Middle Season #30

 

Middle Season #30

Looking north down Ellington, the height of fall color... pumpkin orange, burgundy purple.  In Bemis, banana yellow hickory.

The Axis on Which the Whole Earth Revolves

 

Odilon Redon, Tree (Arbre), 1892

‘Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves -- slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment. Only this moment is life.’ -Thich Nhat Hanh

If we choose to drink a cup of tea in mindfulness, the pleasure of drinking tea will more than double because we are truly there and the tea is also truly there.

Tea is an act complete in its simplicity.
When I drink tea, there is only me and the tea.
The rest of the world dissolves.
There are no worries about the future.
No dwelling on past mistakes.
Tea is simple: loose leaf tea, hot pure water, a cup.
I inhale the scent, tiny delicate pieces of the tea floating above the cup.
I drink the tea, the essence of the leaves becoming a part of me.
I am informed by the tea, changed.
This is the act of life, in one pure moment, and in this act the truth of the world suddenly becomes revealed: all the complexity, pain, drama of life is a pretense, invented in our minds for no good purpose.
There is only the tea, and me, converging.

The Work that Awe Requires

Gustav Klimt Fir Forest I, 1901

John Green, from the chapter "Our Capacity for Wonder" in  The Anthropocene Reviewed

Marveling at the perfection of that leaf, I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see.  From the quark to the supernova, the wonders to not cease.  It is our attentiveness that is in short supply. the ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.

The context is that Green takes his two-year old son Henry to see some spectacular site and his son focuses on a single oak leaf.  Green says he's immediately unhappy that his son doesn't see the grand thing, but then looks closely at the leaf and changes his attitude.

Life is something we need to stop correcting

Gustav Klimt. Buchenhain, 1902

 Just began Bewilderment by Richard Powers.  This early section caught my eye.

I never believed the diagnoses the doctors settled on my son.  When a condition gets three different names over as many decades, when it requires two subcategories to account for completely contradictory symptoms, when it goes from nonexistent to the country's most diagnosed childhood disorder in the course of one generation, when two different physicians want to prescribe three different medications, there's something wrong.....

Watching medicine fail my child, I developed a crackpot theory: Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom.  Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing.

The second paragraph has three tee-shirt-worthy epigrams:

Life is something we need to stop correcting.

My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom.

Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing. 

All of these things are about his son in the book, but I imagine that they'll be about the earth in general.  There's a metaphor (I'm assuming) between over-diagnosis of ADHD and humans' sense of "correcting" nature.  Why?  Because we can hope to fathom the complexity and specificity of the world and we don't know what the earth is designed for.

Traveling Geese

Koson Ohara

 

traveling geese --

the human heart, too wanders

Issa Kobayashi

Building your Reframing Muscle

Vincent Van Gogh Thatched Cottages in the Sunshine Reminiscence of the North, 1890

Leo Babauta writes about the power of framing to create our mood.  He write, "The way we view life is usually invisible to us, and yet it is probably the most powerful thing in our lives."  He writes from a Zen point of view.  This is another example of how Buddhism and Psychology are similar.  

I think that the notion behind writing 3 things you're grateful for and "excited about" are both ways of reframing the day.  I have many times reflected on my inability to even think of three (sometimes even one!) thing I'm looking forward to.

What I'm thinking now is that it's hard to "reframe" without content.... meaning, it's hard to be excited about a general day -- with no knowledge of what's coming in that day.  Maybe it's easier to do it with a list of tasks that will come... (grading papers, running a meeting, doing a post observation... walking with Jennie... making dinner with Jennie... texting my kids or parents).

(As I'm writing this, I'm having second thoughts about what I said... is the idea of "exited about" lists more about reframing or about planting some inherently interesting and exciting things into your day?  Maybe it's two different things... in any case, my point about the need for "actual content" stands, as does the need for some regular work/attention on reframing.)

Babauta writes about framing as a practice, like exercising... like in loving kindness meditation you work up to wishing well to people who are challenging for you to love.  But it can also be used to change your mood about things that you're not challenged by much... neutral things. 

His list is filled with ideas like "opportunity to...." and a great number of virtuous things.  

I'm thinking that this is similar to "setting intentions" and also about Ellen Langer's mindfulness experiments when she asks people (like musicians) to do things in "slightly original ways in ways that no one will notice.)

Some examples he provides of how framing can change things:

• An act of helping someone else might be seen as a way to impress others and get acknowledgement and love, or it can be a simple act of joyful connection with another human being, or a way to offer your gift to others.
• Answering an email can be another opportunity to mess up and look dumb, or it can be a way to connect with someone you care about, or a place of exploration and learning.
• Writing can be a dreadful chore full of pressure or boredom, or it can be a place of curiosity and play, or a place of deep contemplation and silence, or a way to sing your song to the world with exhilaration.
• Cleaning the bathroom can be a gross mundane task that you feel like avoiding, or perhaps a meditation practice helping you to be more present to your life, or maybe a way to connect your heart to all others who have to clean a bathroom.

He notes that our automatic framing can often be a problem, making us see things as burdens, as opportunities for failure or criticism.

From ZenHabits "Create a Powerful Framing of the World"

Choosing a Powerful Framing.The idea is to look at a situation, bring awarenes to what your current framing might be, and then decide to reframe it for yourself. Try on the new framing, and practice seeing things in this way for awhile, and see what results you get. There is no right answer. Pick a situation that seems particularly challenging: maybe you have not been eating healthily, or feel bad about yourself, or are frustrated with someone, or feel like you’re avoiding hard tasks, or have a hard time with a family member who is suffering through health problems. Take that one situation, and examine your view. What framing might cause the reaction you’re having? You don’t have to get it exactly right, but take a shot.Are you committed to that framing? Would you be open to letting it go and trying on something new?

Here are a few possibilities among the limitless number … a situation or task or person might be:

• An opportunity for play, adventure, exploration, learning.
• An opportunity for curiosity.
• An opportunity for compassion and love.
• A way to express your gift, your true self, to sing your song.
• A way to connect with someone.
• An opportunity for wonder, gratitude, appreciation, awe.
• A way to practice mindfulness, being present to your life.
• A chance to surrender, trust, relax with life.
• A place to practice letting down your defenses.
• An opportunity to deepen, to contemplate, to find solitude and silence.
• An exhilarating experience of freedom and openness.
• A place of spaciousness.
• A chance to savor, find the deliciousness, find the delight.
• A place to choose.
• A way to experiment, try something new.
• A way to meet your needs, to own what you want, to set boundaries with love.
• An opportunity to lead, to serve.
• A way to express your purpose.
• An expression of your power.

7 Ways to Practice Gratitude

1.  Write a note of appreciation
2. Keep a gratitude journal
3. Give a compliment (to a friend or a stranger)
4. Find something to appreciate in nature
5. Text 3 people you love and tell them what you appreciate in them
6. Create a gratitude calendar
7. Try a gratitude meditation

Title: 7 Ways to Practice Gratitude

Relationships, Word Choice, and Storytelling

Odilon Redon, Three Vases of Flowers, 1909

This list of 4 things was in a recent Marriage Minute.  All of them are about storytelling -- and the specific words we choose to tell the story.

 1. Fondness and Admiration: Fondness and admiration grow when couples intentionally put a positive spin on their relationship, on their history together, and on each other’s character. When they talk about each other and their relationship, they choose words that express warmth, affection, and respect.

2. We-ness vs. Me-ness: Happy couples tell their stories with a sense of “we-ness” or of solidarity and togetherness. Often their words show shared beliefs, values, and goals. 

3. Expansiveness vs. Withdrawal: All couples have a story to tell. How couples share what Dr. John Gottman calls the “Story of Us” can determine the health of the relationship. When the “Story of Us” is positive and full of detail (expansive) versus lacking detail or negative (withdrawal), a couple has a strong buffer against conflict and they tend to focus on their partner’s positive qualities.

4. Embrace Your Journey Together: As Dr. John Gottman says, couples who "glorify the struggle" express great pride in their ability to overcome difficult times together. They talk about how the hard seasons strengthened their bond and how they use conflict as a catalyst to grow closer together. These couples share profound meaning together and a life of purpose.

Learning by Doing

Van Gogh's study sheet of hands

Thinking about beginner's mind, being vulnerable, embracing discomfort.  Thinking about seeing "more beauty" when drawing.

Kleon says (but can't find the quote) that he learns more from an hour of figuring out a song on piano than.... something... hours of reading about it.

Lower your standards for what counts as progress, and you will be less paralyzed by perfectionism. 

-Adam Grant

Henry Moore's (working) hand drawings

On Inner Beauty

From Anne Cadet newsletter Anne's Cafe.  There's a number of great things her about silence in life, interior beauty (Compassion, generosity, humility. Ease and joy and serenity. The courage to face everything. Honesty. Integrity.) outer beauty (Serenity and joy are visible in people’s bodies. Ease with oneself. )  and "divine sandpaper" of living in a community.

BEAUTY TIPS FROM NUNS: SISTER SHANE PHELAN

Shane Phelan, 64, earned her PhD. in political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst before teaching women’s studies and political theory at the University of New Mexico. She left academia to join a New Jersey convent in 2000. She was ordained as an Episcopalian priest in 2009 and served a New Jersey parish for two years before co-founding an ecumenical spiritual community, Companions of Mary the Apostle, in West Park, New York.

 So a little about you. On a scale of 1-10, how tired are you of the question, ‘Why did you become a nun at age 44?’

I must not be too tired of it—I’m writing a memoir! I became a nun because I fell for Jesus. I let myself fall in love. I knew I was at an end in my career and I didn’t know what else there was. I was praying to know what else to do and eventually I realized that I wanted to pray, and be with people who prayed.

Then out of the blue I heard this little voice say, ‘You should be a nun’.

How did you respond?

I said ‘God, if this is you, tell me what to do with Max, my dog.’ I went off to school that day and three times I told friends this weird story and three times they said, ‘Well, if you decide to do that, I would take Max.’ Okay, fine!

So now that you’ve been a nun for two decades, what would you say makes a person beautiful inside?

Beauty in a person is the fruits of the spirit: Compassion, generosity, humility. Ease and joy and serenity. The courage to face everything. Honesty. Integrity.

What’s one thing I can practice to get all of that?

Wow. I think one huge thing is really being in an intimate relationship with other people. Whether it’s living in a community or living with one other. That’s where I get to practice.

There’s a saying in religious communities about ‘divine sandpaper.’ It’s that intensity of being accountable to other people for how I am and how I’m being. That’s what I attribute all my growth to. If I were living alone, I wouldn’t notice some of my rough edges. I could ignore them or deny them. I could just go on my way.

For those who live alone, what’s another way to cultivate inner beauty?

Silence. In our community, we wrote a rule: Not just silence in terms of sound, but including all of our devices. So during our hours of silence, roughly 8 pm to 7 am, we try to refrain from using our devices. I might want to check the weather or play a little game. But I’m trying to keep myself centered and open to the world.

And what makes a person beautiful on the outside?

Some of the same words. Serenity and joy are visible in people’s bodies. Ease with oneself. It’s easy to say ‘health’ and all of that. But I’ve known some truly beautiful people who are crippled with arthritis and in wheelchairs. It’s the person showing through their face. It’s in their energy.

You lost 65 pounds. That’s like an entire fourth grader! And you’ve kept the weight off for seven years.

It was a third of my body weight. I started at 210 pounds, now I hover between 145 and 150, and I’m five-foot-ten and a half.

How did you lose the weight?

I lost 50 pounds in Weight Watchers when I was in the convent, but I couldn’t keep it off. Several years later I did Weight Watchers again with an app and lost maybe 15 pounds, but it was excruciating because I was still consuming the foods that make me want more. Mostly sugar and flour.

Then I went to a recovery group for overeaters. My program sponsor basically put me on a boot camp plan, which I didn’t want. No sugar, no wheat, no refined carbohydrates, no artificial sweeteners. I could have fresh fruit but no fruit juice and no dried fruit. And there was a plan for how much to have at each meal.

The first 30 days are virtually carb-free and you’re in shock. But the weight just started to come off. I wasn’t hungry because of the protein and the amount of vegetables I was getting.

I had a mental goal in mind of 160 pounds, and 160 came and went. Finally I asked my sponsor, ‘When am I going to stop losing weight?’ She said, ‘When we start adding stuff in.’ But the important thing was to not change what was working. Instead of adding carbs, we added more protein and fat.

Do you ever eat sugar or carbs now?

I have oatmeal or toast in the morning, and at dinner I have gluten-free pasta or rice. But the trick is I have half a cup of it.

When was the last time you had a real dessert?

Things are so sweet to me now. I can have a baked apple with raisins and it’s like, wow! But the last time I had sugar was February 26, 2014.

Do you attribute your success entirely to the diet?

The other factor is I needed a community around me. My program sponsor said, ‘You’re going to call me three times a week. You’re going to write your food plan every day and send it to me. You’re going to call two others in the program every week.’ So I was enmeshed in accountable, loving relationships from the beginning.

Did you get universal support?

When I stopped drinking when I was 28, it was scandal. Everybody drank. And then when I stopped eating sugar, that was a scandal.

I had some eating buddies. We’d excuse each other having an extra piece of cake. So then they felt rebuked when I didn’t. They’d try to convince me that a little wouldn’t hurt.

Get over it! The food industry has made addicts of us all. So it’s really normal to weigh 50 percent more than you should. And it’s normal to eat all this junk and feel awful. You need a whole medical team to support you. There’s an industry around diabetes. So, I’m a scandal.

You look very happy when you say that.

I’ve spent my life being a scandal. I love it! But yes, I get this sense from others of, ‘You should be able to have a piece of cake now and then. What’s wrong with you?’

What’s wrong with me is I’m an addict and I don’t respond normally to those foods.

It must be a relief to have that decided.

The key for me is surrender. Acceptance and surrender. Yes, it’s really true. I’m better off without.

Some might say that if you’re being rigid and eliminating entire categories of food, that you’re not being spiritual. That you should be ‘eating intuitively’ or ‘listening to your body’.

Right. Would you tell someone who kept kosher that she wasn’t spiritual? That’s a rigid food plan. So is Halal. Those are food plans.

The other part for me is that my intuition was off before I started this program and it will get thrown off by eating certain things. It is akin to saying I’m going to pray every day and pray on a schedule, because it deepens my intuition and opens me to the world. It leaves me feeling clear and unclouded. So that I have intuition.

Anti-paean to gardening

Gustav Klimt. Apple Tree, I, 1912

Emerson became more wealthy around 1847 and was able to buy land to plant a large orchard of fruit trees.   Mostly this was a great change, but he also felt like it cramped him.  Richardson says, "Emerson was coming quickly to regret having bought additional land and having set out ambitious plantings."

In his journal he wrote (in his vigorous prose) this anti-paean to gardening:

No land is bad, but land is worse.  I delight in long free walks. These free my brain and serve my body.... But these stoopings and scrapings and figurings in a few square yards of garden are dispiriting, driveling, and I seem to have eaten lotus, to be robbed of all energy, and I have a sort of catalepsy, or unwillingness to move, and have grown peevish and poor-spirited.

Middle Season #29

 

This from this middle season:

Trout lillies in my back yard - a few days after my moms bloomed in her yard  (these got eaten to the numb by rabbits this spring)  some trees are pretty yellow, at least sections of them, snapping turtle at the road edge in a pile of beautiful leaves  

Some trees are pretty yellow.  Drifts of locust leaves  

The season of long, soaking rains.  Unpredicted rains

.

Greenwich Mean Time

Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Fritza Riedler, 1906

 

Robert Richardson, in his Emerson biography, writes in chapter 75 how Emerson found England bigger, faster, more modern, urban, more bustling.

Railroads connected everything. It was symbolic of the new forces that on December 1, 1847, while Emerson was in Liverpool, the time all over England was reduced and standardized to Greenwich Mean Time. Until that day, time for each village or town had been regulated by local solar observation, noon being the moment when the sun reached its highest point overhead.

The tiniest changes make a huge difference

Christoph Niemann "Walk in the Park"

 From the "Cover Story" feature: 

You condensed a pedestrian into a remarkably small number of pixels, and his dog into just three of them. How did you pull this off?

I start the drawing by setting up a tiny Photoshop document. (For those who are familiar with the software, this one is only forty-four pixels wide.) With such a coarse grid, it’s very difficult to draw recognizable objects. I try to squeeze in as much as possible by arranging elements of the image in context to one another. The tiniest changes make a huge difference. If I had placed the same dog next to the person, it would look twice as big—if I moved it up, where the street is, it would be a grizzly bear with an orange T-shirt.

Give Yourself a (Pointless) Mission

Vincent Van Gogh Belvedere Overlooking Montmartre, 1886

 

This is from Rob Walker's Art of Noticing newsletter (No. 72)

This is supposed to be a comparatively happy time — in the U.S., at least, it’s all about re-opening, rejoining society, reconnecting — but I’ve been cranky for weeks. This weekend, however, I had a mood-lifting moment: I gave myself a mission. It’s not an important mission, and in fact it might be sort of a silly one. But that’s part of the point. I’m really looking forward to it.

I like to swim, and I’ve visited all four of New Orleans’ year-round indoor public pools plenty of times. But there are also five outdoor public pools operating this summer; every year I visit the one nearest, multiple times. I’ve never considered going to the others because, you know, they’re farther away. I go to the convenient one. Efficient.

What happened this weekend is that I suddenly realized that’s exactly why I should visit the less convenient ones — all of them, the less efficient the better. That’s my new mission! Here’s some of what I like about it.

• First, it’s containable: just four steps.

• Second, it offers direct novelty — I’ve never been to any of these pools.

• Third, it offers indirect novelty (contact novelty?): they’re mostly in areas I don’t go that often, off my beaten paths.

• Fourth, there’s a deadline! They’ll all close up by the end of August, so I can’t postpone indefinitely.

• Fifth, while this is definitely doable, it’s challenging: obviously I have to balance the mission against my schedule, and since weather and other x-factors may close any given pool on any given day, that might not be easy.

A day later each decade

 

Our data shows that peak fall foliage is getting a day later each decade (Outside Magazine)

Outside Mag article "Leaf-Peeing Looks Different This Year" by Megan Michelson

In 1938, Wilfred Dexter and his wife, Polly, opened Polly’s Pancake Parlor in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire. In those early days, during the Great Depression, Polly began charting the weather daily, as well as attendance at the restaurant. She recorded temperatures and snowfall, and in autumn, she indicated the week when fall foliage was at its peak. As was the case then and even today: leaf-peeping season always resulted in an uptick in business.

Eventually, Polly and Will’s daughter, Nancy, took over the restaurant and continued her mother’s tradition of recording the weather and the fall foliage. These days, Nancy’s daughter, Kathie Côté, runs it alongside her husband. Kathie still keeps diligent, hand-written records on graph paper of the climate and fall colors and the impact on their day-to-day number of day-to-day customers. (Kathie’s daughter, Emily, has finally started putting the data online.)

and

 

Today those stacks of clipboards and binders of penciled-in spreadsheets remain one of the longest-standing records of peak season in New England. And scientists are turning to this data as part of continued study into how climate change is impacting its timing and quality.

“We’re looking at historical documents starting in the 1950s. Our data shows that peak fall foliage is getting a day later each decade,” says Stephanie Spera, assistant professor of physical geography and environment at the University of Richmond in Virginia, who’s in the midst of a research project on how climate change will impact fall foliage in Maine’s Acadia National Park. (Spera is using the data from Polly’s notes as part of her study.) “In the fifties, peak foliage was the first weekend of October, and now it is a week later, around the 12th or 13th of October, depending on where you are.”

Because the sailor and the ship and the sea are of one stuff

 

Wheatfield with cypress tree, 1889 Van Gogh

Emerson, according to Robert Richardson,

There was new power for Emerson again in the Bhagavad Gita as well. It was, he said, "a transnational book." He admired its teaching that worship is the height of right conduct, "because the sailor and the ship and the sea are of one stuff, because though the bases of things are divided, the summits are united."

Seven Kinds of Wisdom

Gustav Klimt, The Park, 1910

Emerson's staring point for Islam was a book called the Akhlak I-Jalaly, translated by W.F. Thompson as The Practical Philosophy of the Muhammedan People, published in London in 1839.

It enumerates seven kinds of wisdom: penetration, quickness of intellect, clearness of understanding, facility of acquirement, propriety of discrimination, retention, recollection.  (406)

Emerson particularly liked the book's commitment to learning and teaching: its conclusion says: "Let it be the object of your constant endeavor to instruct both others and yourself."

(from Robert Richardson's Emerson biography)

As much transitional surface as possible

Vincent Van Gogh Sower with Setting Sun, 1888

 Robert Richardson on Emerson

The combination of a commitment to the work of abolition and the publication of the new book of essays had a revitalizing effect on Emerson, enlivening his reading and sending him ranging ever farther afield. New readings overlapped old, familar books yielded fresh connections with the present, and books from one culture or era became newly applicable in another. This sort of cross-fertilization happened frequently for Emerson. This year, 1844, he gave it a name "croisements," crossings or crossbreeding. Its startling symbols for Emerson were "the seashore, and the taste of two metals in contact, and our enlarged powers. . . at the approach and at the departure of a friend." He felt these crossings or intersections most strongly perhaps in the "experience of poetic creativeness which is not found in staying at home, nor yet in traveling, but n transitions from one to the other." As he tried to court this crossroads experience, so he tried now to manage his whole life so as "to present as much transitional surface as possible." (404)

Sunday Routine

“I love to ride, even in the winter,” Ms. Shopsin said of bicycling through the city. “I wear ski goggles and I have lobster mittens and waterproof pants. I’m prepared.”Credit...Christopher Lee for The New York Times

 Here's Tamara Shopsin's Sunday Routine; it's one of a NYT series by that title.

It tells the story of the title and includes headings and photos.  It covers waking up/breakfast, morning commute (seen above), work, afternoons, relaxing at home, dinner.  The headings are things like "Stella" the name she gives to her moka pot or "Go for the Tea, Stay for the Bathroom" (which is a detail about a tea shop she goes to after work.

It feels like a fun way to organize a piece of writing... many clever choices.  None of the photos are glamorous or staged.

It is this way with wonder

From World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil:

It is this way with wonder: it takes a bit of patience, and it takes putting yourself in the right place at the right time. It requires that we be curious enough to forgo our small distractions in order to find the world. When I teach National Poetry Month visits in elementary schools, I sometimes talk about fireflies to conjure up memory and sensory details of the outdoors. Recently, however, seventeen students in a class of twenty-two told me they had never even seen a firefly -- they thought I was kidding, simply inventing an insect.  So I asked them what they did for fun in that crepuscular-pink time just before dinner. When I was growing up, I played kickball, tag, ridging bikes -- anything, really, until my parents flicked on the porchlight. But the students' most common answer: video games and movies. In other words, they were always indoors. And usually in front of a screen.

Middle Season #28

 Vines turn red in FB Woods, some pretty fungus in FB, toad lillies with a couple buds, and a stream of dry leaves collecting a low place just inside Bemis Woods.

10.4

1. Heavy Overcast. Cool and very humid. 66 degrees and 88% humidity. Locust tree outside window with a few yellow fronds. Ocassional single leaves (more like petals) drift down
2. 10/5. Maple leaves on patio. Dozens of them. 

3. Groups of birds flocks. First time noticing. Fall site. 

   Very light sprinkles of rain. 

   10/6

   Maple leaves begin collecting along driveway

   10/7

   Huge group, extremely loud grouping of birds (crows? Starlings?) in very tall trees on Ellington.  Hard to see them because trees still fully leafed.  Groups flying off to north.  Cacophony.  

   10/8

   Season of locust leaves coming into the house

   Veeck park peen trees laden with pine cones

Year of Horrible Reading

 I've always liked reading plans.  For awhile I was reading an American fiction novel from each decade from 1880-2000 in a year.  Other times, I've trying to do a set number of classics, biographies, etc.

Learned from Kleon that Ted Gioia (one of my main new music suppliers with his annual 100 best albums of each year- all the way back to 2011) also has a series of reading projects, including his Year of Horrible Reading.  And that's just the beginning, there's a number of sister sites, like the New Canon, and here a link to dozens of extended reviews of novels.

Here's his write up of the project:

This is my year of horrible reading.I am reading the classics of horror fiction during the course of 2016, and each week willwrite about a significant work in the genre.You are invited to join me in my annus horribilis. By the close of the year—if we survive—we will have tackled zombies, serialkillers, ghosts, demons, vampires, andmonsters of all denominations. 

The scrawny pine looks extravagent

 

Hasui Kawase

"The scrawny pine, too looks extravagant... summer moon" Issa Kobayashi

(from a Tweet from Kazuko M. (@EstherHawdon)

A great difference between this season and a month ago.

 HDT wrote on October 7, 1851 -

The weeds being dead and the weather cooler, the water is more transparent. Now is the time to observe such weeds as have not been destroyed.  The fishes are plainly seen.  Saw a pickerel which had swallowed a smaller fish, with the tail projecting from his mouth...  There is a great difference between this season and a month ago, -- as between one period of your life and another.  A little frost is at the bottom of it.

The Quiet Places

Outside Magazine

 Gordon Hempton has been on a quest to protect quiet. Here's his organization's website which identifies the quiet parks, quiet trails, experiences.

In 2019, Outside mag published - "A Quest to Protect the World's Last Quiet Places" (by Chris Wright) profiling Hempton's efforts.

Just as humans have spread colossal amounts of carbon dioxide and trash around the planet, we’ve also blanketed it in our damn racket. Air traffic has tripled since the 1980s, and the number of cars worldwide, already over a billion, is expected to reach two billion by 2030; the U.S. Bureau of Transportation estimates that 97 percent of the American population is regularly exposed to highway and air-traffic noise. And it’s not just in populated areas. A study published in Science in May 2017 found that human-caused noise had doubled background decibel levels in many of the most protected wildlife habitats worldwide. (In some endangered habitats, it increased background decibels tenfold.) Human noise is constant and practically everywhere.

"Hempton estimates that there are now fewer than ten places in the U.S. where natural noise can be heard uninterrupted by noise pollution for longer than 15-minute intervals."

Recent studies have shown that quiet can decrease stress levels and lower blood pressure and heart rate; another showed that silence helped mice regenerate brain cells in their hippocampus. On the flip side, man-made noise has been proven harmful both to people (causing high blood pressure, heart disease, and low birth weight) and especially natural ecosystems. When a researcher from Boise State University introduced a “phantom road” into pristine Idaho wilderness by simulating the din of traffic through loudspeakers, the noise alone drove a third of the local songbird population away. Some of the birds that stayed lost significant portions of their body mass, likely because they couldn’t hear to communicate or hunt.

The first question QPI has to answer seems simple: How quiet is quiet? Hempton and his team have already identified over 260 exceptionally quiet places around the world. Next, with the permission of local communities and governments, they hope to send out teams to certify those areas as quiet parks.

The teams will test each potential site for three consecutive days, measuring natural-noise decibels and intrusions; while no area is pristine, these readings will help them set the organization’s official standards for certification. According to Hempton, any “alarming or shocking” signature, like gunshots, sirens, or military aircraft, would immediately disqualify it from certification. Loud noises, if they’re natural, are fine.

Silence is worth seeking

 From Comfort Crisis:

Silence is worth seeking, even if it's uncomfortable at first.  Where can we find unadulterated natural silence? An acoustic ecologists (real job, apparently) named Gordon Hempton traveled the country in search of silence.  He now believes that there are only 12 places in the Lower 48 where we can sit for 15 minutes and not hear a single noise created by humans.  No droning planes, trains, automobiles. No blaring TVs, cellphones, or radios.  Just natural soundscape. Some of these 12 places are spots in Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Hawaii's Haleakala National Park, and Washington's Hoh River Valley. 

Steven Orfield, Orfield Labs, buys an "anechoic chamber."  This is in a section about the benefits of silence for PTSD and "the production of more cels in an area of the brain that fights depression" and "that two minutes of silence led to the bigger drops in measures of relaxation like blood pressure and heart and breathing rate compared to a handful of other relaxation techniques."

When people first enter the chamber, they feel uncomfortable with the silence, said Orfield.  The lack of noise is a sensation unlike any they've had. "But then people start to calm down," he said. And they become progressively more pacified, during which their perception of sound recalibrates and begins to settle.  Then they reach the 30-minute mark.

"That's when people start to hear the sounds their ears make," said Orfield. "Then they hear their heart beat, and the joints in their arms and legs moving.  Some people hear the flowing in their lungs and the blood from their arotid arery spreading into their brain.  People go into the chamber thinking they're going to hear silence.  But what they get is the sound of themselves." The thing about silence is that it's nowhere, indeed. 

Put yourself in a position to have wild moments

 From Comfort Crisis by Michael Eagle:

Donnie and I are silent for a moment. Then I look at him. "Unbelievable, just unbelievable," he says. "Moments like that are why I come up here. Only by coming out here can you put yourself in a position to have wild moments and experiences like the one we just had." I'm also thinking it's unbelievable we didn't get trampled to death.

This section comes after the group is watching for Caribou.  The herd spooks and runs right at the author and Donnie.  Just before the herd turns, he writes, "I'm locked on them, completely in the here and now. We can hear their breathing, smell their coats, and see all the details fo their ornate antlers."

I like Donnie's idea of having to put yourself -- literally, place your body -- in the position that a "wild" experience will happen.  It's not in front of a screen... or a book.  It takes effort.

Brain Chemical Cocktail

 Loretta Breunig - podcast - https://www.mentalhealthnewsradionetwork.com/our-shows/the-happy-brain/

14 Days to Happiness book resources including PDF - https://innermammalinstitute.org/books/14days/

Inner mammal method https://innermammalinstitute.org/method/

Moon cycle pics

 

Sept 11 7 pm

Sept 18 7 pm

Sept 23 7 am

Sept 25 8 am

Sept 20th was full moon. 

Gratitude Photo

Gratitude Photo.  (from NYT article by Tara Parker-Pope)

Take a fresh look at the people, places and things in your life. Now snap a photo. It could be a building you haven’t noticed before, a tree in your yard, children playing or your pet. 

When people talk about life after the pandemic, they often say they’ll never take the small things in life for granted again — going into the office, meeting friends for dinner or just getting a haircut.

So how do you keep from sliding back into complacency? A few studies offer simple ways to keep appreciating the world around you.

When we make an effort to notice our surroundings or show appreciation for the people, places or things that make us happy, it’s called “savoring.” Scientists know that savoring exercises can lead to meaningful gains in overall happiness and well-being.

One small study found that mindful photography can be a fun and easy way to savor everyday experiences and cultivate gratitude. For the research, college students were instructed to take photos of things that brought them joy or felt meaningful to them. They were also told not to rush and to put some thought into the project. During the study, the students used their phone cameras to take pictures of campus buildings, blooming flowers, friends hanging out in the quad or objects in their dorm rooms.

(I learned about this article from Rob Walker newsletter)