Enlightened in Many Ways

Repost ffrom 8/27/2016:

"Supreme Awareness (Chiti, Brahmin, Self, Supreme Auspiciousness) is most often explained using the metaphor of 'light.' Light, and by comparison 'consciousness,' is illuminating, brilliant, bright, shining, luminous, allows us to see, provides visions, can be enlightened, shows the Way. Understanding is a function of seeing, looking, and insight. Light is associated with life, growth, energy, and warmth. Consciousness can be clear, focused, split up, diffused, shadowy, opaque, and magnified. Numerous religions have considered the sun to be a divine being, or their gods and goddesses to give off light, energy, warmth, and to light the way for us. Evil beings keep us in darkness, steal the light away, burn us up or freeze us, or are the Prince of Darkness."
- Mike Garofalo


Sunshine Power. Compiled by Mike Garofalo.


"Sunlight bestows a whopping 12.2 trillion watt-hours per square mile per year. The solar energy hitting the earth per year exceeds the total energy in all forms consumed by humanity per year by a factor of over 20,000 times."
- How Much Solar Energy Hits the Earth? From EcoWorld: Nature and Technology in Harmony.


"At first a small line of inconceivable splendor emerged on the horizon, which, quickly expanding, the sun appeared in all of his glory, unveiling the whole face of nature, vivifying every color of the landscape, and sprinkling the dewy earth with glittering light."
- Ann Reacliffe


The Ancient Four Elements  Fire (Sun), Earth (Soil), Air, Water

Most Honored Greening Force

Repost from June 10, 2013:]

"O most honored Greening Force,
 You who roots in the Sun;
 You who lights up, in shining serenity, within a wheel
 that earthly excellence fails to comprehend.
 You are enfolded
 in the weaving of divine mysteries.
 You redden like the dawn
 and You burn: flame of the Sun."
 -  Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), Viriditas
 


"Now summer is in flower and natures hum
Is never silent round her sultry bloom
Insects as small as dust are never done
Wi' glittering dance and reeling in the sun
And green wood fly and blossom haunting bee
Are never weary of their melody
Round field hedge now flowers in full glory twine
Large bindweed bells wild hop and streakd woodbine
That lift athirst their slender throated flowers
Agape for dew falls and for honey showers
These round each bush in sweet disorder run
And spread their wild hues to the sultry sun."
-  John Clare, June 

"Tell you what I like the best --
'Long about knee-deep in June,
'Bout the time strawberries melts
On the vine, -- some afternoon
Like to jes' git out and rest,
And not work at nothin' else!"
-  James Witcomb Riley, Knee Deep in June

The Spirit of Gardening

The Month of June

Getting Ready for Springtime

 Repost from February 10, 2021

We have been working on our home gardens, as weather permits.  I've worked on the raised garden beds on the west side of our home.  The area is sloped: house above, shrubs and mostly grass for 40 feet to the street below.  

To expand, I covered the grass with cardboard, placed the concrete bricks, filled the bed with home garbage, composed steer manure, bags of raised bed topsoil, straw, leaves, organic materials, etc.  Leaves cover the active composting area.  Plenty of good growing soil in a sunny west facing location.

Photos taken on February 7, 2021, Vancouver, Washington

The Spirit of Gardening

Hot Summer Days

 A high pressure weather system is over the Northwestern USA.  This weekend, the temperature is up to a high of 114F, with 76% humidity.  This is the highest temperature we have experienced in Vancouver, Washington.  

When we lived in Red Bluff, California, the summertime temperatures were quite often over 100F in the summer, but the humidity was very low.    

The house is closed up.  Window shades are all drawn.  We water our yard and garden as soon as it is daylight, around 5:15 am.  If I walk, it is at 6 am.  We do all our chores in the early morning.  We try to relax, rest, read, and watch TV all afternoon.  We have a couple of fans and a small one room air cooler. 

Thankfully, the Federal Bonneville Dam provides our electricity, and the Columbia River our water.  

Basically, sweating and uncomfortable in the afternoon and early evening hours.  Very difficult to be enthusiastic or very energetic.  

The Unconquerable Sun of Summer

"The sun is always a powerful, invincible image, whether it is the weak illumination of the pre winter solstice, or the savage primal energy of midsummer. Long before humanity developed written language humans must have gazed in terrific awe at the reborn sun each morning, how it over came the dangerous dragon of darkness that it sank into each evening, the provider of light, warmth, sustainer of growing vegetation -life itself--this enormous solar edifice quite clearly was one of the earliest forms of worship as man began to fashion a supernatural interpretation of natural phenomenon from the daily spectacle of the dying and reborn sun. Albert Pike makes the following concise statement in his Morals and Dogma: 'To them [aboriginal peoples] he [the sun] was the innate fire of bodies, the fire of Nature. Author of Life, heat, and ignition, he was to them the efficient cause of all generation, for without him there was no movement, no existence, no form. He was to them immense, indivisible, imperishable, and everywhere present. It was their need of light, and of his creative energy, that was felt by all men; and nothing was more fearful to them than his absence. His beneficent influences caused his identification with the Principle of Good; and the Brama of the Hindus, and Mithras of the Persians, and Athom, Amum, Phtha, and Osiris, of the Egyptians, the Bel of the Chaldeans, the Asonai of the Phœnicians, the Adonis and Apollo of the Greeks, became but personifications of the Sun, the regenerating Principle, image of that fecundity which perpetuates and rejuvenates the world's existence.'"
-   Christ, Constantine, Sol Invictus: The Unconquerable Sun   By Ralph Monday

June: Quotes, Poems, Sayings

Summer Solstice Celebration

From the Front Porch 2

Creating A Raised Bed Garden Over Grass

On the west side of our home, there are a few pruned shrubs near the house, then there is unwatered grass in the side lawn down to the street curb.  There are no trees or shrubs in this area of the west side lawn to block the direct sunlight all afternoon.  I wanted to convert some of this unused sunny ground into a raised bed vegetable garden for future planting.    

I started working in 9/2019, and created the raised bed you see me sitting on below.  I've been working in 11/2020 on expanding that first raised bed garden.  Thus far, I have added 52 square feet of new raised bed garden space this month.  

How?  Method?   I lay down the concrete blocks (16"x8"x8") in the pattern desired.  Then I lay cheap doubled cardboard over the grass.  On top of the cardboard I add, at various times in the year: small wood chips, leaves from our sweet gum tree, grass clippings, composted cow manure, kitchen vegetable garbage, bags of raised bed soil, back yard soil from digging, bags of vegetable and flower soil, 16-16-16 fertilizer, , etc.- in short, organic materials.  I get my blocks and bags of organic material from Ace Hardware or Lowe's in the nearby Orchards' neighborhood.

Here is how the west side raised bed garden looked in August-September 2020.  We enjoyed eating many tomatoes, squashes, peppers, zucchini, garlic, onions, and cabbages.  We also enjoyed sunflowers, nasturtiums, marigolds, and other summer annuals.  

 

September 2020

There are a few pictures below that show some of the ongoing process of creating an expanded raised garden bed in 2020-2021.  

"We seem to have lost contact with the earlier, more profound functions of art, which have always had to do with personal and collective empowerment, personal growth, communion with this world, and the search for what lies beneath and above this world."
- Peter London, No More Second Hand Art, 1989 

For me, this gardening project involves my personal empowerment: gets me moving, keeps me physically active, provides for regularly scheduled enjoyable work assignments, and allows me to create something useful pretty much on my own.  Family members help a little and we all share in the beauty and productive output of the new raised bed garden.  I always have personal growth in my knowledge and appreciation by doing, by refining my planning skills, by using good judgments to balance means and ends, and in creating something beautiful.  Gardening generally brings people into closer communion with fundamental aspects of our world- a communion of touch with the soil and the spirits of the seasons.  Here I searched beneath the new fertile soil; and, from above, maximum sunlight.  Here I searched with my own hands and body by nurturing fertile soils; integrated with a few aspects of the scope of the mind of gardening language and gardening tradition far above me.  

"Nothing is more completely the child of art than a garden."
- Sir Walter Scott

Gardening and Art

The Spirit of Gardening

Thoughts at Dawn

"Supreme Awareness (Chiti, Brahmin, Self, Supreme Auspiciousness) is most often explained using the metaphor of 'light.' Light, and by comparison 'consciousness,' is illuminating, brilliant, bright, shining, luminous, allows us to see, provides visions, can be enlightened, shows the Way. Understanding is a function of seeing, looking, and insight. Light is associated with life, growth, energy, and warmth. Consciousness can be clear, focused, split up, diffused, shadowy, opaque, and magnified. Numerous religions have considered the sun to be a divine being, or their gods and goddesses to give off light, energy, warmth, and to light the way for us. Evil beings keep us in darkness, steal the light away, burn us up or freeze us, or are the Prince of Darkness."
- Mike Garofalo


Sunshine Power. Compiled by Mike Garofalo.


"Sunlight bestows a whopping 12.2 trillion watt-hours per square mile per year. The solar energy hitting the earth per year exceeds the total energy in all forms consumed by humanity per year by a factor of over 20,000 times."
- How Much Solar Energy Hits the Earth? From EcoWorld: Nature and Technology in Harmony.


"At first a small line of inconceivable splendor emerged on the horizon, which, quickly expanding, the sun appeared in all of his glory, unveiling the whole face of nature, vivifying every color of the landscape, and sprinkling the dewy earth with glittering light."
- Ann Reacliffe


The Ancient Four Elements  Fire (Sun), Earth (Soil), Air, Water

Divine Illumination, Sol Invictus, Good Day Sunshine

"The sun is always a powerful, invincible image, whether it is the weak illumination of the pre winter solstice, or the savage primal energy of midsummer. Long before humanity developed written language humans must have gazed in terrific awe at the reborn sun each morning, how it over came the dangerous dragon of darkness that it sank into each evening, the provider of light, warmth, sustainer of growing vegetation -life itself--this enormous solar edifice quite clearly was one of the earliest forms of worship as man began to fashion a supernatural interpretation of natural phenomenon from the daily spectacle of the dying and reborn sun. Albert Pike makes the following concise statement in his Morals and Dogma: 'To them [aboriginal peoples] he [the sun] was the innate fire of bodies, the fire of Nature. Author of Life, heat, and ignition, he was to them the efficient cause of all generation, for without him there was no movement, no existence, no form. He was to them immense, indivisible, imperishable, and everywhere present. It was their need of light, and of his creative energy, that was felt by all men; and nothing was more fearful to them than his absence. His beneficent influences caused his identification with the Principle of Good; and the Brama of the Hindus, and Mithras of the Persians, and Athom, Amum, Phtha, and Osiris, of the Egyptians, the Bel of the Chaldeans, the Asonai of the Phœnicians, the Adonis and Apollo of the Greeks, became but personifications of the Sun, the regenerating Principle, image of that fecundity which perpetuates and rejuvenates the world's existence.'"
-   Christ, Constantine, Sol Invictus: The Unconquerable Sun   By Ralph Monday

June: Quotes, Poems, Sayings

Summer Solstice Celebration

Gayatri Mantra

Oṃ bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ

tát savitúr váreṇ(i)yaṃ

bhárgo devásya dhīmahi

dhíyo yó naḥ pracodáyāt

 

Oh God, the Protector, the basis of all life, Who is self-existent, Who is free from all pains and Whose contact frees the soul from all troubles, Who pervades the Universe and sustains all, the Creator and Energizer of the whole Universe, the Giver of happiness, Who is worthy of acceptance, the most excellent, Who is Pure and the Purifier of all, let us embrace that very God, so that He may direct our mental faculties in the right direction.

Alternative meaning
Om, that (Divine Illumination) which pervades the physical plane (Bhu Loka), astral plane (Bhuvar Loka or Antariksha Loka) and or the celestial plane (Suvar Loka or Swarga Loka),
That Savitr (Divine Illumination) which is the most adorable,
On that Divine Radiance we meditate,
May that enlighten our intellect and awaken our spiritual wisdom.

Burning Sun

We have been in a heat wave for one week. Daytime temperatures have exceeded 105F for many days.  Very tiring.  Light exercise (walking and Tai Chi) at 5 am, watering in the early morning, outdoor physical chores before temperatures reach 90F, then staying indoors in the semi-darkness in the afternoon doing reading, web publishing, watching the Tour de France, etc., and finally, gym and then relaxing in the evening.  

"The eastern light our spires touch at morning,
The light that slants upon our western doors at evening,
The twilight over stagnant pools at batflight,
Moon light and star light, owl and moth light,
Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade.
O Light Invisible, we worship Thee!"
-  T.S. Eliot 

When temperatures climb to over 105F, it is more "fear" than "worship", although the two states of mind are often intertwined.  

Sol Invictus

"The sun is always a powerful, invincible image, whether it is the weak illumination of the pre winter solstice, or the savage primal energy of midsummer. Long before humanity developed written language humans must have gazed in terrific awe at the reborn sun each morning, how it over came the dangerous dragon of darkness that it sank into each evening, the provider of light, warmth, sustainer of growing vegetation -life itself--this enormous solar edifice quite clearly was one of the earliest forms of worship as man began to fashion a supernatural interpretation of natural phenomenon from the daily spectacle of the dying and reborn sun. Albert Pike makes the following concise statement in his Morals and Dogma: 'To them [aboriginal peoples] he [the sun] was the innate fire of bodies, the fire of Nature. Author of Life, heat, and ignition, he was to them the efficient cause of all generation, for without him there was no movement, no existence, no form. He was to them immense, indivisible, imperishable, and everywhere present. It was their need of light, and of his creative energy, that was felt by all men; and nothing was more fearful to them than his absence. His beneficent influences caused his identification with the Principle of Good; and the Brama of the Hindus, and Mithras of the Persians, and Athom, Amum, Phtha, and Osiris, of the Egyptians, the Bel of the Chaldeans, the Asonai of the Phœnicians, the Adonis and Apollo of the Greeks, became but personifications of the Sun, the regenerating Principle, image of that fecundity which perpetuates and rejuvenates the world's existence.'"
-   Christ, Constantine, Sol Invictus: The Unconquerable Sun   By Ralph Monday 

June: Quotes, Poems, Sayings

Summer Solstice Celebration

Solar Eclipse

Last evening, around 6:30 pm, there was a solar eclipse.  There were many eerie optical phenomenon at the ground level in our garden as a result of the eclipse.  In the following photograph, look between the well pump house and the north facing shaded side of the garage.  What do you see?

"For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the light and the air which vary continually.  For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value."
-  Claude Monet

"Zeus, the father of the Olympic Gods, turned mid-day into night, hiding the light of the dazzling Sun; and sore fear came upon men."
-   Archilochus (c680-c640 BC), Greek poet

Seeing: Quotations, Sayings, Poems, Quips