via Wimp.com

I have had a couple of lovely quiet days at a friend’s house. She and her husband have a wonderful home and a large, quiet garden. I have been beading and reading. Regenerative stories, meditative needles and silence.

I leave this morning for Spokane. Court on Tuesday and in preparation I have been reading some material from the Washington State Institute for Public Policy of problems inherent in providing educational services for the deaf and hard of hearing in the state.

I’m looking forward to the drive. I like the basin terrain, seeing the plants as they respond to sun and rain and warm weather. I suspect it won’t be as warm as it was a couple of weeks ago when I was here last since it has been raining, which I view as a good thing since I don’t much enjoy heat.

I have a room booked at my favourite motel in Spokane, but apart from the necessary conversation to pay for the room, this will be a day spent in silence. Bliss.

I think I should have been an anchorite – well except for the necessary religiosity, of course. I wonder if there is a way to make this propensity of mine pay?

and a perfect fit for the day I’ve just had.

via Wimp.com

How cool and easy is this.

For further instructions and video go here.

peardg, photographer

This is what our “winter” Olympic weather is like. Cherry blossoms. In February. Gads, the implications.

Work hours have been long of late. I get to work in the dark and leave in the dark and even though the days are beginning to get – by minute degrees – longer, I have not been outside enough to see it.

But then I have my lunch break.  So today I went out to drink my coffee and eat my banana and sat in the only dry area outside my building. And for the first time this year, I smelt the first rush of budding winter honeysuckle. The fact that the air smells of flowers in January was not what brought me to the coast, but it is certainly a large part of what keeps me here.

After work, it was dark and raining. Not terribly hard, but for long enough that the city was soaked and the roads had patches of standing puddle. I had come by car that day (long, boring story) and so had to drive home. Getting out of downtown after work is a bit of a tense dance but once out and moving in the traffic along the edges of the core, one can often go at least two blocks before getting stopped by another light. The final stretch home for me is a long road that runs between older homes set well back from the road and with gardens aggressively healthy. What struck me in those final slow but steady miles was the interplay between the water, the lights and the smells.

I drive with my window open in all weather bar outright hurricanes. Driving along the last straight toward home, the air warm enough to swirl the mix of cedar, winter bloom and the occasional wood fire from someone’s woodstove through my car, the lights from the streetlamps, the homes, the businesses, sparked along the thin sheer of standing water, and broke open in sprays of colour when car tires plundered the still of flat water. Driving was like moving along a gently undulating fold of black satin. It was impossible to discern the lane markings; driving was more a matter of trusting the tail lights of the person in front of you, which surprisingly, was comforting. By the time I got home it was if work had never been.

The title poem from Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest has a stanza (the middle of three) that goes

Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps
of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe
up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road, this
road. Roustabouts shouting from the crow’s nest
float like Ascension angels on a ring of lights.
Chokecherries gouge the purpled sky, cloud-
swags running the moon under, and starlight
rains across the Ford’s blue hood. Blue, this blue.

I know what he means by “Blue, this blue.” I understand that “blue” the word, and that colour, they both hold the same things, this set of experiences, these feelings. The memories float under the word and when it is used; there they are, pushing up against awareness, skewing perception a little to the left, a little right.

Rudbeckia hirta

The Rudbeckia, for me, is like this. In its Fall form there is a bag it carries, full of memory and feeling that transfer — onto a poem, an essay by Searles, my sense that the moon pulls at me, sliding as it does, invisible across the day-sky.

Bits from that Rudbeckia bag spill out at the oddest moments. Sometimes I can figure it out, but others? No. But I trust it, this ability to transfer meaning acquired one way, and then transfered to some other entity, by some other process, to be used some other way. The thing I would love to know…how are we able to do this?

Which is, of course, is how I come to be reading Searle and Lakeoff and Johnson.

By the way, the moon has set and the leeks are soaking in the sink.

I’ve been gardening interspersed with reading Searle’s “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” poems randomly selected from Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest and Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh. All the while I have been deeply conscious of the fact that the moon has been crossing the day-sky unseen.

The moon rose sometime around midnight (it is at last quarter) and is, as I sit here writing, close to setting. It will set before dark, and since I have been poorly this weekend, it was daylight before I woke and so, for this day, although I can feel the tidal pull of the moon on my awareness, I have not seen it for at least two days now.

I feel better today, having slept the lion’s share of two days and when I went out this morning for tea, the garden presented itself as a “must do.”  Some plants are still strong, even though the nights have been a bit frosty, but others have long since died back. The tomatoes, cilantro, the lupins, the sweetgrass and the poppies have become dried letters from summer.  When I pulled the dead tomatoe branches today, there was a faint smell left, and I even found one small orange tomatoe left clinging to a wizened branch. The poppies dried to leave architecturally beautiful seed pods on elegant stems.  I have saved those and put them dry into a ceramic pot outside my door. On dark moon next I’ll cut back the lupin pods and place them there along with the poppies.

The moon will be in Cancer at the moment, sinking to the horizon, just north of west. That’s how it feels, that the moon in Cancer is sinking to the west, but of course what is really happening is that I, on a spinning earth, am backing away as I stand and look to where I know the moon to be – that as I spin backwards, the edge of the earth is rising up and hiding constellation after constellation, until finally, it will hide a moon already hidden.

What has that to do with Searle and poetry? More on that after I go pull the remaining leeks.

My first thesis was written about this plant. It was a terrible thesis but I had a few good ideas and the research did teach me a lot about how people and their actions are organized almost entirely without awareness around their received beliefs.

The plant itself is rather beautiful in flower, although in the wild I haven’t seen its blossoms. It grows primarily by rhizome. This plant came with me to the west coast in a pot. It doesn’t grow naturally here, but if you go up toward the arctic you can find a different type – Hierochloë alpina. This one is Hierochloë odorata.

I use the plant as a ‘membrance from home. It grows like crazy in the plains and I have spent many wonderful months wandering around looking for it, watching people gather it, listening to people tell stories about it, reading about other cultures’ use of it. I also use it as an incense. Given my history with it, and its wonderful smell (one generic name for it is “vanilla grass”, another “holy grass,” and of course the one from North America is “sweetgrass”), I find it most efficacious in augmenting a calm, peaceful, receptive state.

But the blossoms…the are so delicate, very small, and rather like little white tongues tasting the world.

The picture, by the way, was taken last spring by peardg.

Lovely isn’t it.