Rio Celeste and Volcan Tenorio

In Costa Rica, south of Lake Nicaragua, a series of volcanos dot the landscape from the northwest to the southeast. One of those is the triple-humped Volcan Tenorio, famous as the headwaters for the Rio Celeste.  A sulfurous vent and calcium carbonate cause the river to run an opalescent blue.  We hiked up into the cloud forest to the catarata, past blue lakes and bubbling hot springs.  To the strange place where a white vein of mineral slashes across the crystal clear river.  There the river is shocked immediately into its unlikely shade of blue.

click on any picture to enlarge

The Love Note to 2014: February 16 to March 10

February 16 to March 10:

I love words.

These baskets woven of sound - these containers for some nugget that we have cut from the stream of our thinking.  We click and hiss and hammer the air and another brain catches our thoughts.

I love the murmur of a place where people gather - air vibrating as these woven baskets and their cargoes of meanings move among minds.

I love that humans play with this elaborately crazy adaptation - we joke, we sing, we pun.

I love to travel to places visited long ago.  To see the peaks of Olympus rising above the Puget Sound and think, "Oh, I'd forgotten how they loom over the city in light like this."  To see old friends who are sudden years farther down their paths and have them see me.  To replace memories that are tattered, blurred and incomplete, with new ones.

I love when memories of place get crossed - the drizzle of Seattle so exactly like the soft rain of Cork.  

I love to travel to places new.  In Costa Rica, there is a place upon the skirt of a volcano where a little seam of white turns a river an opalescent blue.  And markets where the fruit is strange and the seller must explain what parts to eat - tomate de palo, cas, manzana de agua, rambutan . . .

Anatomy of a Long Day

February 27:
I wake up in the morning in a house perched upon a hillside.  It is Mercer Island in Seattle's Lake Washington, and I am staying with old friends, Jordan and Susan.  We were housemates 20-odd years ago, when Jordan was trying to be both artist and anthropologist.  (He's an artist now.)  Beyond the far shore the peaks of the Olympic peninsula loom among clouds.  Every evening Jordan soaks some steel-cut oats and in the morning cooks them with dried fruits and nuts.  Susan has already gone off to work at  a school district to the north.  There is fresh coffee in the pot, and I eat my share of the oatmeal.

I'm here to work - on a week's sojourn in Washington state talking to people about taxation, government, community and such things.  The first two days I did a few longer sit-down interviews and walked the parks on Lake Washington talking to the young immigrants and others who were enjoying the rare sunny day.  But today, I don't have any appointments lined up, so I load my equipment into the car: a small video camera on a tripod, a pair of maps, a little black notebook and a laptop computer.

I drive southward, finding the 515.  I stop somewhere near the town of Kent in a land of strip malls and franchises.  I find a pair of African American women sitting in their car waiting for a Chinese mechanic.  They don't want to be taped, but I talk with them - about what it means to be a single-mother Black woman in Washington state, about taxes and community, and the priorities of the powers-that-be, about what might change and what won't.  After 20 minutes of so, when their mechanic arrives I thank them and leave.  I step into a vacuum repair store, but the proprietor won't talk to me, and a leather store where the proprietor's Mexican brother is willing to talk, though he knows little enough about Washington state.  I spend a quarter of an hour in a nail salon.  (The old Vietnamese woman who owns the place tries to destroy my camera with a glare, but when I close it up she ignores me and returns to giving the manicure.)  A Black girl with indigo toenails and a young Mexican couple with a toddler talk with me about the state and about taxes and jobs and getting going in life.

Soon I am driving further south.  Route 515 has ended, but with the Cascades on one side and Puget Sound on the other there is only so lost I can get.  I come across a large and bustling community college, where the guard seems uninterested in me.  I first interview a half dozen Danish students, but their take on things is pretty irrelevant to the task at hand.  A pair of landscapers are willing to talk and I video tape a chat with an Alaskan Vietnam vet, who's been in Washington since the 70's.  And I talk to a pair of friends sitting by a fountain - one Black one White - neither of whom seem particularly bright, but that's a demographic, too.  I get a trio of students - one African American, one half and half Italian, and a half-Anglo-half-Mexicano.  They are sharp and articulate and trying to find a way in a society more or less indifferent, if not hostile to their success.  It's a good, long, rich, far-ranging interview there in the bustling center of the college.  They take me into the main building to introduce me to others who'd have something to say, but I have to move on after some brief, polite interrogations.

Down out of the hills I find the run-down center of Auburn.  A construction crew is tearing up the central avenue because of some water main issue.  I interview a conservative union contractor outside of a bar where he'd stepped out to have a smoke.  I interview a liberal man out walking his dog.  But I'm hungry now, and a local woman directs me to a Vietnamese restaurant.  I have a soup and a mango bubble tea with black tapioca pearls in the bottom.

I get back on the road to Tacoma.  I walk the streets of Tacoma.  I shoot some video of the port across the river mouth - with its piers and ships and billowing smokestacks.  I'm pleased by some shots with a curious gull in the foreground.  I'm not finding many people to interview.  A parking attendant, a quartet of state workers on a smoke break, but the conversations are brief.  Probably I'm done for the day.  The ability to charm or cajole a person into a spontaneous conversation with a stranger is a delicate thing, and once that ability falls away, there is little chance of gathering useful data.

In any case, I need to offload my video and write down my notes for the ones that weren't taped.  I stop in a cafe in Des Moines for a couple of hours.  I drink a peppermint tea and tip the high school girls 5 dollars for letting me work there in peace.  I drive back north along highway 99 toward Seattle - past all the seaside industry.

I find my way to Freemark Abbey upon Phinney Ridge, where a poetry reading is scheduled.  An old friend has a new book out and she is reading from it tonight with some other poets. (There's a conference of writers in town.)  I know it must be 15 years since I saw her last, because I remember showing her my son Porter as a babe in arms.  She's surprised to see me there on the corner outside.  I can't stay long - but enough to hold hands and stare at each other and marvel at the trajectories of life.

There is another reading across town I've promised to go to - friend I've known since high school.  There is nowhere to park near the bar where he is reading poetry.  I drive around for a while until I settle on a little pay parking lot, buy my coupon, lock up and go off in search of the place.  It’s a gallery actually, but move down past the art and there is a bar in the back.  A beautiful woman with olive skin and a black dress is reading the last couple of her poems, and I settle in with a glass of red wine.  The poets read and I listen.

Afterwards, we go out for dinner and conversation - a couple of poets, a publisher and his wife, and another woman.  The first restaurant we try is packed, but upstairs is the Tin Table.  (Across the corridor is a hall filled with a swirling mass of dancers -- every age sweating and spinning, coming out in the hallway to cool off and stretch.  The sound of swing music reverberates.) This restaurant doesn't have any tables either, but they settle us in a rough circle of easy chairs.  They bring me grilled trout and my friend has wild boar sausages and we split a bottle of Verducchio.

When it is time to go my friend and I walk the couple of blocks to where my jeep in parked.  As I go to unlock the door, it takes me a moment to comprehend what I am seeing - that there is a glittering constellation of glass all over the back seat.  When I comprehend it, I mutter to my friend that someone has smashed in the window.  He curses and curses again when I tell him that the thief took my camera, laptop and all the video that I shot over the past three days.  I set about picking up glass that has fallen onto the front seat, mentally going through the inventory of things that are gone.

He asks me if I want to scream, but I don't want to scream.  I'm annoyed that I parked in such a dark corner, and that so much of the past days' work is lost.  But it has been more than 25 years since I've been robbed.  In that time I have intentionally not worried myself and I have trusted much and taken my chances.  That seems like a pretty good deal.  My coat and gloves are gone, though the thief left the second-hand novels that I'd bought for the plane.  The thick purple straw from the bubble tea is gone -- along with most of what I'd left there from lunchtime.  My friend takes pictures of the damage and talks to the police about how to report the crime.  But it is nearly midnight and there is nothing that a police officer could do tonight.  I will file the report tomorrow.

I take my friend back to his lodgings, and drive out across the bridge toward Mercer Island.  The open back window creates a throbbing, reverberation in the car that threatens to give me a headache.  But the day is nearly over.

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Winter sunshine

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I'm lying on my back on a sled by the climbing tree.  My jacket is under my head as a pillow.  The sun, which heaves itself a little higher every day, is warm on my face.  Today is one of those outrageous lapis lazuli skies.  A foot and more of snow is on the ground.  The frantic flocks of birds that were zipping and flitting and fretting around the bird feeders in yesterday's snowstorm are gone.  I'm staring up at the dapper nuthatches that are scampering in the branches.  Chickadees and titmice make occasional flights to the bird feeders for a sunflower seed.  A tiny, cryptic brown creeper is also poking around in the lichen and bark crevices.  I watch him work his way out the branch I'm under until my neck gets tired and I turn back to face the sun.

The wind occasionally sweeps down cascades of tiny, sparkling ice crystals, which fall upon my face and hands.  A downy woodpecker taps on a branch at the top of the tree.  Monica pops her head out and asks if I'm sunbathing.  She laughs and snaps a picture of me to show her sister in Costa Rica how we do things up north.  The sun feels so warm, but every breath is a little cloud of fog that the breeze takes away.  The tree is getting busier.  A half dozen goldfinches are at a feeder, a cardinal, a couple of juncos, a pair of blue jays pass through.  The wind is picking up and I see a glimpse of a fast hawk riding it southward.

When I lived in San Diego I would say sometimes that I missed winter, but people thought I was just being contrarian.  San Diego is a city made up of people who didn't like the winters back wherever it was they came from.

When I left southern California to spend a couple of years in the former Soviet Union, I thought the Russians at least would be a bit more stoic about the cold.  But it turns out that just as San Diego is as far south as US winter-haters can flee without becoming Mexican -- Almaty is as far south as Soviets can flee before the mountains rear up in a retaining wall of ice and snow.  Almatians are, for the most part, not lovers of the winter months.  They just haven't been as successful in their escape as San Diegans.

When I moved to Maine I found people who take winter in stride.  I suppose people who don't like winter have mostly moved to the San Diegos of the world or done themselves in in some bleak January.  The remnants who successfully live in the north seem to get out into what sun there is, and are not trapped by cold and ice . . . .

An upper branch of one of the trees drops a fist-sized clump of snow onto my chest, and I decide it's time to go inside.  Our mailbox was been knocked off by the snowplows and I need to rummage around in my shop for hardware to re-mount it.

The Love Note to 2014, February 9-15

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I love a breakfast of sourdough bread, warm and with butter,

and black, black coffee.

I love how sunlight ricochets from icicles,

how snow etches itself upon the twisty trunks of sassafras.

I love our winter wren whose summer song bursts out in delusion or denial,

the noisy jays of winter, who'll go quiet as the summer nears,

their sudden alarms that scatter other birds like shrapnel.

The Love Note to 2014 - February 2nd to 8th

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I love the collaboration of ink and pen and paper.

I love the heft of leather-bound journal
when it's time to trek and travel.

I love maps,
and a journal that is a cartography of living

an inked approximation of place - moment - memory.

and empty pages
that are as smooth as possibility.

Snow Day

The Love Note to 2014, January 26th to the 1st of February

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I love:
the creak of leather,
its acceptance and resistance to all the twists of use,
this wisdom, which old leather has accrued.

I love:
cotton, worn to ghostly softness, before the fibers part.

I love that scientists admitted umami, a savory fifth taste upon the tongue alongside sweet, bitter, sour, salt.

I love the clumsiness of talk of tastes and flavors,
a language to be made that we've not made yet,
but which Monica speaks so wordlessly.

Bushy Beard lichen - Usnea strigosa

Read the rest below . . .

_

I'm not a very consistent feeder of the birds - but it's been cold these last weeks.  I rummaged in my shop to find the feeders that I'd never gotten around to cleaning - and hung them up filled with black oil sunflower seeds.

It didn't take long for the customers to arrive.  Black-eyed juncos by the dozen and the white-throated sparrows that travel with them.  The occasional song sparrow or fox sparrow or tree sparrow will scratch on the ground with them.  Alighting on the feeders are the white-breasted nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, black-capped chickadees and tufted titmice.  They all scatter when the larger red-bellied woodpecker crashes in.  Among the chipping of the sparrows I also hear the slide-whistle call of the goldfinches.  A couple of house finches squabble with them.  A half dozen pairs of cardinals brighten up the snowy scene.  A carolina wren makes an appearance.  The tiny brown creeper ignores the feeders, but seems to like the bustle of birds flying all about.  It does its thing, creeping around the bark poking in the crevasses.  Blue jays show up occasionally in loud gangs - as do the mourning doves.  I was surprised yesterday to see a male Eastern Towhee scratching with the juncos under the bare lilac.  He should be off in his southern ranges far to the south.

I'll spend this 25 pound bag of sunflower seeds to see the birds through the worst of the cold - and a smaller bag of thistle seed for the goldfinches - but after that I think they're on their own again . . . .

UPDATE, Feb 5th

A hairy woodpecker came by today, and Monica said there were a few red-winged blackbirds joining.  The little brown creeper comes by every day.  But filling up the three feeders and scattering around a few handfuls used up the last of the 25 lb. bag.  There was eight inches of snow on the ground, though this evening's rain will have turned that to a few inches of slush.  Still, I may have to see about getting another bag.

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The forest reclaims the ruins

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A comment I left over at the Archdruid Report:

I was hiking today in the Rhode Island woods and it got me to thinking about our stories of progress. I think one of the reasons that the hegemony of Progress never quite gained full hold on me has to do with walks like this. The Pocono mountains where I spent summers as a child - like the Rhode Island woods - are filled with the remains of old farms and houses, tanneries, quarries and forgotten cemeteries. You may feel like you are walking in the forest primeval, but then you notice a few scraggling branches of lilac and an elderly apple tree. Poke around and you are certain to find the foundations of a cellar overgrown. Obviously, these abandoned places could be folded into the story of Progress, but for me they never were. They didn’t give me an alternate story really, but I think they created a productive dissonance to the stories that I was being told.

Updated with the Archdruid's response:

Andy, fascinating. It occurs to me that frequent childhood trips to the Gray's Harbor area of Washington's Pacific coast, where rotting pilings from long-defunct canneries stick up out of the water like decayed teeth and the ruins of dead factories are nearly as common as they are here in the Rust Belt, may have played a similar role in the shaping of my imagination.

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Hiking to Phantom Bog

Swamps along the Pawcatuck river

Judging by the oak trees, it's been at least a century since the woods behind our house was pasture.  Those days left behind the innumerable stone walls that criss-cross the forest.  Today I hiked back through them.  The temperature was dropping through the mid-twenties, but the breeze was light.  A new layer of snow was fresh from last night, but not deep.  

A single holly berry

Once you cross the low wall that bounds our property it's not long before you come to another wall and then another.  There's a small stream that runs to the southwest, and although the water is little more than a trickle, it creates a broad, swampy swale of green briar, pepper bush and other shrubs that make crossing though a chore.  

Tracks of a fisher cat?

I've never settled on a singular path or cleared one for myself, and often enough I just drift to the southwest until I eventually come to the dirt road that cuts between highway 91 and the railroad tracks. Today I drifted as far as an old foundation I know about - it's marked by a young holly tree - but then just cut through the swampy woods.

The snow showed the tracks of the local creatures -- deer, fox, gray squirrel, coyote.  And down the ice-covered stream itself ran the trail of a fisher cat, I believe.  (It might have been an otter, but there was no sign of any dragging tail.)

I crossed the swale without too much trouble, and continued through the woods to the head of a shallow gravel and sand quarry.  A good place for a snowy owl to hunt, but alas there were nothing but blue jays.  At the mouth of the quarry is that dirt road, which offers access to the railroad tracks, but also bends northeastward to parallel them for a stretch.

Ice in the gravel quarry.

John Weeden Barber, died 1852, aged 5 months and 26 days.

I followed it for a few hundred yards to where it forks again, turning leftward up into the forest or rightward down to the tracks.  If you turn right and cross the tracks there you might be able to spot an unpromising footpath that disappears into the woods.  As far as I know it's mostly used by hunters, though someone had once opened it enough for a four wheeler, perhaps to get to the old cemetery that is hidden down there. Or maybe it was fishermen using the trail as a back way to one of their camps down on the Pawcatuck river. 

Remains of a well.

No one has been keeping the trail open recently, however, and scrub oak has collapsed down onto much of it.  Even the deer had given it up, and only coyote prints were upon it.  I persevered to where the land rises and there is a clearing with the remains of an old farm.  The foundations of the house and barn and a hand-dug well mark the edges of a grassy glade.  Pitch pines grow around it surrounded on two sides by swamps and on the third by the river.  It seems an unlikely spot to farm.

Still, it is a pretty place.  To the north there is open water and beaver-felled trees.  This time of year the beavers themselves are cozy within their lodges.  If the lake has a name I've never seen it on any map.  I suppose it may be the northmost extent of Phantom Bog, which surrounds this bend of the Pawcatuck and reaches down Poquiant Brook toward Watchaug Pond.  On this day, the water was iced over and quiet.  Only the little kinglets that live in these stands of pine made any sound at all.

I didn't take the trail back, choosing to trust the deer paths wherever the forest wasn't open.  A single deer can take you into any kind of difficulty, but a well worn deer path always avoids the worst thickets and stands of greenbriar. Their browsing even prunes back what little there is.  The snow has been on the ground for nearly a week, so it was easy to see their favored paths.

I zigged and zagged, because the deer don't always go where you'd like them to, but the hazy winter sun stayed to my left and I wasn't in much danger of getting lost.  I came to the railroad tracks at the quarry mouth and walked back the road toward home.  A flock of robins and a lone hermit thrush kept me company.

Francis Lee Greene, died 1876, age 14

I love January - 19th to 25th

-

I love a joke well-told.

I love the solving of a riddle, that moment when the rigid, false facade collapses and an unexpected figure strides smiling forth.

I love:

the migration of birds

the orioles squabbling in Costa Rican palms while juncos forfeit their taiga to claim these rich south woods of winter.

the dormancy of things that stay - creatures burrowed deep to sleep.

the fierce biding of stemless roots and leafless twigs.

the genius of a queen bee, hot within her cluster, sipping summer's honey.





 . . . The whole love poem below the fold . . .

Between the sea and Ninigret pond

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There was a steady, cold rain falling as we arrived at East Beach.  Monica was supposedly leading a hike for the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center, but we weren't expecting anyone to join us.  A light breeze was moving great bands of torn black cloud from south to north.  But Monica had brought a huge black umbrella, and I wore my broad brimmed hat, and we were determined to walk.  My resolve to get out into the woods every week had failed me for too long already.  There's an irruption of snowy owls along the southern New England coast, and we weren't going to catch a glimpse of one by staying inside.

The southern Rhode Island coastline from Watch Hill to Point Judith is made up of salt lagoons separated from the sea by narrow barrier beaches.  Ninigret pond is the largest of these lagoons, and East Beach conservation area - an undeveloped stretch of coastline - bounds it for three miles from Blue Shutters beach to the Charlestown breachway.

We walked east northeast along the sandy, unpaved jeep trail through a low forest of pine.  The rain upon needles sounded like sleet, and felt like sleet on the skin, but it was liquid enough.  Juncos, chickadees, sparrows and yellow-rumped warblers flitted around the underbrush.  A downy woodpecker chittered to itself as it poked in the bark.  A red squirrel fled across in front of us.  Deer had left deep tracks in the rain-wet sand.  The crash of surf seemed odd to hear as I walked among pine trees.

After a couple of miles we crossed the dunes to the beach, and continued further.  The graceful gulls of summer are all gone, leaving dour Herring gulls and their larger cousins the Great Black-Backed gulls.  A few rafts of eider and maybe scoters bobbed up and down on the swells beyond the surf.  We didn't walk all the way to the breachway.  In the mist it kept retreating.  And in any case five miles on sand is hard work for a Saturday morning.  As we hiked back along the wrack line, my wet, cotton pants gripped my knees icily.  But every shell, stone and crab carapace upon the sand glistened with vibrant color and glossy texture in the stormish light.

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More winter loves, January 12-18

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I love that moment when a friend averts their eyes - to gather the threads of the story they intend to tell -  and we lean in to catch it.

I love the resonance of raindrops doinking gently on my black and broad-brimmed Amish hat.

I love that toads live in our cellar - warty house guards who take crickets and bring good luck - or so I'm happy to believe.

I love the eight-eyed spiders who stalk prey in high corners and leave no cobweb behind.  Jumping spiders - too quick - I love their way of moving - jerky little teleports.

I love the sunbeam that re-makes a room to a sudden work of art.  I love my wife's drowsy, feline pleasure in the warmth of slanting sunshine.

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A week of winter loves

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We can lament the time-wasting aspects of life on-line - but I'm linked with a far-flung circle of friends and phantasms though facebook posts and bloggings.   One of these friends passed on a new year's idea for keeping a jar and every day slipping in a note about something good that happened - so at some point you can empty that jar like a piggy bank of happy moments.  Another friend came to a poem exchange with Stephen Dunn's Loves, in which he rambles on and on about the things he loves.

I thought I would try to combine those ideas, and every day write down a single thing that I love.  At the end of the year, I might have the draft of a mighty poem - or at least I'll have had another tool to chip away at pessimism and distraction.  Here's a first installment.

A week of loves . . . January 5 - 11 . . .

I love the cold so bitingly mad that wind-tossed branches clack together as metal rods.  I love the mist-drizzle needles' subcutaneous dance in the blood-heat of my cheeks.  I love the gray, wet, chill air, which can be snatched away like a magician-scarf to shock me into knowing light and sun-warmth.

I love the arrogance of chickadees and tufted titmice - tiny, feathered, fearless, dinosaurian.

I love the skepticism of cats.

I love how Irish stout will not be rushed - whose churn from foamy brown to velvet black forces one to wait and contemplate.

I love the victory of laughter over shyness.

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Six degrees below zero

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It was bitter cold this morning - six degrees below zero as the sun came up.  

I own a pair of boots that I wear only a few days each winter - usually when I shovel snow.  Even with their thick woolen inserts they fit too loosely for walking far - unless I wear wool socks as well.  I own this pair of boots for the rare morning like this one.

wintering hives

The snow is a dust that has forgotten it was ever water.

The rhododendron leaves have drawn themselves down in tight coils, as if the plant were squinting against the cold.  

The only tracks across the whiteness are from birds among the weed-tops and a lone deer, who browsed a long path through the yard, nibbling cedar and pruning the cherry.  

I can hear a woodpecker pounding dully on the oaks.

I'll put out birdseed, which I haven't done yet this winter, but this is the kind of cold that can kill even the juncos and chickadees if their energies fail.  

And I'll sweep the little drifts from the beehive entrances, though no bee is going to try to venture out.

tree shadows on the snow

A Tarot Reading for 2014

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A commenter noted that my predictions from New Year's Eve, were kind of depressing.  Of course, any good pessimist can always simply claim to be a realist.  And I do.

But if I'm being honest, I also admit that I have a superstitious reluctance to make rosy and optimistic predictions, especially about my life or the lives of people I care about.  There's an old and well-established tradition that talking with confidence about future good things will "jinx" them.  It's a tradition that is alive and well in my own upbringing.

If I were just a little more superstitious I could avert the problem by humbly knocking on wood. 

I don't "believe" in such things intellectually.  It seems preposterous to me that the universe at large would care if I get hubristic in my pronouncements about good things coming my way.  On the other hand I do "believe" such things in the sense that the reluctance exists and persists in me.  (Sometimes, in fact, my intellect will relent and allow the superstitious part of me knock on wood for a tiny dose of irrational peace of mind.)

A time tested way to get around this problem is to consult an oracle, so this morning I cast the cards for a New Year's reading.  This is how they fell:

It's my familiar deck, the Mythic Tarot, cast in a traditional Celtic Cross. 

The significator is Strength, with the Three of Pentacles as the crossing card.  This indicates that our strength is being blocked by the things we have created in the material world - our own success and prosperity.  As we try to understand this conflict at the conscious level, the crowning card is the Six of Cups, a card that symbolizes looking back and dwelling upon the past - while in the position of the more unconscious base of the matter is the Four of Pentacles, the miser card.  By focusing on the past rather than the  future, and trying irrationally to hold onto what we have, we thwart our own strength.

The card of where we've been is the Queen of Swords, which is the powerful, but uncomfortable blending of icy intellect, emotion and the grounding of the feminine.  In the position of where we are going is the Two of Pentacles, which is the card of getting down to work and creating something in the world.

The resource card is the Ace of Wands, which is the inexhaustible fire of creativity and passion that gives energy and drive to action.  It is a card without preconceptions, but only the desire to create something.  The next card is how the situation is seen by others.  In this case the Seven of Pentacles represents the challenge of making decisions - of forethought and planning.  So while the common view is that we have choices to make, the reading as a whole puts the emphasis less on planning and selecting options, and more on inventing and doing.  

The hopes and fears card is the Queen of Cups - who symbolizes a more integrated, but also more limited or focused way of being than her counterpart the Queen of Swords.  The Queen of Cups experiences and embodies her emotions and the slippery element of water, where the Queen of Swords manages it all through intellect and control.  In this contrast, there is hope and reluctance to set aside some of the directing force of reason in favor of emotional depth and honesty.

The outcome card is the Nine of Pentacles, which is a card of material prosperity and reward for work and effort.

If I wanted to offer an antidote to the intellectual pessimism of yesterdays predictions, I couldn't have asked for a more straightforward and complementary reading.  As I said yesterday, I don't believe that 2014 is the year that we begin to honestly tackle the problems of our unsustainable ways of living.  But in its inimitable, affirming way, the tarot lays out the case that as we eventually come to extricate ourselves from the material and intellectual pitfalls we have fallen into, we have the resources and the clarity of motivation to invent for ourselves a new, satisfying way of living.

That's why, in spite of my reasoned pessimism about where our civilization is trending - I still raise a family, learn to keep bees, travel, make plans and make friends.

Happy New Year, people!

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The Year to Be - Nine Predictions for 2014

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Medellin, Colombia

As the physicist once said, prediction is hard, especially about the future.  But as the New Year is about to open, I think I'll try my hand at this fools' game.

In general, I think 2014 will continue a time of great caution and lack of vision among those who hold political and social power.

Japan

The status quo has become more brittle due to a bundle of interrelated issues including,

the over-exploitation of the seas, soils and biosphere

the destabilization of the climate

the plateauing of fossil fuel production

the impending cresting of economic growth

the dissatisfaction of global publics who cannot be allowed democracy or democratic discourse

and last but not least, the dishonesty and intellectual bankruptcy of the cult of Progress and infinite growth.

Paradoxically, the very fragility of the status quo, the lack of imaginable alternatives, and the fact that no one wants to overturn the boat, mean that we will muddle along without much in the way of change this year.  Still, things will happen, and here are nine predictions I'm willing to make . . .

Caldas, Colombia

Tokyo, Japan

• In US politics, Republicans will spend another couple of months convincing people that their greedy insurance companies are actually Obamacare, before they pivot and take credit for all of the things that are popular about the program.   

• Democrats will get some credit for successfully pushing for minimum wage increases, and Republicans will mostly get out of the way eventually.  Life will improve slightly for millions of people and small businesses.

• Having disappeared almost entirely from the political and media discourse, climate change will be back in the news as hot weather, drought, and sea level rise continue to intensify.  Notably, it will be treated not as a problem to be solved, but rather as an inevitability that must be adapted to.  The solution that dare not speak its name (i.e. changing our way of living) will continue to be tabu.

Quito, Ecuador

• Among the Chinese, there will be unrest in 2014 stemming from ecological degradation -- especially pollution in the air, soil and food.  The Chinese government will react by purging some high-profile officials and when that doesn't settle things, it will look for a pretext to stir up the distraction of a nativist backlash against the Japanese, Tibetans or Uighurs. 

• Energy production will limp along at a plateau, just enough to keep the global economy sputtering, while food prices will be kept just low enough to avoid riots and revolutions.  Predictors of doom and predictors of a new prosperity will both be disappointed.

• On the tech front, Google Glass and smart watches will fail to extend their reach beyond the chic geek digerati.  But late in the year there will be the first incarnations of true digital assistants - programs that can adapt to individuals and manage their social networking and digital connectivity.  The nimbler of the telecoms will get on board and start working on these new digital PA's.

Quito, Ecuador

• The Sochi Olympics will be a fiasco impressive even by Russian standards.  The one upside being that few people will go in person so the inadequacies and brutalities of the effort won't become as notorious as they might have.

• One of the world's great monoculture crops will mostly fail this year.  Although this will be blamed on a new pest or blight, the failure will actually be due to a combination of narrow genetics, unstable climate and the decline in agricultural research.

• On the global spiritual front, the push by Pope Francis for a more modest, non-consumerist and even ascetic spirituality will be echoed in popular movements within religions around the world, including evangelicals, muslims and others.  Governments will be unsettled and ambivalent about this development.

Rhode Island, US

So, if there is still an internet at the end of 2014, I will revisit these predictions and we can see how prescient I was or wasn't . . .
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Christmas 2013

(click on the pictures for a better view)

The family gathers at my parents' house in Pennsylvania.

Each Christmas eve, Porter and I cut a hemlock that can serve as a Christmas tree.  After years of harvesting the prettier ones, we have to scour the property for the least scraggly.  But in comparison to the famous random-boughs-wired-together Christmas tree of years past, any respectable hemlock crown is welcome.


The decorations are brought down from the attic.  My sister Chris and Nico string the lights, and gradually the decorations fill in.  This year, Bridget (age 5) has mastered the scissors, and she and Porter and Chris added varied attempts at paper snowflakes.

A gingerbread house for Santa

My brother-in-law Eric baked and helped the kids construct the gingerbread house for Santa to enjoy on his visit.  They did the decorating on their own.

My sister Chris took the dough that had been rising by the wood stove and made pizzas for the evening meal.  People would disappear with wrapping paper and scotch tape, and gradually the floor under the tree gathered its burden of presents.

As the night deepened we settled in the living room with song sheets and enacted the annual butchering of the carols.  Occasionally, one of the more skilled singers (Fred or Nico or Eric) could keep us more or less in key, but more often things devolved quickly.  We're getting better, I think.

The kids were sent off to bed, and more gifts accumulated.  We've reduced the presents among the adults with a "secret santa" system, but for the kids it's still a free for all.

No one had thought to stock up on wrapping paper, but fortunately my father always saves the Sunday funnies for that purpose.

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By tradition, on Christmas morning, the kids can empty the stockings that Santa has filled, but the presents under the tree have to wait until after breakfast.  Usually this results in some aggressive rousting of slugabeds, who may be lacking caffeine or holiday spirit.  But this year, Bridget and Leo were the ones to sleep in - to after 8 a.m.!

Nico and the tree

Porter had brought stacks of Alberto's arepas from California, and they were the basis of the un-rushed breakfast - with eggs and cheese.

Afterward, the gifts were distributed with much ado, and everyone had new toys.

The Christmas hemlock

Santa demolished the gingerbread house, but left a note

Salting the arepa properly

A sharp-shinned hawk got a titmouse from the feeder

Grandpa helping Leo unwrap a toy truck

Gathering for the Christmas feast