Cape Ann, Massachusetts - gathering compost

Each fall, after our rental season is over, Naomi and I take a trip to the New England Coast for a little R&R. The last few years, I take the occasion to gather some seaweed as compost for my garden. I understand that seaweed can offer the garden many trace elements that the garden doesn't ordinarily get from regular land based compost. I also like it because it is very fibrous and takes a long time to completely break down, thus adding good tilth to the soil.
It makes the car smell like the sea on the way back home! I take this as another advantage - prolongs the vacation.

Cape Ann Oct. '08

Wind whipped waves splayed

against a gently sloped beach

Each erupting from below,

Animated by desire to break free

Is the whole ocean conspiring,

Throwing itself upon the land?

Complicit wind shears the crest

Wresting desperate drops aloft

Thrilled by towering waves above me,

Trembling at the thought of rules broken

"Thus shall you come and no farther,

And here shall your proud wave be Stopped."

Job 38:11

Birthday Party

It was Tovah's second birthday last Friday. She had a great birthday party on Sunday afternoon which Naomi and I attended along with her other grandparents and assorted friends and friend's parents. There was not a melt-down among the attendees. In the accompanying video (all the way at the bottom of this post) you get to see most of the people who attended the party. Bracha was still visiting from Israel and played guitar and sang for us.

Sukkot

And so, It is Sukkot!

The pictures were taken at the time that we built the Sukkah and relaxed with our cousin, Bracha, from Israel - just after Yom Kippur. This is my favorite holiday - celebrating the harvest and camping out. It really connects with the land and is a perfect environmental holiday. The Pilgrims self consciously modeled their Thanksgiving holiday after Sukkot.

During the holiday one eats meals and sleeps (weather permitting) in a three sided hut reminiscent of an

Adirondack leanto. Traditionally, the Sukkah is decorated with the seven agricultural species of the Land of Israel. One also waves, in six directions including up and down, a Lulav and Etrog as they are held together in hand. The lulav is basically a palm branch with myrtle branches on one side and willow branches on the other. The trees can symbolize fruitfullness, life giving water, and sensual beauty and strength. The Etrog is a fruit, somewhat like a lemon, which is grown in Israel. It is citrously fragrant, beautiful, and has the pistil remaining on the end. Just to be sure the symbolism is not missed, the Rabbis ruled that the Etrog must be turned just before the waving so that the pistil is pointed in the direction of the waving. It is no mere accident that the Etrog played an important part in European Jewish folk traditions as a fertility enhancer for women.

Observations and Reflections while sitting in my Sukkah

I sit in my Sukkah

Air expectantly still.

Candle burns without waver

Save my will.

Lulav and Etrog

Him and Her I wave.

Arching palm, fragrant fruit,

Sparks pulsing through air.

Blue Jays throb through,

Harsh cries daring-do.

Woolly alder aphids,

Thousands within eyesight,

Waft through the air

With their waxy white.

I sip my wine, eat my bread.

A jet passes overhead.

I am startled by

Neighbor’s rifle report.

His mouth’s ear - tasting deer-

Is deaf to any tort.

An early evening owl calls

"Who looks for You-all".

The entire universe

Billions of years hence

A dense black dot

Or, an empty lot

Meanwhile the wise one said:

"Praise God,

Obey the commandments",

Swat the late season mosquitoes

- Dead!

Visiting Maria in Chicago!

Today we visited the Farmer's Market in Oak Park. Berries galore and tomatoes were enjoyed by all - along with some coffee and homemade donuts. It was a beautiful fall day!

Aldo Leopold's Shack

So, on Thursday, I flew to Chicago to visit My daughter, Jenna and her husband, Mark, and my Granddaugher, Maria. On the first full day there Mark and I took a trip to Baraboo, WI to see Aldo Leopold's 'shack'. It was a pilgrimage of sorts. Well, maybe not 'of sorts', but probably an actual pilgrimage. It was a three hour drive from Oak Park to Baraboo, WI. On the ride Mark and I had a long discussion about community connections, fragmentation of society and whether that fragmentation exists now any more than in the past. Discussion involved what makes a community and how we can recognize one. I presented the idea that the romanticized traditional geographically bound communities based on neighborliness and kinship can be basically destructive of humanity - promoting provincialism and prejudice, limiting educational opportunity, intellectual curiosity, and generally generating constraints on human potential and sometimes resulting in destruction of the environment. I argued that a more cosmopolitan mode of living can promote intellectual and creative growth, emotionally healthy individuals, less prejudice, and more compassion for fellow human beings. I pointed out the contrast between Sarah Palin, living all her life in Wasilla with few outside experiences and closely bound with her kin and neighbors, compared to Barack Obama, raised in Kansas, Hawaii, Indonesia, and living in Boston, LA, and Chicago. Sarah of 'Drill, Baby, Drill', pipelines, anti science, familial retribution, cronyism, etc. Barack of environmental awareness and concerns, universal health care, science and reason, interest in and concern for the rest of the world. This turned out to be an interesting discussion to have before going to Leopold's 'Shack'. This was the place of inspiration for Leopold, who grew up in Iowa, went to High School in New Jersey, College in Connecticut, worked and lived in New Mexico, married a Spanish American woman and wound up spending much of his adult life in Wisconsin (living and working in a community of scholars - students and colleagues who came and went), where he wrote one of the seminal books on expanding the notion of community to include the environment in which we live.

Maybe the idea of community needs to include the notion of a community that we make, each of us, of our friends and relatives, as we choose. This community can sometimes be partly or even mostly located in a particular geographic area, but almost everyone needs to step out of that area for a significant time for meaningful integrating activity in order to broaden their perspective of humanity and their knowledge of their self. Modern communications and travel make this easier than at any time in our history.

My own community includes, with a few very significant exceptions, hardly any of my neighbors. It is mostly my family scattered in Massachusetts, Saratoga, Chicago, California, Alaska and close friends flung far into places that their interests and opportunities have taken them. This community is close knit and responsive and nurtures me and I don't think my sense of committment to humanity and the world has suffered because it is far flung.

I thank Mark and my blog-journal for the opportunity to sort some of this out in my own mind.

Check out the link below.
www.aldoleopold.org/

Bracha visits from Israel

This past Monday, on the way back from the Garlic Festival, we picked up our cousin Bracha who is visiting from Israel.  We are having a wonderful time showing her our place and visiting around the area and putting her to work in the Garden.  This is her first visit to North America.

Compost

So, yesterday I turned my compost. I'm not a very careful composter, but, if one is not in a hurry, composting tolerates most anything. I like to think of these piles of organic materials as my next year's tomatoes. You can see that the fall colors are coming on. The compost consists mostly of hay that I gather from bush hogging the fields and from sundry garden debris. This compost combined with ample manure, which I either buy or gather from neighbors who keep animals, is basically what keeps the garden going.