Golden Songbook

Hey Diddle Diddle,
The Cat and the Fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon.

The little dog laughed to see
Such sport
And the dish ran away with the spoon, spoon, spoon,
The dish ran away with the spoon.

-Mother Goose

Did your mother sit next to you on the piano bench at the
upright piano in the dining room in the house
on Oak Ridge Avenue and play this song?
Mine did.

It was before she bought the Beckenstein from the woman
down the street.
I remember the light that shone on the book as she played
and how she was able to reach forward and turn the page and not miss a beat. She would give it a swift pull and over it would go.

I always wondered about the words to this song. So much going on!
Never underestimate the power of a full moon!

Happy New Year's Eve everyone!

look up

Winter

Clouded with snow
The cold winds blow,
And shrill on leafless bough
The robin with its burning breast
Alone sings now.

The rayless sun,
Day's journey done,
Sheds its last ebbing light
On fields in leagues of beauty spread
Unearthly white.

Thick draws the dark,
And spark by spark,
The frost-fires kindle, and soon
Over that sea of frozen foam
Floats the white moon.

- Walter de la Mare --

once in a blue moon

A full moon occurs every 29.5 days, and most years have 12. On average, an extra full moon in a month — a blue moon — occurs every 2.5 years. The last time there was a lunar double take was in May 2007. New Year's Eve blue moons are rarer, occurring every 19 years. The last time was in 1990; the next one won't come again until 2028.

blessing

Beannacht
(Gaelic Blessing)
by John O'Donohue

On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.

And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The grey window
And the ghost of loss
Gets into you,
May a flock of colors,
Indigo, red, green
And azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
In the curragh of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.

e-card

the shortest day

Happy Solstice everyone. Shortest day of the year. First day of winter. How will we ever make it through?

I wrote the previous post in the six am pre dawn light with wood stove warming the room, dog at my feet and a cup of tea at the ready.

Now it is evening. Today I have faced crowded parking lots that have been reduced to half their original size due to the piles of snow placed there by plows. I have seen a car with the passenger window shattered due to a slow motion slide right into a tree. I have received a series of calls from Carrie at Penn Station as she waited to see if she would get on a Boston bound train at all in New York City where everything is delayed. I have had a call from Eliza who faced low visibility due to high winds and blowing snow on the Mass Pike as she headed west for an interview. I have seen the UPS truck back up our driveway, hoping it would not get stuck and block my car in. The driver left his customary two dog biscuits next to the package in hopes that someday Calley would not bark bloody murder every time he comes. I have driven south to the train station on Rt 128 this evening with cars zooming by me in the "break down" lane, which Boston drivers appear to have turned into a "fast" lane. It is wild out there. People are crazed. Snow doesn't help these situations.

Everyone has made it home safely but tomorrow is another day in the count down to Christmas. Safe travels to all as you navigate this crazy time of year. As for my earlier meditation, its reality will come. Maybe at the end of Christmas day when we can all finally relax.

white christmas

Looking at the temperatures for the week ahead, I think I can safely say we will have a white christmas here in New England.
Monday 30 degrees, Tuesday 26 degrees, Wednesday 31 degrees, Thursday 36 degrees.

This is good. It's not that I want to strap on skis and head for the hills or get on a toboggan and take a snow blinding ride down DeNormandie Hill, or put on skates and hope that the ice is indeed solidly frozen in the middle of Valley Pond. With the mercury at 12 degrees this morning, I barely want to open the door to let the dog out.

I like snow on Christmas because the known world is altered. The cars in our driveway are lumps of white. It will take some effort to get them cleared off to go anywhere. I walk slowly down the front path so as not to slip, I drive cautiously on the roads, not salted in Lincoln for environmental reasons, and check my brakes. In this fast paced world what else slows us down and makes us mindful of every step?

As for Christmas, that is the point. It is a time to stop and look around and notice family, friends, and the beauty of snow on the familiar maple at the end of the driveway. Snow is a wake up call. It is a reminder to stop and breath deeply. So is Christmas. So as we head to the finish line of December 25 this week, I hope you will all take time to enjoy the moment, the people around you, the ones you know and the ones you do not know. Rather than thinking of this holiday as a hassle of shopping, cooking and too many people, realize that Christmas is a gift we do not choose. The calendar brings it to us every year, like it or not. Open it with care. We will be zooming into 2010 all too soon. If you blink, you might miss the beauty and power of the present moment.

Heat

It is below freezing here in New England. I searched for long underwear and my warmest gloves and hat before setting off for a walk with Calley yesterday. I had to walk on the roads, too. Ice and crunchy snow made it slow going in the woods. I resist this time of year. I don't like the cold as a general rule. These days, one of us makes a fire in the woodstove every morning. Thanks to David's vigilance in keeping a pile of wood and kindling by the dark green Jotul, I don't have to go outside. My shoulders relax as the heat begins to radiate out into the room.

The "Jotul" and David lived here for five years before I arrived. This house, which had only four rooms when he bought it, had a non-functioning hot-air furnace. On the cold day in January when he left his Cambridge apartment and moved out to Lincoln, he stopped at The Fireplace Shop at the Fresh Pond rotary and bought the little stove, put it in the back of "The Rumbler" (his green Rambler station wagon) and headed out Route 2. It was his sole source of heat for years.

Around the time I moved in, David installed a new furnace with a fan. We called it "the groaner." When we turned it on, the fan would groan like an animal in the basement. It sent hot air up through the floor registers (and ancestral dust circulated as well) until the air in the house hit a certain temperature; then it would switch off and the temperature in the house would plummet and the groaning would begin again. It was not an ideal heat system. On the November day that we brought baby Carrie home from the hospital, David made his first ever trip to the Burlington mall to buy an electic oil circulating heater from Sears to put next to her crib.

When the groaner finally croaked, we were tired of "fried air" and a drafty house. We invested in a hot water heat system which involved threading copper pipes through the walls that attached to heavy cast iron radiators and the most glorious thing of all: radiant heating in the kitchen floor. It barely mattered that we lived with holes in the sheet rock walls for years as a result of the pipe installation. The house was finally, evenly warm.

And yet, on a chilly winter morning or at the end of the day, there is nothing better than standing next to a wood stove to get deeply warm. So the Jotul is still the center of our attention when it is cold. And we are not the only ones who love it. As the green enamel begins to heat up, our brown dog Calley appears out of nowhere, circles a few times, curls up on the rug, and lets out a long, contented sigh.

papers

Hello Everyone,
Today I am sorting through a pile of interesting and not so interesting papers on my desk.
Emerson showed up. I'll pass this along to you.


Don't be too timid about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.

Be an opener of doors. Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

water fact

Only 1% of the world's water is fresh and unfrozen—and most of that is found in underground aquifers. Only 0.3% of the world's water is fresh surface water, including huge concentrations like the Great Lakes, the Amazon and Lake Baikal.

That's one reason scientists, environmentalists, ecologists and military planners all worry that water shortages could become a source of conflict in coming decades.

Birds are worried about it, too.

HOPE enhagen

It's a big week for international climate action. World Leaders, scientists, and activists are gathering in Copenhagen to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto treaty.

Here is a link to information on the climate summit from The Guardian.

And from the New York Times.

To keep our minds on the subject, below is a questionnaire from the Wall Street Journal sent to me by my brother Don. How is your climate literacy?

Listen up when reporting about this climate summit comes on the news this week. Don't turn that dial on the radio as you cruise around in your car! It is important that we all be educated on this subject. The President of the United States is attending. There has been a shift in attention and world leaders finally are paying attention.

Now for the quiz.

1. Household appliances and electric gadgets suck up lots of energy in standby mode just to keep the clock on and the machine ready to go at a moment's notice. In rough terms, the amount of electricity wasted that way in the U.S. each year is equivalent to the output of:

A. 0.8 nuclear power plants
B. 1.8 nuclear power plants
C. 8 nuclear power plants
D. 18 nuclear power plants

ANSWER: D. Scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimate as much as 10% of U.S. residential electricity use is lost in "standby power." That's about one-sixth of all the power produced by the 104-strong fleet of nuclear reactors in the U.S.

2. Worries about how to curb man-made greenhouse-gas emissions are now a driving force behind economic and foreign policy world-wide, as the current Copenhagen climate-change summit demonstrates, but how did it all get started? Who first described a link between man-made emissions, a greenhouse effect and rising global temperatures?

A. Joseph Fourier (1768-1830)
B. John Tyndall (1820-1893)
C. Lord Kelvin (1824-1907)
D. Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927)
E. Al Gore (1948- )

ANSWER: D. Fourier first proposed the idea of a "greenhouse effect." Tyndall first proved it was real, and the prestigious Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the U.K. is named after him. But Arrhenius was the first to link industrial activity, especially burning coal, to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—and to rising temperatures, though he initially expected that effect would take a few thousand years.

3. When it comes to emissions of greenhouse gases, most people know the biggest culprits: China and the U.S. Which three countries round out the top five?

A. Brazil
B. Mexico
C. South Korea
D. India
E. South Africa
F. Russia
G. Indonesia
H. Japan

ANSWER: G, A and D. Indonesia and Brazil have zoomed up the rankings due to the inclusion of tropical deforestation—not just industrial activity—in the tally. That's one reason people from investment bankers to think-tank types are becoming tree huggers: Preventing deforestation is seen as a relatively easy and cheap way to tackle a huge chunk of global emissions, though questions loom on enforcing forest-protection plans in remote places.

winter

Okay, we get the message. Winter is here. The days are getting shorter. Dark by 4pm! Today we woke to a covering of heavy snow that weighted down tree branches. As the sun came up, and the sky turned a dark blue, we reveled at the transformation of our known world into something else. It happens every year and yet we are still surprised.

As for the bell in the crab apple tree, I learned that from my mother who often put bells in trees both inside and out. Her beloved bougainvillea which thrived through forty New England winters donned a small bell and had ivy growing at it's base. The pink flowers were radiant inside as the snow fell outside. The bell in my crab tree was hers, surely she bought it on one of her many trips to the "Far East." The little tree outside my kitchen window has become a kind of shrine to my mother. I think of her as I gaze out the window at all times of year. The granite marker in the cemetary in Andover is cold stone. But a bell in a tree, steady through all the seasons, now that was my mother.

As for the august pine, now white with snow, that makes me think of my father! (in a good way!)

Thanksgiving

The sun finally came out today. It has been rainy and cold. But we are grateful! For our health, our homes, friendship, family, jobs, animals, the natural world. For smells, stars, gardens, the moon tonight and ancestors. For the eggs we collected this weekend from two separate family flocks here in Lincoln. For the walk through Lindentree Farm a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) now shut up tight for winter, hay on fields, tractors stored away.

The Thanksgiving feast is a meal comprised of ingredients that are from the local harvest. Cranberries are from bogs on Cape Cod, a free range turkey from Vermont, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, green beans, all from New England fields. This is how the early settlers ate. Ideally we should eat food that is grown locally, not foods shipped from around the globe. Food transportation is a contributer to global warming. Planes and trucks emit large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. It is also good to know where the food you eat comes from and the conditions under which it was grown and harvested. I recently watched the film Food, Inc so this on my mind.

One hundred years ago, an orange was a covetted Christmas gift (think of the books Little House in the Big Woods and Little Women) Now I understand why! An orange had to travel far to get there in the days when they only ate what they had canned or meat they had smoked. The burst of an orange in your mouth after months of stored food must have been amazing. We are lucky to have such variety available to us year round. But although the produce may look good, the taste is often a disappointment. I have decided not to buy tomatoes this winter. The taste is nothing like that of a warm, sweet August tomato picked off the vine. I'll settle for canned.

People are hungry. Food pantries are running out of food. I have never had to worry about whether I would have enough food to eat. For that I am grateful. I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving!

In the Boston Globe

cohousing
"A model for the future, with an eye to the past"

We don't hear much from the fourth "Moccasin Hillbilly" here on this site. He must be busy doing other things, like designing and building a cohousing project in New Hampshire. The architectural correspondent for the Boston Globe, Robert Campbell, wrote about the project in today's paper. I have attached a link to the article for those of you who may not get the Globe. I took the above photo last winter when the project was in construction, before landscaping.

Sugar Nymphs

Writing at the
Sugar Nymphs Bistro
Penasco, New Mexico

I climb into the back seat of Sarah’s car, buckle myself in between Edda and Eliza and we take off. After a rainy drive winding through the mountains we arrive at a low adobe building with a blinking sign out front. “Sugar Nymphs Bistro” draws us in. This is what I think of when I think of being a writer in a cafe. Soft guitar music plays as we enter. The sound of a child giggling at the next table is so quiet it does not disturb, just creates a sound track of comfort.

We are welcomed in by the blue winged angel on the counter, arms outstretched. A wooden rooster sits on top of the espresso machine and photographs by a local artist adorn the walls. Cakes on pedestals sit on a red counter next to a pumpkin pie and a tray of chocolate chip cookies the size of CDs. Dessert and drink choices are written in pink and green chalk on two blackboards on the wall. Green and pink steam floats above a chalk coffee cup.

I am surrounded by writers intent on their craft. Heads bowed, hands moving across the pages of their notebooks. The waitress delivers hot chocolate topped with thick whipped cream. Edda looks up from the page and with a spoon, skims off the white, coolness and slides it into her mouth. I look down at my triple layered carrot cake with the cream cheese frosting and decide to eat the whole thing. No one gets fat at the heaven cafe. Nathanael sips his hot chocolate and is deep in thought with far away eyes.

I am floating on a cafe cloud suspended in the air. Does this place really exist? Will I come searching another time to find a pile of tires and a stray dog?
Tomorrow I will leave this colony of writers and drive down the mountain and fly home to sea level. To the land of ordinary coffee shops selling pastries wrapped in cellophane. There will be no bistro on a mountain filled with writers I have come to know without having to say a word.

The bistro will be gone but the writing will continue. We are together in heaven’s cafe writing for eternity and we didn’t have to die to get here. Just breathe deeply, pick up a fast moving pen and write like your life depends on it. Because it does.



dedicated to Natalie Goldberg who drew us together from all directions and to my fellow writing students. thank you.

Fun on US 64

I don't think we are in Massachusetts anymore. We were on the second highest bridge in the US highway system. It spans a gash in the earth that is 650 deep down to the Rio Grande. Oh, the power of water. Anyone for a swim?

Fame

I am ten years old. My brother is in boarding school in Massachusetts so I can enter his room whenever I want to and go through his stuff. The top drawer of his desk smells of lead pencils, erasers and ink stained wood. A protractor, a jack knife, and a couple of marbles rattle as I push the drawer shut. Nothing interesting there. A wooden box with a hinged top holds his record player. I lift the lid, turn it on and place one of his precious 45’s on the turntable. I lower the needle and hear scratchy rock and roll. This isn’t fun when he isn’t around to tell me not to touch his records. I turn the dial to OFF and close the lid.

Finally I end up where I always do in John’s room; sitting in the brown velvet worry chair in the corner next to the bookshelf. Behind me are windows looking out to the garden below. I don’t know why it is called the worry chair. Little sisters don’t listen to the details of stories that parents tell at cocktail parties. From my spot in the chair, I reach over and run my finger along the row of matching book spines. Which volume will it be today? I stop at the last one; XYZ all in one book. I lean over to grab the last volume of the World Book Encyclopedia and pull it into my lap. “What if I read every blue and red volume? Would I know everything?”, I wondered. I open randomly. Eli Whitney invented something called the cotton gin. Black and white photographs accompany the article. One shows black men with bags over their shoulders picking cotton. Another shows a machine with gears.

I keep flipping. George Washington. I learned about him in school. Our first president. He couldn’t tell a lie. He admitted to chopping down a cherry tree. What's so bad about chopping down a tree, I wondered. That’s nothing compared to the time Gay Parker and I stole clip-on flower earrings from the 5 and 10 cent store on Springfield Avenue to use as barrettes for our dolls. Will I never be president because I lied to my mother when she found the garish accessories and asked me about them? I said they belonged to Mrs Parker, who was a Quaker. She must have known.

What does it take to be in the World Book Encyclopedia? I wondered if I would ever do something impressive enough. I read about women but they were mostly nurses, like Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale. Eleanor Roosevelt was in there, but she was married to a president. I didn’t expect to be married to a president and anyway, I wanted to be famous in my own right.

Maybe we all wonder how we will be remembered and even if we will be remembered after we are gone. Being in print is not the only way. Encyclopedias are gathering dust on shelves or have hit the land fills long ago. We are all famous to the people that matter. To the people we know. It is like making peace, it happens so often we can’t even keep track. It’s all a matter of showing up.

write

Why I Write

I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create fabric in a world that often appears black and white. I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue.

I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change. I write to honor beauty. I write to correspond with my friends. I write as a daily act of improvisation. I write because it creates my composure. I write myself out of my nightmares and into my dreams. I write to the questions that shatter my sleep.

I write to remember. I write to forget. I write as an act of faith. I write as an act of slowness. I write to record what I love in the face of loss.
I write as a bow to wilderness.

I write because I believe I can create a path in the darkness. I write as a witness to what I have seen. I write for the love of ideas. I write knowing words always fall short. I write as though I am whispering into the ear of someone I love.


-Terry Tempest Williams

Three chairs

"I had three chairs in my house;
one for solitude,
two for friendship,
three for society."

"In solitude, we grow like corn in the night.

Good friends elevate one another, they see
who the other can be as well as who they are.

Don't let unjust acts go unnoticed."

HD Thoreau
Walden

Aiming High

lapidary |ˈlapəˌderē|
adjective
(of language) engraved on or suitable for engraving on stone and therefore elegant and concise : a lapidary statement.

I certainly try.
Thanks, Robin.

All Hallow's Eve

Eliza, Carrie and Tim here for the weekend. We carved gourds and lit candles to ward off the spirits that are out roaming tonight. We also had a great dinner and ate chocolate cake in honor of Carrie's birthday. Two holidays covered in one night.
Topped it off with a rip roaring game of ping pong.
Happy Halloween everyone!

october