a star. The easiest of these to observe is a lunar occultation. As the moon orbits, it changes its position with respect to the fixed stars. Sometimes it even moves directly in front of a fairly bright star.
It's an amazing event to watch through a telescope, especially if the side of the moon that eclipses the star is not illuminated at the time. The moon slowly, but as steady as anything, creeps up on the star. The moon gets closer and closer to the star, then all of a sudden, within a tenth of a second or so, the star just winks out.
Not all occultations are as quite as dramatic, and these call for more effort on the part of the observer. Sometimes an asteroid invisible in a small telescope will occult a faint star. What happens then is that the star will dim measurably for a bit, and then return to full brightness.
It turns there's good amateur science to be done here, because with precise measurements of exactly when these occultations take place, we can improve our knowledge of the orbits of these solar system bodies. The International Occultation Timing Association coordinates the activities of the relatively small band of amateurs interested in this activity. By precise I mean on the order of 0.1 to 0.01 seconds, but this is achievable with a camcorder and a precise time signal.
And where does one get this precise time signal? The easiest way is via shortwave radio. In the U.S., the station WWV broadcasts time signals on frequencies of 2.5, 5, 10, 15, and 20 Mhz 24 hours a day.
Posted by Numenius at May 14, 2004 11:05 PM | TrackBack
Comments
That's all interesting. It gives rise to many questions which I find hard to formulate such as the consequences of choosing lunar over solar time. And what kind of telescope you'd recommend for a beginner. We get some great clear skies here in Yorkshire though not as desert clear as I think I'd like for star gazing.
Posted by: Coup de Vent at May 17, 2004 02:14 PM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/05/14/timing_planetary.html
Foundations
By Fragments from Floyd
The first time we saw this old house here on Goose Creek it looked as if it would soon be overtaken by forest, would become a home to growing things, melting into the hillside where it sits. Trees emerged from the foundation; poplar and maple sprouts bristled from an ancient brick walkway barely visible in the moss and mud, the white poplar of its outer walls weathered the color of the dirt road below it. Birds nested on the lintels and black snakes and bats formed a closed ecosystem in the attic.
Five years ago this month, we began to "reclaim" this house from a fate that comes naturally when man-made order is left to the slow but certain forces of nature. Where there was random growth and decay, we engineered structure, design and utility. At great expense of human effort we imposed our will on the workings of the natural way of things, moving against the universal flow toward chaos: a coat of paint; a new foundation; new windows; a fire-safe chimney to keep the inside dry and warm; a water-tight metal roof. And we invited the snakes over to the barn.
From the end of the pasture--the flat floodplain of the creek where five years ago there was a rangy crowded phalanx of pine trees--we stand and look back at this house now in its early summer vestures, dappled in the cool shade of the five maple trees planted so long ago for this very purpose. The grass is green and mowed; the forsythias and bleeding heart have come and gone, Hostas border the new walkway. In the open windows the curtains gently sway. With the changes we've made, the house is tight and dry now, a solid, permanent and vital part of this landscape. It is built--rebuilt--to last. But we know that it will not.
Some day--it may be a hundred years, but some day--this artificial habitation, this solid, comfortable and familiar home place will have weathered its last winter with warm caretakers inside. No smoke will rise from the chimney in December. The yard that takes so much care will not get it, will grow wild, neglected and unkempt. The paint will crack and peel. Poplar and maple seeds that fall in abundance around the house will sprout closer and closer to it's dull sides, will rise and branch and block the drying sun. Their roots eventually will breach the foundation wall and water will find its way to the oak timbers cut from this land and first set in place in the 1870's. The studs and joists will become a slow meal for the ubiquitous organisms that simplify and recycle this edible shelter that once was our home, then the home of others we cannot guess, then their childrens' home.
Meanwhile, in that far-off time, the wind will blow down this narrow valley stirring the tops of the poplars just as it is doing out my window now. The same wildflowers I've watched bloom and fruit over my few years here will grow under forest that ages in the way undisturbed forest will do. In that day when only ruble and twining vines remain where the house once stood, someone will stand on the this little knoll where our front porch used to be and look out across the bottomland. By then, the pasture may have reverted back to forest. The forest will have long since healed from the savage logging of the 90's. The two creeks--Goose Creek and the one I have often written of as Nameless Creek--may have cut new channels with the floods of years, but will still meet each other in this quiet valley as they have for a thousand years.
Through the conservation easement process, we have taken steps to protect this small part of God's green earth so that nature can do what it does so well without the help of man's industries or ambitions. This old house will inevitably go through the processes of change incumbent on manmade things (and other homes may come along here to replace it). Meanwhile, this natural preserve on which the present house stands will see the cycles of growth and repair, diversity and succession that is the way of things in this living world. This house we've renovated is a legacy perhaps for decades to come. This valley watershed sheltered from excessive development--for others to enjoy as we have--is a bequest to the future for generations.
A larger version of the image above is available here.
Posted by fred1st at 07:11 AM | Comments (5)
Comments
And again the sin of envy overcomes me. Pictures and words connecting as intended. Mission accomplished Fred. Well done, and appreciated.
appreciated here too, pop. Maybe more than you guess. Here's to a hundred years...
Posted by nathan at May 11, 2004 11:26 PMI love the picture Fred. It speaks volumes if one has an ear to hear.
Is that the wheel of a horse-drawn mowing machine? It certainly looks familiar.
Posted by Clarence at May 12, 2004 07:45 AMThat looks like it might have been a plow to me.
So many old house succumb to fire, but I have seen, even explored, some that just fell to rack and ruin. The best demise for a house I ever saw, though, was ice.
Some ingenious soul in Fleischmann's, N.Y., led a garden hose to the roof of a derelict house during a cold winter in the '80s, turned on the tap and let it spray from Thanksgiving through March. The resulting cascade of ice was spectacular, especially with lights at Christmastime.
The weight was supposed to bring the structure down, but I think they had to finish the job with machinery later.
Posted by P. at May 15, 2004 07:20 PMVery moving.
Posted by Rob at May 15, 2004 08:46 PM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20040623003336/http://www.fragmentsfromfloyd.com/archives/2004_05.html
As Time Goes By
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)
I'm visiting DocRoc at the famous Tin Chateau this weekend. On the way down here I mapped out our friendship: meeting at MLA in San Francisco one year, where she read a book I had made about a trip to Venice; her moving to Cambridge, Mass, where I lived at the time; her supporting my move to Santa Barbara; her own move to Idyllwild nearby and then Los Angeles; our move north to Davis; her move out here to the Lower Sonora Desert.
Timing is everything, they say. Maybe it isn't everything, but it's a lot. And it gets locked into place. Venice, or Cambridge, or Davis. And in the TC.
For the Ecotone Wiki's Time and Place entry
Posted by Pica at May 15, 2004 11:10 PM | TrackBack
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/05/15/as_time_goes_by.html
Winding Down the Weathered Road
By Laughing Knees
Playing with the light around a cherry tree in bloom, Nogawa River, Tokyo, Japan, 2004 (It is well past the cherry blossom season, but I’ve only this weekend had any time to sit down and work on my spring photographs)
This is the 23rd installment of the ongoing place-based essay series at Ecotone. This week’s topic is Time and Place. Please feel free to drop by and read what others have written, and if you’d like, to contribute your own essay.
The white wagtail scurried ahead and stopped, to glance back at us, bobbing his tail and wheezing his shrill chirrup, urging us to “Hurry, hurry! Come, right this way! It’s just a little further! Hurry!” When our bicycles neared just enough to loom over him, the loaded panniers brushing the grass at the edge of the asphalt, he popped up into the air and darted further up ahead, to repeat his encouragements. For more than 2500 kilometers it seemed he led the way, the same wagtail, forever ahead of us, like the second hands of a clock.
That was the warmer half of 1995, the year my wife and I got married and decided to set off for a six month honeymoon by bicycle across the northern circle of Europe. We left our jobs, packed away all our belongings, drew wads of traveler’s checks from our bank accounts, rolled out our heavily laden bicycles, and flew over the expanse of Eurasia to Holland, where the wind waited for us outside the alleyways and canals of Amsterdam.
Neither of us had ever taken off 6 months to just follow our whims and the first few weeks tailed us with the worries of Tokyo, and the Bullet Train accuracy of speed timed to within seconds. That first day pushing the pedals beyond the sign for the city limits of Amsterdam felt like being flung out the door into the cold; the hardness of the road under our tires seems to present a vast horizontal wall beyond which we could not perceive. In a kind of reverse deadline panic we raced from town to town, urging each other to make the kilometers count, tallying up the numbers on our cycle computers, and feeling unsettled when, because we were still out of shape and exhausted from the wedding preparations, the average day’s distance added up to no more than 30 or 40 kilometers. We shouted at Holland’s seething winds, holding us back, and bickered when darkness fell too soon in the campsites. The weight of unenclosed hours and days, and when we paused to accept them, weeks and months, whispered for us to hurry, not waste any time, and make up for the guilt we felt from taking so much unproductive time off.
Under a stand of dark leaved chestnut trees on the western edge of Germany we threw our bicycles down and threatened to each return to Japan, alone. It seemed the trip would be over before it had even started.
On the road, cocking its black capped head, stood the wagtail, tsk-tsking. It left us to stand silently gazing out over a field of flowering yellow rapeweed, the heads billowing like waves in the breeze and the slow whale bellies of clouds overhead dragging their shadows across the rolling hills. We munched on bread rolls with gouda cheese, and in chewing calmed down enough to look at each other again.
“It hasn’t entered our heads yet, has it?” I offered.
“What hasn’t?”
“We’ve got six months. Six whole months! What are we hurrying for?”
“I don’t know. You’re the one in a hurry!”
That almost stoked the fire again, but I nodded. “You’re right. I don’t know what got into me.”
“Ever since we arrived you’ve been racing to finish the day. I can barely keep up.”
“I guess I don’t know how to get my mind around this. How do you plan for six months?”
My wife had a way with time. She always turned toward the sun and closed her eyes. “We’ve got six months. We can take our time.” A gust of wind brought the fragrance of some distant flowers. My wife inhaled deeply, smiling, and then opened her eyes again. “Didn’t we come here to look around? Isn’t that why we chose to go by bicycle?”
I sat silent a long time, just seeing the fields and the swallows swooping through the air. A damselfly alighted on my bicycle handlebar and slowly relaxed its wings. I felt something deflate inside myself, replaced by a quiet beating.
“I think I was scared,” I said.
“Of what?” inquired my wife.
“Of frayed ends.”
She looked at me with a frown, but said nothing. She brightened and picked up her bicycle. “First we have to get rid of a lot of this weight.”
Everything changed that day. The whole journey. We slowed down to the point where moving forward invoked less headwind and trees and passersby fell behind with less sharp reduction. We stopped when something nicked the corners of our eyes or the sky swung us into stillness under its great pendulum. The kilometers rolled by day after day, week after week, more as expressions of movement in the scrolling panorama than as signposts. Much of the journey hovered above the bicycle handlebars, each of us lost in long reveries during the spells between towns, and much of that time as partners in a silent traverse of newness, leaving unanswered questions in our wake.
Our perception of time and our participation in the revolving of the globe reflected in the mornings and evenings, when we woke with the calling of the hooded crows, jackdaws, and robins, and with the first light filtering through the walls of the tent, and when we retired to books held up in the coolness of the evening air and the stirring of hedgehogs and shrews in the bushes, before turning out our lights and sleeping with the whole night wheeling through our minds. At times we happened upon a place that so merged the inner stories we bore with its character of wonder that we lingered for a week or more, tasting the place to its very fruits and vegetables and getting to know its hoary old inhabitants. The bicycles moulted into wings that flew between rest stops for our eyes and feet. We became like the wagtail, landing somewhere to root around among its rocks then flitting a few pedal strokes to the next sunny vantage point.
By the time we reached the Shetland Islands and the Orkneys our muscles took us without protest to where we pointed our front wheels, the rhythm one with our bicycles. Our breathing seemed to exhale from the soil, and we headed on and beyond in all weathers, thoroughly entranced by the light of the sky. We walked for hours, sometimes alone, and returned to the tent with sprigs of flowers or seashells that we handed to each other as if they replaced the money that we used now only for food and occasional transportation. At the campsites other long term travelers joined us over hissing camp stoves to converse and relate tales until deep in the night. Our time and their times brushed together like passing veils, always with the light glimmering through.
We had ceased to exist wholly in the modern world.
So when it came time to return to Japan and back to jobs and four walls and alarm clocks, we floundered along the highways and took every opportunity to escape them. The last days of the journey wound down in the copper light of late autumn, among the wet country hills of Northumberland, England, and the gray tangle of backroads in Belgian town outskirts. Neither of us could find words to protect the dream we had just woken from. Six months had passed and it all seemed like a single instant, like shaking loose summer leaves from a tree.
Japan crashed into our ears, cut into our eyes. We slept for two months with the apartment windows thrown wide open, welcoming the bite of winter air, feeling our breath stoppered in our chests, our muscles aching for resistance. And gradually, insidiously, the clocks ticked louder and the television screen held our gazes longer, and that lone figure tramping along the sandy lanes retreating further and further down the road.
It’s been nine years. My beard has sprouted white hair. The bicycles stand furled in the kitchen by the window. Days pass when the sun creeps past the curtain. Sometimes I wake at dawn, after a evening laboring at some other person’s dream and falling into dreamless sleep, and hear the wagtail calling. He bobs his tail, like a finger beckoning. “Hurry! Hurry! No time to lose. It’s out here where the heart beats like thunder.” Like a storm moving across an endless field, and the road leading straight into the dark, gathering clouds.
Posted by butuki at 10:09 PM in Nature and Place | Permalink | Comments (8) Comments: Winding Down the Weathered RoadThat was beautiful!
Posted by dave at May 17, 2004 04:12 AMThat is a great story.
Posted by Denny at May 17, 2004 05:30 AMI admire your courage, and your prose. Have you been following Cassandra’s posts?
Posted by P. at May 17, 2004 11:49 AMTaking time out, slowing down - then going back and having to pick up speed again. the price of creating freedoms for oneself. Sometimes I wonder if it really would be easier never to stray from the path. Years ago a coleague I was close to left the profession we were in to retrain and kept telling me to jump. I didn’t but carried on while also going to art school. I’d like to have that kind of time out. But I also worry it would do my head in coming back.
Posted by Coup de Vent at May 18, 2004 06:43 AMA beautiful piece that leaves me with a deep sense of yearning for those dreams I’ve turned away.
Posted by Penny at May 18, 2004 08:38 AMBeautiful writing……..
Posted by Dottie at May 19, 2004 10:22 AMYes, beautiful writing. And that photo of the cherry blossoms against the white sky is stunning! I thought it was snow until I enlarged it and looked closer.
Posted by leslee at May 20, 2004 11:41 AMBeautiful. Thank you for sharing…
Posted by Thomas Sturm at May 20, 2004 04:16 PMSource: http://web.archive.org/web/20040606052150/www.butuki.com/archives/2004_05.html#000164
Parts
By Hoarded Ordinaries
We got back from Ohio last night while it was still light; the lawn had been freshly mown and everything was wet from late afternoon showers. This morning the dog and I reacclimated ourselves to Keene by doing our usual walkabout the yard, as I’ve described before. Coming home after visiting with family for nearly a week is a welcome sensation, like settling into a pair of old, broken-in shoes: comfort. The house was just as we’d left it, but the yard was greener and lusher: the lilacs bloomed while we were gone, as did the irises and some unnamed white-flowering shrub in the dooryard.
Out behind the house where we rent a first-floor apartment stands a wood storage shed where our landlord stores, I assume, yard tools and other household implements. Behind this shed is an assortment of random stuff: boards, a rusty barrel, a bag of garden mulch, a water-soaked tarpelin. These parts, I’m sure, are merely the pieces of a larger work-in-project, something started then abandoned or something never yet begun. These parts, then, can represent either failed dreams or the hope of a promise yet fulfilled, a dream deferred but not abandoned. Like anything, how you see these parts depends in large part on how you look at them, whether you view the glass as being half empty or half full.
Call me an eternal optimist or merely a slob, but I love this old shed and its sprawling arrangement of stuff, a sentiment I feel as well for our back porch with its motley assortment of castoff kitchen chairs. Although Chris’s Germanic nature would straighten, clean, and tidy-up everything in sight, I have a soft-spot for the random and the ragtag: I prefer the sight of chipped paint on old wood to the pristine perfection of new siding or a pre-fab storage unit newly purchased from the likes of Home Depot.
As I’ve said before in reference to my fondness for old abandoned buildings, I have a strong aesthetic ken for the Japanese notion of wabi-sabi, the “beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.” Abandoned buildings, old weathered sheds, and cast-off project parts all point to the passage of time; perfectly homogenous houses with “vinyl is final” siding do not. Gradually, those boards out back will return to the earth as will the shed that props them up; so too will the hands that made them as well as the hands that placed them. In winter-time, these parts were covered with snow; today, they lay dappled with damp and shrouded in green, looking entirely different from even a week ago when the yard was browner, colder, and less lush. Viewed from above, as a whole, Keene shows only slowly the passage of time, but when viewed up close, on the level of backyard storage sheds and screened porches, time’s hand comes into sharp focus, its passage and effect looming large amid minutiae.
As I mentioned above, the lilacs bloomed while we were gone this week: their buds had been bursting when we left, and now on our homecoming they are in full flower. Lilac is my mother’s favorite color, lilacs her favorite flower; I remember from childhood a lilac bush that blossomed in the backyard of a house where my parents no longer live, having moved into the house across the alley when I was about eleven. When we were visiting my folks in Columbus this week, I don’t remember whether that lilac bush was blooming, but certainly it must have been: in fact, I can’t even remember seeing that lilac bush even though it surely must still be there in my parents’ old backyard, a yard visible from the rear kitchen window of that house across the alley where they still reside.
In my mind, I remember that blooming lilac bush as being the backdrop of much of my childhood; I remember my mother looking forward to its blooming every year. In my mind, I have a vivid memory of a photo taken beside that lilac bush: after my First Communion, I posed there in a long pink dress with my mother in a long green dress and my father in a shirt and tie. Looking back on that picture now that I’m back in Keene, I am shocked to see that there is no lilac bush in it: in the background instead is the maple tree that grew in the middle of the courtyard between our house and the house next door. The tree that I considered my closest childhood friend, that maple is older and larger today but still flourishing, a new crop of neighbors having put a bench swing under its crowning shade.
In theory at least, it should be possible to date both time and place by the blooming of lilacs and other plants: here in Keene, the lilacs bloomed in mid-May whereas in Walt Whitman’s New York, lilacs were in bloom when President Lincoln was shot in mid-April, 1965. Psychologists say that smell is the most evocative of the five senses: in Whitman’s case, the smell of lilacs always reminded him of Lincoln’s death and the procession of his flower-draped casket across America. In his masterful elegy to Lincoln, Whitman used the image of the flowering, heart-leaved lilac, a western fallen star, and the mournful song of a hermit thrush to represent the tragic loss of a man cut down in the prime of a noble life: a flower-draped casket is the ultimate statement of wabi-sabi, a touch of care that points to life’s impermanence, the way that life continues even though its parts fall prey to time.
Whitman’s New York is several hours south of New Hampshire, as is the Ohio of my childhood: the lilacs in both places will inevitably bloom earlier than those here in Keene. Thus a trip that transgresses latitude will also transcend time: visiting Ohio brings me back to the scenes of my past while submerging me for a time in a natural world several weeks more advanced toward summer than that here at home. Again, these subtle temporal shifts are not visible from a far: they cannot be mapped on any satellite photo or radar scan. But when the parts themselves are viewed apart from the whole, time’s movement across the seasons and across the years is revealed, an unmappable motion that none of our grandest projects or storage sheds can track or ignore.
This is a double-duty blog-entry, serving as my contribution to the Photo Friday weekly challenge, “Parts,” as well as the Ecotone biweekly topic, “Time and Place.”Comments
Kevin Kim Says:
May 16, 2004 at 11:25 am
If I’m not mistaken, lilac is also Gilderoy Lockhart’s favorite color.
Kevin
Loretta Says:
May 16, 2004 at 1:35 pm
The lilacs are in bloom right now in southern New York, right outside the city. I have a white lilac bush by the front door that is very scraggly. I am going to replace it this year, but with white again as I have a fondness for white in the garden.
We used to have a home with two sheds in the back. One even had windows and a Dutch door. I used to fantasize that the original owners kept a tiny pony in it, or sold honey from it. We always planned to put a new floor in it and turn it into a potting shed instead of just the shed where we shoved all the gardening stuff.
I was sad to see that over the last ten years, the former owner took it down and replaced it with a prefab plastic unit from a warehouse store.
Kathleen Says:
May 16, 2004 at 9:55 pm
glad to hear you had a nice trip and a nice return.
Tom Montag Says:
May 17, 2004 at 11:47 am
If I remember correctly, lilacs were blooming in Columbus, OH, when we were there April 9-11th, so the blossoms might have been spent already by the time you were in town.
Lorianne Says:
May 20, 2004 at 7:56 am
Kevin, I’d be willing to bet my mother has *no idea* who GL is. I’ve always preferred *lavender* over *lilac*: lilac is more on the pink side of the spectrum, lavender’s more blue. And I prefer a good deep violet to either one: both lilac & lavender are a bit too pastel for my taste, but to each his own! 
Loretta, your comment perfectly sums up my thoughts on old vs. new sheds. That plastic prefab shed has no stories inside it: it’s antiseptic. Give me a little grunge and grit anyday!
Kathleen, as is always true of familial visits, the return was more relaxing than the trip itself, as I’m sure you can understand!
Tom, it makes sense that Columbus lilacs would bloom significantly earlier than those here in NH…and your date goes along with Whitman’s observations, too.
Source: http://hoardedordinaries.wordpress.com/2004/05/page/2/
So Many Shades Of Blue
By London and the North
This pic is called A Bad Day Ends Well.
Is everyone else getting spam to their comments? I can't always keep up with deleting it. Even with updating through the MT Blacklist. I'll have a look around - someone's bound to be having a good rant about it!
I'm in cyberisolation at present. I confess to only fleetingly visiting a couple of weblogs recently. It is not hard to feel that one has fallen off the flat planet. I miss the sanity of my cyberchums. I think I'll go visiting later tonight!
I am having some tough days and yet, after a break, I look at it all and wonder why I am letting such ridiculous goings on get to me. Fortunately we are having some wonderful Spring days. The valley is so green and lush. The skies are staggeringly broad and blue. I spent the afternoon yesterday planting up all the pots on the terrace and then spent ages watering everything. I love watering plants. When I was a student I used to get up at the crack of dawn and cycle over to my part time job at Clifton Nurseries in Warwick Avenue and water the plants. The smell of pelargoniums at 6am under running water. Heaven! And the solitude of greenhouses. I really enjoyed removing the dead leaves off the plants. Then onto one of the first institutions I worked in - at that time as a student social worker. I was good at it and innovative. I wanted to be a therapist. On reflection I was too steeped in psychoanalytical ideology at the time to be able to practice with a political awareness which I place value on now.
In 1989, after a decade of institutions, I decided, with such loving encouragement from my friends who believed in me, to jump ship and practise out of a less institutional setting. I enjoyed all the part time bits of work which I did: lots of teaching, being a surgery counsellor, working with staff teams who were struggling, working with people who made such incredible leaps of faith whom I will never forget. Really, I am a very privileged person. The people I have worked with, do work with are braver and most likely stronger people that I may ever be. People are amazing.
I guess it's knowing that so keenly, my belief in human beings' ability - given the opportuinity - to take hold and turn things around and make their world work for them. I have been there for so many people. In ways even many other therapists cannot know.
Institutions, on the other hand, take their toll. They take and do not give back. They attempt to control and stifle committment and innovation. I have to remind myself that the bloke who I want to supervise my PhD is himself a reject of academia. Anyway, the story goes that six years ago after moving Up North I thought that the household income required my doing a part time job as well as the other. So one came along and for three and half years it was fine. Then there were structural changes and a helluva lot of crap from all directions. It's like a relationship: how long do you keep working at the problems before jacking it in.
Me, these days, I'm a long term relationship kinda person. Work through stuff. Speak to it or don't speak to it - whatever seems like the most productive.
The good news is that while I keep getting knock-backs from a nervous and confused institution, I have produced a quality paper for publication and have made arrangements to do a clinical doctorate. Which may involve resigning if my agency still does not give its blessing. But, many buts. I won't call it burn out. It's agency fatigue. What a bugger.
Thanks to Susan who, when I walked out of work at lunchtime today, sent me a text saying C (the baby) AND I ARE PROUD OF YOU. NOW GO AND BUY A MAGNUM. (An ice cream!)
I don't know why but I made this my contribution to Ecotone's special on Time and Place. Maybe that's all it's about... time and place.
Posted by Coup de Vent at 07:30 PM | Comments (4) London and the North Comments: So Many Shades Of BlueCongratulations are in order for that article and the clinical doctorate track. Here is a toast, to which I am raising this glass of Syrah, to wish you all the best with the academic plans!
Posted by maria at May 18, 2004 03:47 AMCdV: I think this was a GREAT Time and Place topic. I am full of admiration for your choice of path--I have a friend whose degree was in Law with French from Brum and he went on to do social work in Glasgow--but when you're good they promote you out of practising and into management, and who wants THAT? -- So I think he's going through similar thoughts. Hope this leads you where you want to be, but for the moment it's good to mark the occasion with a raised glass. (Or cup of tea in my case, it being 6:50 am.)
Posted by Pica at May 18, 2004 02:50 PMI guess it's all time and place, isn't it? To say that only certain "natural" events are moments to be relished is to deny that our own everyday existance, with all the good and the bad, is not part of nature. So your piece would, as Pica pointed out, definitely be considered part of time and place. It's where you are after all, isn't it? You're not any place else...
Posted by butuki at May 18, 2004 06:43 PMPS... I've been getting so much comment spam lately that I have to take a deep breath and stop myself from destroying the computer. MT-Blacklist is barely doing it any more. I've even got spam visually lodged in my referrer's list, leaving an advertisement at the bottom of the page. I may just have to get rid of the list just to get the advertisement off. What a pain in the ass....
Posted by butuki at May 18, 2004 06:46 PM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20040612180007/www.airenet.co.uk/alife/2004_05.html#000490
Time and Place
By The Whereproject After much lurking and hanging back, I’ve decided that it’s time to post something for this week’s Ecotone topic, “Time And Place.” Even as I’ve fallen behind on writing in my own place blog, I’ve been thinking about the affect the practice of place blogging can have on perceptual pace. If a weblog has been defined as a "website organized by time,” then it makes sense to define a place blog as a weblog organized by place. What this offers is a writing medium that encourages a regular encounter with the ordinary places we inhabit.
As Mitchell Thomashow has pointed out in his book Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change, it’s difficult for us to develop a deep sense of place when we don’t modulate the pace of our perception, if we only experience places at the pace of a car or an airplane and not at the pace of walking or biking. It would appear that the Internet also seems to be part of the problem; as the “information superhighway,” it tends to provides us with vast amounts of information in a very short time.
So if the web is going to help us develop a deeper sense of place, it seems we need to find ways to use in such a way that we can modulate our perceptual pace; instead of settling only for the metaphor of the information superhighway, we need to cultivate “information walkways” on the web, ways of using that web that counteract the furious pace and disorienting vastness of cyberspace. Does place blogging provide way of being online that slows us down perceptually and fosters more attention to place? Or is it like attempting to walk or bike on an interstate: it will either get you run over or arrested?
If the writing of Ecotone bloggers is any indication, it appears that place blogging creates a rhetorical rhythm between life online and life in places. The ease of publishing that characterizes the weblog facilitates daily writing, and by extension, daily observation, and because weblogs are online, the production of local knowledge can be shared either with those next door or those in the next country.
Of course, blogging about place does not necessarily or automatically alter our perceptual pace, but its seemingly built-in focus on both place and time does seem to help those of us trying to pay closer attention to where we are.
Source: http://www.whereproject.org/node/92
Time and Place
By Beginner's Mind
It seems like wilderness is defined as a place where no humans live. But here in Vermont, much of what is now wilderness was once the living space of shepherds and farmers. In human history terms, that occurred not so long ago.
At the turn of the 20th century much of Vermont was cleared and used for farming. There was a thriving culture of raising sheep, and there were a number of mills turning wool into cloth.
So, today there aren't many areas of old growth forest. But, you can hike through seldom visited areas and come across the remains of old stone walls. When clearing the land, the settlers would remove the stones from a field and build walls along the edge of the property. There is a stone wall in the woods behind my house that is close to being the property line between me and our southern neighbor.
But now the state is something like 80% forested. When exploring the forest now, not only can you find stone walls, but also cellar holes and even the occasional stone chimney. The chimneys look especially odd, sometimes, because, other that it and the fireplace it surrounds, there is almost no evidence that anyone ever lived there. You can also occasionally run across the rusted remains of an old plow or other farm implement.
So, time here seems to run in circles. The wilderness still holds clues of the mystery lives of dreamers and schemers who came to conquer the Northern Forest. But though it was knocked back, in the blink of a geological eye the woods have gotten back up and is now thriving.
posted by Robert @ 2:21 PM | Comment (1)
Comments
John Elder's book, Reading the Mountains of Home, talks about this very thing. When we were in Sweden a few years ago, where the forests are thick and seem ancient, you could come across old remains of farmhouses deep in the spruces and know that someone once tried to eke out a living from the poor, rocky soil...
Source: http://beginnermind.blogspot.com/2004_05_01_archive.html#108490536540155549
impalpable habitations
By alembic
This post is my response to ecotone's (May 15, 2004) biweekly topic: Time And Place
Tim Lingdren of the Where Project is writing his dissertation on the relationship between literacy, place, and the Web. He is a student of Composition and Rhetoric, so the 'place' he is exploring, the way I understand it, is the one in which our senses make themselves at home. This is not an imagined place; it is a space bound and shaped and colored by the habits of our perception ' and the ways in which inhabit the world with our words.
So now I am getting a bit carried away here with the rhythm of my own rhetoric. Lindgren's fine prose put me in the mood to meander through the tiny mazes of my small plot of homegrown discourse.... So let's get back into the clearing, then:
Lindgren's call for exploring the perceptual spaces of the Web (of blogs) as 'information walkways' to help us deepen our experiences of real places reminds me of a contradiction I have been mulling over for a while. This one has to do with the idea that the more space there is for my senses to take in, the less time I have for inhabiting it ' or feeling as if I could know it, in the sense in which knowledge about place is communication about difference. But I am getting into abstractions again:
A couple of years ago, when I was still running my small, homemade blogging system, with few links and few visitors to my site, I used to walk the hills of my neighborhood regularly, as well as spend a considerable time tending my garden. Back in those times, I felt privy to all sorts of information about my neighborhood that can come only from the engagement of all senses: from full presence in both place and time.
When I wrote about my walks or my garden in those days, be it on my old blog, in poems, or essays, my focus seemed to be on the 'plain sense of things' (Wallace Stevens reference), all in an effort to record as closely as words would allow me, the immediate world which I inhabited as much with my senses as with my words.
Once I migrated my blog to Movable Type and people started to stop by, and I, turn, started to travel farther in the worlds of blogs, my walks in my physical neighborhood became less frequent and I spent a lot less time in my garden, or even caring about it. My focus shifted to worlds that came to me first in words only. At first, it was intoxicating to find out about the state of certain flowers in some other blogger's garden in Vermont, for example ' even as my own rose bushes, just out of view of my office, began to fail. To know where in London one can have good Lebanese food, to take another example, made me feel, somehow, a bit more worldly ' or rather, a bit more as if my neighborhood just got bigger, even as I was eating leftovers from my fridge because I didn't have the time to go exploring restaurants or grocery stores within a wider circle of my physical neighborhood....
With my longer daily walks across blogs, which were now part of my expanded 'neighborhood,' the perimeters of my focus grew wider too. I was still trying to take in the 'plain sense of things' and record as closely as words would allow me, the immediate world that I inhabited as much with my senses as with my words. But where is the plain sense in things in a world of blogs that came to me as 'recent imaginings of reality" (another Wallace Stevens reference), day in day out?
It wasn't until very recently, when necessity 'forced' me to spend days on end by a lakeside, talking with a great number of people from my physical neighborhood, that I realized just how disconnected I have become from the place I call home. Because of my blog walks, I am beginning to know more about the subtle changes in downtown Keene, NH, for example, than about those that are taking place in Larkspur, CA, which is visible to my eyes from my window ' though obviously not as clearly, and as particularly framed for me, as Keene is.
So where am I? Good question ' in more sense than one, or even two. A crossroads of sorts, in which, if I take the road that leads into the ever-widening neighborhood of the blogosphere, I will get to know bits and pieces of the wider world, as reflected in shards of images and impressions. But, I will also get know less about the physical world in which I live in a web of relations, and which sustains me ... not only in my daily needs, but also in my creative explorations ' in the more perilous webs of the imagination.
For me, without a focus on the physical neighborhood, without that pace in which all the senses can take their turn in roaming the 'walkways,' there is no beat or heart in writing ' only the 'shadowless moon wholly composed of shade/Women with other lives in their hair...' (Wallace Stevens, 'Study of Images II').
Time and place in the blogosphere, seem to be working against each other for the me who is the writer. Blogging about place takes time, not only to write with an informed and informative perspective, but also to inhabit, with all senses, a place that, in the end, resists all description. Perhaps this is too oblique (maybe because I need more time to understand its relation to what I am saying) but here is Wallace Stevens again, as one take on literacy, place, and time from 'An Ordinary Evening in New Haven':
II
Suppose these houses are composed of ourselves,
So that they become an impalpable town, full of
Impalpable bells, transparencies of sound,
Sounding in transparent dwellings of the self,
Impalpable habitations that seem to move
In the movement of the colors of the mind,
The far-fire flowing and the dim-coned bells
Coming together in a sense in which we are poised,
Without regard to time or where we are,
In the perpetual reference, object
Of the perpetual mediation, point
Of the enduring, visionary love,
Obscure, in colors whether of the sun
Or mind, uncertain in the clearest bells,
The spirit's speeches, the indefinite,
Confused illuminations and sonorities,
So much ourselves, we cannot tell apart
The idea and the bearer-being of the idea.
Posted by maria at May 24, 2004 12:01 PM | TrackBack
Comments
Maria: some great stuff here. You're making me want to think through some old Ecotone posts and write again on the same topics.
What is valuable to me about visiting other blogs (and reading books) is how they function as windows onto a world I can't see--from my kitchen counter in Davis or from the limits of my own experience or knowledge (or perception). The danger, I think, is when that starts to susbtitute for the effort to expand my perceptions and experience of the place I'm in. I should walk more; impossible to ignore my surroundings when I'm walking.
Posted by: Pica on May 25, 2004 07:05 AMMaria:
This is a rich post, and I really appreciate the way it articulates a tension that I feel all the time.
As I mulled it over, I began wondering how this tension is different from the problem nature writers face, namely the tension between spending time in nature versus sitting down to write about nature? When does the mediating role of writing become an end in itself, something that obstructs meaningful engagement with actual environments? Conversely, to what extent does the practice of writing enable a deeper engagement than we would otherwise have?
While it seems like place blogging shares some of these tensions, there also are important differences that emerge when we read and write online, but I think we still have a hard time assessing the gains and losses of allowing online technologies to mediate our engagements to place.
As you read other place blogs, do you ever feel like they inspire you to explore your own places more? Did they ever give you a new lens through which to observe your own locale? It sounds like, looking back, they tended to be more of a distraction. Do you think this has anything to do how they were written? Perhaps one measure of a successful place blog should be how well it inspires readers to explore their on places. When we write about place, is part of our "job" to persuade our readers to leave our sites and get outside? I don't really know what this would look like, but it seems like it's worth talking about.
Tim
Tim:
Your first set of questions about the role writing plays in the mediation of our relation to place is a thought-provoking one, indeed. I don't have the answers, which, of course, would have to be teased out with the help of a research methodology that could measure engagement, meaning and their effects on changes in the environment.
I like your observation that blogging displays important differences from the more traditional ways people have been writing about place. You are right to point to that balance sheet of losses and gains that come from allowing technology to mediate both our relationship to writing and the places in which we live and write about. Of course, the tricky question is (and that's why you are writing a dissertation on this, since there are no clear answers) what goes into the gain column, and what ends up in the losses column.
Finally, to answer some of the more direct questions you posed about how reading place blogs affects both my relation to my place and blogging ' all excellent questions that many of us place bloggers should ask ourselves periodically:
Yes, other place blogs have inspired me to explore my 'place' more. But that exploration has been -- how to put this in a concise (blog-style discourse)? ' mediated or framed by both the discourse of blogging (short and frequent posts, peppered with relevant photos) and also by the kind of 'local' issues and blogworthy places other bloggers considered relevant to share To exaggerate a bit, so that I can make my point, it's almost as if I tried to present 'my' literal place in my literary blog in text and images that would fit the 'popular discourse on place' ' and that's a framework that has questionable roots (or, to follow in the analogy, wood pieces) in the local culture.
I think that the 'aha' moment that, for me, bridged traditional ways of writing about place and place blogs came when I first read the work of W.G. Sebald. His 'The Emigrants' made time into place, and it did so in a way in which blogs work: passages on different topics and seemingly random photos, a shadowy narrator of sorts, but all of it, over the course of reading, cohering into a discernible narrative. His 'The Rings of Saturn,' did the opposite: made place into time for me and inspired me to undertake my then walks in my own neighborhood with more care ... as well as to write differently, not only on my blog, but also in my offline work.
Anyway, I could go on and on about this ' but it would make bad form, in the sense of blog etiquette, wouldn't it?
You've articulated for me the conflict that I have felt since I started blogging six months ago. I write considerably about art and writing and the creative process, and I am acutely aware of how much time the blog takes out of my limited "free time" when I would be writing fiction and creating art.
At the same time, I am very aware of the degree to which my writing and art has been inspired by the blogs I read and the web sites I surf. The connections I have made with other artists and writers have enriched my real time life as much as my virtual reality.
It is a question of balance. Unfortunately, it is too easy for me to sit with my laptop and blow an evening when I could have been writing, creating art, or reading. Or in the morning, I'm scrambling to get out the door on time because I spent an hour composing and polishing a post.
I can't imagine turning away from the Internet altogether. You can't shut the barn door once the cows are in the pasture! Danny Gregory goes on "electron fasts" when he does not post for a week and plunges into his projects and life. I think it is a fine way to handle the conflict.
Posted by: Loretta on May 28, 2004 04:40 AMBalance is indeed the key, Loretta ... and I like the idea of an "electron fast" in the wake of a bout with information indigestion problems....
Posted by: maria on May 28, 2004 09:54 AM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20040706135824/www.ashladle.org/archives/000358.html#000358
A Place for This Time
By Switched At Birth
He was drawn to the window wall and stood there, gazing out toward the far mountains, hands clasped behind his back. He and Buck went out on the deck, while his wife and I sat on stools at the island bar in the kitchen, she asking questions and me providing answers for the mundane but essential details of life in this house.
I could see her husband talking with Buck, his shoulders slumping into his chest and belly swaying out a bit over his pants, in that way of too-long deskbound newly retired executives. Short, blondish hair, he reminded me vaguely of the actor, Brian Dennehy, hands carving the air as he spoke. Every moment or two, he turned back to the view, resting his elbows on the deck rail.
In the kitchen, his wife of more than forty years, watched him, too. "It's always been his dream to have a glass house in the mountains," she said, a trace of something in her voice. Wistfulness? Worry? "He had better live at least ten years, because I don't plan to move again. They're going to have to carry me out of here in a box, or down the hill to the old folks home."
We all walked around the house together, Buck and I demonstrating what the various light switches turned on, how the fancy faucet in the kitchen sink works, the quirk in closing the dishwasher door, where the satellite dish wiring enters the house, and all the various other small details any of us could think of. Then it was time for them to go, to return to their home several states away, pack up and return to move in on June 11. By then, the house will be empty and ready for them, only a bottle of champagne and a fresh bag of Smoky Mountain Roasters coffee beans left to greet them.
We gathered at the top of the steps near my desk, looking through a French door to the tree-lined ridge. There was a moment of quiet. Then he spoke: "I had a bout with non-Hodgkins lymphoma about four years ago. Went through a round of chemotherapy." Thud. I felt it in my belly. I could see Buck tighten, too. We waited. "Last month, a spot of something turned up on the Cat scan. I may need to go through another round." He hit the subject lightly, and with considerable grace, but there it was.
They came the next day in the early evening to meet with a contractor to talk about adding another set of exterior stairs and a garage. We went out to visit with them for a few minutes and wish them safe journey. Just before leaving, he shook our hands, and this man, who I suspect is considered by many to be undemonstrative, hung onto Buck's hand an extra beat and, looking at us both intensely, said "You've just given us everything -- everything. Thank you."
Back upstairs, alone again, Buck poured a scotch for me and made himself a Manhattan. We stood in the kitchen, quietly, looking at each other. Finally, I spoke. "This man needs some time here, looking out over these mountains."
"Yes," Buck agreed. "They need this place at this time more than we do."
This is my submission to Ecotone's May 15 topic: Time and Place. Better late than never, I hope!
07:12 AM in Permalink
Comments
That's really, really, beautifully done.
Posted by: dale | May 27, 2004 06:08 PM
"You've just given us everything -- everything. Thank you."
Those words brought tears.
Posted by: Penny | May 27, 2004 06:56 PM
Nicely told, again. Thanks.
Posted by: Tom Montag | May 27, 2004 09:59 PM
This is one of those rare posts that has become a story, intact. And a signature moment in your lives. I love the beautiful simplicity of your writing. Of the hundreds of writers I have enjoyed over the years, I love this sort of thing best.
Posted by: Denny | May 28, 2004 07:56 AM
Oh Beth, I have felt very sad knowing I will never visit this beautiful place anymore. This post made me feel so much better. I know these people will find much comfort and joy in that magnificent place. I'm so glad you could share it with them.
Posted by: Ann | May 28, 2004 08:27 PM
Beautiful story.
It's easier to let go knowing that it will be a peace-giver for the next family.
Posted by: Kathleen | May 29, 2004 04:37 PM
A very poignant piece and so beautifully written.
Posted by: susanne | May 30, 2004 03:55 AM
Hey, Beth, this was an incredible piece. Why not submit this one to Sun Magazine? Do you read Sun?
Posted by: Fran | May 30, 2004 05:39 PM
Your thoughtful words and sensitivity brought tears to my eyes: "They need this place at this time more than we do."
You are such good people. You deserve the very best in your new life in Florida.
Posted by: David St Lawrence | June 2, 2004 07:55 PM