chelidon

Tree is trimmed and lit (with Forest, as the youngest in the house -- at least until next year -- doing the honors of placing the star on the top), family and friends in the house are asleep or on their way there, Forest is long asleep with visions of sugarplums, or perhaps Legos, in his head, there's plenty of wood on the fire, the lovely dinner meal is digesting with the help of some good wine and after-dinner port, stockings have been, per tradition, hung on the mantle with care (and well-stuffed by house denizens and/or Santa), other gifties have been sneakily snuck downstairs and placed under the tree, the dog has been walked and is happily snoozing....so now it is finally time for me to grab a few much-needed Zs myself. Heck, if I stay up much longer, Santa might pass us by, and that wouldn't do at all, not at all.

I am particularly grateful that we moved to a somewhat more innocent place, where my 9-year-old boy, and most of his classmates, have not been jaded beyond their years, and still believe in Santa Claus. Because I still do, too.

A thrice-blessed Yule and a very merry Christmas, in the very best traditions of both, to you all. Good night and sweet dreams!

Some big news to post later today, but in the meantime, more pics of Griffin (scroll down for the more recent pics and movies). He has decided that snow is just about the most fun thing ever. When we got the big storms (24" of snow) over last weekend, and before I plowed, he would leap in and just about disappear but for the tip of his tail, then pop up every so often like a seal. He wasn't too happy about the pooping when cold wet stuff is touching his butt (can't blame him, really), but quickly figured out that some pirouettes in place would tamp the snow down enough that he could stand on it, rather than in it. Smart pup.

It really is amazing how much difference a month makes -- he's got to have just about doubled in size, and is 22+ lbs. Griffin is going to be a big boy, and is growing into a very handsome dog.

I'd like to introduce you to our newest member of the family, Griffin. He's a Hovawart, and a real cutie. The cats will forgive us. Someday. Maybe.



A rapidly-growing gallery of puppy pics and vids here

Whee!

I love my local paper, but sometimes its small-town roots show, and not in a good way.

Front-page above the fold photo caption today, pic of kids on a school bus:

Third- and fourth-graders from Westshire Elementary School in West Fairlee were heading down I-91 yesterday to see Phantom of the Tollbooth at the Lebanon Opera House.

*sigh*

Clue for editor: Norton Juster is not the same as Gaston Leroux, nor even Andrew Lloyd Webber. Wikipedia and Google are your friend.

To my friends and loved ones understandably discouraged by the California Prop 8 results, as well as the equally despicable Prop 102 in Arizona, Arkansas Initiative 1, and Florida Amendment 2, take heart -- times (and minds) are indeed changing, and injustice and bigotry can not stand against truth and basic human rights forever.

But in the meantime, same-sex couples can marry in Massachusetts and Connecticut, same-sex civil unions are the law in New Hampshire and Vermont, and same-sex domestic partnerships have legal rights in Maine. Winters may be chilly, but there's nothing more romantic than sitting in front of a blazing fireplace with someone you love...and knowing it's it's legal. Also, deep blue really is a lovely color, especially on a political map. Just sayin'.

Breathing again now. I didn't realize until the election was called and McCain had conceded just how much energy I had been putting into this, and for how long.

Now the real work begins. But yes, there is hope.

You don't have to finish it. All those things you could do, all those things you should do, all those things you want to do -- you don't have to finish them all. And you won't. When you die, as you will, there is so much that you will leave undone, incomplete, unfinished. And that is fine, that is not only normal but inevitable, that is the way of the world, and you share that in common with all people in all places and times.

You don't have to finish it. And you also don't have to see your life as one small step in a long chain from point A to point B, a milestone against some arbitrary measuring stick in an inexorable march of progress from what was, to what will be. That is not how the world works. Times rise and fall, empires rise and fall, fashions and moral codes and religions and schools of thought rise and fall, and if you do not see "progress" in your own particular lifetime, that is okay. Do what you can, what you are called to do, and that is enough. Some cycles, perhaps most cycles, play out in decades, centuries, eras, and some cycles, perhaps most cycles, are not even obviously cycles at all. Humanity projects a need for simple rules, narrowly-defined forward progress and easily understood patterns onto a universe which is so much richer, so much more complex than that. The universe is far more vast, more wonderful, surprising, and full of mystery than we can possibly imagine.

You don't have to finish it, and you won't. You don't even have to make progress, and you may not, depending on your own definition of progress. All you have to do is let go of the fear, and live your own life fully and completely. With passion and fervor, engage the world around you and those in it, and do what is in your heart to do. Love, live, and create, and know that the trajectory of your life, the words you speak, the thoughts you have, the lives you touch, and most especially, the love you bring to the world, these are the impressions you make onto the essence of the cosmos itself. These wonderful tracks made as you walk, your life's true Tales, they never fade, do not age, do not pass away, they are forever and always part of the eternal fabric of the universe, for all time, as long as time shall be. This one truth is a thing so true that all the universe stands in quiet witness to it, now and forever.

You don't have to finish it. And you don't have to make progress. You have a life, and a death, a beginning and an ending. And in between is magic, that is your birthright: to live your life as fully as you can, and have your own unique Tale become a part of the grand weaving which is constantly creating the universe -- an essential piece of the great infinite story which tells itself, the song of all voices which sounds everywhere, in all places, creating and reifying existence, at every moment, sung in love and beauty by every speck of matter and energy that was, is, or shall be. You are not merely a meaningless letter upon a page, you are not a single word in a sentence, you are not a sentence in a paragraph, a scribbled footnote, or even a single page in the book. Your life is a dense, rich chapter, a whole section, one entire book in a series, full of richness and meaning, and the loss of a chapter, or an entire book, leaves a gap that no one else can ever fill.

But you don't have to finish it, because there is no "it" to finish. You don't have to make "progress," because your entire life is progress enough. You don't have to worry if you are doing enough, or if you made the right choices, you don't have to second-guess your own life. By the standards of the universe, you are already a success, and the proof of that success is your very existence. Just as you cannot escape your life, your life cannot escape you.

You don't have to go out and write the book of your life, because you are writing it, in every moment, through every action, every choice, every word, each creation, touch and love. Your living history, the song of your life, the story of who and what you are, and your place in the great Tale, is being told all around you. There are no bit players, no anonymous actors, no unimportant stories. All voices are heard, and all tales are told.

So you will leave things undone. And yet, your Tale will be complete in itself -- not a fragment, not an unfinished story, but complete, entire and perfect.

So relax, open fully to the wonders of the universe, drink deep of the exquisite joys and precious pains and love and laughter and sorrow and agony, immerse yourself in the communions and loneliness and rapture and boredom and wonder and mystery. Know that who and what you are, your life, however long it lasts, will be complete, and that your Tale, whatever it is, matters, and that your life has meaning, even if that meaning is not clear. The fact that you are here is mystery enough. Your existence itself is such an incredible, improbable miracle that to question its worth is very much the same as questioning the worth of the universe. It is, and you are, and that is mystery and meaning enough to ponder for one lifetime, or many.

Breathe, live, and love. That's all you need to do. And look, you're already doing it. That's all there is to it.

Really excellent piece by Michael Polllan in the NYT here.

With cheap oil coming to an end, so is cheap food, and so is being able to temporarily, and artificially, boost agricultural production by in essence, pouring oil all over it (in the form of fertilizers, chemicals, pesticides, industrial-scale production and distribution methods, etc). Localized, sustainable agricultural practices that do not depend on massive injections of petro-based chemicals to counteract equally massive soil nutrient depletion will have to become the norm, and soon.

Excerpt:

Farmer in Chief

By MICHAEL POLLAN
Dear Mr. President-Elect,

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won’t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

Full article here, login required, blah blah.

In keeping with the seasonal shift towards thoughts of the ending of things...

Neil Gaiman: Important and pass it on

...a really good post from Neil Gaiman about the importance of writing up a quick will -- for anyone, but especially if you're an artist and care about what happens to your work (and want to make things *much* less difficult for your friends and loved ones). There's a link in there to a simple will form (for US folks, but international forms are available online) that anyone can fill out in 30 min or less. It doesn't require a lawyer, or spending any money, or really, much time at all.

Really, death is the one thing that absolutely, without exception, will happen to you, sooner or later. Might as well spend just a few minutes of life dealing with that. While you're at it, write a living will/advance directive, so others clearly know what you do and don't want medically if you can't say it yourself, could save loved ones endless heartache and grief. Working in a medical setting, I know too well what happens if you don't have one of these -- people who don't know you have to try to figure out what you wanted, so they'll usually err on the side of ridiculous and extreme measures, or family will make choices which are clearly against the will of the patient. Don't let it happen to you, remember Terri Schiavo.

More info here (including a link to the easy to use Five Wishes template: Advance Directive)

Off to Vermont Camp with my Ravishing Partner and Beamish Boy (his first Witchcamp! ...and my first in 10+ years where I don't have to teach)... The weather seems to have finally changed from tropical rainforest back to a more normal New England temperate summer, so we should have nicely warm sunny days and lovely cool nights, with perhaps a few rainstorms in there, but not the daily thunderstorms and deluges we've had for most of the last couple of months. There will be swimming, and sunning, and much musical and drum jamming and dancing, and hanging out with old friends and new, and reading, and much delicious family time with my much delicious family.

Catch you all on the flip-side, and have a lovely and wonderful week! I am afraid that by the time I return, the impetuous and resolute pumpkin vines will have fully consumed the hapless Japanese Maple tree out front (one of them is working at it, even now, over the top of the tree and down the other side, anchored with heavy pumpkins growing larger by the day, tendrils seeking, searching, inching closer, closer to the house...)