Peaceful Potter

Probably won't have a chance to post another one of these for awhile, so here's a photo of napping Potter & a lovely shot of a Japanese rain forest from a blogger whom I follow.

Hydrangea, Bamboo Forest, Japan

Solstice blues?

I've noticed, thanks to my Diana moon app  that the days' lengths has barely been budging around the solstice - in fact they don't start getting shorter until several days from now.

Of course, you know me, I love long, winter nights when I can snuggle under my blankets and if I awake around 5AM can pretend I have the whole night left to sleep - as opposed to now when the birds are already beginning their morning caterwauling, er chorus.

This year we've had a beautiful, gentle spring this year, esp. the last few days that have been around 70F, low humidity and gorgeous. Here are some thoughts from a recent NY Times op-ed piece by Akiko Busch about the necessity of darkness.  

The Solstice Blues  
By AKIKO BUSCH JUNE 20, 2014

Santtu Mustonen

IN mid-June, the twilight seems to go on forever, the sky awash with translucent shades of rose, pearl, gray. These are evenings of enchantment — but also of apprehension. The moment the sun reaches its farthest point north of the Equator today is the moment the light starts to fade, waning more each day for the following six months. If the summer solstice doesn’t signal the arrival of winter, surely it heralds the gradual lessening of light, and with that, often, an incremental decline in disposition.

It is easy to associate sundown with melancholy, to believe that temper can be so closely tied to degrees of illumination. The more floodlit our nights, the more we seem to believe that a well-lit world is part of our well-being. But equating the setting of the sun with that of the spirit may be misguided, at variance with some essential need humans have for darkness and shadow.

In his book, “The End of Night,” Paul Bogard notes that two-thirds of Americans no longer experience real night. “Most of us go into the dark armed not only with ‘a light,’ ” he writes, “but with so much light that we never know that the dark, too, blooms and sings.”

Certainly, that is true where I live in a rural area of the Hudson Valley in New York. It may be the country, but the gas station and convenience store down the road emit a halo of orange light; across the street at Stop & Shop, high-intensitydischarge lighting casts a radiant glow across the parking lot and beyond. The garish gleam of illuminated signs and street lighting further drenches the crossroad. Illumination, albeit artificial, bathes my world.

It occurs to me now that such an extravagance of light can work to diminish our comfort with nightfall, encouraging us to link darkness to fear, brightness to security. But it is a flawed connection.

In his 1933 anthem to obscurity, “In Praise of Shadows,” the Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki cataloged the oppressiveness of the illuminated world. An advocate for opacity, he lamented the bright, shining sterility of hotels, hospitals, Western living rooms and bathrooms, the glitter of diamonds, the glare of silver, steel and nickel tableware. “Were it not for shadows,” he wrote, “there would be no beauty.”

Tanizaki’s appreciation for the subtleties of the shadow world resonate all the more today, when we tend to equate light with clarity and transparency, and assume that brightness and exposure in the environment have some corollary lucidity in thought and behavior. But of course, that is not so. We have a need for the shadow world, those things that cannot be easily explained, those things we suspect or imagine but do not know. And all those other areas in our lives that are defined by their gradations of uncertainty. Such ambiguity has a place in human thought and perception.

Here, when the sun finally falls, is the time one hears more acutely the cry of the coyotes, the courtship call of the barred owls. And if I am far enough away from the crossroads, from the floodlights of the town park and the headlight beams of traffic, I can make out the distant pinpoints of Orion, the dim shadows the white pines make in the moonlight, the random flicker of fireflies. The water in the marsh catches just a bit of the star shine.

One can have a similar experience in a city. Linnaea Tillett, a lighting designer in New York, spoke to me of a nighttime walk in Central Park, of listening more keenly to bird calls, the screech owls, foxes. But most of all, she spoke of understanding more fully night as a place of life. All species have their own cycles, and nocturnal rhythms are part of that, she said. “Standing at the edge of the pond, I heard an animal plunge into the water, maybe a raccoon or badger, I don’t know. It is still a mystery.”

Such experiences, she said, are important at a time when many of us are looking for ways to reconnect with the complex ecologies around us. Light, and its absence, are essential parts of this, and of the weeks that lie ahead now, Ms. Tillett said. “It’s not about going from light to dark, but of being more sensitive to this progression of light, looking more acutely at the degrees of twilight, being more attentive to the nuances of half light.”

The summer solstice may be a good time to recalibrate the impulse we have to equate dusk with depression. Perhaps it makes sense to use the coming months of declining light as an opportunity to recognize the value of nightfall, the blooming and singing of the dark, in an increasingly illuminated world.
Akiko Busch is the author, most recently, of “The Incidental Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science.”

Food for thought

Some pix posted by a fellow Raveler that I thought you might enjoy (remember you can click on the images to see a bigger version):

Shouldn't that be "cherish them"?

Heading up to close to 90F today - fortunately they're predicting a breeze & it's only forecast to last a day. Toddling out later to an acupuncture appt. Before that some tootling, after that some tootling and stitching.

Summer still life

A recent photo of the photogenic Mimsy.

I awoke early this AM from one of those frustration dreams (you know, the kind where you're desperately trying to do something and it just isn't happening), couldn't fall back to sleep so just decided to get up. Fortunately for me, it was in time to hear Krista Tippet's interview with Jonathan Haidt. I'd hoped there would be a transcript that I could quote directly some of the great ideas he has about the psychological differences between liberals and conservatives, and how understanding those differences can help us understand each other, since our family certainly runs the gamut. But no. So I'll just quote from the blurb at the top of the page:

"When it comes to moral judgments," he says, "we think we are scientists discovering the truth, but actually we are lawyers arguing for positions we arrived at by other means." He explains "liberal" and "conservative" not narrowly or necessarily as political affiliations, but as personality types — ways of moving through the world."

Please take a listen thorough the link above, which, I hope, will help lead us all to a kinder, gentler way of being.

Peaceful puss

Found this recently on the ipad. Mimsy napping on the bed. Beautiful dove-gray day out there now. Showers forecast for later so best I get out soon for a toddle.

White coral bells

With fond memories of the song we sang, with different lyrics, at Presbytery Point.



Another beautiful day out there - our white coral bells long past blooming (if they be lilies of the valley), to be replaced by poppies, tuber roses & siberian irises (purple and white).

Ancient door, Tuscany

I can't claim to have been in Tuscany, though I did see some amazing things during my summer in Canosa di Puglia in 1972 & in the day and a half I spent in Venice in 1975 en route back to Brussels on the Slavic Trip. Unfortunately have no idea where any of the photos I took during either of those sojourns are. :|

I love the way the slightly open door beckons us in. Going to be hottish today- around 80F - heading out late afternoon to tutor a couple tooters @ Northeastern.

June is bustin' 2014 edition

And the first of our poppies has popped.

Gorgeous day out there - best I get tootling since I've let it lapse the past couple days due to fatigue after Wellesley preparations.