Pink Sauerkraut

Merlot Variety of Napa red cabbage, regular green cabbage, carrots, garlic and ginger sauerkraut! YUM!! Good luck finding this at the grocery store!

Last spring, the weather was unsettled, and my seedlings were started late, because I was traveling overseas for all of January. But, I still managed to grow enough tomatoes, peppers, cukes, parsley, garlic and nasturtiums, among other things, to put away around 200 servings of frozen veggies to be Vita-mixed into a private blend V-8, V-9 or V-12!

Note the funny nose on the salad tomato. That’s fairly common with this early variety. I can’t remember if it’s a Sub-Arctic Plenty or an Oregon Spring. The purple onion is a Welsh Bunching variety that I cut the seed head off to allow it to form a larger bulb. I bought a packet probably 20 years ago and still have them. There’s a beefsteak tomato in the back, and a light green Armenian cuke, which grows with fancy scallops. They are delicious and stay tender even when ridiculously big. Like 2-3 feet long and 4 inches in diameter. The striped cukes were new for me last summer. Delicious and tender, but like many of my cukes the last few years, they are getting killed off by a fungus or virus. Along with the garlic, the beets did GREAT. I really liked the first time for me Red Cloud variety. Very uniform and clean.

The cabbage crop, the second most important after all the juice ingredients, was pitiful. The heads were not solid and I ran out of time in the fall. The two year old neighborhood “Kraut Party” was delayed when the usual participants got CoVid and then RSV. But come January, I figured I would make a small batch of kraut with the Chinese (Napa) cabbage that had been quietly reposing in the produce drawer of my fridge. Since this was a solitary effort, I put in more garlic and ginger than my friend would have wanted, along with the Suzuko variety Napa cabbage and carrots. I didn’t get a photo, but it tasted pretty good. I was surprised at how the unique Napa cabbage flavor was brightened, even with the strong overtones of garlic and ginger, delicious all together, with the extra garlic and ginger intended as anti-inflammatory to heal the after effects of the RSV.

After transferring the green / white Napa kraut to a smaller jar, I decided to try, despite my neighbor’s warning not to mix red and white / green cabbage in the same batch, to do just that. I used the Merlot variety Napa cabbage, and a small regular green cabbage head, along with what would probably be considered an excessive amount of garlic and ginger, as well as carrots. I did not know what to expect for a color, but certainly I was not expecting PINK!

Half gallon Ball Canning Jar at Left. A nice serving of fiber and probiotics at right. My arthritic hand was tired after slicing the Napa cabbage, so I chopped the green cabbage in the Vita-mix, as coarse as I could, but that was still pretty fine.

Since I cut out almost all the sugar in my diet after coming home from the hospital, I found myself really enjoying the flavor of the kraut for my bedtime snack. So once this batch was done, I got out the last of my cabbages, both small red heads, and made the last batch from last summer’s harvest. After two weeks, I put this garlic and ginger heavy batch in the fridge yesterday. Yet to be tasted.

The garden is a wonderful place and wonderful activity. I actually had a good year for fruit. First time the tart cherries produced enough / the birds left them for me that I could make juice. It was delicious. The cherries are technically tart, but are pretty sweet. The batch shown was about half of the harvest. Not huge, but it’s just me. So much better than buying the stuff at the grocery store. My Canadice red seedless grapes were also quite productive and I made and canned some juice from them too.

And then, at the end of the summer, there were quite a few Monarch Butterflies that came to get nectar from the Echinacae flowers.

This appears to be a female Monarch.
It was a good season for the coleus plants, too.

Mushroom Memoir

I joined the Brownie Troop at Oakview Elementary School in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1965. The troop was full, but the Girl Scout Troop needed leaders, and they told my mom that they would let me join if she volunteered. I don’t remember much about the Brownie activities. I do recall the day an older kid leaving detention, for an infraction unknown to me, set the couch in the teacher’s lounge on fire during our Brownie meeting, and I do remember being one of only two girls who were crying about it. Half the school burned down from that little lit cigarette butt. I also remember wearing the Brownie uniform, and I kept the little gold Brownie pin for many years.

In fact, the little gold pin (not real gold!) was only recently stolen, when someone broke into my house, left my old laptop and took the jewelry box. I live, and have lived, in a rural area for 34 years now. They didn’t have to break the wood frame of the door, but they did. The basement door is left unlocked. But that would have been too easy. Of course, the cops didn’t care, even though it was one of a series of recent B&E’s.

Of course, the size lumber that was used to build the house in the 1840’s no longer exists. My neighbor Wayne had the brilliant idea of flipping the board around its vertical axis, so the damaged portion would be hidden in the wall. That facilitated and sped up the repair.

Anyway, back to the Girl Scouts. My mother kept on being a troop Leader when I graduated to the Junior Girl Scouts in 4th Grade. Pretty much everyone disliked her. She had a short fuse. Perhaps due to lead poisoning. She grew up in Fairmont, West Virginia. After the Flint (Michigan) Water Crisis (due to lead contamination), a large group of scholars got together for a research project, and they showed that local murder rates in the early part of the 20th Century were very closely correlated with the distance of the town from a lead smelter. Lead, at that time, was the material of choice for all the snazzy new municipal water system pipes. It didn’t rust like steel. Richer municipalities, along with those closer to the lead smelters, used lead pipes. Flint was wealthy at the time. A center of manufacturing.

Back to my mom. Perhaps adding to her lack of patience were her bad teeth. She had a lot of mercury based amalgam fillings. My sister didn’t want to hear my theory of our mother’s temper’s relationship to her fillings, but I think the fillings and the lead pipes in Fairmont probably had a significant effect. I didn’t know her father, who died before I was born, but nobody else in the family ever seemed to have such a temper. Anyway, she was a tough woman, but the Girl Scout Troop did a lot of exciting outdoor activities when she was the leader. We did many overnight camping trips. Way more than most troops. People are always complicated.

Adding to my early exposure to nature, at some time even before joining the Girl Scouts, my parents had decided that we should do family camping. No trailer for them. After the first trial with rented equipment, we had a giant canvas tent that would sleep 8, for the four of us and the miniature poodle. We visited the Shenandoah National Forest on our early trips, and my parents kept the top of the Styrofoam “ice-chest” with the bear fang punctures for many years, as a souvenir of one of the most exciting nights of our lives. The dog was terrified. It made a good story. See, I am still telling it 60 years later!

All that goes to say that, at an early age, I was, despite growing up in suburbia, introduced to nature. My first gardening adventure was growing radishes at age 4. They turned out very spicy. My mother served them as the “bitter herb” for the Passover Seder. The years that I have not had a garden are very few. A couple of summers when I was in college. A couple of years when I lived overseas.

When I had a chance, I moved to a rural area. I live on a forty acre plot, with a hundred by hundred foot fenced area for a garden and small orchard. For the last 5 years or so, I have been growing tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, parsley, radishes, garlic, nasturtiums, and various other things, to make “veggie juice smoothie packs.” I try to have a home grown juice smoothie every morning for breakfast. My goal is 225 juice packs in the freezer for the winter and spring.

The garden is a big part of why it’s painful for me to contemplate moving away. Losing the chance to see a dark night sky is another big reason. Looking up and the stars, and thinking about how people have been looking at some of the same groups of stars that we call constellations for as long as 30,000 years is just amazing to me. Way back then, Deneb, the swan goddess’s tail, was the pole star. Myths and archeological finds (Gobeckli Tepe) from the ancient near east and Europe hint at the religious traditions of that time. Before I moved out to the country, I knew the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia (the giant double-u). I don’t really remember even understanding the mythological significance of Orion, and his dog, Sirius. The whole calendar of the ancient Egyptians was based on the appearance of Sirius after it had spent time below the horizon. During the Geminid meteor showers last week, it was very clear and the date was close to the new moon, so very dark. Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, was sparkling white, green and red. I feel sorry for city dwellers.

But, as much as I love working in the garden, being in the garden, eating my own produce, ugly heirloom tomatoes and all, and taking a few minutes on clear nights to ponder the stars, there’s something even more special about hunting for wild mushrooms in the woods at the back of the property. On occasion, on my way to the back of the property, I have found Dryad’s Saddles, edible if young enough, in the grass, or sprouting from a tree, or giant puffballs along the south-eastern edge of the property. Neither are very tasty, but they are edible and so a decent consolation prize. But the tastiest prizes are in the back, with the big oaks and maples and other, mostly deciduous, trees.

Learning to recognize and get brave enough to eat chicken-of-the-woods, hens-of-the-woods, shrimp-of-the-woods, green quilted Russulas, black trumpets, white and yellow oysters, red chanterelles, entolomas, and a VERY few morels, while avoiding eating Jack-O-Lanterns, red Russulas, Destroying Angels, “Little Brown Mushrooms,” and Angels Wings…. Now that’s a skill. Because I have taught myself, and have never yet gotten sick. As “they” say, “There are old mushroom hunters, and bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters!”

Most of the people in my neighborhood learned to find morels when they were kids. Nobody where I grew up hunted mushrooms. Or at least I do not recall, even among the Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts in my social circles, anyone who hunted and ate wild mushrooms. And even my current neighbors are surprised to discover that when I say I hunt mushrooms, I do not mean “only morels.”

It has definitely been challenging to learn to understand the jargon of mycology. One of my early finds was a whole clump of giant white, funnel-shaped mushrooms at the edge of a water-logged area near the tree that I was convinced for years was an elm, but I now think is a beech. I looked through all my books and could not find anything remotely resembling these beautiful, snow-white, 8 – 10 inch high, 5- 6 inch diameter fungi. Any one would have made a meal! Some months later, I finally “grokked” that the cap shape descriptions in the books were not random. “Oh it might be flat, it might be convex.” No. The point was that they always go through a sequence, usually from convex, to flat, to concave. So the reason that those shrooms looked the way they did was because they were at the end of the cycle of maturity of the “fruiting body,” and the caps had turned inside out. Usually, the pictured examples of mushrooms in guide books are sooner after they pop up.

The aspiring shroom hunter needs to learn all the vocabulary associated with the way the gills, or other “fertile” surface is connected, or not, to the stem; the vocabulary to describe the shape of the stems; and the vocabulary used to describe the habits of the particular species, such as “gregarious,” or “solitary,” or “clustered.” The aspiring mycologist needs to know the difference between gilled shrooms, and shrooms with pores. For the pored shrooms, are they boletes, or are they polypores? Numerous older books say no polypores (which include Dryad’s Saddles, Chickens, and Hens) are poisonous, but newer books don’t want to be that BOLD!!!! Too many people have taken up this hobby. The experts want people to be sure that they have identified the exact species before cooking and consuming it.

Way too many people, IMO, are willing to eat a shroom that someone in a Reddit forum or some software says is ok. This is insane. Ok, there are a FEW mushrooms that are recognizable, just by looking at the cap shape and coloration. But the software apps that act like they can identify a mushroom from the view of the cap are completely ridiculous. Ok, for pure curiosity, fine. But not to eat. Period. Stay cowardly.

A lot of my finds go in the compost, mostly unidentified. For the first time, I found what I was pretty sure were blewits this fall, but after checking in all of my books and a few reliable on-line sites, I wasn’t sure if a) they were blewits or b) blewits are always safe to eat. I was excited when I identified “Woman on a Motorcycle.” I didn’t eat it, but I was highly confident that I knew what it was.

Maybe it would be ok to die of mushroom poisoning, since that supposedly was how the Buddha finally entered Nirvana. But, the symptoms of organ failure that the Amanitas and other really deadly shrooms cause are not reportedly fun to live through. One of my engineer colleagues told me about mistaking Jack-O-Lanterns for chanterelles. He does not care to repeat the experience. My plan is to continue to be a cowardly mushroom hunter.

As I age, and my joints creak, and I don’t move so fast, and I still have to work for a living, I wonder if it even makes sense for me to keep living out in the country, where it’s so hard to find people to help with the garden and mowing the lawn, etc. But then I realize that if I move to the city or the suburbs, I will sit on my rear end even more of the time, instead of getting out in the fresh air and growing and hunting my own produce, and admiring the same stars that all the famous and forgotten people since antiquity, and even before antiquity, have viewed.

Joyous Just Passed Solstice, Merry Christmas if you celebrate, and happy New Year. I’m not terribly optimistic that 2024 will be an improvement over 2023. The world seems to be falling apart. But some people manage to find joy anyway.

Tomatoes

All beginners once
Some day we come to an end
Recycling matter

There’s nothing like an heirloom beefsteak tomato, hot from the sun, sliced, and drizzled with a little bit of Ken’s Steakhouse Greek dressing! This dressing looks like it might be my own home made recipe.

Soon, come February, the Zip-locks of seed packets will be taken out of the freezer. Their temperature will be allowed to equilibrate with that of the living room prior to opening for the annual census. Tomatoes. Tomatoes first. I used to start one or two seedlings of each of 25 varieties. The last two years, I have increased the roma types, because of their convenient size for my juice packs. That has decreased the variety of heirloom beefsteaks. The salad tomatoes are holding steady. But I still like to try at least one completely new to me heirloom every year. I’d been growing Paul Robeson for years, a delicious blue salad tomato that my racist right leaning pal likes, before finding out that Paul Robeson was a famous African American socialist.

I have not shared this knowledge with my pal yet. Who am I to take away his enjoyment of a healthy pleasure? Besides, there’s some poetic justice in the situation….

So anyway, first, I take stock of the tomatoes, and figure out how many new packs to order. The peppers. Let’s not forget the peppers. I’m more open minded on the peppers. The individual variety packets don’t last as long, so there’s more opportunity for experimentation. Next, the lettuces, cabbages, broccoli, cukes, melons, etc. Then, the flowers. Gotta have zinnias and cosmos, and something new. The garden provides the chance to see a cycle of life in less than a year. From infant to crone, despite the infant mortality that comes with weeding, and the early maturity deaths due to bacterial wilt, etc., March to September is all it takes.

They say gardening is good for health. It provides opportunities for exercise, and the potential for nutritious food. Some also say it’s cheaper than hiring a shrink, but serves the same purpose. I say gardening is all of the above, and the most spiritual activity there is, linking us from beginning to end, from dust to dust.

All beginners once
Some day we come to an end
Recycling matter

Love and The Chakras

Love is an emotion.

Love, at one level, is an evolved and amplified version of the simple light (good) – dark (bad) sensory – will (desire) couple that was gifted or developed (depending on your worldview) by the earliest eukaryotic lifeforms.

Merwegon the Wise

Say Whaaaat???

What the heck did that mean????

All lifeforms, if they / we are to survive and have a chance at thriving, must have a link between the necessities and some form of pleasure. (We have to enjoy eating, for example, at least when we are justifiably hungry.)

Even if you are a Christian Fundamentalist Bible Thumper who has the literal version of the 6 day creation story etched in your DNA, you must admit, sticking with your love of Truth, that God re-used the blueprints for the earlier lifeforms again and again, with small tweaks eventually adding up to big changes.

As life forms evolved, more and more complex systems developed within individual species. These complex systems worked to enhance our survivability and thrivability within whatever environment we found ourselves.

The complex systems likewise developed within the micro-environment of its “bag of skin.” That means that sensory input systems interacted with developing hormonal, nutrition assimilation, procreation, etc. systems, to allow the emergence of more and more adaptable life forms.

In other words, life was able to leave the seas, and took over the land and atmosphere as well.

Merwegon the Wise

All of this change has been driven by the precursor of the complex spectrum of attraction emotions we call love. Thus, the Hindu sages who systematized the Chakra system rightfully chose the heart and love as the center of the Kundalini Serpent, which represents the Chakra System

So How Do All The Rest of the Chakras Work to Support the Central or Original Chakra?

Love, or attraction, as we have already noted, must be linked with pleasure so that will (desire) works for survival, thrival, and procreation (reproduction of the life form).

Love, central Chakra 4, thus exists for the primary purpose of survival, Chakra 1. Chakra 4 is thus, at one level, an upgraded, automated, empowered and empowering system that overall enhances chances of survival.

When the lifeform is complex, and it evolves the ability to adapt to multiple environments, the responses to various situations must allow for different branches of a decision tree to be followed.

Merwegon The Wise

If the individual moves to a different physical or cultural environment, different responses may be called for in nominally similar circumstances.

Hence, Chakra 5, associated with the intellect!

In humans, greater intellects can hold, compare and contrast a greater number of simultaneous inputs. The procreating individual or couple, or in the case of some fungi, trinity, who uses their intellect (maybe we should specify consciousness) wisely will do better in life!

But, without a will, Chakra 3, to overcome obstacles, the entity might give up and die.

When all is going well, the procreating entity will successfully produce new copies of its species, or perhaps be the male bird that fertilized the female bird who laid the egg of the first domestic chicken. (See Neil DeGrass Tyson on which came first, the chicken or the egg….), with or without the direct micro-management of God. Hence, Chakra 2, sexuality and reproduction, is inevitably linked with survival (#1 below) and will (or desire, #3 above) supported by, or more accurately, in a self-reinforcing feedback loop with Chakras 4 (love) and 5 (intellect).

Now Chakras 6 and 7? That’s another story!

What is a fact?

My Purple Pen / Stylus

What is a fact? How can we tell if something is a fact? What about something being factual? Is there a difference? What is the opposite of a fact? Sometimes considering the opposite can help us define the thing of interest. One opposite of a fact is an opinion.

For example, a circle is round. But a cylinder is also round, and so is a sphere. From certain viewpoints, a cylinder could look like a rectangle, a trapezoid, or some other type of polygon. From certain viewpoints, a circle could look like an ellipse, or even a line. If the cylinder looks like a rectangle or a circle looks like a line, are we still seeing a round object? How would we know? If we are able to acquire different viewing angles, maybe we could figure it out, but if not, we’re stuck in our ignorance.

If we are looking directly at an object, we have one type of data. If we are looking at a picture of an object, we have a different type of data. Looking at the single picture, we might not know if something is circular, elliptical, cylindrical, or spherical. If we are looking directly at the object, if we can handle it, we can figure out quickly if it is two or three dimensions. We can look from different angles, and readily determine if it is a cylinder or a cube.

If we think we are seeing a cylinder, but it’s a picture, and we can’t be sure, then we would be demonstrating intelligence to admit uncertainty. We would say that it’s our opinion. We could say we believe it is a picture of a cylinder. In the best cases, belief is founded on data. But sometimes, belief is totally founded on faith because an authority told us. That is different from faith based on our own personal experience, even if our experience is supplemented by teachings from an authoritative source.

Sorting out facts and opinions is a difficult task. In order to learn to distinguish facts from opinions, it’s wise to start with simple facts. Like describing simple physical objects. The pen I used to write two checks a few minutes ago is mostly purple, and it has silver colored accents. The pen is a cylindrical shape, with one pointed (tapered) end, from which protrudes the rolling ball that transfers the ink to the paper. The other end is a slightly smaller diameter cylinder, with a hemi-spherical flexible tip. That reminds me that most of the rest of the pen is rigid. There is an arm that protrudes slightly from the untapered end, which is folded to be more or less parallel to the length of the main cylinder itself. It is silver colored, and shiny like the other silver accents. Everything I have said up to now is a fact. If anyone else looked at this pen, unless they wanted to pick an argument, or were unfamiliar with my language, or did not know what a pen is (or is for) they would agree. But in some sense, unless I have used it to write with, which I have, I can’t be sure it’s really a pen. It could be a prop for some demonstration. And that small flexible tip makes this object into a stylus for use on a phone screen, in addition to being a pen. So my calling it a pen in a way may be considered to be an opinion. In any case calling it a pen is not the same type of fact that calling it purple or cylindrical is. And truthfully calling it purple is dependent not only on the cylindrical object itself, but on the light in which it is viewed. Knowing that it is purple is a conclusion that a human with unimpaired color vision could determine, in the right light. But other organisms might see a different color, because different animals see colors differently. Finally, even men and women humans see colors differently. Many men, even those who are not colorblind at all, see fewer colors than women.

I have run into people encouraging us to reach out and speak to people who have different beliefs from those we hold. I have spent a lot of time doing so. I was involved in interfaith dialogue for many years. But with a breakdown in agreement about which facts are true, I don’t think we have much hope until we re-establish some sort of agreement on basic facts. The sentences in this post are made up of words. The post has layers of sentences and then paragraphs. The sentences convey meaning, for anyone who speaks English and wants to try to understand them. The individual meanings conveyed in the sentences and paragraphs are trying to encourage each reader to do a thought experiment, by describing a familiar object.

Appearance, heft, size, etc. are facts that most can agree to. Whether it’s a good pen, a nice pen, a useful pen, a stupid stylus, an ugly weapon, or mightier than a sword? Those are all definitely opinions.

Note all the features I failed to mention: The knurled pattern toward the ink end, the arc shape of the arm, as well as the fact that the protruding part is not at the far end of this arm. The “silver accents” most likely are chrome plating, but I don’t have proof as of now. Maybe, some time in the future, I will put this pen in my electron microscope, which has a microchemical analyzer, to see if I am right! We have some hints that the main body of cylinder is really a cylinder, due to the coloration change along the upper and lower edges of the rectangle. But they are only hints. You are looking at a photo. You can’t tell if you are looking at a picture of a real pen, or a picture of a picture of a pen.

Consequences of Critical Thinking

Chapter 2 of David Levy’s popular text book warns us that concepts must be judged by their consequences, rather than trying to fit them in to a rigid pigeonhole of true or false.

Sadly, the Republicans have made full use of this theory, but without paying attention to the other tenets of critical thinking: ensuring a relevant and comprehensive frame of reference.

While a few Republicans have started saying “Life” must refer to more than the fetal stage of humanity, Democrats have failed to make hundreds of points about the damage that Trump and Friends have done to the environment and industrial safety, to name just two subjects. Science is only of interest to Trump if it’s related to enhancing the military.

But that isn’t how science works. The whole reason for the strength and power of science is that it gives humans an epistemologically robust way to understand and influence the world.

Science has had beneficial and detrimental effects on humanity over the years. If we include the early technological achievements of humanity, domestication of plants and animals, then civilization, we got complexity, choice, and more chances for expression of our individual potential. But at the cost of the creation of a huge social underclass, deprived, to varying degrees, over the last 10,000 years, of many of the sweet fruits the upper tip of this complex hierarchy enjoy.

Education, and particularly science education, is the basic foundation for any remedy to humanity’s ills.

Teaching illogical faith based “facts” to young children rots the structure to which any future knowledge will be fastened. If Mary was a literal physical virgin when she gave birth to Jesus, then no facts that we can discover or verify for ourselves are ever necessarily relevant. If 3=1, then no facts that we can discover or verify for ourselves are ever necessarily relevant.

Illogical faith based facts corrode any potential for developing knowledge in the absence of a group of similarly brainwashed people.

If God is individually protecting people from CoVid19, why bother with masks? The lessons of the great plagues of 600+ years ago, that even the cardinals were not immune to the bacteria, seem to be lost on the evangelical right. It’s medical science, a PORTION of the web of scientific progress, that has, over many centuries, allowed us to regain the lifespan of our “primitive” ancestors.

Science, more than literature, religion, history, allows humanity to double, and triple (etc.) check, our theories and ideas.

Neils Bohr, the great physicist, taught that the opposite of a fact is a lie, but the opposite of a GREAT TRUTH is ANOTHER GREAT TRUTH.

Values are great truths. But the society that doesn’t base its values on a factual foundation is eventually in for rough going.

I hope that those people who are aligned with a fact based reality can find a way to help the rest of the world clean their glasses. That includes me. It’s been very depressing to hear people saying that they are voting based on their 401k or their friend’s jobs making military equipment so we can sell it to the Saudis to kill starving baby Yeminis. That sure is Pro Life. (The last sentence is sarcastic, for those who are challenged in those matters.)

Beautifully Black: Chrysalis of 2020

The Monarch caterpillar hung itself from my trashcan, the week I forgot to take the almost full container out to the street to be emptied. So, I was sad to miss its exit Wed., but glad to find the chrysalis empty when I got home, so I could put the very full can out Thursday.

Monarch Chrysalis the morning just before it split. A few strands of spider web decorate the shell.

Random Desires?

Life builds on little things. Randomly at first, then directed, or at least guided by, some aspect of desire, which itself, is guided, at least in humans, by culturally reinforced genetic programming. Desire takes us someplace, which may be different from what our consciousness thought it had its eye on, so to speak.

Let’s put some flesh on those sentences.

My great-grandparents, the earliest generation for which I have even the least specific information, somehow met, in four pairs, and made kids. Two became my grandfathers, and two my grandmothers. I know my father’s mother had sisters, and that her parents were well enough off to get her sisters’ husbands started in business, and at least one of them got started a second time after the first endeavor failed. I guess I need to ask my dad about his dad’s siblings. I don’t remember ever hearing him talk about anyone else in his dad’s generation. As for his dad’s parents, I only know that my great grandfather was a mercury poisoned mad hatter, and that’s why my dad’s dad left Russia. My dad’s dad’s mother is a complete unknown, kindof like the mother of Abraham of the Bible.

My mother’s mother came from a big family. She was born in Scranton, PA. So I have seen photos of her and her parents. They, like my father’s mother’s parents, apparently were of some means. They were property owners soon after arriving in the USA as immigrants. Likewise, my mother’s father had a fairly large family, who had paved the way for his participation in what we now call chain migration. His relatives had a job waiting for him in the family grocery store. Eventually, he became a traveling salesman, kept company by his male and female German shepherds.

So there we have the first level of random events that ultimately led to the production of my grandparents, a necessary precondition for the eventual existence of yours truly.

Apparently, despite the existence at that time in Europe of matchmakers, I have been made to understand that both pairs of grandparents were desirous of each other. My father’s mother’s parents were apparently not too pleased with their daughter’s choice. That history wave continued to be the case, in a milder form for my mother’s mother’s feelings toward her daughter’s choice, and in full force for my mother’s feelings toward my selection. Therefore, the history wave of parental disapproval skipped from XXXX family (I don’t remember my father’s mother’s maiden name) to the Spiegel family (mother’s mother’s maiden name) where it stayed, despite my mother’s change of name on marriage.

So now we have demonstrated the move from random, or at least independent, or at least apparently independent, chains of events, being influenced and thence ultimately determined by, desire. In my father’s father’s case specifically, he was said to have fallen for Dora because “she and her sisters were considered “hot.”

Never having believed that I personally was hot, even when several boys and later men, told me that they found me to be in possession of the hotness commodity, I found it hard to believe that the grandmother for whom I am named was hot. I am to inherit the slightly colorized photo of her when my dad passes, unless he forgets to specify it in writing. In which case, I would have little hope, having become the black sheep of the family. In the photo of Dora, I do find her pretty.

Despite my belief in my lack of hotness, I still chose a mate, or allowed myself to be chosen, and despite my lifelong desire to remain free of children, nature’s pull and culture’s push resulted in my gaining offspring.

Had my dad not encouraged my interest in science, had I not decided to become an engineer, I would not have gotten the jobs at the steel mills, where I met Nick, who was a mobile equipment operator on my team when I, along with a Swedish woman metallurgist and two black men who had risen through the labor ranks into management, ran one of three shifts of steelworkers. Nick and I became friends, and we (I and spouse) began visiting Nick and his family. His daughter was “so cute,” that we began to question our desire for freedom from children. So it feels like, if it weren’t for Nick and Mary and their Nicole, I would have been able to achieve the Buddhist goal of getting off of the hamster wheel of karma or dharma or I would have been able to break what Jews call the chain of the generations.

By the way, I picked engineering as a career choice, because I desired to be with guys. Their interests seemed more compatible, regardless of my inability to experience their attraction to me.

Anyway, back to the subject. So consciously, I was heading for having a family with cute kids, and a desire to show how effective our well planned parenting experiment would be. But that brief window of desire was interrupted by the reality of having to provide for the offspring, and stick with their other parent, whose laziness became more oppressive as the basic tasks became more burdensome. Subconsciously, I guess I was going for increased compassion for my fellow humans. I experienced being trapped by the biological need to protect the offspring. I experienced the burden of having to earn a living, not just to support myself, but others. I experienced being a hypocrite, unable to rise above the walls of the small circle defining my social responsibilities, unable to speak out against things I knew were wrong. Well, that was my excuse. Hell, it’s still my excuse. But now I don’t have kids to directly support. Just myself, my ex, and the neighbors who mow my lawn, weed my garden, and plow my snow. There are still those who depend on my finances. Or at least enjoy them.

OK. 53 words in the original impersonal paragraph, versus 925+ (due to post posting edits!!) in the version adorned with specific details. Which was more interesting? Which easier to understand? If the second version was easier to understand the gist of, did the first shed light on the fact of the universality of the experience, despite potential complete separation of particular experiences?

Please let me know!!!

Use the comment feature below!

The Moons of Jupiter, and, well, Spiders

Or How to SEE the world

Last weekend, for the 4th of July holiday, I visited my friends from my new church. The 4th of July is actually the center of the “Holy Week” for this new, semi-atheist church. The Alpha and Omega Celebration is intended to help people cement their new view of life, relatively unencumbered by what they now see as an overly limiting world view imposed by their parents before they were able to think for themselves.

They don’t believe in, as the founder says, “a Big G god.” I feel like many of them (well, the group is quite tiny…so many is relative) have embraced reductionist atheism. But the “dogma,” or “scripture,” now limited to a document entitled “The Distinctions,” allows for belief in spirituality.

I volunteered to help the founder, Dan, in whatever way I can, based on my longtime study of the world’s (and history’s, and pre-history’s for that matter) religions. I may be ordained as the first “Curate,” as soon as we sort out the fact that I finally paid dues to join another church that I have attended for over 20 years, and don’t believe I should have to renounce one in order to join the other. However, I may soon care less, as the leadership of that church is refusing to have any formal soul searching about civil rights in this nation that is now hosting our spirits’ “vehicles.”

Anyway, the moons of Jupiter. Yes, so we had our Alpha and Omega celebration at Harper Lake last weekend. I actually got in the water and swam a bit. Then I got in a kayak and tried to kayak around a bit. My shoulders were ok, which was a surprise. Concern about the shoulders had kept me from believing I’d ever be able to get in a canoe or kayak again, even as I had fond memories of these activities in my youth. Sadly, I was not able to deal with the waves from the power boats sharing the lake, and it had been so long since I had used this skill set, I needed more room than usual to steer. After the second time that I found myself heading for or being headed at by a large vessel, I went back to shore. But it still felt like an independence.

Later, Dan got out the two telescopes he had bought for the occasion. Freedom from the religious ties that bind allows us to center ourselves in the cosmos revealed by science, and call it a religious practice. After the telescope purchase motivating non-event of the partial penumbral eclipse of the moon, we turned the scope to Jupiter. Finally, I saw it. A disk, not a point, and a series of pinpricks from 1 to 7 o’clock. I realized that those were the moons of Jupiter. WOW.

I say finally, because while the optics of the telescope were beyond any hopes I might have had, the features used to control the position and direction of tube were poor quality at best. Granted, it’s still a crime against humanity that they were so good for the supposed price of $60.00. That price and its implied consequences might have gone unnoticed in the past, but not now.

I feel so different to have seen the moons of Jupiter with my own eyes. And while the eclipse was a non-event, the detailed features of the moon were more amazing than any image I remember seeing. There are fine cracks in the surface, and super bright pinpricks that are reflections from I don’t know what.

My respect for those who had to make and aim their own telescopes 400 years ago has drastically increased. My personal thanks to the workers who made the one I used, allowing me a new window on the universe, before my cataracts deteriorate my visual processing further.

The full moon is a strong anchor of my first sighting of the Dead Sea, but the stronger anchor is the memory of the nuns sharing the beach the next morning, whose eyes I felt on my wet tee shirt. I had forgotten my bathing suit. The salt water made the wet tee shirt even more revealing than it would have been in fresh water.

The full moon will be a strong anchor of my first Alpha and Omega celebration, but the stronger anchor will be the moons of Jupiter. Of course, had I not known they were there, I wouldn’t have noticed them. Ten days later, I am still amazed by the optical quality of what was most likely a Chinese telescope. A $60 National Geographic branded window to a bigger world.

I am grateful for the Alpha and Omega experience of being positioned at the body of the spider, while my technologically enhanced senses reach out in all the directions that a spider’s legs do. We can see the world as a network of spiders with a new spider body at the point of every spider’s toe. Some of the legs reach back to more central spiders, until there’s no center, because everywhere is the center.

Assam Gibbon Sanctuary and Tribal Life

We had a long adventure to get to the Gibbon Sanctuary after a short stop back at the Orchid Co-op to buy souvenirs. This was not the first time I would have been happy to spend more money to get a higher quality of craftsmanship, but it just wasn’t available. I bought one of the many roughly carved wooden rhinos, some Assam tea, and some locally grown Stevia leaves.

The Gibbon Rest House was our destination, but Google Maps (and the entire internet) does not know that this business exists. We did have the street address and finally made our way to the goal, which had a giant yellow sign marked Spot On Gibbon Homestay. But the owner, Diganta, insisted that the sign had nothing to do with his business and he would (FIVE YEARS after opening HIS business, FIVE YEARS of confusing his customers later…) ask Spot On to remove the sign. OK. Ok. Ok.

No. Despite the sign, we are NOT at Spot on Homestay.

There is very limited information on visiting the Gibbon Sanctuary available on-line, and when planning my trip, I had found a traveler’s blog, and they said they stayed in the “Forest Guest House.” The “Gibbon Rest House” was not IN the sanctuary. It was 15 km away in Jorhat. I complained to the travel agent AGAIN. He said there was no accommodation in the sanctuary. Finally, the guides provided by the government explained that there is a Forest Guest House, but it is only for use by the park employees. So I do not know how those westerners got invited, but I didn’t get the nice forest birdsong I had anticipated as my lullaby. I got normal Indian city noises, loudspeaker blasted Islamic calls to prayer five times a day, and reasonably quiet nights, interrupted by the occasional dog barking, and terminated by some loud roosters.

Compared to the views of the elephants and rhinos, the gibbons were less photogenic. They are entirely arboreal, and they stay high up in the trees, like probably a minimum of 60 feet or 20 meters, and they are not that big. So without special photo equipment the sharability result is limited. But they were a lot of fun to watch swinging through the trees. Thinking about it, I guess that means that if there were gibbons at the Brookfield Zoo (near Chicago) they were probably living too close to the ground for their ultimate happiness. In any case, here is a flavor of what we saw. Overall, in three half days, we saw an apparently unprecedented 6 groups of 1-6 gibbons. The guide provided by the national park, the armed guard (in case we surprised some elephants), our hotel owner host and guide all started telling me at the 10 am breakfast break the first day that I had brought them luck. I told them NO. It was a gift from Maa (Durga, great goddess of India). By the end, we all agreed that 1) I brought them luck 2) Maa blessed my visit and 3) the guides were skilled. I was told that there are people who make the trip and NEVER see a single gibbon. In fact, as we were getting ready to leave Kaziranga, a British woman said they had made a brief stop at the Gibbon Sanctuary and had seen no gibbons. So, there you have it. Diganta bought a wonderful cell phone with a fancy stabilizer, so his video was the best. Here is part of what he shot. The male is black, and female brown. She’s a bit harder to see. They are obviously enjoying life.

Since I am still at the IIT Madras Taramani Guest House with reasonably fast internet, I will now upload a few videos from the dancing at the Orchid Co-op. After the professional dancers finished their 20 minute presentation, the host invited the audience. The Home Science students I had met earlier in the day pushed one of their classmates to sing. She has an angelic voice. Then they all started dancing. They looked really happy. I will have to see what I can do later to add the video. The file is too big, and was captured sideways.

Happy Home Ec College Students Dancing at the Orchid Park
Everyone is always taking photos and selfies and videos of everything in Asia. The happy young women continued their dance, and toward the end of this clip, two Western women are joyfully welcomed into the circle.

While we are back in the orchid park, and on the subject dancing ladies, I will post the picture of the beautiful Dancing Lady orchid.

Dancing Lady Orchid

The last afternoon in eastern Assam, sated with my blessed and lucky gibbon viewings, we made a small jaunt to a village where the tribal people of Assam still try to maintain a hint of their old life-ways. First thing I see?????? A Baptist church!

Baptist Church in Small Village in Assam, near Nagaland border.

There was even a (dry) Baptismal Fount off to the side. Well, I have always been conflicted about Christianity in India. But it provides a counterbalance to the devastation created for the lower caste and out-cast people. All sisters and brothers in Christ is more appealing to the Western democrat than the hierarchical system of the bronze age, as much as modern India has struggled to reduce its damage.

We were invited into the home of one of the families. Everywhere in India, people have wanted to take selfies with me. Here are three family members, including two cute young girls.

Assamese Tribal Family. Many of the people of this region look somewhat Chinese. They are considered to be genetically linked to the Chinese, and we are not far from the Chinese border.
Baptist family roasting beef in Assam, India. They are Christians, so they eat beef. There has been violence against Muslim beef providers in India.

I also spent an hour or so talking with my taxi driver, Sarwal, and some members of a tribal “Self Help Group” that had built a small amusement park, complete with boating in a small lake. Like many places in India, it’s not for the weak kneed. I got to practice my Hindi a bit, even though the native language, Assamese, is preferred. These people did not refuse to speak Hindi with the same force as my friends in Tamil Nadu, who mostly claim they do not know any Hindi.

My taxi driver, Sarwal, explained to me that he only looks at Facebook when he is “boring” because he has to wait for his customers to see what they came to see. I tried to have Dharmendra explain the difference between BORING and BORED, but am not sure I had much success.

Sarwal looking down at the lake, from near the entrance of the small, still under construction, amusement park.

Well, I am going to post this already very long post, but will briefly jump ahead to my second to last day in India, when I went to the Arignar Anna Zoological Park. It’s the largest zoo in India. They do a lot of work to rehabilitate populations of endangered species. Dressed like an Indian, I was less popular as a selfie subject, but these young ladies asked for one.

I started getting tired of people asking for selfies. So I told them I wanted one too. One of the four of them took this photo for me. I had been walking more or less near them in the “walk through aviary” at the Arignar Anna Zoo, but was not sure if Muslim women wearing hijabs wanted to be seen with an American. It was exceedingly hot, which was the reason I had my shawl covering my dark hair.