Our new toy is a tiller.

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familyfarm

Well, it’s not MY toy, really. I just sit and watch. And take photos.

This spring it will be a bigger garden plot, with tomatoes of all colors. With lettuce and beans and squash and other vegetables that their fertile fancies haven’t yet decided upon.

I grow the herbs on the other side of the house, where even now the lemon scented Melissa is boasting a mass of bright green leaves. It will make a relaxing summertime iced tea after those hot days tending the garden.

I noticed that the poppy seeds I planted in the fall are starting to poke up through the covering of autumn’s leaves that have kept the ground from freezing all winter.

Things are springing. They are tilling. I am waiting.

Buddha waits for Spring

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buddha

Until the snows came, Buddha rested on a tree stump in the corner of our yard. Now he waits in the corner of the porch, along with bike helmets and what will be the starting of seeds.

I wish I could wait like Buddha, without anticipation or expectation. Waiting in stillness as lives begin and end, as the first butterfly finds its way to our doorstep, as somewhere on a mountain, an old woman cries for stillness.

The 70s at 70

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My 70th birthday is today. My Face Book profile photo today is one from the 70s as a reminder of the fleetingness of time and body image.

I am here trying to take care of my 94 year old mother , but I am feeling like the sciatica inflicted 70 year old that I am.

And I’m pissed because my laptop wont connect to the net even tho the wifi sig is coming in strong. So I’m doing this late at nite on my iphone because it’s my only time my hands are free of my mother’s ferocious grasp.

Let me tell you, those 70s were a hell of a lot more fun than this one.

But it’s my birthday so I’ll bitch if I want to. Hell, my first birthday card is my jury duty notice.

all that’s wrong

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From The Narcissus Society by Roger Cohen in the NY Times:

Community — a stable job, shared national experience, extended family, labor unions — has vanished or eroded. In its place have come a frenzied individualism, solipsistic screen-gazing, the disembodied pleasures of social networking and the à-la-carte life as defined by 600 TV channels and a gazillion blogs. Feelings of anxiety and inadequacy grow in the lonely chamber of self-absorption and projection.

[Be sure to read the rest of the above piece.]

And that’s just the “little picture.” Add the above to the stonewalling of the RIGHT(eous) GOP that is preventing what is supposed to be our “big picture” government from fixing what it can, and we wind up with an American society that has too much wrong because it has too much RIGHT(eous).

I have never felt so powerless to affect the big picture.

Maybe we need a real Luke Skywalker so that this Empire can Strike Back.

Delilah of Sunhats and Swans

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It starts out the way a horror story might: a stormy night, an unscratchable itch in the middle of an odd young man’s head. Something is going to happen.

But it’s not a horror story, and something does happen. Or rather “someone.”

It’s a story about a sense of family forged, not by nature, but by nurture; about a young woman – only a girl, really — dropped into a still town like a pebble into a still pond.

And things begin to happen.

It’s my daughter’s debut novel, and you can read more about it and also buy it here:

Alice Fulton, poet, professor, and Guggenheim Fellow offers this back-cover description:

Delilah of Sunhats and Swans, Volker’s first novel, combines the insouciance of youth with the tragedy of experience. It tells the bittersweet story of one young woman’s transformative effect upon the lives of others. Delilah is a seeker — a pilgrim and a stranger. She also is a charmer, a being blessed with charisma as mysterious as it is luminous. Haunted by her past, Delilah somehow manages to make the most of the present. You won’t soon forget her.

the truth about the Massachusetts Brown vote

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Contrary to many Republican assertions, the defeat of the Democratic Senate candidate earlier this month was not a statement against the Obama agenda.

A new Washington Post/Kaiser/Harvard poll regarding Massachusetts voters

suggests that while the election was a “protest of the Washington process,” it was not a rejection of progressive policy. Only 11 percent of voters, including 19 percent of Brown voters, want Brown to “stop the Democratic agenda:”
– 70 percent of voters think Brown should work with Democrats on health care reform, including 48 percent of Brown voters.
– 52 percent of voters were enthusiastic/satisfied with Obama administration policies.
– 44 percent of voters believe “the country as a whole” would be better off with health care reform, but 23 percent believe Massachusetts would be better off.
– 68 percent of voters, including 51 percent of Brown voters approve of Massachusetts’ health care reform.
– 58 percent of all voters, including 37 percent of Brown voters, felt “dissatisfied/angry” with “the policies offered by the Republicans in Congress.”

What people in other states don’t realize is that Massachusetts already has (and Brown voted for it) a health care system similar to the basics of the proposed national health reform. The new Republican Senator Brown was/is against the national effort NOT because it won’t work, but rather because Massachusetts already does what a national health care system would do for the rest of the county.

In the words of Senator Brown:
BROWN: It’s not good for Massachusetts because any time government is trying to put a government option there with directly competing with what we’ve done already here, it may be good for other parts of the country, but for us where we have 98% of the people insured already, government should not be in the business of running health care…We took actually money that was coming from the Federal government and also from the uncompensated health care pool, things we were giving hospitals were in fact to pay for this. And obviously there’s an employer contribution and a purchaser contribution. We gave through the Connector and various types of plans, Commonwealth Care, we provided pretty good plans for a lot of folks that wanted that type of care.

You can listen to Brown’s position in an interview here.

The above linked site also explains

Brown implied that the federal government needs to play a role in reforming the health care system and stressed that the federal dollars have helped insure residents who “don’t have any care whatsoever.” “Until they change the federal rules regarding health care and health care coverage for all, and we have to continue to support the folks hare in Massachusetts to keep them healthy,” he said

I didn’t vote for Brown, but if he is really going to represent me and the other almost-half of the Massachusetts citizenry (who voted for the Democrat), I hope he really is, as he has claimed, an independent Republican and that he will opt to legislate without his previous provincial motives.

those other news bits

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While other bloggers, newscasters, and websites keep us all up to date on the big and important news stories of the day, here I will share with you some news bits you might have missed:

ScottRitter, former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, was charged with masturbating in front of a webcam for a police officer posing as a 15-year-old girl.

A sheep in Turkey gave birth to a lamb with a human face.

The remains of five Native Americans from Tierra del Fuego, Chile, kidnapped in 1881 by a German animal trader and exhibited in zoos as “Savages from the Land of Fire,” were returned to Chile.

Austrian scientists stopped burying live pigs in snow and monitoring their deaths.

Miami’s Royal Caribbean cruise line, which had been “optimistic” about 2010 profits, continued service to its beach resort at Labadee [Haiti], on the island’s unaffected north shore.

One-hundred-four-year-old former Coney Island strongman Joseph Rollino, who reportedly bent a quarter with his fingers on his last birthday, was hit by a minivan with a defective horn in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and died.

All of the above gleaned from Harper’s Weekly, where they are documented with links.

a poem I didn’t write but wish I had

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Lesson In A Language I Can’t Speak Yet
by Rita Gabis, from The Wild Field;Alice James Books, 1994

The jellyfish lies naked on the sand,
a circle I can see through to the bright harvest
of stones. On one side of it is white foam,
on the other black seagrass.
A gold line of sunlight circles the bay.
I don’t know how the life of a jellyfish begins,
I don’t know where its sex is,
or why the circle is its shape among
all the shapes in the world. The flesh-colored
armor of crabs dries on wet sand.
The snail retreats when I touch it.
The footprints I leave here are full of the vanished
weight of the body.
The heart of the jellyfish is clear,
I was born deaf to the sounds it makes, its cells that shine
next to the rough arms of the starfish,
the starfish that can regenerate
its severed limbs. I have entered
another country, where lost parts of myself re-form;
hatred from the same salty center as love,
desire that had been torn from me.
I have to be open to powers
I know nothing about.
Identity in small things,
the jellyfish that smells like the sea,
the sea that touches all corners of the earth at once,
holes in the sand where mussels breathe.

Killing the Buddha at Christmas

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I am watching the evolution of the third generation of our family’s non-believers. He’s 7 years old now, asking questions like “if everyone has a mother, than shouldn’t the first mother have had a mother.” And so he learns about evolution.

He doesn’t ask about god or the first Christmas. He knows the stories. The various creation stories. The various winter celebration stories. He knows that different people believe different things when it comes to all things “god.”

He’s never been to an actual church service, although he might when my 94 year old Catholic mother finally passes away. He understands death as the final human event, and he participated in our ritual when we sent his grandfather’s ashes into the sea. He understands the power of ritual, apart from its religious associations.

What causes him to wonder, to experience awe, are the questions of science. What makes him feel secure are the roots of family. What sparks his creativity is the vitality of this planet’s various mythologies.

I brought up two compassionate, ethical, moral children (now adults) without a belief in in god. If they feel the awesomeness of the divine around them, it is through the natural world and their connection to it. And through their example and teaching, my grandson is sensing that divine as well.

Some people find comfort in faith. That’s OK. It’s just not us.

But we do find comfort in some cultural traditions. Christmas, for example.

It’s Christmas Eve.

For dinner tonight, we will have beet barszcz and three different kinds of pierogi. My daughter has kept part of the family’s Polish food tradition.

We will open family presents tonight in front of the lit Christmas tree, and Santa will come when we are all asleep and fill our stockings. For us it’s a cultural thing, not a religious. After all, stories of virgin births are a part of almost every cultural mythology.

We will set a place for the absent member of our family, way out in Portland, Oregon, who, we hope, will enjoy the box of gifts we sent out to him.

On Christmas Day, we will go to my son-in-law’s family to continue the feast.

Christmas, Xmas, Yule, Saturnalia, Solstice. We celebrate our family and hope for a future in which we all will thrive.

Merry Christmas.