Pumpkin Carving Time

I have a thing for owls in trees. There's this experience I had one evening a while back in the woods...a memory.


The pumpkins were gathered up today. There were fourteen of them in the garden. I think there are four left out there (not the ones in the picture; those were grabbed).

Here's me bringing in the kill:

With the pumpkin slicked from the rain and from washing it down with the hose it looks like I just gave birth to it. And the labour was so intense it caused my hairline to rapidly recede.

The membrane, the actual meat of these Rouge Vif d'Etampes pumpkins, is so incredibly thick and sweet smelling. You really have to put some effort into carving these ones.

Here's a couple more shots:

The Desert Fathers

OF LOVE

VII. At one time the abbot John was climbing up from Scete with other brethren: and he who was by way of guiding them mistook the way: for it was night. And the brethren said to the abbot John, "What shall we do, Father, for the brother has missed the way, and we may lose ourselves and die?" And the old man said, "If we say aught to him, he will be cast down. But I shall make a show of being worn out and say that I cannot walk, but must lie here till morning." And he did so. And the others said, "Neither shall we go on, but shall sit down beside thee." And they sat down until morning, so as not to discountenance their brother.

Cranberries

The importing/exporting, shipping and packaging of produce mystifies me.

These cranberries are a "product of USA".


This can mean one of two things. Either the berries were grown here in Canada,


and then shipped to the U.S. to be packaged and then sent back to us (Canada), or it can mean simply that the berries were grown in the U.S. and shipped to be packaged in Canada, Nova Scotia.

I know the former is what happens to a lot of the cranberries grown here in British Columbia. They are grown here and then sent to the Ocean Spray company in the U.S. and then shipped back to us as a "U.S. product".

I'm sure there's a name for this, but don't know what it is. Boomerang exports?

It's strange, but at least not as bad as having the wherewithal to grow some of the finest, tastiest garlic in your own province, and instead importing the blandest, most pathetic garlic from China. (I'm sure China is capable of growing good garlic but shipping that distance requires produce that can endure the travelling. The more like styrofoam the better.)

There's a name for that and I know it. It's called profit margin.

By the way, tomorrow, October 12th., is Thanksgiving Day in Canada.

I'm grateful for a lot of things; things that, once I start counting, shed all their relation to numbers, for I see the things expanding out to eternity, and gaining a value that I cannot comprehend.

Damien of Molokai canonized today

Therefore I prayed, and understanding was given me; I called upon God, and the spirit of wisdom came to me.

I preferred her to scepters and thrones, and I accounted wealth as nothing in comparison with her.

Neither did I liken to her any priceless gem, because all gold is but a little sand in her sight, and silver will be accounted as clay before her.

I loved her more than health and beauty, and I chose to have her rather than light, because her radiance never ceases.

All good things came to me along with her, and in her hands uncounted wealth. --Wisdom 7: 7 - 11


And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

And Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.

You know the commandments: `Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.'"

And he said to him, "Teacher, all these I have observed from my youth."

And Jesus looking upon him loved him, and said to him, "You lack one thing; go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me."

At that saying his countenance fell, and he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions.

And Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, "How hard it will be for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God!"

And the disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said to them again, "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

And they were exceedingly astonished, and said to him, "Then who can be saved?"

Jesus looked at them and said, "With men it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God."

Peter began to say to him, "Lo, we have left everything and followed you."

Jesus said, "Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel,

who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. --Mark 10: 17 - 30

Saint Damien of Molokai,

Pray for us!

Kurosawa's Dreams

If you find Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1990) at the rental store give it a try. I watched it several years ago and remember the evocative power of these 'dreams'. The film consists of eight different segments, each one a dream; Kurosawa's own dreams. Whether dreams he dreamed in his sleep or dreamed while awake we don't know.

The following one, 'Crows', is probably the film's weakest segment (the part where the aspiring painter walks through the painting stills looking for Van Gogh is cringe worthy, and are those commercially pre-stretched canvases that Van Gogh is carrying?), but interesting nonetheless. George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic provided the visual effects.

And Scorcese as Vincent Van Gogh...bleh. Bleh. Bleh. No thanks.

Dreams - Van Gogh from Thiago Barbosa on Vimeo.

Ink Drawing - Cloth and Potatoes

Garden Sprawl Friday

In this post from August I wrote about two projects for the front and back. The back still remains the same, but the front (planned as a B.C. native garden),

I have been working on:






It's a start. There's much more to be done. Salvaged stone and brick will be used, and the garden will be extending further both ways - actually three ways, as the front part, curving along the path-to-be, will be coming further out and more bushes planted.

Those wood and foliage chippings,


were all used up.


I'll re-seed that grass.

I mixed sand into the chippings, as well as some of the native soil that I originally dug out. And where I put the plants in (the ones that I have put in so far), I did a mix of the same but with peat and saw dust as well.

Here's some of the plants:

Lingonberries (Vaccinium vitis-idaea).




I hope to have the lingonberries as the main planting.

Here is Bearberry (Arctostaphylos), or Kinnikinnick:


And this one I am looking forward to:


It is an evergreen huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum - var.‘Thunderbird’) found in Tofino on Vancouver Island.

Here's an interesting one I found at the nursery:


It is Gaulnettya wisleyensis (Wisley Pearl). It is a cross between gaultheria (Salal) and pernettya.

And my favourite of all, the red huckleberry - Vaccinium parvifolium - (not a true huckleberry):




You have to go into the woods for them. As I said before, there's a reason why you do not see them in cultivation. They only grow on the decomposition of evergreens, mostly douglas fir. I need to find rotting material and some douglas fir stumps/logs. These two specimens I took from Redwood Park. I made sure to take some of the deep red, long advanced wood-rot of the fallen tree they were growing on.

Taking bareroot specimens of red huckleberry is difficult. It is impossible if you try and take one that is a big bush, or even a medium bush, as the roots go out far and you cannot dig up the entire root system to support that large a plant. So you find the smallest ones, and dig up as much root as possible; then when you plant it you clip off some of the stem and leaves. The ones pictured above have their native soil beneath the peat moss that I put on top.

I took them from the woods about three weeks ago, or more. They seem to be doing alright.

More Forest Drawings

I think I could live in the woods, or on the outskirts of them.

Two Forest Ink Drawings

The Desert Fathers

CLXVII. The abbot Agathonicus, head of the monastery of our holy father Saba, used to tell, "I went down one day into Ruba, to make my way to the abbot Poemen the solitary. And when I had found him and had told him my thoughts, he sent me when it came to evening into a cave: it was winter, and that night was bitter chill, and I was stiff with the fierceness of the cold. The old man came to me in the morning, and said to me, 'What ails thee, my son?' I said to him, 'Forgive me, Father, but I passed a bitter night with the cold.' He said to me, 'For my part, my son, I felt no cold.' I was mightily astonished to hear it, for indeed he was naked. And I said to him, 'Of thy charity, tell me how it came that thou didst not feel so fierce a frost?' And he said to me, 'There came a lion, and went to sleep beside me, and he kept me warm.' "

Two Etudes

Zimerman plays Chopin Etudes from FranzFerencLiszt on Vimeo.

Frost

Once by the Pacific
By Robert Frost

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken.

Life Chain this Sunday, Oct. 4

Go.

'Or' Meme

I started writing some 'either/or' questions. You can be memed if you want. The gist of it is you have to pick one without giving any explanation, quickly; like you're going to a desert island and you have to pick one. Picking one over the other doesn't mean you hate the other or that you like both, nor does picking one state what you're present situation in life is; that's not the gist. You just have to pick one over the other(s) - that's it. Though I cheated on my own meme and sometimes said, 'both' or 'neither' or simply gave different answers altogether, which you're free to do, it is recommended that you choose one or the other.

You can add some of your own too if you wish, but none can be removed.

------------

Tail-gated or cut off? Cut off

Coffee or tea? Coffee

Dog or cat? Cat

Radio station or buzzer? Buzzer

Cezanne or Van Gogh? Cezanne

Tom and Jerry or Wile Coyote and Road Runner or Sylvester and Tweetie? Tom and Jerry (the classic ones that is; the ones they won't show on t.v. anymore, most probably because of the Aunt Jemima nanny)

Big Trouble in Little China or Evil Dead II? Evil Dead II (Though admittedly B.T.I.LC. is more fun to watch while drinking beer with a friend)

Laughed at or screamed at? Laughed at

The forest and then the ocean, or the ocean and then an island? The forest and then the ocean

Twenty acres and a shack or ten acres and a mansion? Twenty acres and a shack

Jaded cool-head or kooky wing-nut? Kooky wing-nut

Doctor or dentist? Dentist

New Catholic Literary Revival or T.O.B. Time Bomb? Go to hell

Wordsworth or Keats or Byron or Shelley? Keats

Heavy metal or rap? Eaten by sharks

Pro-life dinner or pro-life picket? Pro-life picket

Oar or Ore or Or? Ore

Linen or cotton? Linen

Vizzini or Inigo or Fezzik? Inigo

Pizza or pizza or pizza? Pizza

Time travel into past or into future? Into past

Hysteria or depression? Depression

Treasure or dinosaur bones? Dinosaur bones

Misjudged or flattered? Misjudged

Caught talking to yourself with great emotion, or someone with psychic abilities reading your mind? Caught talking to yourself with great emotion

Ear ache or tooth ache? Tooth ache

The A-Team or MacGyver? The A-Team

The Muppet Show or Fraggle Rock? Dang it Paul, you ask some tough questions, don't you?

Robert Stack on Unsolved Mysteries or Bob Saget on America's Funniest Home Videos? Both too scary

Thomas Hardy or John Steinbeck? Both

Blake's pictures or Rousseau's? Rousseau's

Forced to do two hour's worth of dish-washing or forced to do five minutes of stand-up improv in a heavily peopled venue? Five minutes of stand-up improv

Handle a snake or a bullfrog? Handle snake

The mummy or the wolf man or Dracula or Frankenstein's monster? The wolf man

Watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind or arguing with a Jehovah's Witness? Arguing with a Jehovah's Witness

Cotton candy or caramel apple? Neither

Read Camus or push a big rock up a mountain again and again? I choose neither. Why choose neither? Because…[profound pause] because I choose to. Oh right, that's The Matrix part Three, never mind.

Marriage proposal in the sun or rain or snow? Rain

Nobody knows, but me

Long Black Veil is such a sad song. The sadness does not come from the obvious imagery of death, such as the grave or scaffold, or the mourning woman in the veil and the night wind.

Rather, there's a deeper sadness about sin. It bears down on the listener. The song touches upon this original condition within us, in its ontological reality: the universal condition of us all. The song grieves with this heavy weight - not laying it on with garbled and overwrought emotions - but it does so in simple terms, the meanings resolving in their own good time, and with an almost upbeat rhythm, which only goes into making the song that much more deep-reaching.

It is about how sin closes in, and closes us in; it is about the awful claustrophobia of sin. This sense is most imparted by the refrain: "Nobody knows, nobody sees; nobody knows, but me".

The narrator is referring not to some special knowledge that makes him higher than others, but to something of which he is ashamed and cannot admit, so he hides it, even if it means that hiding it will get him executed for another's sin of murder of which he (the narrator) is innocent.

There is something inexpressible in that the narrator's sin comes to haunt and condemn him through another's completely unrelated sin and that the two sins are very different; that it is not necessarily the external perversity of sins that make one ashamed, as much as a deep knowing within the soul that it has commited an offence that is contrary to its ingrained dignity.

On a more lofty level there is perhaps a notion in the song that before the Eternal Judge not one of us has an alibi.

The song wasn't originally written by Johnny Cash, but clearly Cash took the song and made it his own. I haven't heard covers of the song by other musicians, and don't really care to. The song was written for Johnny's voice.

The Desert Fathers

XIII. There once came thieves into an old man's cell, and said to him, "Whatever thou hast in thy cell, we have come to take away." And he said, "Take whatever you see, my sons." So they took whatever they could find in the cell, and went away. But they forgot a little bag that was hidden in the cell. So the old man, picking it up, followed after them, shouting and saying, "My sons, ye forgot this: take it." But they, marvelling at the patience of the old man, brought everything back into his cell, and they all did penance, saying one to another, "Truly, this is a man of God."