Barbara Rodgers

blue thread

A mood of melancholy has followed me around like a dark cloud the past couple of weeks. It probably has a lot to do with the anticipated move out-of-state for our son and daughter-in-law drawing ever closer.

Tuesday Laurie of Speaking from the Heart, posed the question, “What’s been your most recent surprise?” Well, the night before Tim gave me the dragonfly pendant pictured at the right. Laurie hinted that she wanted to see it, so….

Other recent gifts have been a long phone call from my daughter and of course, this new web domain from my son. I feel blessed and full of gratitude, and yet, still blue. I’m also taking more steps on a path to vegetarianism and am engaged in a pensive, inner spiritual struggle. Planning to write a post about that soon…

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragonfly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky:
So this winged hour is dropped to us from above.
~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(Silent Noon)

I went up to visit my father Tuesday, and stayed overnight, returning yesterday morning. Visiting him always leaves me sad as there is so little I can do to make his life easier. My only hope is that my presence somehow makes him feel as comforted as the presence of my own children makes me feel…

Bernie, my sister Beverly, and I took a walk in the woods Wednesday morning. Bernie is showing his age and was in a little funk himself. If you haven’t been introduced to Bernie yet, you can find his story here.

Lately I’ve thought a lot about “my” hemlock tree, which I climbed all the time when I was a child. I loved to sit high up in it and absorb its energy and have now been wondering what its energy would feel like these days. Part of me wants to climb it again, for old times’ sake, but I’d have to bother someone for a ladder to get to the lowest branch and I question my agility and this stage of my life. The tree has been under attack and weakened from an infestation of the hemlock woolly adelgid, which my brother-in-law, who is a botanist, is trying to control. So I took a picture to show where Hurricane Gloria snapped its crown off in 1985. You can see where new growth has filled in above the break, in about the middle of the photo.

When I got home and uploaded the picture I was delighted to find it full of orbs! Orbs have been on my mind recently, too, since seeing Kathy’s picture of a golden brown orb on her post at Lake Superior Spirit. I think the orbs are a good sign that my tree still has some healing energy. Maybe I will bother someone about a ladder… Later on, walking along the path to the mailbox, I thought this little clearing looked pretty so I snapped another picture, and didn’t realize until I got home that it was full of orbs, too.

But that was it for surprise orb photos. The hemlock below has not fared so well, and has become an ideal place for woodpeckers to drill for insects…

I liked the texture I found in a pile of scrap lumber by the shed…

And to end on a more cheerful note, a pretty flowering sedum in Beverly’s rock garden…

swallowing the sun

Like the prodigal son
I return to you, the sea.
You who scare the idylls off
into tame inner fjords, bays and inlets
because you are much too majestic for weekend yachtsmen,
outboard motors and hobby anglers.
Without so much as a blink you swallow the sun
like a raw egg-yolk for supper
and at daybreak you lift heavy banks of cloud
dense with rain and squalls, a wet cloth
on sleep-heavy eyes and throbbing temples.
With the horizon like a diadem about your brows
you write your salt letters to the shore.
Land changes,
men and beasts come and go.
Only you
live your solitary life, the world’s
blue eyes fixed on the stars and eternity.

If the Earth has a soul,
it swims in you.

~ Kolbein Falkeid
(Homecoming to the Sea)

rosemaling

The new email subscription widget that Nate installed seems to be working now. Tim subscribed last night and he got a confirmation back and I got a confirmation notice for his subscription this morning. (It may have come while I was sleeping…) Please let me know if you have any problems.

Is anyone using the RSS feed? Wondering if that is working for those who get posts through that feed.

what we are

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
~ Kurt Vonnegut
(Mother Night)

I find sometimes it’s easy to be myself
Sometimes I find it’s better to be somebody else
~ Dave Matthews
♫ (So Much to Say) ♫

along came a spider

"Little Miss Muffet" by John Everett Millais — “Little Miss Muffet” by John Everett Millais

This morning started off with a blood-curdling scream – mine. I was minding my own business, loading the dishwasher, when I turned to glance at the clock – and there, dangling right in front of my nose, a spider hanging from the ceiling on his thread. Now I won’t tell you how big he was because I have no objectivity when it comes to spiders, and anyway, as far as spiders are concerned, size makes not one iota of difference. They all loom large in my consciousness!

Well, it didn’t take long for the knight-in-shining-armor, well, the knight-still-in-his-pajamas, who had been minding his own business working from home today – thank goodness! – to scramble down the stairs ready for battle. What he found was a woman cornered by the sink, wielding a dirty spatula most ineffectively. He performed the required deed swiftly and promised the poor spider an honorable burial at sea. After giving a warm hug and some soothing words to the lady-in-distress, he went back upstairs and a moment later I heard the toilet flush.

As I returned to cleaning up after breakfast and waiting for my adrenaline to stop pumping, I decided that perhaps it was time to share my spider saga with my readers – one never knows from where inspiration for a blog will come!

It all began when I was about three years old, although my parents are a bit hazy about the time frame. We had moved into the house they built in the woods when I was three, and I was still young enough to be playing outside in the summer with no shirt on… I was sitting on the front porch when a spider let itself down on a thread from the gutter, landed on my bare back, and started to bite me. I started screaming and running away and around the house, my parents chasing after me and trying to figure out what was wrong with me. When they finally caught me and discovered the problem, one of them said, “Oh – it’s only a spider.” I’m not sure I ever saw the culprit on my back, but as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve always been highly sensitive, and from that moment on developed a profound fear of spiders. In my childish brain I couldn’t understand how “only a spider” could inflict so much pain and terror.

Unfortunately for me, spiders are strangely attracted to me and they actually do seek me out. Must be my pheromones or something, but as anybody who has ever spent any time with me will affirm, they do manage to come to me while ignoring all other humans in the vicinity. They usually drop down from the ceiling, but once I was lying on my bed reading when one popped up at the foot of the bed and started charging straight for me. Once I was on a treadmill at the gym, where the ceiling was at least two stories high, and one dropped down from it, right in front of my nose, causing me to panic and stumble and make Tim, on the treadmill next to me, wonder why on earth I was suddenly flailing around.

Now I know spider encounters are supposed to be messages from the universe that I need to pay more attention to my creativity. Believe me, I have the best of intentions to stay calm and appreciate the message the next time I see a spider, but they always startle me and the outcome is always irrational panic.

The spider nightmares began in 1972, when I was 15. I suppose they were an expression of the anxiety I felt about moving to a foreign country with my family. I had never moved before, and had never been overseas, not even for a trip. We were to take an ocean liner from New York City bound for Athens, Greece the next day. We were spending our last night stateside in an aunt’s one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, and we were packed in like sardines sleeping on cots – all the women in the bedroom, all the men in the living room. Many relations had come to see us off.

Well, in the middle of the night I “woke up” to see a spider coming down from the ceiling toward me. Naturally I screamed! The light came on and I pointed to it. A bunch of groggy aunts, my mom and my sister were asking, “what? where?” I pointed and pointed but no one could see it and they finally concluded that I was having a nightmare. Eventually I didn’t see it any more and realized it had to have been a dream. These spider nightmares have been with me off and on ever since.

It’s amazing sometimes that no matter how well you think you may know another person there is always something new to learn. Tim & I were married in 1975 and that is when I met my sister-in-law, Fran, and we have been as close as sisters ever since. Somehow one evening in 2007, 32 years after we met, Fran and I got to talking about dreams and made the startling discovery that we both have had the same recurring spider dreams! While having this dream we are both convinced that we are awake and keep pointing (sleep-pointing?) to the spider as it moves across the wall or ceiling, trying to convince whoever is in the room with us that it is actually there and being frustrated that the other person can’t see it. If alone in the room, a blood-curdling scream brings someone in soon enough. Only half-jokingly I theorized that in past lives we must have both been eaten by a spider and were somehow destined to be linked in this life, too, by marrying two brothers. Fran decided that we had been flies…

So those are the highlights of my spider tale. There have been too many real encounters and dream encounters to ever possibly tell them all, but that’s enough of this subject for one day!

Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a spider,
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.

global consciousness project

Global Consciousness Project

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
~ Carl Sagan
(Conversations with Carl Sagan)

science, mystery, wonder

Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it. … I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature.
~ Robert Sapolsky
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers)

an ancient disease

This morning we learned that late last night another one of Tim’s brothers, age 57, survived a heart attack. I’ve come to the conclusion that September is heart attack season. You may recall that last September one of his brothers, at age 51, had one, and Tim himself, at age 54, had one in September 2007. It will be interesting to see if the three youngest brothers make it out of their 50s without repeating the pattern laid down by the three oldest brothers.

Apparently the gene came from their maternal grandmother, who didn’t survive her heart attack at age 54, and their maternal great-grandmother, who didn’t survive her heart attack in her 50s – not sure of her exact age. I remember Tim’s mother was thrilled to have made it past the age of 54, only to succumb to lung cancer at age 60.

Egyptian Princess Mummy Had Oldest Known Heart Disease

Poor Princess Ahmose Meryet Amon – her name means “Child of the Moon, Beloved of Amun.” A CAT-scan of her 3,500-year-old mummy revealed “blockages in five major arteries, including those that supply blood to the brain and heart.” Interestingly, “The new study suggests that genetics may be even more important than thought in causing atherosclerosis, and the mummies might hold clues to which genetic factors are involved.” Tim’s cardiologists were certainly very interested in his medical family history. Researchers have yet so much more to learn about cardiovascular disease.

evening scenery

Sunday night we decided to have supper at the health food store in Mystic and then take a little stroll along the Mystic River. We wound up eating outside and enjoyed a little tourist-watching. The summer tourist season is fading away… The old salts at Schooner Wharf must be tired of having their gravel parking lot thrown into the river, rock by rock. (see signs above) We didn’t see the attack seagull, but then again, we didn’t dare to even touch a rock!

The brick building across the river in the next picture used to be an elementary school called Mystic Academy. Now it is a “senior care community” called Academy Point at Mystic. Some of the people living there must have rooms with fantastic views…

The reflections of the clouds in the water were delightful…

A boat color coordinated with nearby homes…

When we started to drive home we finally noticed the huge almost-full moon. So we made another stop at Eastern Point and took a picture of her, looking towards Avery Point. With the moon illusion at work here, she looks much smaller in the picture than she did with the naked eye…

I found this interesting explanation at Grand Illusions, but I don’t really comprehend it!

The first problem is for photographers. A wonderful picture presents itself, with the full moon just rising above a spectacular horizon. Click, the picture is taken. Yet the result is disappointing. The moon seems much smaller in the photograph than it did when viewed with the naked eye. Even professional photographers fall for this one. Yet on a normal lens, 50mm on a 35mm camera, the field of view is around 50 degrees, and the width of the moon, subtending an angle of 0.5 degrees, will be 100th of the width of the photo! Many photographs that you see in magazines, containing both a moon and a landscape, will be composites. The landscape will be taken with a normal lens, the moon taken with a telephoto lens, to get a bigger image.