Quarter Day

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Some years it sneaks up on you.  The solstice, that is.  The weather remains an area of fascination for me, and not one of infrequent complaint.  The late spring (pretty much all of May and June up until Juneteenth) around here has been rainy and chilly.  Oh, we’ve had hot days sprinkled in, but even this week I had to wear a thermal shirt and fingerless gloves in the morning since there was no sun and the furnace has been off since last month.  The last couple of days, starting, ironically, at Valley Forge, have been getting hot.  And today begins astronomical summer.  I write about the seasons quite a lot.  Having been born and raised in a rainy, temperate zone climate, I grew up accustomed to four distinct seasons.  And we’re now at the longest day of the year.

The quarter days always make me reflective.  Culturally, there’s no real celebration associated with solstices or equinoxes.  The winter solstice falls relatively near Christmas and other winter holidays.  The spring equinox is close to Easter.  The start of summer, which should be ebulliently hopeful with its abundant sunshine, tends to get overlooked.  Some like to say summer is when life is easy.  It does mean mowing the lawn quite a bit.  The grass loves all the rain we’ve had this year.  Waypoints, however, are important.  We divide the year so we might anticipate.  Our agricultural roots focus on planting and harvest.  Even our hunter-gatherer forebears had to follow the food that changed location depending on the prevailing weather.  The seasons are deep within us.

The summer solstice always makes me think of Ari Aster’s Midsommar.  The underlying fear of too much light.  Even here there is a profound message for those able to excavate it.  If things are going well we tend to sabotage them.  Still, I prefer to think of this as a season of hope.  Summer illuminates.  I write this noting the sun’s chasing of twilight outside my window, even before five a.m.  There are still some clouds in the sky because old patterns are difficult to break.  But it is a season of light.  The next quarter day, when we start to realize that the darkness will be increasing until the sister solstice comes to our rescue in winter, is likewise passed over in silence.  By then many will be ready for a respite from the heat that comes with too much light.  Others of us will be thinking of cycles and how they are full of hope and anticipation.

Remembering Holidays

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Memorial Day is an important stepping stone to get through the capitalistic year.  Not only does it mark the unofficial beginning of summer, it’s also the first holiday after the long, long drought of March, April, and nearly the whole month of May.  That’s a long stretch of unbroken work.  My ideal holiday may be one where I could hole up in my study with books and endless time to write, but that kind of situation isn’t really realistic.  There’s a lot to do.  Around these parts, however, getting outdoors to take care of those weeds has proven difficult.  Every day since last Tuesday (nearly a full week, as of today) it has rained at least a little.  Sometimes a lot.  And the temperatures dropped on Wednesday, back to early April levels, as if May were vying for the title of the cruelest month this year.

We’ve been making the best of it, getting out to see local attractions while dodging raindrops.  The weeds, I’ve noticed, love this kind of weather.  And I have a visceral reaction to putting on a heavy jacket to go out pulling weeds while watching each passing cloud for a potential downpour.  On the plus side, we have rainbows.  In fact, two nights in a row, about the exact same time, near sunset, we had a rainbow in the exact same spot in the sky.  That’s a sign of hope.  And indeed, the summer takes on a more relaxed atmosphere at work and a few holidays start creeping back in.  Until the stretch of September-October, the second annual drought.  But by then, however, off in the distance I can see the holiday season that starts in November and I know I can make it through to December.

It’s an odd way to live, isn’t it?  Experts talk about how work will be different in the future, but I have a mortgage due in the present, so I step from holiday to holiday, grateful for the time to recover.  With a government trying its best to eliminate benefits to seniors I may have chosen a bad time to reach my sixties.  At least I’m young enough to still pull weeds and push a mower.  (Once the grass dries, that is.)  The main point is not to waste this rare gift of a holiday.  There’s no rain in today’s forecast (but there is for Wednesday, every day through next weekend).  Seeing the sun buoys me up.  And if I can’t have that I can always hope that at least I can have rainbows.

Dangerous Driving

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It reminded me of the time my manager fell down into the basement.  It also makes me think I must be neurodivergent.  Yesterday we were helping my brother in New Jersey get some things in order in his house.  He lives about an hour and a half from us and when the GPS showed us our options to get home we decided to go shunpiking.  I find something atmospheric, and maybe a little haunted, about driving along roads next to a river.  We crossed into Pennsylvania just north of Trenton and followed “River Road” home.  This stretch of road, mostly highway 32, is almost impossibly quaint.  I’d driven sections of it before, but not the whole stretch.  It was a pleasant day but we’d just come off of a period of rain and high winds.  The winds were still up, and have been gusting for about a week now.

After somewhere over an hour on this pleasant drive, we saw a motorcycle stopped in the road.  I slowed way down, unsure of what I was seeing (this starts the neurodivergent part), and I saw a man staggering across the road to lay down on the berm.  I could see branches on the road.  Unsure what to do, I pulled up next to him and offered to call 911 (my wife actually suggested that, since I didn’t know what to do. She’s better in a crisis than me.).  By then the people in the cars behind us had gotten out and one of them indicated they had medical training and that help was on the way.  The man indicated he’d been driving his motorcycle and the branch came down on him, or right in front of him—he was pretty dazed and confused.  Not wanting to throw my own ignorance and ineptitude into the mix, I pulled over, and my wife and I got out of the car and started clearing branches from the road.  Kay and I, and by now others, had pretty much cleared the road and, unsure what to do, and since there were many people attending the man, I drove off.

Image credit: Doug Kerr, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license, some rights reserved, via Flickr

That incident made me very reflective.  When I worked at Ritz Camera in Brookline, Massachusetts, one day my manager didn’t see that the cellar door (inside the store) was open.  We heard a scream and a thud and I ran to the door and pulled it back open.  The door had to be held by a hook and eyelet being joined and while I was trying to do that, one of my coworkers brushed past and down the stairs to help our manager.  Later, my co-worker ribbed me for being more concerned about the door than the person.  I was actually trying to help our manager, but in my mind, going down the stairs only to have the door fall on my head made no sense.  It turned out the manager was fine; a trip to the ER showed nothing seriously wrong with her.  I don’t know about that man by the side of the road.  I was only glad that, as my wife noted, so many people had stopped to help.  I just hope he, like my manager, was okay.

Weather Bugs

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In one part of my life (ahem) I’m compelled to use Microsoft Windows products.  (In my personal life I’ve used Macs since before 1990.)  On a recent update they’ve added little, frequently changing icons in the lower left end of the task bar.  It took me a few days to figure out how to stop it from sending distracting news and sports updates (I don’t need these, and they disrupt my concentration).  They also send weather updates.  I couldn’t figure out how to turn off the weather, so I let it stand.  Perhaps it’s a sop thrown to workers who now spend more hours a day on the job because commuting is becoming less of a thing, a bit of relief from staying on task.  Something to make you feel connected.  Fine and good.  But does it have to be so alarmist?

Some of us can’t ignore sudden changes on the screen (much of advertising relies on this).  When the weather icon shifts, which it does periodically, it draws my eye.  It uses the language that’s become typical to dramatize the weather.  Temperatures will “plummet” on Saturday, for example.  I looked at a more sober weather website.  The high would be ten degrees lower than it was for that day.  Hardly a “plummet.”  Or it will tell me, in rather heightened tones, that four inches of snow are coming on Wednesday.  The more sober site says possibly one inch.  An hour or so later, the icon humbly admits maybe it’ll just be one inch.  The question is, do we really need these constant updates?  With theatrical exaggeration?  I turned off news and sports, otherwise the work day would include an almost subliminal news feed that goes from boot-up to log-off.

I get through these difficult days by mostly ignoring the news.  I don’t ignore the weather—it seems more real than what’s happening in Washington.  Besides, I wrote a weather-oriented book once upon a time, and I haven’t lost the interest.  We’re going through the time of year when spring and winter are duking it out.  Every few days it snows or ices, and in-between I find wasps inside that think maybe it’s time we should just be getting on with this.  Meanwhile, each day, all day, I’m sent weather updates meant to shock and awe me.  Into what?  Yet more panic?  I’ve noted before that in some respects I have a monastic personality.  I prefer calm, most of the time, without too much extraneous stimulation.  I go for hours each day without even glancing at my phone.  And for the weather, I prefer just to look out the window.

CSI: Backyard Edition

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Dateline: January 24.  Location: Backyard.  It was clearly a crime scene.  There were prints in the snow.  Blood.  Signs of a struggle.  The marks hadn’t been there the evening before, so I knew I was looking at a recent offense.  Two indentations in the snow, about 10 yards apart.  Too far for a small animal to have leapt.  A third impression, closer to the second.  Clear feather imprints in the snow.  Earlier on the day in question, I had observed a hawk in the white pine across the street.  Two angry blue jays strafed the interloper, but he appeared unintimidated.  He fluffed his feathers and surveyed the area, including, I presume, my back yard.  In his own time he left, in an unmarked flight.

In the morning, rabbit tracks.  The first impact had been violent.  Debris had been raised from under the snow blanket and scattered toward the southwest.  No footprints leading away from the site.  This led me to conclude the victim had been lifted into the air.  But why the second impact site?  There had been a struggle.  The victim, presumably of the Lepus genus, had tried to make a stand.  The second impact site had bits of blood toward the west.  Neither of these first two scenes of investigation bore any indicative hints to the identity of either the victim or the perpetrator.  I did not have the means to test the blood.  No tracks led from either impression.  The third site clearly involved a struggle.

Impressions of feathers, spread at least two-thirds of a meter across, remained clearly visible in the snow.  Between these wing prints evidence of a scuffle.  Perhaps an argument ensued.  No feathers or fur remained on site.  I had to piece this together before the snow began to melt.  What I am labeling site 1, the initial strike, was near a bush under which rabbits are frequently observed to rest.  A hawk, confident of its ability, swooped down in the night and apprehended the rabbit.  The victim fought back, enforcing an unscheduled landing.  Site 2.  Blood was drawn.  Site 3 was an easy rabbit’s leap from site 2.  Perhaps the rabbit escaped.  The wing and claw marks on the snow suggest that the victim did not survive this third attack.  No solid physical evidence could be recovered.  It was just too cold outside to go and look personally.  I am not paid enough to do that kind of work.  Or I could have it backwards.  Site 3 could be the initial strike, but my reconstruction seemed more likely  Either way, the backyard would, however, never feel safe again.

Book Stages

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Books appear in stages.  All publishers are different.  These platitudes encapsulate my experience in finding a venue for my ideas.  Sleepy Hollow as American Myth has just appeared in McFarland’s spring and summer catalogue.  I haven’t seen the proofs yet, but I suspect I will before too long now.  What’s with the spring and summer catalogue?  Well, believe it or not, books are seasonal.  Publishers go by seasons.  For many academic publishers there are two seasons: Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter.  The timing of certain books may fall in a specific place within those seasons but many academic books are aimed at classroom adoptions so early spring and early autumn are the most popular times.  It’s no coincidence that academic conferences also cluster around the semester system, the big ones being either autumn or spring.  Academics have a migratory instinct.

Personally, I’m hoping Sleepy Hollow will be out in late summer.  I don’t have any control over that, but it’s about then that normal people’s thoughts start turning toward falling leaves, long nights, and monsters.  Every year there’s a day in August when I step outside and literally smell autumn in the air.  As a kid seasons seemed like something as rigid as a biblical law: spring was March through May, summer June through August, and so forth.  The older I get, the more I realize how negotiable seasons are.  The Celts celebrated the start of spring in February.  Yes, there are lots of cold days yet to come, but the early signs of spring have begun.  For early risers, we finally start to observe earlier sunrises.  (These technically start around January 10, but they’re slow getting out of bed.)

You might think the ideal season for a book on spooky stuff, like Sleepy Hollow, would be timed for release in the fall/winter cycle.  Not necessarily.  Both Holy Horror and Nightmares with the Bible hit the market after Halloween.  Normal people’s thoughts had shifted to Thanksgiving.  I’m pleased that Sleepy Hollow will be released a bit earlier.  Summer is ideal for Halloween-themed books.  And yes, I devote a chapter to Halloween and the Headless Horseman.  They are closely related.  So I was glad to receive McFarland’s spring/summer catalogue and find my book on page two.  I don’t have a publication date yet, but I’m looking forward to being part of the discussion about one of my favorite ghost stories of all time.  Speaking of which, it’s almost time to begin gathering firewood for next winter, or at least it will be in summer.  And it’s not that far away.

Burn Out

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The Los Angeles fires are terrifying.  In my case, I can’t help but think of the Peshtigo, Wisconsin fire of 1871.  I read two books about it, the first because my daughter, in late elementary school in Oconomowoc, heard about the fire in class.  Embers of October by Robert W. Wells is one of the scariest books I’ve ever read.  After we’d safely moved out of Wisconsin I read Denise Gess and William Lutz’s Firestorm at Peshtigo.  Frightening stuff.  I feel for those suffering from the Los Angeles fires.  America is particularly vulnerable to such things since, according to books I read when writing Weathering the Psalms, the western half of the nation exists in, for the most part, a perpetual drought.  (Those who live in Seattle may disagree.)  Rain doesn’t fall evenly across the country.  I grew up in the relatively moist eastern part (we get a lot of rain), but even here fires are a possibility.  We had a very dry October, and a very dry May the year before.

Image credit: Mike McMillan/USFS, public domain as a work of the US government, via Wikimedia Commons

Global warming will only increase the problems, I fear.  Too long too many people in power haven’t taken it seriously enough.  The weather is a large, extremely complex phenomenon that we still don’t understand.  I sit shivering at my desk on a cloudy January day looking at weather apps that tell me it’s sunny outside.  One thing we do know about it is that if we tamper with it in one place, it affects the weather everywhere.  What if, instead of posturing and fussing with people who live in other countries, with larger entities trying to control them, we all turned our attention to that sky we hold in common?  Trying to understand its needs and temperaments?  Realizing that if crops fail in one country there will be shortages everywhere?

The fires aren’t just Los Angeles’ problem.  Large nations posturing about who has the biggest leader has proven ineffective time and again.  We need cooperators and collaborators, not nationalists.  Embers of October, especially, paints a Hell on Earth.  One that couldn’t be escaped by many of the people in this small town that was utterly wiped out by a natural disaster.  Such things should be required reading.  Instead, small-minded people ban books claiming ignorance is bliss.  Trying to avoid a metaphorical Hell, they introduce a real one here on earth.  And yet, some use even this to divide people against each other.  And people who have no will to help one another is Hell indeed.

Liminal Time

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Considering the number of people who declare autumn their favorite season, the equinox receives pretty slim press.  This year it falls on the 22nd and, as always, it is one of the four quarter days of the pre-Christian European calendar.  Even among pagans it seems not to have had the same level of celebration as the other solstices and equinox.  I sometimes wonder if that’s because things are generally good already in September.  The intense heat of summer is over but the chill of October hasn’t yet arrived.  We stop using the air conditioning and don’t have to turn on the furnace.  It’s the Goldilocks month.  It’s part summer when living is easy, and part fall when the world is beautiful.  Like its fellow quarter days it is truly a liminal time.  

Liminal periods are always good for reflection.  No matter how much I want to savor this time of year, I have a feeling that it always catches me off guard.  There are changes afoot.  Starting Monday it will be dark more than it is light, and that will hold true until the sister equinox visits us in March.  These longer nights have traditionally made room for ghosts and goblins.  If we haven’t begun to store up supplies for winter, now is the time to start.  It’s the season when we all believe in magic, if just a little bit.  I’m one of those people who finds melancholy somewhat lovely.  It’s not depression (believe me, I know!), but a kind of happy sadness that the season itself is ephemeral.  Pretty soon people will be watching scary movies, but not quite yet.

Harvest is a joyful, spooky time.  Those trees that have been green since April now put on their colorful winter coats but soon will spend the colder months bravely naked.  Snow may come.  Fall is a prophetic season, warning us of what might come.  Monsters may be set free from their chains.  And yet there will be cozy indoor holidays when we can hunker down and recollect the year that has just been spent.  There’s a wisdom to seeing the quarter days as the spokes on the wheel of the year.  Like many wheels already rolling it’s futile to attempt to stop them.  They’re moving us to the next place that we’re meant to be.  It’s true that the autumnal equinox falls on a weekend this year, but it does seem to me a natural holiday.  And a time, like all holidays, for reflection.

Dictionary Dreams

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“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.”  Thus begins the venerated Nunc dimittis, familiar from so many years of chanting evensong at Nashotah House.  It comes to mind when I’ve reached a milestone I never dreamed of attaining.  One that makes me feel as if I’ve accomplished my life’s work.  Strangely, it didn’t occur when my name ended up in a study Bible’s front matter.  But a friend recently sent me a note that immediately brought old Simeon’s words to mind.  I have been cited in the Oxford English Dictionary.  My book Weathering the Psalms is quoted (in the web version) under “simile.”  I have no idea how examples are selected for the OED.  It used to be scraps of paper sent in by astute readers, but I suspect things have changed.  How my obscure book ended up there, I haven’t a clue.

There’s an irony here as well.  Like most academics clueless about publication, I initially proposed Weathering the Psalms to Oxford University Press, assuming they published such things.  It was turned down on the basis of a reviewer—one or two I know not—that I later met at a social function, where he was clearly embarrassed.  I really just wonder how the OED found the book to cite in the first place.  In terms of copies sold, it has been my most successful book, but that’s not saying much.  As far as I can tell, it’s only sold less than 400 copies (the royalty statements don’t have the total and I haven’t received a check in years).  I guess all things in the world are connected, whether we notice it or not.

Those who know me personally are aware that validation is a huge thing for me.  I suspect that is true of most people who grew up in difficult circumstances and who managed—and this is never a certain thing—to pull themselves out.  Having been fired from my long-term teaching post (where I was working on this book) only made me want to prove myself more, I guess.  Insignificant things like getting a Choice review for one of my books (which continues to sell poorly) and having that behemoth of a dictionary notice that I used a fairly common word in a fairly common way do tend to release the endorphins.  It’s like maybe someone noticed that I’ve passed this way.  Maybe there was a reason for trying to capture the Wisconsin thunderstorms in a book about the Psalms.  Maybe there’s a reason each working day there concluded with the Nunc dimittis.

August Thoughts

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The other day I saw a headline on a BookRiot email blast: “August is Spooky Season Jr.”  I’ve often wondered why more horror fans haven’t emphasized this.  It’s not just that stores start putting out their Halloween merch, and it’s not that Summerween has taken hold.  No, it’s a feeling in the air.  When I was younger, August always seemed like the hottest month, the dog days of summer.  For many years now, however, I’ve begun to feel autumn’s approach in this month.  Some of the earliest trees begin to change (some start even in late July).  And if I take the time to smell the air when I step outside on an August morning, the first hints of harvest greet me.  The produce at the farmers’ markets should be a regular alert to that.  And my mind turns to the half of the year with which I most resonate.

It’s as if nature wears a mask, lulling us to suppose the weather will always be warm enough to sustain us, dropping rain in appropriate amounts at the correct time.  Yet we know that we have attacked our planet and it knows so too.  The true nature of all of this is change.  And change is scary.  A deep-seated fear accompanies autumn.  Did we store enough away for winter?  Is the house winterized?  What if the furnace breaks down?  What if the cold truly becomes too intense to stand?  I spend most of the year wearing multiple layers and fingerless gloves indoors.  Cloudy days make my office so chilly I can barely stand the lower thermostat setting until the end of the work day.  What if snow prevents me from getting to the store?  What if there truly is something scary in the dark?  All of this begins in August.

I watch horror movies year round.  I like to read creepy tales.  I even try my hand at writing a few.  Even so, I’m glad to learn that I’m not the only one whose thoughts turn toward Samhain even as Lughnasadh dawns.  A cool day in August is enough to start the chain-reaction going.  Some of us feel the respiration of fall even now.  Hear its slow heartbeat.  See its rictus grin.   Harvest tells us something about our own souls.  Our sins catch up with us as the nights grow longer.  The sun sets nearly an hour earlier than it did in late June, have you noticed?  And it rises nearly an hour later, I’ve noted.  Let spooky season jr. begin!

Spirit Storm

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Some time ago, we experienced quite a windstorm.  More than wind, there was a dump of rain, thunder, hail, and all that.  My wife and I were attending a Tibetan singing bowls sound-bath with some others in the cancer support community.  I’ve described this practice before, here.  In any case, the meditation is held in a large room with a tin roof—the kind of place you don’t want to be during a tornado.  We’d just got inside when the gust front hit and knocked out the power.  The instructor still went through the meditation, but the storm sounds blended with those of the singing bowls.  Afterwards my wife asked about Job.  Specifically, God speaking from the whirlwind.  I told her that was God on a bad day, but I understood what she was getting at—there’s a spirituality to the weather.  (I was going to suggest Elijah instead, but “but the Lord was not in the wind.”  Alas.

I thought of Weathering the Psalms.  My contribution to biblical studies, had I been allowed to remain in academia, would’ve been further explorations of weather terminology in the Bible.  But the Lord was not in the wind.  I wrote that book because I noticed the juxtaposition of severe weather with daily chapel at Nashotah House.  We were required to attend, no matter what the weather.  (Such is life on a fully residential campus.)  We were reciting the Psalms one day when a storm blew the power out.  It may have happened more than once, since we’re getting on past two decades hence my memory’s a touch imprecise on the point.  In any case, the spirituality of the power of the storm fascinated me.

It still does.  The next morning, out for my jog, I marveled at the number of branches down.  Thousands in the Lehigh Valley were without power.  This is probably why the ancients considered the storm god chief of the rest.  The violence of nature is something that suggests divinity.  Other primates have been observed screeching back at the sky during thunderstorms.  It’s deep in our DNA.  That doesn’t make it any less spiritual.  There’s a lot of weather in the Bible.  I only explored a tiny piece of it by trying to tackle the Psalms.  The Good Book, however, doesn’t say much about the spirituality of weather.  It’s there nevertheless.  Anything that can snap a tree a foot in diameter like a toothpick has a spiritual message for us.  I mused on the way home—we had to take a detour because of downed trees—that had the storm claimed us as victims, dying while meditating is probably not the worst way to go.  Now I wonder, what might God’s nice words from the whirlwind be?

Doing Without

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I’m a creature of habit.  Although I’m no internet junkie (I still read books made of paper), I’ve come to rely on it for how I start my day.  I get up early and do my writing and reading before work.  I generally check my email first thing, and that’s where something went wrong.  No internet.  We’ve been going through one of those popular heat waves, and a band of thunderstorms (tried to check on their progress so I could see if it’s okay to open the windows, but wait—I need the internet to do that) had rolled through three hours ago, at about midnight.  Maybe they’d knocked out power?  The phone was out too so I had to call our provider on my cell.  The robovoice cheerily told me there was a service outage and that for updates I could check their website.  Hmmm.

I can read and write without the internet.  I’m on Facebook for, literally, less than two minutes a day.  I stop long enough to post my blog entry and check my notices.  I hit what used to be Twitter a few times a day, but since people tend to communicate (if they do) via email, that’s how the day begins.  This morning I had no internet and I wondered how tech giants would live without it.  I’m no fan of AI.  I use technology and I believe it has many good points, but mistaking it for human—or thinking that human brains are biological computers—flies in the face of all the evidence.  Our brains evolved to help our biological bodies survive.  And more.  The older I get the more I’m certain that there’s a soul tucked in there somewhere too.  Call it a mind, a psyche, a spirit, a personality, or consciousness itself, it’s there.  And it’s not a computer.

Our brains rely on emotion as well as rationality.  How we feel affects our reality.  Our perspective can change a bad situation into a good one.  So I’m sitting here in my study, sweating since, well, heat wave.  It was storming just a few hours ago and I can’t check the radar to see if the system has cleared out or not.  What to do?  Open the windows.  I’ll feel better at any rate.  And in case the coffee hasn’t kicked in yet, “open the windows” is a metaphor as well as a literal act on my part.  And I don’t think AI gets metaphors.  At least not without being told directly.  And they call it “intelligence.”

Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash

Storming Fourth

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Our founders picked a day of uncertain weather to declare independence.  One gets the sense that people were more stoic about the weather in those days.  Of course, we’ve increased global warming and made things more extreme.  Nevertheless, I can remember very few fourths of July when the possibility of storms was zero.  The weather around here has been odd this year with a suddenly hot June, with a dry spell that killed quite a few plants, followed by a cool start to July and some very intense storms.  And now, on the fourth, the possibility of rain in the forecast.  The grass hadn’t been growing in the dry spell, but I’m hoping the rain will hold off today long enough for me to get that job done.  In fact, on this secular holiday I’d been hoping to get quite a few outdoors chores checked off the list.

When I was younger and fireworks were the main draw to the day, I noticed that just about every year rain fell, or threatened to, on July fourth.  I’m sure it’s not that way everywhere, but here in Pennsylvania, where the declaration was signed, it’s a reality of life.  Of course, the modern Independence Day celebrations evolved over time to include the cookout and fireworks—outdoor activities both.  For me, apart from the outdoor chores on a day off work, a movie seems like an indoor celebratory alternative.  Perhaps Return of the Living Dead, set on the fourth.  Or I Know What You Did Last Summer.  Or Graveyard Shift.  Maybe something else.

Watching the political theater unfold—and my, what a dramatic election year it’s been—perhaps a comedy horror is just about right for today.  This is going to take some thought.  Something to occupy my mind while doing those outdoor chores.  Of course, I’ve got a book to get submitted as well.  If the weeds can hold off for another day or two—is it wise to paint the porch when rain’s in the forecast?—maybe I can finish up Sleepy Hollow.  It’s a good American ghost story.  That might be appropriate as well.  You see, holidays are so rare that too many things crowd in on them.  They’re breaks from the constant earning of more money, which is the American way.  Of course, our founders were largely restless gentry.  For me a day off work is always a busy day.  Especially when the rains have returned and the grass has grown.  It must be the fourth of July.

Springing

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Life, for everyone, has difficult times.  Katherine May has a reassuring, but not always cheerful way about her.  She calls troubled times Wintering.  The subtitle of her book explains that it’s about The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.  My wife and I read this one together.  It reminded me, in some ways, of Barbara Brown Taylor’s Learning to Walk in the Dark.  In a society vapidly preoccupied with an often shallow happiness, admitting, even pondering the things that are difficult is an act of courage.  May has a disarming way of writing, a humility and self-deprecation that are an antidote to the brazen self-assurance we too often see in the media.  She looks for lessons in her own experiences of pain and loss, and yes, surviving through winter. 

Winter is often a quiet time of reflection.  In our bright, loud, beeping, buzzing world we don’t take much time for such things.  Indeed, capitalism (which is generally not deep, although deeply engrained) doesn’t encourage it.  “The more you can work,” it whispers in your ear, even while sleeping, “the better you’ll feel.”  Winter slows things down.  Makes life a bit harder.  Think of all those days when you just don’t feel like going outside in the cold, snow, and sleet.  When the chill drives you next to the radiator, covered in lap blankets.  When it’s dark most of the time.  Such are good times to think.  As May shows, when you turn a difficult situation around and look at it from different angles, truths about yourself, about life, begin to emerge.  What is it we’re after that keeps us running all the time, dangerously overheating?  We need winter.

The anecdotes here are deeply personal.  This is particularly difficult for a writer because many of us face rejection frequently.  When you’ve poured yourself into a book, blithe casting aside by agents and publishers hurts.  I admire the bravery and the wisdom of writers like May.  She shows that wintering is possible, and that it is followed by spring.  Lives, she notes, are cyclical.  We can find quite a lot of meaning in that.  I often find myself fearing winter.  The heating bills.  The wearing of many layers of clothes for months at a time.  The dark and cloudy days.  Yet a good part of me welcomes the retreat.  I know that, in the cycle of the year with few days off from work, that if I can make it to Halloween, some rest—some wintering—awaits.  And that is a hopeful thought indeed.

Eclipsing the Earth

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We need a new word.  One for the high an eclipse brings you.  I’m finding myself having difficulty coming down from it.  It seems so mundane to have to do something as ordinary as work after experiencing totality.  We only caught very brief glimpses of the moon over the sun through small breaks in the clouds, but we did get to experience totality.  How do you come down from that?  The next day we had a several-hour drive to get home so that we could all be at work yesterday morning.  What could be more ordinary than that?  And the eclipse happened on a Monday, not an unusual day for a holiday.  Only it wasn’t a holiday, but a “vacation day.”  So was the driving day.  At my age you need a day to recover from all the driving too.

Several friends have posted their amazing photos and videos of the event, so I’ve decided to “release” my video to the wild.  A few explanatory notes: we were in upstate New York, on the shore of Lake Ontario.  It was chilly and we were bundled up (we came home to 80-degree temperatures, which was quite a shock).  The video may seem to have not much happening for the first couple of minutes and this is because electronic cameras tend to “even out” the light (film photography is much better).  When I started filming this it was getting dusky but the phone smilingly tried to make it look like normal daylight.  That wasn’t the case.  (Be patient—drama takes time to build!)

It occurred to me that many people (who had clearer skies) thought totality was all about the moon over the sun.  I take a more Buddhist approach.  The Buddha admonished not to mistake the hand pointing at the moon for the moon itself.  The real experience of an eclipse is what is going on down here on earth.  My video shows how the sun faded, and then went completely dark and back again in a matter of minutes.  My experience of this was quite a spiritual one.  If I’d been looking up I very well might have missed it all.  In other words, being in a cloudy situation, totality was an opportunity to take in what was happening on earth, in real time.  There is a lesson in this.  Life tends to deceive us into thinking the most important thing is the peripheral one.  Experiencing an eclipse is all about being, and living, on earth.