LOOKING BACK, LOOKING AHEAD

JANUARY IS COMING, with its celebration of Janus, the two-faced god who looks in both directions. Janus or Ianus stood at the origin of time and guarded the very gates of heaven. Here is Janus Bifrons, with his two fronts, at the Vatican museums -- an image captured on Wikipedia.

According to the Wiki, Janus may be traced to Sumerian solar gods, where one twin faced southeast to greet the sun at the coming of winter, and the other twin faced northeast to greet summer. Eventually the two fused into a single body with two heads, facing in opposite directions.  Regardless of what details you believe, we clearly have a case of yin and yang -- each side contains and balances the other; there's no looking forward without looking back. At every transition we enter the new, but never without a backward glance.

And so today we ponder the past year. Because you can't just shut the door and start over.

Among some wondrous books I've been reading is the voluptuous The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock. It tells the amazing story of Mary Delany, who began her life's work at the age of 72 when she was inspired to capture an entire botanical garden, each patiently cut from hundreds of snippets of colored paper, then cut and fastidiously pasted onto black backgrounds.  If you haven't heard of this remarkable woman, I recommend her story and the book's the astonishing images of her nearly 1000 collages, now in the collection of the British Museum.

I love the lushness of this Papaver somniferum, the Oriental opium poppy. And her  portrait of Pancratium maritimum, or sea daffodil, offers an incredible elaboration on nature.

Mrs. Delany was a "late bloomer" in the best sense -- and her story provides a delicious role model for late bloomers everywhere. And it's especially apt on December 31: in tracing the arc of Mrs. Delany's life, Peacock observes how one phase builds upon another:

Wholesale throwing out only closes a door against the past... You have to sort through the details of the past in order to process what happened, and then to move ... [forward in a pattern of] slow growing, that layering upon layering that is growth in maturity.

That does NOT mean tomorrow is not a new slate. It is -- both a miraculous way to reset the counters, and a way to connect to one's best by applying the lessons and experience of earlier years.

That process is different for each of us.  Whatever your definition, may you be happy, healthy, and fully at ease in the coming year.

STILL CHRISTMAS

A FEW FLAKES DRIFTED slowly down on Christmas morning,  leaving a dusty sparkle on the ice of the lower pond.

As I shot the picture, I noticed that the wind had snapped another pine in the lower woods. Investigating, we found the downed trunk in several thoroughly rotten sections, with the telltale hen-of-the-woods mushrooms growing up the side.

Nature never takes a holiday.


And on the music system, Yo-Yo Ma's joyous holiday party of several years ago, a CD entitled  Songs of Joy and Peace. You can find pieces of its back story on MySpace and You Tube snippets, and can listen to samples of the finished product at the title link above.  It's wonderful music to play over the holidays.  Great joyous riffs, punctuated with endless variations on Dona Nobis Pacem. 


No matter what holidays you celebrate, what we all share is this common gateway to the new year and the rising sun. It's a new chapter, a new start.  May the coming year be a good one for you.

A ROSE FOR CHRISTMAS

WHEN I WAS AN EVEN LESS EXPERIENCED GARDENER, I believed the catalogs and magazines that assured me the Christmas rose, Helleborus niger, would brighten my Christmas garden. Over time,  I learned that in New England it blooms somewhere near Easter (depending on the moon and the vernal equinox, which combine to make Easter the most movable of holidays).  But this year a local market has outwitted Mother Nature by stocking potted plants they say we can enjoy now and move outdoors "when the ground thaws."

I have a wonderful assortment of hellebores, including some treasures from Heronswood, and I'd love to have this beauty join them. Wish me luck. Gardening is always an adventure.

So this is my experiment for the season -- along with the snippet from an awesome four-foot coleus I got from Cecile, a wonderful local gardener. When I admired its dramatic show in a large pot near her front door, she promptly reached over and snapped off a generous shoot for me.

But you know, even if I don't manage to keep the hellebore viable in the dry heat of the house in winter, it's a delight to have it at Christmastime.

SODDEN SOLSTICE

DRIVING OUT ON SOLSTICE MORNING, I found the world new-washed by the middle-of-the-night gully washers.  All was fresh and green – more mid-April than winter solstice. And it reminded me that every event (paradoxically – or is it?) contains its opposites. Very yin and yang. The strength in the weakness, the softness in the sturdy. The wisdom of the I Ching: there's always another side to consider.

THE DAY WAS balmy, holding its breath almost, while shoppers jockeyed for parking spots, butchers and fishmongers darted behind counters wrapping parcels, and the merchants breathed a sigh of relief to see their shelves emptied.

In the evening, a widespread band of rain moved in with intent to soak, and it has continued all night. I've come to depend on our faithful NOAA display to understand the greater context for the scene outside the door. Beneath the leaf mulch, the spring bulbs should be sending out healthy roots.

Across the bridge, the mosses are a mottled carpet of green and rust in the woods -- a perfect flooring for the bare season, covering the earth until the snow arrives.

THE SHORTEST DAY?

THE CHRISTMAS REVELS, mentioned yesterday, commemorate the darkest days of the year, and mankind's immemorial efforts to "bring back" the disappearing sun.

But is this really the "shortest day?" Perhaps not, when you look at the "hours of daylight" for our zip code:

Date	Sun Rise(AM)	Sun Set (PM)	Daylight (Hrs/Min)
12/17	7:08	4:14	9:06
12/18	7:09	4:14	9:05
12/19	7:10	4:15	9:05
12/20	7:10	4:15	9:05
12/21	7:10	4:15	9:05
12/22	7:11	4:16	9:05
12/23	7:12	4:17	9:05
12/24	7:12	4:17	9:05
12/25	7:13	4:18	9:05
12/26	7:13	4:19	9:06
12/27	7:13	4:19	9:06
12/28	7:13	4:20	9:07
12/29	7:14	4:21	9:07
12/30	7:14	4:22	9:08
12/31	7:14	4:22	9:08
1/1	7:14	4:23	9:09

So every day from 12/18 to 12/25 is the same “short” length, 9 hours and 5 minutes (yes, certainly, the seconds may vary). But look how flat it is: it takes TEN DAYS for the daylight hours to rise again to 9 hours and 6 minutes. It’s a “time out of time” when change ceases to happen. (The same thing happens at the summer solstice in June, when the long days are with us for a 10-day period.)

The other notable trend is that sunrise comes later each day throughout this period although, blessedly, the afternoon sun lingers longer each day. And perhaps the best news is that we gain a full hour of daylight during January, which pushes the sunset back past 5 PM.

But in the meantime, we can enjoy the delights of the season -- the magic of snowfall, sunshine on new snow, enjoying a brisk walk or a cross-country ski, then returning indoors to warm by the fire, to read and laugh and plan for the warmer days ahead. And savor that evocative phrase from the I Ching:

I have a good goblet

I'll share it with you.

BUMPS IN THE NIGHT

Winter rumbled in at 12:30 a.m., with lightning and window-rattling thunder -- more like a summer night than the start of the cold season.  Ponds are already overflowing, and the neighbors' vernal pools are at higher levels than they ever are in late April -- missing only the tadpoles and other creatures that populate them in the spring.

Wave after wave of heavy rain pounded on the roof, nearly drowning out the sound of the town's emergency  horn:  1 -- 4 --- 7, the code for Sunset Road. Shortly afterward the cry of sirens as volunteer firefighters responded to the call. Lightning must have struck.

Commenting on the strange weather, someone recently observed that the North Pacific rain forest conditions seem to be migrating to New England. I for one am glad this isn't snow, for we'd be shoveling out a couple of feet tomorrow

DAYS DWINDLE DOWN

A TIME FOR KEEPING CLOSE TO HOME as nights are long and days are brisk. There's ice on the pond, and the evening brings owls' lonely hoots from the woods as they seek companions for the winter night.

This year we managed to get to Cambridge before the Christmas holiday to see the original Christmas Revels (which has now spread to Washington D.C., Seattle, Portland, Oregon, Houston and other points) for a rollicking three-hour "time out of time" that opened the holiday celebrations with great cheer.  

And Ludwig von Beethoven had the good grace to be born on December 16, which led our local public broadcasting station, WGBH, to throw a gala birthday bash of works well-known and rare. They've posted a video of a delightful WoO (work without opus, not part of the official Beethoven catalog) 152 No. 8, "Come Draw We Round the Cheerful Ring" with renowned tenor William Hite in an arrangement for piano, cello and mandolin. And the entire concert, which includes a fabulous performance of the "Les Adieux" piano sonata No. 26 by Gilles Vonsattel, as well as a memorable Hite-Vonsattel rendering of the song cycle "An Die Ferne Geliebte," is available in an audio-on-demand link at the same website. We were fortunate to be sitting in the second row of the visually and aurally gorgeous Fraser performance studio, but enjoy recapturing it from the Web.

There's a sense of bustle this year, as folks who've trimmed back in recent seasons are engaging the short-day season with great gusto -- to drive the darkness away.

HERDING TURKEYS

THE TURKEY HERD evolves as the seasons change.  In spring, there are individual turkeys wandering through the ‘hoods, but by fall, they amass into giant throngs, 20-30 strong.

Our town has some 4800 human residents (318/square mile). I don’t know how many deer and coyotes we have per square mile, but I can recall about 25 or so deer bedded down in our “back 40” during the deep snows last winter, and the local paper had a shot of five coyotes who gathered in the backyard of one resident for a noonday portrait.  Our own deer completely enjoyed our hospitality: they ate everything in sight, and walked single-file along the stone wall along  the back edge of the property.  I hope that deer spoor makes a good fertilizer, because we had plenty of it.

Each year around Thanksgiving, turkeys begin to herd up.  We’ve seen them in groups of 1, 2, or  maybe half a dozen  throughout the spring and summer, but now they seem to seek safety in numbers, and the herds can grow to 20 or 30 in the fall.  Not just on our street, but all over town.
 
Down East Street there’s a dependable flock with a population of at least 12 that inhabits the front yard of a certain gray bungalow.  And I had to stop and wait the other morning as a group of (I counted about 22) sauntered (again, single-file) across the road while traffic waited in both directions

We got a blurry shot of the herd as it crossed our driveway: it’s hard to grab a crisp shot when the turkeys are in full retreat. They move fast. Perhaps they know that Turkey Day is approaching.

TGITH

My friend Jane alternates between 2-day workweeks and 3-day workweeks… “And do you know,” she says, "I come to dread those 3-day weeks!”  Don’t get me wrong – she’s busy all week, and works more than just those days she shows up in the office. But she’s trying to find a path to retirement, and cut back on the “face the office” days.

I, too, now have a 3-day schedule in an office, and that’s the subject of this post: Thank God It’s Thursday -- TGITH. Today is my last day in a cubicle until next week.  I will work tomorrow, of course, but tomorrow I can do the work I choose, when I choose, wearing clothes I chose.

CELEBRATING THE YEAR

OUR LOCAL LIBRARY had a display of occult and Pagan material just before Halloween, and I borrowed a couple of books to explore.  Wisely, pagans celebrate more than just the four corners of the calendar: the well-worn spring and vernal equinoxes -- when the number  of daylit hours speeds up or slows down rapidly -- and the wondrous summer and winter solstices -- when the Sun almost stands still for a week, as morning minutes are exchanged for evening minutes.  Pagans also stop to savor the four cross-quarter days from Celtic mythologies: Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh and Samhain. 

Imbolc (also Imbolg or St Brigid’s Day, or in the Anglican calendar, Candlemas) coincides with our Groundhog Day, February 2. Last winter I heard it called “Solar Spring” for the first time: and the word Spring was a true anodyne in the midst of that snow seige. In our Boston suburb, it’s always a time of hope: we can start looking for snowdrops on the mild, sunny days, or drive by local farms and see the first lambs of the season.  But even though the sun promises warmer days ahead, make no mistake: there’s a reason it’s called Candlemas on some Christian calendars. We’ll keep the hearth fires burning for a bit longer; there’s still some weather ahead.  Still, Imbolc is a welcome stop on the way to the spring equinox on March 21-23.

Beltane --  May 1, our Mayday -- is the original Pagan fertility festival, the start of all the magic and bounty that summer brings.  It's grounds for a grateful shout-out, and leads us on to the full celebration of the midsummer festival  at the solstice in June.

Lughnasadh (lun' asuh), August 1, is a personal favorite, for I was born on the eve of this holiday. Lammas bread was traditionally made from the first harvesting of the wheat. We don’t celebrate so much with bread these days , but instead with the onset of garden greens and early vegetables -- and the promise of tomatoes by August. 

Samhain (sah' win) is November 1, the end of the harvest, and also known as All Souls Day (our Halloween). This year they really turned out the lights in our community -- up to a week in some spots -- and let us know that darker days were at hand!

And so on to the winter solstice in late December, when we "turn the sun around" for a new season of light and warmth. These cross-quarter days offer stops on the way to the four corners of the year.  They help us feel gratitude for the cycle of light and dark, the alternating tides of high and low, cold and warm, as even the planet seems to breath in and out. 

WHAT SCIENTISTS DO

Of course simply living simply is not possible in 2011. There are things to be concerned  about.

At Harvard a couple of weeks ago, a group I belong to, New England Science Writers, was meeting in Jefferson Hall to hear physics professor Gary Feldman talk about the recent CERN (hadron collider) experiment that described measuring nutrinos traveling at speeds faster than the speed of light. The press had a brief heyday with that, and one of the NESW members asked Feldman, who’s a member of the MINOS project at Fermi Lab in Chicago – one of the few places on earth equipped to test the French-Italian results – to interpret the findings. It was a delightful talk, and Feldman was clearly convinced  that “mistakes were made,” understandable mismeasurements, which will be tested and explored by the MINOS group. That’s how science works, day-to-day.

But a side note to our Harvard trip turned out to be equally deightful. We arrived  early, and were poking about to make sure we had the right place and time.  Across the hall from Jeff 256 was Jeff 257, the office of Professor Emeritus Richard Wilson, with a handwritten note on the door: “Dick won’t be in for the next few days. “

But “Dick” had left an invitation for folks to help themselves to a handful of interesting publications in his Outbox, including a reprint of a talk he’d given earlier this year on the Fukushima disaster and its lessons, as well as a wonderful book he published in 2001 called Risk-Benefit Analysis. At one point in the book, he calculated the relatively high risk of being a U.S. president by dividing the number of presidential assassinations by the number of president-years served by our 44 leaders. Even though it’s a high-risk job, he pointed out that people continue to line up and apply for it!

Turns out that studying risk has been one of Wilson’s longtime passions, and he now considers himself somewhat of an expert on “dangerous things.”  We were intrigued with his voice, and decided to see if we could find him actually speaking on the Web. Sure enough, we located a brief interview with Andrew Revkin of the NY Times.

In the end Wilson was engaging, but may also have felt a bit adrift. The time has passed, he said, when politicians and policymakers paid attention to the scientists. Back in the 50s and 60s, during the threat of nuclear war, they had listened, he said. But somewhere, somehow scientists have lost their bully pulpit, he admitted ruefully. Still, he keeps his scientific voice out there. We’re happy to hear it. It’s important to have all the facts we can.

SIMPLY DELICIOUS

THE ANTIDOTE TO yesterday’s Jenny Holzer Truism might be this one:

IF YOU LIVE SIMPLY, THERE IS NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT

Living simply has great appeal as the days draw down. Last week, after three days of power outage, and still appreciating the wonders of heat and electricity, I wanted to make an old-fashioned, healthy treat for our  morning garden club meeting.  I had already bought some really good oatmeal and some fine pecans, and wanted to make the World’s Best Oatmeal Cookies.  So I Googled for a recipe, and found that ALL were advertised as the Best Oatmeal Cookies Ever!  It took quite a while to check them all out, but I finally found one to that looked promising. With many thanks from Journey to Crunchville, here's the recipe:

• 1 cup butter, room temp
• 1 cup brown sugar, packed
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 2 eggs, well beaten
• 1 TBSP (yes, tablespoon) vanilla
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ginger
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• 3 cups oatmeal (old fashioned, not instant)
• 1 cup raisins
• 1/2 cup chocolate chips (optional)
• 1/2 cup chopped nuts (optional)

Directions

1. The key is to soak the raisins. This makes all the difference in the world. Beat eggs and vanilla together, then add the raisins and stir. Soak for an hour or two. Just walk by a few times and stir it while you wait.

2.      Preheat oven to 350 F. Cream butter and sugars with mixer. In a separate bowl combine flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger & nutmeg. Stir the dry ingredients until well blended. Add dry ingredients to creamed mixture and mix well. Now add in the egg & raisin mixture. Then add oatmeal and chocolate chips/nuts and combine well. Form into balls on cookie sheet and chill 15 minutes so they don’t melt flat when you put them into the oven. Bake until just set (8-10 minutes). Let cool on cookie sheet for 2-5 minutes or until firm enough to transfer to wire rack.

The extra spices give an edge, but the vanilla “marinade” in the raisins made the cookies unforgettable. I’ll never go back to unmarinated raisins!

Talk about a simple pleasure.

RANDOM THOUGHTS FOR SHORTER DAYS

HUNKERING DOWN in November, it’s a good time to reflect on the blessings we are given in this short life. It’s a time for the human spirit to supply the bounty that Nature so amply provides in the warmer months.

PLANTING FALL BULBS is a hopeful act. When you’re young, you look forward to spring, when you’ll be able to see them bloom. When you’re older, the sneaky thought crosses your mind that spring might be held without you, and you realize you only hope you’ll be there to attend the festival.

ANOTHER GREAT LINK FROM DOMINQUE BROWNING: here's a video by a free-spirited, creative pair of New Yorkers who quit their lucrative day jobs to pursue their passion, and they’re urging us all to ride passionately through life.  Here’s to the joy of cycling!

Which brings me to another Jenny Holzer Truism:

                       fear is the greatest incapacitator

A true truism if ever there was one. We all know that, yet our fears persist – and rule our lives.  Why do we let this happen? Consider this ...

Today the NY Times Magazine published readers’ responses to Dan Kois’ recent article “Lynda Barry Will Make you Believe in Yourself." One reader, who had attended one of Barry’s writing workshops, wrote she would “never forget how she talked about the critical voice inside our heads. She said that if someone walked up behind you and said the story you were writing was stupid, you wouldn’t listen to them, so why do you listen to the voice inside your head telling you that very thing?”  Kois also has a starter kit of Barry books at the Times Blog. This is a woman who wants to make you see that life is worth living. In fact, it may be even more than that – you might even see that you ARE living if you’re following your passion!

TRUISMS

MY GO-TO BLOG, the one I must read whenever I can, is Dominique Browning’s Slow Love Life.  I have followed Dominique over the years, first in her books (before Slow Love, she wrote Around the House and In the Garden, Paths of Desire, and many compilations of work from her days as editor of House and Garden magazine, where I always treasured her monthly column.)

This past week her blog introduced me to Jenny Holzer, a conceptual artist who had collected a set of maxims she called Truisms from 1979 to 1983. A truism, according to Merriam-Webster, is “an undoubted or self-evident truth; especially: one too obvious or unimportant for mention.” According to Holzer, it's her "Reader's Digest version of Western and Eastern thought."  I decided to take a look at a few of them.

There are several that start with “If” -- perhaps a good place to start:

                    if you aren't political your personal life should be exemplary

Well, I have never considered myself political, nor is my personal life exemplary. Moreover, in 2011 being "political" seems to be about being a bit contentious -- knowing more about "solutions" than I would ever claim to understand. So let's think about exemplary.

May Sarton, in her later books A House by the Sea or  Encore, a Journal of the 80th Year,  wrote warmly of friends who lived “exemplary lives” – a phrase I deeply admired at the time, and a category where I did not belong. I’m just a simple trudger, a laborer in the vineyards, trying to meet the next deadline, get the garden planned and planted, the meals prepared – oh, and if I have a little extra time, help with a local fundraiser. But crusading with a passion? Dropping everything to save humanity? Hard to know where to begin.

Jump to a New York Times piece this past September about the resurrection of Kenyon College in Ohio. The article quoted Horace Mann, Kenyon’s first president (1859-59), in a statement from his 1859 commencement address that became the college motto:

Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

That would given anyone pause, but for me it evokes another memory. Early in my career, I worked with a number of  physicists, many of whom had earned graduate degrees with R. Victor Jones, now Robert L.Wallace Emeritus Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard. My colleagues  were advancing the frontiers of applied science, getting published in Phys. Rev. and the leading engineering journals, doing interesting work, making good salaries, raising children...  But every time they would bump into Vic, his greeting was always the same: “Hello (Tom or Ramon or Mike).  What have you done lately for world peace?”

Who of us can measure up?

111111

A MAGICAL DATE, a time of new beginning. It's what a friend has called the "sticks" season, when the leaves are (mostly) down, the plants are dying back (but not yet cut away) and the "bones" of the landscape are revealed.

A fast-moving storm pushed through with lots of wind and just a little rain -- enough to darken the ponds to a mirrored surface. The stream is flowing between the ponds and the lower pond shows the trees reaching down into the earth as well as up toward the sky. It's a time of reflection.

The change of air brought the temperature down from the mid-50s to 39, so it's a bit cool to sit out and contemplate the serene face that rests against a maple, just off the patio deck.

In the garden, aconitum napellus (monkshood, wolfsbane) is the last flower to bloom. It’s a time of pagan omens, with a haunting November full moon. The world moves widdershins, as the sun retreats. The afternoon daylight can no longer be saved, and darkness falls too soon. 

We'll plan to spend more time indoors, with warming fires, and pull out the recipes for soups and stews. November brings us down toward the winter solstice,  a time when the human spirit helps to bring back the sun.

BOUNTY

It's Labor Day, and time to make a special seasonal recipe: Todd English's August Tomato Tart. The recipe is in "The Olives Table", his wondrous collection of recipes from the Olives Restaurant, and he warns that this dish  "should be made only when beefsteak tomatoes are at their peak, in August and September. "

Beefsteaks are Jack's go-to tomato. He'll chop three or four of them, add some cucumber, and mix with balsamic vinegar and a little olive oil, salt and pepper. That's lunch.  And the garden is swimming in tomatoes.

Todd makes his tart in a cast-iron skillet, which gives a great crisp crust. Lacking the right skillet, I use an old standby pie dish. On the stovetop, I start by sauteing chopped bacon, then thin sliced red onion with some crushed garlic cloves.  I harvest fresh rosemary, mint, and basil from pots on the patio, chop the herbs together.  Then I turn on the oven and assemble the pie: I partially bake the crust, spread sauteed bacon and onions on the bottom, add the sliced tomatoes, sprinkle the herbs along with salt and pepper, then crumble feta cheese across the top. In just ten minutes, the autumn feast is ready.

Oil-cured black olives would also be good -- maybe next time!