More Insect News

The unseasonable cold has retreated. This afternoon would have been summerlike except for a certain crispness in the air. Once the sun started falling the illusion of summer vanished. The crisp evenings still have ladybugs and asian stinkbugs dashing inside at every opening of a door. The ones who have made it inside make smaller and larger circles around the window glass. Today I saw a fly join them and thought of this poem before reaching for the swatter:

THE COLD FLY

I see a fly
warming himself on the windowsill,
rubbing his legs, enjoying the morning sun.
He seems to know when the light will shift:
a sudden buzz
and he's at another window.

From Heaven My Blanket, Earth My Pillow: Poems by Yang Wan-Li
Translated and Introduced by Jonathan Chaves

Afternoon view

Signs of Impending Winter

When I came home today I found the infallible sign that warm weather is over; hundreds of ladybugs crawling over the house looking for a way in. They were latecomers this year, having to compete for space with the Asian stinkbugs who have been staging their own invasion.

News that stays news

I don't comment much here about politics. It's not that I don't have opinions but rather, as a rule, there is not much new or helpful I have to offer on any given issue. It seems we cycle around the same set of mistakes year after year regardless of the party in power. This is an observation that goes back at least to Ecclesiastes. Here is one of my favorite restatements of it:

The Gods of the Copybook Headings
by Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936)

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return.

You can hear this read at Classic Poetry Aloud

Foretaste of Winter

Yes, that white stripe down Hogback Mountain is snow. Last night our steady rain on the farm turned to snow up on the higher ridges. Around here a little altitude can make quite a difference in your thermometer reading.

They grow up so soon

When I published my first post on this blog, the young man in the uniform was twelve. He is now twenty, a college student and part time soldier with the Virginia National Guard. The photo was taken this spring at Fort Benning at his graduation from basic training. It seems like just a day or two ago that his mother and I brought him home wrapped in small blankets. Enlisting was his idea. I am extremely proud of him, but I also find that I approach the prayers for peace in the Divine Liturgy with a previously unaccustomed fervency.

Blast From the Past

No, this is not a lightning strike. This is what happens when a small point and shoot digital camera and an unsteady hand meet the Browntown 4th of July fireworks display. This was not the picture I intended, but I kind of like the effect.

The March of the Pens

When I hung up my jacket this evening I found four pens in the inside pocket. I am not sure how four ended up there. Most days there are one or two, some days none at all. There seems to be a steady movement of writing implements from my desk to my jacket, to the top of my dresser and back again. I pick up what pens I see on the dresser in the morning, and take them out of the various pockets they have crept into when I change in the evening. At the end of some days, the pens in my pocket are not the pens that were there in the morning. Other days the pens are identifiable, but their numbers have changed, seemingly at random. Years ago I read a story in which it was discovered that odd socks, tangled coat hangers and abandoned bicycles were all different stages in the life cycle of a mimetic organism, possibly alien. I begin to wonder if I have become the transport system for another organism that adopts the disguise of a common writing implement to make its migration across the wastelands of modern life to feed, breed and eventually die, leaving pen shaped skeletons in the back of drawers and in the pockets of rarely worn overcoats.

Leavings

Amazon dropped the latest Wendell Berry's poetry collection, Leavings, on the doorstep last week.  It is vintage Berry; part polemic, part lyric, part pastoral with a few oddities thrown in.  I am still spending time with the poems, so no review today.  I do want to share the short poem that begins the collection.  So, bending fair use a bit, here it is:

LIKE SNOW

Suppose we did our work
like the snow, quietly, quietly,
leaving nothing out.

Stupid Sheep Tricks

No, I don't know what she was after in the wheel well. No, I don't know how she managed to get her head stuck. No, it was not easy getting her unstuck. Yes, she's fine.

Looking Towards Home

With the leaves turning I can look up the mountain and see the tourist traffic on Skyline Drive looking down on us. This summer Susan and I took our own trip on a free entrance day and took this picture of our home. Right now the green is mixed with yellow, orange and brown.

Back Again

Well, I did not set out to take a year long blog sabbatical. About this time last year I took a day off. A day became a week, a week became a month and the days, weeks and months just piled up. Not much has changed since then. We still raise sheep on the family farm. I still practice law in a small firm in a small town. I still worship at the local Greek Orthodox Church. The kids are taller, my hair is thinner and my knees creak a little more each morning. With the boys' schedules growing more complex as they grow older and an illness earlier this year sidelining Susan for months, the farm is showing the effects of a family labor shortage. In fact, I was tempted to rename the blog on this relaunch as "The Bad Shepherd Chronicles." No disasters so far, just a lot of small tasks left for later, much like this blog. Nonetheless, I am back and will resume a daily chronicle of life here in the Shenandoah Valley.

Bright Sunday Morning

Morning View, trees, mountain and cloud

Morning light with a few clouds

Tuesday Morning view from my library

Morning light and shadow, first hint of fall

Truck, tree, shed and barn

Abba Anthony 4

Abba Anthony said to Abba Poemen, "This is the great work of a man: always to take the blame for his own sins before God and to expect temptation to his last breath." This is a classic word from the Desert; no compromises, no illusions, no excuses. It is a very different word than we get from our culture. We have legions of experts ready to tell us that our faults are not in ourselves. We are victims of circumstance, bad genetics, poor parenting, bad government. It is not really that the experts are wrong. It is just that the work of the Christian is different. Let us take it for granted that we walked in in the middle of the story, that we stand, in the words of A. E. Houseman, "a stranger and afraid/In a world I never made." Recognizing all this, the Christian nonetheless insists that he is free, which is another way of saying that he is responsible. To place the blame for sins outside yourself is, ultimately, a way of diminishing your freedom. To accept blame is, paradoxically, the first great step to freedom. The last part of Abba Anthony's word, to expect temptation to the last breath, is the opposite of the message of almost every self-help guru and almost every book, CD, t-shirt, poster, or piece of jewelry marketed by the members of the Christian Booksellers Association. We want to buy easy answers and an end to struggle. Abba Anthony says that struggle itself can be the great work that, as free men, God has called us to. This is not a proposition with great marketing potential. It is nonetheless, as we will see in tomorrow's saying, the heart of the Desert message.

After the Break

I've taken a few days off from the blog, but will start regular postings again this evening with the next installment of Abba Anthony. In the meantime, here is a picture from a couple of winters ago; Susan bottle feeding a newborn down at the barn.