The treetop of Damocles

Came across a guy in the woods walking his pit bull.

“Out looking for mushrooms?”, he asks.

“A little, but I’m mostly looking for wildflowers. They’re so beautiful this time of year.”

“Hell yeah they are!”

I did not expect that response but a guy who will “hell yeah” wildflowers is my kind of guy.

So there’s an eclipse coming, if you haven’t heard. We’re in the path of totality. In fact, we’re at the end of the zone where the darkness will last a full four minutes. It’s caused a bit of a hubbub.

• IU cancelled classes and is holding an event that features William Shatner performing spoken word poetry and a Janelle Monae concert. By Friday afternoon, they were giving away tickets to faculty and staff, so I wonder how well-attended the event will be.
• Authorities are warning about a massive influx of people, causing traffic jams and fuel shortages. Bloomington is expecting 30,000 people. Spring Mill State Park is expecting 11,000. It’s reportedly been a bit hectic at local grocery stores this week. Apparently there’s been some panic buying. I suspect this is due to the memory of shortages in the early days of the pandemic.
• This morning alone I saw four small aircraft flying into the (very small) local airport. I’ve noticed a lot of helicopters in the area today also.
• Local campgrounds are all booked. Hotels have been booked for a year or more. Local astronaut Charlie Walker will be addressing a crowd at the 4-H Fairgrounds.

We don’t plan to drive anywhere until Wednesday. I do plan to do some walking though, to see how bad the traffic gets on some of the main roads. It might get a little crazy around here for the next couple of days—and I’m not looking forward to that. But I am excited about the eclipse itself!

I built a serving tray out of a gate I found alongside the road a few weeks ago. Plenty of flaws, but it was fun.

We’re regularly getting woodpeckers at our feeders now. And a few days ago I saw an eastern bluebird. Not bad for a place about ten blocks from the nearest large patch of woods. Word may be spreading among the bird community about our place.

I received issue 16 of Mortise and Tenon Magazine today—my first one. It is, as I expected, a beautiful thing. And their mission statement! How could you not love it?

Mortise & Tenon Magazine exists to cultivate reverence for the dignity of humanity and the natural world through the celebration of handcraft.

I’ve been listening to the really excellent episode 108 of the Weird Studies podcast, on skepticism and the paranormal. They discuss the difference between skepticism (the practice of investigating claims in a rational manner) and Skepticism (the practice of believing nothing that cannot fit easily into the terms of scientific materialism). The former is a commendable practice, the latter is dogmatism. The discussion particularly engages with George P. Hansen’s book The Trickster and the Paranormal.

I looked up the book on the university library’s website but it’s currently checked out. However, another interesting book popped up in the search results: They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos M.N. Eire, an investigation into levitation and bilocation in early modernity. The following, from the preface, seems to be on the same page as the Weird Studies guys:

To write a history of the impossible is risky for any scholar nowadays, especially if one suggests, even tentatively, that the assumed impossibility of certain events deserves closer scrutiny and some challenging. This is what I am doing here, in this book. Read on and see. Keep in mind, however, that I will be raising more questions than I dare to answer. The history of the impossible is all about questioning, about being evenhandedly skeptical—that is, being as skeptical about strictly materialist interpretations of seemingly impossible events as about the actual occurrence of the event itself. Counterintuitive as this might seem— given that the impossibility of certain events is deemed unquestionable in our dominant culture and that dogmatic materialists tend to think of themselves as the only truly objective skeptics—this sort of nonconformist skepticism is necessary if one is to claim any kind of genuine objectivity.

Nearly every time someone mentions Eclipse Day (which I always imagine with capital letters), I think of this from Neil Gaiman.

In episode 103 of the Weird Studies podcast, J.F. and Phil consider the Tower card of the Tarot. As they have throughout the series, they especially refer to the anonymously written Meditations on the Tarot.

As with virtually every other episode, the whole thing is worth your time. But here I just want to note their discussion of gardening as an act of co-creation. Organic gardening, that is. As they note, modern chemical gardening and farming is, in fact, a stubborn imposition of human will on the natural world. But organic methods are a cooperation between human intention and nature’s ability.

Gardening in such a way is an act of trust, or faith. The human sows a seed according to their intention, but the fruition is a matter of hope based in the prior demonstrated vitality of the soil. The fruition may not come—but that is often because the human has made some error in judgment. The co-creative relationship may need to be adjusted on the human side, but faith in the living Earth is never misplaced.

Can you believe that Rachel used to say she had a black thumb?