Equal Lights

Monday

Mid-morning dingy awaits an overslept mariner who will row it out to his clamming outboard.

• For a few thousands of years, astronomers have scanned the skies.  Ancient civilizations paid them well as the pundits of their day _ predicting what would happen based on the positions of moon and stars, and the portents signified by novas and comets.  They were probably as accurate as any of our talking heads today.
• Scanning the skies is more difficult in summer in the Northern Hemisphere, where most of those astronomers were located.  They were no doubt happy as the nighttime reclaimed hours of the day, giving them more time to do their work.  More modern practitioners like Copernicus and Galileo probably rejoiced as equinox approached, even though it meant their fingers would be numbed in the crystal clear cold

Tuesday

Reeds have finished growth and seeds, the pond reflects a quiet calm transition.

• This time of year is when I most appreciate sunset.  In the summer the days are long and warm, but at my age they are perhaps a little too long.  When the sun finally goes down, I am often fully into my evening routine, usually indoors.  And if I do try to watch a sunset at the park or harbor, I must contend with swarms of gnats and mosquitoes who think I have arrived to provide dinner.
• Spring equinox remains too chill to linger.  But autumn nights are perfect.  Bugs are vanished.  Air remains balmy.  The sun remains magnificent, and there are often clouds to accent amazingly beautiful hues.  Each evening strikes me fully because I am still active, and I can pay attention to the daily drama.

Wednesday

Twilight falls darkly with hurricane remnant clouds.

• Shine on, shine on harvest moon ….
• We each pretend it shines especially for us

Thursday

Red sky at night brings hope of a clear tomorrow.

• September has crept up subtly.  Last year, lack of rain had a lot of trees with shriveled leaves, weeds dried to brown, and flowers vanished.  But most of this foliage is still verdant and ground cover mid-summer thick. 
• There are still enough triggers around to start autumn transformations.  Cooler air, of course, is one factor, but the shorter days are the real clock for bird migrations and leaf shutdown.  I imagine the cosmic conductor crying out “all aboard” as the seasonal train pulls out of the station.
• Among the many indicators are the ripening of fruits and seeds, now almost complete.  A few flowers may continue just in case winter never arrives this year, but for the most part generational preparations are complete.  Birds are feasting, squirrels are burying, and invisible preparations are underway all around.  

Friday

Evenings fall noticeably sooner now, even week by week.

• Strangely, fire which has been our constant companion since before humans migrated out of Africa _ perhaps before there were modern humans _ is largely absent in the modern world.  In the summer there may be a bonfire or two, tiny flames at a weekend barbecue, but no candles late at night.
• For our ancestors, having fuel for fire ready for the coming seasons was indispensable.  Otherwise bedtimes were earlier with each passing day, dawn awakenings later.  In a few months, unchecked cold could kill.  Keeping a fire handy and having the means to restart one if extinguished was a matter of life and death.
• Today we rarely notice it.  Even now, as days shorten rapidly, we flick a switch as always and possibly turn up the heat for a moment.  Fire?  What’s that, our children ask.  Fire is only associated with disasters like houses burning down.  Civilization hides its presence away along with our other detritus.

Saturday

September has lingered warmly, in some ways even nicer than August had been, keeping much in full bloom.

“All right guys,” shouts Moon from the stage rising above a flickering darkened field.  “We’ve finally retaken half the North, and the rest will soon be ours!”

“Do you really think it’s true, this time?” one Pleiade whispers to another.

“Mars, Mars get up here.  What a show!  Venus _ Jupiter _ here they are folks, the big heros of the night forces!”

“Don’t know,” comes the soft reply.  “Seems the same old garbage every year.”

“And Orion, of course!” booms Moon, as applause rises.  “Ursa, Ursa, where are you?”

“Notice how the South is never mentioned at times like these … I hear it’s going badly down there ….” notes the first.

“All you starry host _ we are winning!  We’re gonna really conquer Earth this time!”  Cheers everywhere.

“Sometimes,” her companion glances around to be sure nobody is listening, “sometimes I think it would all happen anyway even without our heroics.”

Sunday

Berries ripe on the dogwoods, and foliage beginning to give notice.

All great philosophies agree

Without contrast, nothing.

No yang means no yin.

No evil means no good.

No dark means no light.

Perhaps all these fine thoughts

Have simply taken daily cycle

And molded it to our deeper needs

September Seeds

Monday

Milkweed puffs ready to take flight over the ripening goldenrod fields at Upland Farms.

• In September all the fruits and seeds finally ripen and begin their hopeful dormancies for seasons to come.  Fields are filled with floating white silk milkweed rising into clouds of dragonflies, while thistle weeds begin their journey through the bowels of yellow finches which will spread them about.  Wild grapes await harvest, although many birds prefer abundant poison ivy berries.
• The last flowers are rushing to climax.  Goldenrod and asters join the late parade of pigweed and grasses of all kinds.  There are only a few weeks until equinox,  a scant two months until first frost. 
• I have known that intellectually for some time.  But did I not, the bounteous climax of the natural world would inform me that vast changes are soon to occur.

Tuesday

If smartweed were not so invasive, it would probably be cultivated for its late, bright, vigorous display.

• Few songs and poems are composed to our native hickory trees.  Oaks are mighty and strong in song and story, willows weep for poets, and stately beeches inspire young lovers to carve initials.  But hickories are frankly dirty nuisances to suburban homeowners.
• Their tannic acids poison the ground around them, making it all but impossible to grow things underneath.  Branches sprout at right angles, tempting breaks in snowfall and wind, forcing expensive trimming.  Compound leaves get caught in gutters and ornamental bushes as they fall.  And the nuts.
• Oh, the nuts.  If they were only easily opened and sweetly edible they would provide a vast wonderful harvest.  They are neither.  Instead the huge green fruits dent cars as they fall, bruise the unwary head beneath when the wind blows.  And fall by countless pounds to be swept painfully into barrels.
• Of course, this was once their climax forest.  Sometimes I think they know it, and are screaming their resentment of our intrusion all year long.

Wednesday

Hickory nuts ripening and ready to be knocked down by autumnal storms or scampering squirrels.

• Great oaks from little acorns grow.
• The very concept of seeds is an incomprehensible miracle.

Thursday

Dandelion puffs are clichés of literature and photography _ for very good reasons.

• Autumn harvests are the grand reinforcement of temperate zone natural cycles.  In the tropics monsoons come and go, dry periods arrive periodically, but September in the Northern Hemisphere signals a need to get crops in, to save seeds for next year, possibly to sow overwintering cereal crops for early harvest.
• Daily cycles are easy to understand.  Tides are much more difficult.  Weather is impossible.  But anticipation of winter arrival in most of the northern hemisphere was once a matter of life and death.  Until our ancestors were intelligent and culturally wise enough to prepare half a year in advance of their quotidian needs, they could not struggle onto the vast panoramas of Europe and Asia. 

Friday

Lovely purple bunches of ripe pokeweed rarely survive bird appetites for very long.

• Fruits now have become huge and heavy, hard or rotting, depending on evolved natural strategies which are always fascinating.  These plants depend on attracting animals to eat their seeds and spread them about.  An alternate poetic method of vegetation mobility is flight on the winds.
• Dandelions are almost done, but the autumn air is filled with white motes of milkweed, thistle, and vast variations such as asters.  These depend on fluff to ride stronger breezes and gales.  By necessity, such seeds are minuscule, and it is hard to believe they can pack in enough genetic material to begin anew on some appropriate soil after a harsh winter.   

Saturday

Graceful plumes feather against blue skies as summer slides away as quietly and inevitably as the tide.

“Whee!  What a ride!” cries tiny Alda, floating along a blue breeze.

“The golden hours, just as they told us,” laughs Janice, “What a view!”

“And to think they taught us genes are all work and no fun …”

Tiny milkweed parachutes in the immensity of early autumn, fragile, eternal, wonderful.

Sunday

Grasses flicker in constant breeze, blurring meadows, seascapes, path sides, and edges of ponds.

Gigantic firs, stupendous fungi

Start as tiny invisible spores

Impossible but true

Throughout lives we worship nature

For all our science

Life as ineffable as ever was

Locally Grown

Monday

Sumac ripens along field borders, all but unnoticed in our daily rush.

• Cool wet weather all summer long delayed the usual local harvest of zucchini, tomatoes, and corn.  Besides, most of the farms on Long Island are being eliminated by suburban sprawl, and by the simple fact that the farmers have decided there are better ways to live.  But finally, most have arrived.
• We hardly notice.  A few people try to be locavores, and I appreciate getting things at least from nearby upstate or New Jersey, but the fact is transportation and the selection of traits has made almost everything local.  New Zealand lamb, Brazilian beef, Nicaraguan bananas, Mexican tomatoes _ I expect to get these and more any time all year round.  More than that, the varieties of local zucchini or cucumbers or apples I search out will most likely be identical to those from global sources.
• This does not distress me.  In olden days, only fortunate countries like France were able to have the culinary resources now available to everyone every day.  I am grateful that in deepest winter I can feast on strawberries at breakfast, or fresh green beans at night.  And still enjoy very expensive Long Island tomatoes from a few farms out east.

Tuesday

The solitary apple tree on the harbor is having a hard year, with dying lower branches and only a few fruits.

• An accidental apple tree at water’s edge illustrates the dilemma of organic farming.  With no use of fertilizer or pesticides the fruits are small, mottled, hard, and riddled with worm holes.  Some years there is no crop at all.
• Many of us do not realize how much effort goes into apple culture.  Trees must be kept reasonably high, trimmed constantly much like grape vines or apples are almost impossible to harvest.  In spring, efforts are necessary _ sometimes unsuccessful _ to protect delicate blossoms from late frost.  If native bees are in short supply, professional hive-keepers must arrive at the proper time for pollination.  And even organic fruit must use at least “natural” bug sprays like Bt.  Finally, even with machine help, there is considerable manual work getting all the apples picked and packed at the right time and sent off, often across the continent, to reach our supermarkets where we take their availability for granted.
• This apple tree might supply a few families around here, if we were careful and lucky and spent a lot of time working with it.  But it is already way too big for effective use, I’m not sure there are enough bees around, and the constant air pollution from the nearby road _ not to mention what might be in the groundwater _ might not be good for us anyway.

Wednesday

Beans and tomatoes from a friend’s garden are organically flawed but delicious.

• Too many cooks spoil the broth.
• Overly complicated recipes spoil our palates

Thursday

End of season finds boats cramming docks as clouds thicken.

• Some people have perfect pitch, and for them much of the amateur music the rest of us enjoy is a painfully untuned torture.  Some experts can identify one beer from another, but blind tastes also show that most folks cannot tell the difference, especially after the first drink.  Our senses are marvelous and quite perfected for our daily needs, but not as highly tuned as those of animals. 
• That is why I look with suspicion on current food snobbery.  To be honest, I think a lot of the current diners who rave over specialized heritage or rare foods are engaged in what has been called “food pornography.”  Written descriptions of what they are eating overwhelm the actual experience.  I doubt most of these experts could tell the difference between types of tomatoes if blindfolded.
• That goes double for “organic” food.  I understand we should minimize use of fertilizer and pesticide, I fully support being very careful with genetic modification.  But minimizing and being careful is not the same as pretending we can avoid them altogether.  And, again, with very few able to taste the difference nor to prove there is any kind of scientific effect on our bodies, this is just another snobbish way to claim you are somehow better and more in tune with the universe than someone else.  

Friday

Wild grapes encapsulate the difference that domestication has made in our food supply.

• Locally grown tomatoes have arrived in stores, and I enjoy them more than those raised in greenhouses the rest of the year.  On the other hand, these commercial tomatoes are indistinguishable from those from backyards and given to me by happy neighbors.  Same for zucchini and cucumbers, which I accept gratefully.
• We have become a bit impoverished by monoculture, and have perhaps gone too far to select the sweetest corn and best-keeping tomato.  Seeds and plants nurtured by amateurs are much the same as those on industrial farms.  I’m happy someone is trying to bring back heritage species, although I myself cannot taste the difference.

Saturday

Clams remain about the only truly local commercial harvest, a vestige of abundance long departed.

Two tomatoes presenting themselves from overflowing bins at a farmer’s market.  Each tries to outshine the other, as busy hands are picking up fruit around them.

“I’m bigger than you are, you know,” says one.

“Yeah, but I look bright and shiny and ripe,” claims the other.

“But I’m the real deal,” insists the first.  “Completely organic, heritage, traditional.”

“Pooh, pooh.  I’ve just as many genes and carbon atoms as you do,” scoffs the second.  “Pesticides carefully washed off, fertilizers completely integrated into my superior presentation.  You’re a loser.”

“But I am real, honest, natural.”

“So what do I look like, chopped liver?  Your whole presentation is a hoax.”

“At least I am more expensive,” shouts the first, turning a bit redder in the blazing sun.

“Which means I am going first,” exults the second, as it is plucked into a bag and carried off.

Sunday

Kansas (the sunflower state) grows these as a crop, but here they are purely ornamental for the birds.

Frantic finish

Fruit fulfilled

Fitful fun

Summer’s done

Hard Labor

Monday

Idle tugboat anchored  near the harbor channel is used to jockey various work barges into position.

• Ten thousand years ago, the invention of agriculture created successful human societies (what we call civilization) based on masses of food-producing slaves supporting an elite aristocracy.  Several hundred years ago, this transformed into wage slavery as the industrial revolution made peasant farmers obsolete. 
• Aristocracy for all those eons has come up with various justifications for its existence.  Communal protection, the will of the gods, human nature itself.   Almost everyone always admitted there needed to be an aristocracy, the question was only who should be in it and why.
• But, like economics and other artifacts of a certain period of history, all was based on the idea of scarcity and the simple fact that only humans could make a modest surplus of goods from scarce resources.  As automation progresses, those paradigms may be as obsolete as old medical theories of bad air creating disease.  What happens in human society without scarcity?
• The elite today desperately claim meritocracy for themselves, and the joy of purpose for everyone else.  These claims will probably ring more and more hollow as machines start doing everything.  This labor day is not a bad time to wonder what may replace massive work for stable and happy civilizations to come. 

Tuesday

Mowing outdoors seems a relatively pleasant chore as long as somebody else is doing it.

• We are not sure exactly how long it took to domesticate wild grains and animals.  Basic biology seems to indicate it was less time than we might expect.  Corn, for example, hardly resembles its ancient predecessors, but was only bred in the last five thousand years.
• During ten thousand years of agriculture, we should also recognize that humans have been domesticating themselves.  In spite of wars and other horrors, the simple fact is that civilized humans _ those that could cooperate to form extended societies _ conquered the planet.  If we could study ancient pre-agricultural cultures and people, we would no doubt find significant differences from ourselves. 
• With good reason.  That is why stupidities like the paleo-diet and other cults trying to “get back to our roots” are useless.  We left our roots a long time ago, and we are as self-domesticated as any of our useful animals and plants.  Like good little corn stalks, we mostly happily fit into whatever laboring niches our societies provide.

Wednesday

No paddleboard rentals when dark skies threaten and a stiff sixty-odd degree wind sweeps the waves.

• Load sixteen tons, and whaddaya get ….
• Ah, but doesn’t the thought of accomplishing so much set a purposeful tingle in your brain?

Thursday

Already end of summer tasks like cleaning boats for storage are in full swing.

• Nobody can predict the future, but sometimes it is reasonable to project certain possibilities.  Right now, most philosophers seem to be throwing their hands up at the impossibility of understanding how people would live in a fully automated society.  A few science fiction writers have given that a try, now and again, but even they seem to find it hard to figure out what most people to do if nothing has to be done.
• Regardless of ultimate outcome, we are already encountering issues which call for completely different perspectives.  Economics of scarcity are obsolete in an affluent society.  Hierarchical politics are dangerously irrelevant in an ecologically interconnected technological world.  Universally recognized individual accomplishment is vanishing as instant communications fragment social networks back to small tribes. 
• Some problems solve themselves.  But we should be aware of how such massive shifts in how we regard the universe _ the largest change in human organization since agriculture _ play out locally and in our own outlook and daily life.  

Friday

This deli under various names has served a few generations of boaters and ball-players and, lately, cyclists.

• A current fad is to claim humans are a social species, like bees or ants.  Society is our hive.  Evolution has worked through our intertwined culture, rather than individuals, for at least the last hundred thousand years.  A strange thought _ New York and Beijing filled with busy workers and drones.
• For the last ten thousand years, especially in the northern hemisphere, agricultural societies have eventually crushed the competition.  In these cultures, eighty percent or more of the males, almost all of the females, were basically slaves, serfs, or peasants.  That is what used to be called “the march of civilization,” from the golden crescent through Egypt, Greece, Rome and Europe, not excepting China and India, with a side glance at Maya, Aztec, and Inca. 
• For the last couple of hundred, almost all that muscle and brain and desire rushed off the farms and exchanged plows and butter churns for industrial jobs.  That is still true, although the jobs have mutated greatly and are themselves fading into meaninglessness as machines do the real work.
• But how is society itself mutating, as this happens?  I sometimes wish I could hang around to see how it all turns out.  Being part of it, I suppose, is privilege enough.

Saturday

September is bobber fishing time for snappers grown large and impossibly hungry on incoming high tide.

As I wander through crowded Union Square in late August, I notice a group of demonstrators who are apparently just wrapping up.  The speaker has climbed down from his improvised soapbox and is putting away his loudspeaker.  As the crowd thins, I am intrigued by the signs they carry and hasten over to speak to one.

“Workers of the World, Relax!?  Don’t you mean ‘Unite’?” I ask.

“Who wants to unite?” responds the middle-aged brunette.  “Unite with whom?  No, we don’t want to unite with anybody, just to change the old boss for the new boss.”

“But …”

“What we want is for work to become more fun, less of a hassle and not so important to just staying alive.  Give everyone a secure place in the world, and then pay them on top of that for whatever needs to be done.”

“But …”

“Life is too precious to waste working.  Well, it always has been.  But now we have machines to do all the big stuff and it’s time for us to take it easy.”

“But …”

“The rich lately have just been freeloading.  I want to get up when they do, take time off like they do, and have the chance to focus on what I think is important like they do.

“But …”

“Relax,” she smiles.  “It’s going to happen anyway.  We just want to put some thought into it.”

Sunday

Boats, sand, seeding grass on a lazy morning while the rest of the world goes crazy.

I’ve been working on my purpose, all the live long day

I’ve been working on my purpose, doing what the rich folk say

I would be so sad and lonely, not rising early in the morn

Wouldn’t know how to be happy, if no factory horn

Boss Man won’t you blow

Boss Man won’t you blow

Boss Man won’t you blow that ho or orn.

Boss Man won’t you blow

Boss Man won’t you blow

Boss Man won’t you blow your horn

Someone’s in the office with Boss Man

Someone’s in that office I say ay ay ay

Someone’s in that office with Boss Man

Scheming how to steal our pay

And chanting

We’ve got more than you