The Meatspace Times

Fifty-one weeks out of the year, all I get for parking under the cherry tree is bird poop.

One week (or actually a few days out of that week) I get decorated like a Rose Bowl float.

Is this the universe trying to make up for the bird poop? I don't think the universe works that way, although thought has been devoted to the larger significance of bird poop.

The universe frankly does not give a damn, nor am I its dear. I exist. It so far has not squashed me like a bug and that's pretty much as far as our relationship goes.
Which is OK by me. I'm not sure I want the attention of the universe, courting some kind of divine attention to my comings and goings, my life in this City on a Hill. If the Universal Paparazzo wants to train its lens elsewhere, fine by me. Means I can get out of cars without my underwear and not wind up on everybody's damn blog.
Why do we assume God's attention will be benign? Because we ask for it? Hah! The Divine sees through that one - the guilty hiding in plain sight, the killer who wants to go to the station to clear his name. The Deity has seen those episodes of Law & Order and isn't being taken in.
No, raise your hand and you're as likely to get it smacked by the Universe as shaken. Leave it down and you may get a plague of frogs or you may not.
The Universe is not running some damn focus group to find out what the creatures want. The Universe has built the product and has a few hundred thousand units in the warehouse ready to ship.

It turns out that Y-Henge - when the sun rises directly in the middle of the metal frame over the entrance to the Oak Square YMCA - may be more a period than a single day as I had previously thought. The frame, after all, is fairly large relative to the perceived diameter of the sun, and it depends some on what your observation point is.

That said, sitting on the right hand bench on the Faneuil Street side, as you face the firehouse - which I presume is where the chief Druid would have been sitting - the sun looked pretty central just a day before the  equinox.



I dunno what causes the red ovals. Maybe the Druids.

Light fog makes the middle distance a realm of possibility. Out there, half hidden, a troop of horse waits to advance, swaggering bands of plastic Santas and garden gnomes plot the New Age.

In the trees green is gray and squirrels run respectfully as though in church.

The half-seen gives us a license that the fully illuminated does not. It is impossible not to speculate about the fog-shrouded. What lies behind and just out of reach? In fog the actuary becomes a poet, the analytical chemist a peyote-smoked visionary, and the realm of myth gains subjects by the hundreds. We can't not look for something else, it seems, even if we are not all that discontent or imaginatively unengaged in what is.

We can be perfectly happy with our two by fours and our cars that start and don't look too bad, our reasonable health and pleasant enough neighbors, and still probe the fog for more, for some unspecified Other that will astonish, delight, and terrify.

"This can't be it," we say, not so much complaining as voicing a deep belief. We want, by God, our magic.

Serving enlightenment for more than a century

I smelled the first skunk of spring this week, on my way to the Mirror, pungent in the frozen snow fields. A first exploration out to test the food supply, scout out den entrances newly melted out, cruise for a little skunk nooky.

And the round world shifts a little more, the South Africans getting maybe a first haunting sense of waning days and cooler breezes, while up here we desperately sniff the air for a hint that we could pull through this one once again, notch another winter on our belts - them of us as wintered over, that is. We musn't forget that some are in the cold cold ground.

Massa and man, currying favor at this last minute with whatever gods may be, wondering as the lights flicker out if in fact these souls are unconquerable or if that was just another cheap advertising trick, that the huckster god slipped a disclaimer into the fine print and rapid talk, while the images persuade us of an eternal romp, tails lifted high, spraying the bold world boldly, for life, as it were.

One of the nice things about the circumequinoctial times of the year is that dawn comes at a halfway reasonable hour: early enough to be special, but not so early that you have to set the alarm clock. Or I don't anyway.

So on my walk on the first of October I saw this setting full moon, amid clouds that were just starting to pick up sunlight. 

If I had and knew Photoshop I'd probably take out the electrical wire that runs atop the chimney on the house, but I don't, so there's one ethical dilemma avoided.

As a bonus, it turns out that October 1 is also Y-henge day. The sun rises directly in the middle of the ornamental metalwork atop the Oak Square YMCA, if you stand so you face it directly. I couldn't manage the exposure well enough to capture that. 

Y-henge is unlikely to achieve even the limited, geeky fame of MIThenge, but I had hypothesized its existence, and I am pleased to see it is real.