Hummingbirds and Kabbalah

I managed to take some new photos of the local hummingbirds.  This requires arising at 5:30 (at least) in order to be in place when they appear for their morning fountain frolic.  

It's been rainy here for the last month, which means the morning (and evening) alignment of planets has not been visible.  I have found myself more attracted to staying in bed, even on those days when it has been relatively clear and the morning skies visible.   I may rouse myself for the impending conjunction of Mars and Jupiter—but it appears the conjunction coincides with the increased likelihood of overcast skies.

On the reading front, I've been reading a history of Kabbalah.  It's not so much about the mystical system as it is about the men (and it's been pretty much all men) and movements associated with it.  As near as I can gather, the typical repeating cycle of events over two millennia is something like,  "a scammer or scholar (we're not always sure which) with bi-polar disorder, mild schizophrenia, or migraine headaches has a mystical revelation while studying or expanding upon the teaching of Kabbalah, proclaims the advent of a new age or else proclaims themselves a new messiah, garners zealous admirers,  has a run-in with the religious or secular powers, and is jailed or exiled."  There's also a lot of book-banning and book-burning.  1666 was particularly MAGA-meets-Life-of-Brian.

On the dream front, I haven't been recalling my dreams so much; the bits that do come through feel like they're part of a gritty comic book or science-fiction series, like spy chases or ensemble fight scenes; or else they're unsubtly erotic.  

January and Octagons

We've taken down the Christmas trees at our house and at my folks' house.  Our tree this year was one of the smallest ones we've had, and once we took all of the paper doves, ornaments, and lights off of it, I carried it outside.  I enjoyed the tree, but while it was up it underscored how frat-house-cluttered our living room is.  I suppose whenever we decorate for a holiday, we cross over a saturation point.  

My folks' tree is a monster artificial tree that practically requires a blowtorch to take apart, and winches to cinch back into its boxes.  But we did it.  This may be the year I come up with some kind of origami collapsable tree contraption that my dad can manage (I'm seeing a rack-and-pinion mechanism that expands like a car jack, only tree-shaped).

The snow from December has melted and we're back to our regular upper-thirties rain and overcast (with occasional sun).  Since the hummingbirds were peering down the hole in the fountain's stone pillar looking for water, I braved the frigid water and reinstalled the pump.  Within an hour-and-a-half, they'd come back to splash in the fountain's flow, which made me surprisingly happy.

On the art front, I've been playing with octagonal symmetry.  The results tend to look like quilt patterns.  Whereas pentagons and Penrose tiles have to deal with the golden mean and the odd gap where things don't quite line up, octagons have to deal with issues around the square root of two.  What's interesting is that triangles repeating around an octagon almost will make a perfect five-point star (one can almost, but not quite, make eight pentagons fit around an octagon).  I stuck to squares, right-triangles, and isosceles triangles mostly.  It occurs to me that I didn't try using alternating half-circles set on a square's corners--but that might end up looking like jigsaw puzzle pieces.  Hmm.

The latest dream involved going on an archeological visit to an ancient stone tower, built by vaguely South Americans in some unspecified past.  The tower was more like a giant mesa, eroded volcanic plug, or stone pueblo.  I got caught in a shaft that was being used as an elevator and got mashed a little by the plastic gondola as it descended.  

When I got to the top of the tower, there were a bunch of other tourists there.  A strong wind picked up, and the tower began listing to one side.  We were directed to walk down hitherto unnoticed stairs before the whole thing could blow over.  

I can only conclude that the symbolism of the tarot card, "The Tower," has been added to my typical elevator anxiety dream, which, I'm  just now realizing, had the beginnings of the "lost in a constricting maze" elements in it.  Sigh.

Dreaming a Story

 I've got a few quiet moments to myself Friday morning.  

A few years ago, I used to regularly have about fifteen minutes in the parking lot at work for reflection and writing (school drop-off schedule didn't quite mesh with the work schedule).  With various life changes and the COVID pandemic, I don't always have that bubble of time to think about stories, or the latest dream, or various wildlife sightings.  

I must have tried to dream about my current fantasy short story because I dreamed I was a Merlin-esque character in a story Mary Stewart might write.  I had been pulled out of retirement or my hermitage, and was being accompanied by a young man to my old home in a forest of holy and oak.  As we were riding, he was about to tell me something important, when I motioned that he should stop.  A falcon or similar raptor flew out of the forest and alighted on the top of some trees; this indicated that there was someone nearby eavesdropping on us.  "They must have known that you'd come to fetch me," I said, "and have been watching me for some time.

There wasn't too much more; I found a spot next to some ancient trees where my stone house used to be... I have a vague sense that I lived in a stone treehouse.

On the wildlife front:  I'be been seeing the hummingbirds less, probably because they're up right before the sun rises and I am not.  However, we have had an increase in dragonflies, both the small ruby kind and the large sapphire kind.

Return to Delta Ponds

 

Over the weekend, I took a break from Doom-Scrolling and went with Mark to Delta Ponds.  Although the evenings and nights have been overcast and rainy, we've been having clearish mornings.  It's been months since I've been.

 

Mostly, we saw coots, geese, cormorants, ducks, and heron.  We even managed to spy a hummingbird.  Off in the distance,  a bald eagle perched -- probably over the Willamette in hopes of catching a fish.  We saw no beavers, although Mark saw a nutria through his binoculars.

Because it was only about ninety minutes after sunrise when we got there, and because most of the leaves are off of the trees, the structure of branches struck me several times and I wished I had a loom or the graphic design ability to create a screen from the repeating patterns.

Later in the afternoon, before the sky became completely overcast, I got up on roof and took down the holiday star.  

 

Unfortunately, I did much too much Doom-Scrolling Sunday.

Ides of Autumn

We've had a few days of cloudy weather, followed by a couple of nights where the temperature got down to the high 20's, and suddenly the days feel like Autumn.  Now that the sun is back, I really notice how much shadow covers the yard.  

Since it was going to be sub-freezing, I drained the fountain and took out the pump.  This made me melancholy, because now the the hummingbirds won't visit.  The first cold morning I put out a plate of water on top of the fountain's basalt column.  One of the morning hummingbirds zipped over the fountain, hovered around it, and I swear it looked over its shoulder through the glass patio door at me as if to say, "Unacceptable," and zipped over the house and away.  This is the sort of thing that makes me want to have a ritualistic re-filling of the fountain, which will probably have to wait until the March 20 Equinox.  

The second cold morning, all the zinnias durned brown; so did most of the grape leaves, which subsequently fell off of the vine and scattered along the foundation of the backyard-fort-turned-arbor.   

I suppose this will make the yard look seasonally festive this Saturday night.  In lieu of decorating the front, we've been decorating the back for a kind of private display.  I wish friends could come over in person, but with COVID-19, it's out of the question.  I suppose we'll have fun by ourselves -- Mark and The Child have decided that they'll put out Trick-or-Treat bags on a table and leave that out for anyone who wants to walk by the house.  And I still plan to RollerBlade in the full moon light.

Last Lazy Sunday of September

Today is a lazy Sunday.  The morning's fog has finally burned off and white clouds are scudding along a blue sky.  Mark and I had thought to go to the beach, but Mark suggested that maybe we could put it off a week; I was feeling disinclined to spend hours in a car, so I agreed.

I spent the morning sipping some tea, listening to Sunday Baroque, and virtually visiting the chapels of Oxford via a booklet put together here:  

http://www.cleverpaper.co.uk/dominic_price/stained%20glass/mobile/index.html?fbclid=IwAR1doslfpq6E6w7eC9ZphmSPkiJmt9u4wctJjVca83kjDX19vXxhYTN7lIY#p=55  

and I came to the conclusion that Pamela Colman Smith must have been influenced by various stained glass windows when she created the images in the Rider-Waite tarot deck. 

Slightly related, I've been having some fun watching Dr. Colleen Darnell and her husband, Dr. John C. Darnell, at The Vintage Egyptologist:  https://www.youtube.com/c/VintageEgyptologist/featured  

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The spiders are out and building their webs.  There are at least three visible from the back deck; they each hold quarter-sized orb-weaver spiders (I think).  The brown and dun bands on their legs and abdomens remind me of rattan.  I'm guessing the larger spiders are the females.  Yesterday I'm pretty sure I saw a mating ritual; a larger spider sat near the edge of its web and strummed one of the strands.  A smaller spider slowly advanced along the threads.  They faced each other, the smaller spider waving three or more legs so that the tips just brushed the larger spider's legs.  The smaller spider moved closer and closer, occasionally tagging the larger spider, then rushing away as if to a avoid a tag-back.  The larger spider eventually folded its legs close to its body and held still.  The smaller spider quickly wrapped its legs around the larger one (?pinning its legs?) and pressed its abdomen against the larger one.  About ten seconds later, it dashed off, quick as lightning, and hid under a nearby leaf.  The larger spider unfolded and splayed across several web strands.  I didn't stay to watch, but I think they were going to do it again.

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The hummingbirds continue to visit the fountain.  I'm torn between wanting to go out and get a feeder for them and the knowledge that eventually Cicero and Smokey will tolerate Aoife enough to venture back into the back yard.  Cicero's bad enough with dragonflies and snakes, and I can imagine catching and torturing hummingbirds would be great sport for him. 

Autumnal Equinox 2020

Happy Equinox!  

We've had a few relatively smoke-free days, and when I checked this morning the Air Quality Index was something like 15 -- much better than the ten days of +400 readings we had after Labor Day.  

I felt so much better the other night when I stepped outside and I didn't have to worry about not wearing a particulate mask and I could see Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation of Capricorn.  The miasma that had settled over this end of the valley oppressed and depressed me -- I'm sure glad that I don't have some sort of breathing problem, because by the tenth day of the smoke I was ready to just curl up and sleep forever.

I can't imagine being a crow, eagle, hawk, osprey, hummingbird, heron, wren, or other flying thing sharing the sky with the smoke; I can't imagine being a squirrel, frog, raccoon, cat, dog, rabbit, deer, sheep, cow, newt, or other small creature picking through the ash-scape; I can't imagine being a grape, cherry, apple, rosemary, hornbeam, azalea, iris, lilac, laurel, pine, oak, or other leafy thing enduring a sun-block of burnt forest and houses.   

And I can't imagine why someone nearby would want to smoke a cigar right now and ruin an otherwise pleasant evening with their foul smoke.  I mean, honestly.  

Unfortunately, this isn't the last bad fire season we're likely to see (and I think the cigar smoker is a neighbor).  Fortunately, more wind and rain from the ocean is on our way, so we're in for a respite.  

On the plus side, the pair of hummingbirds who had discovered the fountain and come to bathe on top of the basalt column once or twice most mornings seem to be sticking around.  Aiofe bothers the cats so much that they don't venture into the yard, so the birds are safe from them for this season.  I've tried taking some photos of them as they rustle and flutter in the water, but so far I haven't managed clear shots.

Hummingbird Achievement Unlocked

Sunday was my dad's birthday.  He's thirty years older than I am, which means we celebrated his 54th birthday (hat tip to LGL for that math bon mot).  We had a quiet family gathering and lunch.  Afterward, Mark and The Child performed astounding magic card tricks.

My folks have a hummingbird feeder which they keep stocked year round.  Accordingly, they have some resident hummingbirds living around their house.  Over the last four months, I've tied to photograph one of the little guys who has a regular perch in a maple tree at the edge of a deck.  It turns out that the tree is just far enough away, the hummingbird is just twitchy enough, and my camera's auto-focus is just confused enough that I managed to get some artistic photographs of tree twigs with a fuzzy, bejeweled blur. 

This time, I decided to stake out the hummingbird feeder.  The feeder's resident champion hovered a challenge at me before deciding that I wasn't going to try to steal any sugar-water, and I managed to get a few shots, before it flew off to chase some rivals away.  While it was occupied, some of the other hummingbirds visited, and I took their photographs, too.

More here:  https://photos.app.goo.gl/ZVdnrxWsn9RGQvRv7

End of July Post

Whew.  I haven't posted for a while.  This morning I'm having a lazyish morning at Café John, reading news with some tea and a blackberry muffin Mark made.  About a half hour ago a green hummingbird came and sampled the dianthis and morning glories.  It sat on a power line and then flew away.  Luckily Smokey wasn't in the yard.  I'm hoping the hummingbird comes back.  Mark and I weren't sure if it was good at being a hummingbird or not, since the canna lillies threw it for a loop.

A friend interviewed me for her blog and wants a picture.  Mark supplied some "non-goofy" pictures from a recent hike, but the one I like the most is a little out of focus.  I tried to take some self-portraits, but they were taken at night with the sole illumination coming from a computer monitor.  I was hoping they'd come out techno-geeky, but they came out sleezy-leery.   I suppose there's always the photo with the forks.

In other news, I got some exercise equipment -- a jump rope and some stretchy band things you stick in a door frame -- so now all I need is a techno soundtrack with random grunting and I can pretend the living-room is a gym.  This is all part of my plan to be ripped by the time I turn 50, I figure a year and a half should give me enough time.

And now... more tea and muffins.  Oh.  Wait.

Addendum:  As I was closing up this post, two more hummingbirds came by to inspect the canna lilies. I've never seen them actually drink from the canna lilies, so I'm not sure there's nectar to be had. I guess they like red flowers.