Been playing with the bird sound identification feature of Merlin Bird ID this morning. We’re in town so we have a bit more limited variety of birds. It’s correctly identified the usual cast of characters:
We built a new raised bed this week. That’s not a trick of perspective: it actually is much narrower at the far end. On this end is a mound (hard to see) for a three sisters planting. Past that is amaranth, then two columbine plants at the far end.
Sometimes I remember. Sometimes I feel the magic.
Amen, Parker.
If you’re still holding out hope that renewable energy is the future, you might want to read this.
Blue flag iris in our wildlife pond says good morning.
So I’m a religion nerd from way back and one of my very favorite topics is the differences between Christian denominations. (It’s a neat party trick. In my mind. Others may disagree…) The Useful Charts channel has been doing an excellent series on the family tree of Christian denominations. The most recent episode is about the churches coming out of the Second Great Awakening, which are some of the most fascinating groups precisely because they were willing to throw traditional theology out the window and start from scratch. Next time he will take up the Holiness movement, the Third Great Awakening, and Pentecostalism—which is the tradition in which I grew up. So fun!
Parker Millsap’s new album is great. The title track is my favorite so far.
We’re really good at accidentally growing mushrooms
William Anderson, Green Man:
The image of the tree that speaks, prophesies or warns seems to express a recurrent need of the soul—something that we can all experience. When we stand beneath a copse of beeches roaring in a high wind, we seem to hear one of the voices of Nature only our innermost being can comprehend. It sends a message that indicates that nothing we claim for ourselves is ours, that the life force that sustains us is as beyond our power to control as the wind is beyond the power of the trees to resist its lashings, and that we are rooted only for a short time in history, far shorter than the lives of the beeches singing and chanting above us. When we surrender our hearts and minds to their sounds, we undergo a purification which is tinged with the feeling of sacrifice and of making holy everything we have been given - a feeling echoed by many of the tinest representations of the Green Man we will come to consider.
The Green Man is the guardian and revealer of mysteries. In his mask form he is linked to the universal significances of the mask which are those of a part in a drama to be taken up and dropped again and of the world of spirits and of what lies behind death. As the disgorger or devourer of vegetation he speaks of the mysteries of creation in time, of the hidden sources of inspiration, and of the dark nothingness out of which we come and to which we return. As the fruit of vegetation, he signifies the mystery of law and intelligence in natural forms and expresses our own instinctive desire to anthropomorphize everything that is beautiful, touching or powerful in the world about us. In all his forms he is the Poet who in revealing mysteries opens up even more wonderful and enticing mysteries beyond the words he speaks.
Like antlers, like veins of the brain the birches Mark patterns of mind on the red winter sky; ‘I am thought of all plants,’ says the Green Man, ‘I am thought of all plants,’ says he. The hungry birds harry the last berries of rowan But white is her bark in the darkness of rain; ‘I rise with the sap,’ says the Green Man, ‘I rise with the sap,’ says he.