A Messy, Hidden Order

Post 96

Lately I have been walking around Chestnut Hill and Northwest Philly, trying to take pictures that make visible the qualities that make this urban village such a beautiful and useful ecosystem.


We live more adjacent to each other than usually happens out in suburbia, Yet nature encompasses our houses more than it does in most suburbs. It is hard for me to take a picture of a house without tree limbs jutting in at obscuring angles, just as it is hard for me to take a picture of a tree without rooftops ensconcing the distance. We're all tangled up together here, vegetation, animals, humans and a predominately Arts & Crafts architecture that harmonizes the mix. The building materials are organic and often subtly variegated: local stone, usually left irregular, slate, wood, copper and brick. And often all these materials show up in the same house.


Since the Hill is an older development, the houses feel as if they have gratefully nestled into the sheltering earth. Most of them have patina rather than shine. The visual qualities I find in all this are; compatibility, co-operation, comfort, humility, dignity, respect and yes, even love.

All of which has led me to treasure the relative realism of photography. I am inept enough at Photoshop that most of the images I take are pretty much the images I see, (Well sorta, taking into account flattening to two-dimensions, different settings, etc.) So taking photos helps me see more of what I actually see instead of what I think I see. My mind erases all those branches, telephone and electrical lines and other messy stuff. My eye loves photos that my mind can easily read, pics that that are clean, have an obvious subject, focus on what is essential. Somewhat like the photo below,

For me, this is a fairly orderly photo. At least it is clear what you are supposed to look at (the tree,) while there are lots of straight lines, often parallel, making the background angles repetitive and obvious. Of course, turn around and this is what you may well see...

Hmmm, not so easy to decipher, is it.? Or give significance to either? It's just branches. But just branches is what nature often looks like. There are suggestions of pattern yet so many variations and layers that it seems to resist the mind. That is because it is an ecosystem. Nature can always  be broken down into dead analytical bits by mind, but it will only vitally function as a whole. The complexity is what life really looks like. And because complexity is hard to turn into order, we often ignore it or think it chaos.

All this makes me glad I'm not better at Photoshop, since the temptations would be hard to resist. Someday I may get better at photo manipulation and take photos as Art. Right now I take them as praise and as spectacles, lenses to help me see how the Hill's life-enhancing virtues show in it's actual physical reality.  In short, the Hill  looks like a place where a good life can be led. True, it lacks obvious excitements and like all communities, always has more than enough stuff to argue about.  But it is an excellent place to make a garden, take your dog to the park or walk in the cool of a gorge on a summer's evening, It is a supportive place in which to make your own entertainment by co-operating with nature and people around you. When George Woodward developed this area, he built it to hold different classes and different types of people, in fact, he went out of his way to encourage artists to settle here (The Red Rose Girls, Willets,) And because most of the architecture took inspiration from vernacular styles, there is an ageless feel to some of the areas,



We are born to abstract, to strive for clarity and order so that we can master facts and theories and so master nature, of which we are a part.. But in places like this are hints of a deeper order, a hidden order of life itself.

It is that order that most interest me, and that order that I try to take pictures of.

Merry Christmas, the Fall of Tyrants and Happy Birthday

Post 95

O Come, O Come....

Here, during Advent, almost too many ideas are buzzing around my mind. People seem shocked that a business, a global conglomerate like Sony, is currently parading around its sponge cake spine because it will not open a comedy about a nerd who is enticed by the U.S. government to attempt to kill the tyrant of North Korea. I wonder what pernicious mind worm has infected the public; Sony is a global business which exists to produce return for its stockholders, everything else is secondary. Hey-- just because Hollywood benefits by bellowing free speech when it is publicizing gratuitous violence in order to tart up an otherwise hopeless movie--that doesn't mean we have to believe them. Movies are made to make money. It is only when we are lucky that a movie is more than entertainment.

An interlude to lighten the tone.

Cary in a dress again?

CRISIS (1950) is one of the movies where the viewer gets lucky. It stars Cary Grant in what should have won him an Oscar, a  role that subdues his charm to deliver a strong character of conscience, conviction, and this being Grant, the ironic eyebrow lift. He didn't even get nominated, since the film, Richard Brook's first directing job, lost money, was even banned in Mexico, Central and South America,  Have you ever enjoyed "Evita?" Well, this film gives it the lie. It is based on a short story by George Tabori, "The Doubter,"about a surgeon on his honeymoon in South America who is abducted by a tyrannical ruling couple,who are obviously based on the Perons. In the film, Jose Ferrer needs brain surgery and Cary, bound by his Hippocratic oath, is his man, or so Ferrer, gun in hand, thinks. The revolutionaries have other ideas, ideas that mirror Ferrer's in violence.The plot device is a McGuffin carrying the weight of the theme: the man who only uses his power to heal those who give their fully informed consent versus the man who uses his power for whatever he wants, others, their welfare or consent, be darned. Because of force's tendency to overreach itself, only one man lives. Yeah, well, obviously, it is a movie.

More music

In most systems, and human minds love to limit reality with systems, the representative of the system's power is usually a hero who uses force to establish right rule. Not a helpless babe in a cattle stall or a wandering preacher who never uses force. Or a normal hero who says, "I hate all forms of coercion." Tyrants need force, propaganda, conditioning, intimidation. Otherwise they do not exist.

Systems often set up false opposites, like fear versus hope, thou fear is limited and hope is infinite, It is hope that leads us to peacefully tend our lives and better what we can. And there are many more people of hope than there are tyrants. History teaches that sooner or later, tyrants fall.  No wonder Herod was afraid, In the end, love rules as a story, a feeling, a warmth, a rejoicing; never as a system and never as a gun.

There is a part of us that knows this. That part is our inner light and life. On Christmas it is that part of us that we celebrate, in us, in others, in all reality, in Jesus Christ.. It is our true self's birthday.

Joy

More joy

What if Sony or the director or someone leaked this movie onto YouTube and a pile of other websites? What if volunteers translated it into as many languages as possible and it spun around the globe? No force, no retaliation, just joy..

In this is my faith

Merry Christmas

If only they did the descant too

Onwards, To a Bettering Tale

Post 94

If you follow this blog you might have noticed that I came down with a bad case of blog slog this summer. How to do another post and not be repetitive gets harder the further you go on. So I took a break. Maybe enlarged and clarified my horizons. Or so I hope.

I have realized that if I am to get to one hundred posts, which has been my goal, I need to talk about what I am working out at the moment, not just repeat things I have already learned. And, because I like my narrative broken up by images, l am still including pics.

Perhaps part of my blog block is that lately I have been leaning more to contemplation  than to the busy-mindedness that blog writing brings. But while I find meditation and contemplation helpful, I have a suspicion that I may never qualify as a true contemplative. When I have stumbled upon mystical states, I have felt them to be a gift, something from outside calling to something inside for reasons I do not know, but which I rejoice in. It is they that gave me my taste for Spirit. 

God or life or whatever has also graced me (well, so it seems to me at least,) with just enough talent and education to write narratives that celebrate God's creation, For me it has been life enhancing. The mystical inspires the artist in me who needs to express gratitude and delight and something forever open ended.

C.S. Lewis once said that a controllable God is no God at all. There are many forms of psychology, philosophy and spirituality, including some understandings of Christianity, that put God in what is hoped to be a God-shaped box. But, of course, there is no God-shaped box.

God or Spirit or whatever, is first of all...Wild? Free? Different? And always Unpredicatable, something that comes and goes like the wind.  If there are hard and fast spiritual rules then we can control spirit.

Having just shed some stress in the mountains (do trees absorb stress as if it were carbon dioxide?) I feel how important it is to keep my conception of God wild. Not brutal wild, which is a consequence of the fall, but awesome wild. 

 Our original wholeness was not brutal wild but Edenic. Our final wholeness will not be brutal wild but where the lamb and lion lay down together neath the shade of fruitful trees.  No wonder we need wilderness, And see, there is a gardening reference  here after all, one which I doubt I need spell out.

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And so I believe the mind is good for more than just chatter, that reason is a fine servant that helps us discern things--like why wilderness is so important. 

But it is not by reason alone that we work out dilemmas. Just a bit ago I was on the reference desk with a patron who spoke a little Polish. Did you know the Polish word for yes is 'tak'? --Well, now you do. As do I. Hmmm, tak pronounced talk as in talking, writing, communicating, saying yes to life. Yes, I think that works. Yes, I think I will be able to get this blog to 100 posts now.  And I do not think it will even be that difficult. Yes.

(For a sense of scale on this last pic. notice the human in the bottom right quadrant.)

The Fire of Summer

Post 93
Oh, the beauty of the day and all that belongs to it. I thought I would be sad because I have not one hydrangea bloom this year. But no, the lack of blue just heightens the harmony of the hot colors of present flowering.

Only when the light is this strong can white, red, pink, orange and violet (tempered by green) be so right together.

Everywhere there are ditch lilies, the common day lily that looks like fire. It spreads too fast, takes up too much room for its 2 weeks of bloom, has boring and then tatty foliage, and is loud, vulgar and joyous. Almost everyone has some. In the pic on left you can see it with betony, cosmos, monarda, clemantis, honeysuckle, biswort, rugosa rose and a touch of oak hydrangea in the back.

Do all these colors go together? They do for me. I tend to be both bold and intricate in what I create. That goes for everything--garden, art, writing, craft. Perhaps this is because I have a hard time being the right kind of bold and intricate in my life. Either I come on as too bold, or I am too unsure what to do, or most awkwardly of all, I hit upon an ungainly combo of the two. Are the fire lilies and scarlet monarda compensation? Perhaps. But also more.

Below is a spot in Mt. Airy where the day lilies line the block and perfectly offset the permanent, grey stonework The two together make for balance

 The stonework alone is just cold dreaming; fire lily alone and it's a short burn. Together though, you get something worthwhile.

Life these days midst a roaring media and alienating stresses can become overloaded with fanciful dreaming and artificial spices. True imagination and meaningful action are harder to accomplish, harder to develop and hardest of all to fully understand. Yet, as one who who tries to show what I can barely trace with my metaphorical fingertips, I feel that heaven has a possible space here in this world, and that that space has something to do with grace.

No more theology, though it would be easy to expound. I guess my point, intricate, bold and inadequately worded as it is-- is that no system humans can devise for anything is always going to work perfectly. Even with the best of intentions there are always possibilities of mishap, misunderstanding, unintended consequences and a host of other bumblings. And from those with less than the best of intentions--Oy Vey, even more so.

And yet many humans (some who follow some spiritual discipline, some who do not,) have from time to time stumbled on what they know is more than what they deserve. Some inner and/or outer generosity that forgives, heals, restores, does whatever is needed and wanted, a whatever that humans can rarely pull off by their own plans.

                                                                                                  So, when the garden gives more than seems possible, in an exuberance of color that makes my heart glow, I feel in it a small similarity that suggests grace.  

And, per the spirit of this post, please forgive or ignore any inadequate words, misunderstood notions or inapt tropes that I have used. This goes for all my writing. I am just another fallible punter exploring why and how gardening can gardened a gardener.

The Golden Work of Happiness

Post 92

A lot of these posts are about how happy the garden makes me, which it does. From them, one would think that I was born to happiness, which I wasn't. Oh, as a kid and pretty young thing I had all the usual natural exuberances, but even as a kid I had inexplicable periods of depression-- dark, passive times when I would isolate myself, numb to everything but pain. Because back then psych dogma did not recognize childhood depression, it was not until I was in my early 20's that I was diagnosed.

Adulthood has been a process of realizing how genes, family history, culture and my own choices have contributed to habits and actions that influence my happiness.  So much for the post-war, baby-boomer myth that happiness naturally flows from life. Maybe it does for some people, but for people like me, happiness takes work.

It has meant continually learning  how to better adapt to our world without compromising those things that keep me whole.  It starts off with being responsible about finding the best meds and taking them. Luckily for me the meds have improved over the decades, allowing me to prosper in ways once not likely. But meds are not capable of changing the mental structure a depressive builds up over time, a pessimistic, negative, defensive misanthropy that hides 3/4s of the worlds glory. To change that means work, the exhausting work of self-monitoring.

Slowly I have learned how to frame my thoughts in less destructive ways. Over time it has become more natural. Growing up in a world where intelligence was proved by biting, disparaging wit, and knowing that intelligence was the coin I'd been endowed with, it has not been easy to walk away from such a self-validating mind set. Religion has helped.                                

    What we pay attention to does influence the people we are and become, just as choosing to plant  easy-care shrub rose instead of fussy varieties makes a difference over years in the garden.

Chose the right roses and, even in the rain, beauty remains. While in the sun, well, the accompanying scent is, that's right, breathtaking.

  

Aristotle pointed out that the point of life is happiness, but his definition of happiness is different that what we presently might call happiness. For Aristotle happiness meant the cultivation of virtue, cultivating a discipline derived from a set of essential values such as: compassion tempered by practicality, liberty tempered by civility, privacy and sociability, courage and self-restraint, justice and  mercy, toleration and temperance, and so many more. But always virtue had be balanced by a Golden Mean.                                                          

Moderate Liberals like me have become somewhat cowed  by the intellectual fashion of assuming that everything is relative, that all values depend on nothing but subjectivity, and that the only bad judgement is to judge someone else's judgement. I've talked in earlier posts how I think that's balderdash. Some principles work better than others; some principles are better suited to a happy life, some aesthetic choices really do produce happier results. Most vices, most uglinesses, are goods gone out of wack with the bigger picture. Some self-interest is necessary for a happy, productive life. Too much self-interest and you drive away your own happiness. Change is constant but basic, balanced virtues outlast most mutabilities. And the idea of a Golden Mean--that liberty and compassion can, should and must temper each other, feels like an idea America has completely forgotten. Which is silly of us, since it was so central to the Founder's mindset.

So enough of the small and big pictures.  Here are a few more pictures of roses, and of a garden that is presently a joy in its ever-changing balance.