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Archives for August 2017

A Total Eclipse of the Eclipse

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I had high expectations of Monday’s eclipse.  The media had prepared us well with scientific information, beautiful illustrations and photos of previous celestial wonders, and Amazon had plenty of viewing glasses to purchase.  The Great American Eclipse was to make its way across the heart of our country in its totality.  Minnesota wouldn’t see complete darkness, but an almost total eclipse is exciting, nonetheless.  The sun was shining on my Monday morning walk…then the clouds rolled in.  As E-time approached, thunder rolled and rumbled, and rain fell, along with my high hopes.

One of our Bluebirds of happiness flew to the Maple just outside the window, perching on the side of the tree, reminding me that blue skies would come again.  (Tuesday’s sky was blue and cloudless.)

Even in the midst of my dashed eclipse expectations, there was tropical beauty right outside my door in the rain—a banana tree and the pretty pink flowers of Mandevilla.

Beyond the hype and excitement of the eclipse this week was the reality of the waning days of summer.  First day of school pictures filled my Facebook feed.  Cooler than normal temperatures necessitated bringing out the fleeces and sweatshirts.  The tomatoes are finally ready to eat!  The apples are turning red.  Sumac leaves are beginning to turn crimson.  Wild plums are ripening.

 

And our first ever hazel nuts are forming under the curved leaves and inside the fringed husks!

I never say summer is sweet on the humid, hot days (I mean, what do I expect?!), but as August winds down and Summer Sweet blooms and releases its fragrant scent, I am reminded that summer is indeed a sweet time of year.

On the other side of dashed expectations and humid-drenched disappointments is surprise and possibility.  What is eating our Milkweed?  Monarch caterpillars, of course.  Not this time!  The hungry, similar-colored caterpillars are the larval stage of the Milkweed Tiger Moth (a very drab, gray-colored moth.)

And look at this delicate web of water droplets I found in the grass below the milkweed!

At the junction of old and new soil and grass around our patio, a fungus grew that looked like a worn, well-oiled leather catcher’s mitt.  Where did that come from?

Then there is the delicate surprise of a common object seen in a different light—the bird’s nest bundle of seeds of Queen Anne’s lace and a pincushion center of Black-eyed Susan.

 

There’s a book titled Expectation Hangover by Christine Hassler.  I haven’t read it, but she defines Expectation Hangover as “the myriad of undesirable feelings or thoughts present when one or a combination of the following things occur: a desired outcome does not occur; a desired outcome does occur but does not produce the feelings or results we expected; our personal and/or professional expectations are unmet by ourselves or another; an undesired, unexpected event occurs that is in conflict with what we want or planned.”  I’ve had a few of those in my lifetime and know very well the toll it takes on time, energy, and self-worth.  My high hopes of experiencing the eclipse were tempered by the meteorological predictions that didn’t favor clear skies on that day.  It’s important to keep our expectations grounded in reality—what’s the science behind this or what does the history of this person show us or what can we really afford?  I’m not sure it’s our expectations per se that get us into trouble, but our attachment to them.  Those attachments can run deep and profound to the very soul of who we think we are.  But Nature teaches us that even in the certainty of summer morphing into fall, we can discover new surprises and see things in a different light—like we’ve never seen them before.  Expectations and possibilities with a grounding of reality—it’s a recipe for an awe-inspiring eclipse (or not), a sweet summer, and an authentic life.

Lead Into Gold

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“Every human being has gone through a tragedy of sorts.  And the idea is that you have two paths you can take.  You can find that alchemy that turns lead into gold, find that magic where you can see the loss as an entry point for learning and grow from it and become wiser and stronger.”  —Jillian Michaels

A small meadow that I walk by every day had been mowed a while ago.  The grass was not growing back very fast as we had had dry weather until recently.  But something caught my attention earlier this week—a Milkweed plant had grown knee-high above the shorn grass and stood out in stark relief from the dry, brown grass.

I was curious whether a plant had been cut down or if this was a new plant.  When I looked closely, I saw that one stem of the Milkweed had been mowed off, and in its place, three new stems had grown.

As I looked around the meadow, I saw other plants that had been mowed down that were now tall and blooming!  Red Clover, Daisy Fleabane, the tough, persistent Canadian Thistle, and others.

It was not the first time the meadow had been mowed, and I knew for sure the Milkweed had not had its chance to bloom yet.  The Red Clover, like Alfalfa, grows fast and had probably bloomed before each mowing.  The grass had already gone to seed before it was mowed the second time—its life cycle for the season was complete.  But the Milkweed had still not bloomed or produced pods full of fluffy seeds.  It seemed to have accelerated growth to compensate for the set-back of being mowed down.

In 1995, Lawrence Calhoun, PhD, along with Richard Tedeschi, PhD, coined the term post-traumatic growth (PTG)—when our biggest life challenges can offer opportunities for meaning and growth.  While the term ‘post-traumatic growth’ is relatively new, the theme of suffering, meaning, and growth has been prominent in ancient spiritual and religious traditions, literature, and philosophy for eons.  Resilience is bouncing back to ‘normal’ after a tragedy or challenge, whereas with PTG, we bounce back higher, so to speak.  We learn to make meaning of our suffering.  We learn a new way of being.  We grow, bloom, produce seeds and fruit, and complete our life cycle.  We turn lead into gold.

Intentional Grounding

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Do you remember how often you were on the ground when you were a kid?  Our babies spent hours on blankets spread out on the grass while I worked in the garden or their older siblings played in the sandbox.  There was usually a Black Lab dog named Licorice in the grass or on the blanket near them, taking seriously her self-proclaimed job as baby-sitter.  When older, the kids played with kittens, watched the chickens, rolled down hills, caught frogs in the mud of the corral, made forts in the lilac bush, made snow angels and snow forts, and so many other things—all while sitting, crawling, or lying on the ground!  When they entered teenage years, their ground time was reduced to sports, laying out in the sun to get a tan, or an occasional picnic on a blanket.  All three had summers of their young adult years when they returned to living close to the earth at summer camps and outdoor jobs, when their bodies and spirits felt strong and empowered.  And then, what happens to us when we become adults?  How often are we in a building, in a car, in air conditioning, in good clothes, in a hurry?

My Mom recently returned from a week-long camping trip to Wyoming.  She remarked about how well she slept each night on her cot in a tent—much better than her nights at home in her own bed!  I told her about a quote from the Touch the Earth Trail pamphlet from Mille Lacs Kathio State Park that we had visited.

“The Dakota was a true naturist, a lover of nature.  He loved the earth and all things of the earth, the attachment growing with age.  The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power.  It was good for the skin to touch the Earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth.  The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing, and healing.  That is why the old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its life-giving forces.  For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him.”     —Luther Standing Bear, Lakota leader and author, 1868-1939

Looking back at thousands of years of human history, most humans had almost continuous contact with the Earth each day.  This direct contact with the Earth is now called grounding or earthing; (also terms in electrical engineering to ensure safety of equipment and humans.)  There have been studies that indicate grounding’s positive effect on blood viscosity, heart rate variability, cortisol levels, inflammation, sleep, and autonomic nervous system balance. 

If a person has pets or kids, it’s easy to spend time on the ground with them and get a different perspective of the world.

 

When do you feel grounded?  How does one get to that ‘down-to-earth’ feeling?  Luther Standing Bear, young kids, animals, well-being researchers, and yoga instructors know that you can literally just drop down to the earth.  When I feel tired, achy and beat-up, like the weight of the world is on my shoulders, I like to lie down in the grass on my stomach, usually with a Black Lab dog named Tamba by my side.  I am never too much or not enough for Mother Earth.  I am just another one of her precious creatures.  My body feels supported; I feel the warmth of the sun and the cool of the shade.  My heartbeat becomes the heartbeat of the Earth, and with that awareness comes a calming, a grounding, and an appreciation for the life-giving forces inherent in Mother Earth and in each of us.

A Bog Blog

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Has your mind, body, or spirit ever been stuck in a bog?  Twenty years after graduating from college I returned to that same college with a husband, three kids, and a desire to learn.  I took a molecular biology class in one of my first semesters of graduate school that amazed and inspired me with the information that had been discovered about DNA in the twenty years since I had taken science courses.  One of the most mind-bog-gling things I needed to learn was PCR or polymerase chain reaction, a laboratory technique that multiplies thousands to millions of copies of a segment of DNA or RNA.  This technique was so foreign to me that I just couldn’t wrap my head around the concept!  My mind was in a bog of old information that couldn’t process the new information because of how radically different it was.  It took months of reading, study, labs, talks with my professor, and plenty of frustration before I was finally able to grasp it.  I went on to do a special topics class with that professor using PCR and fluorescent tags, and my understanding and appreciation for the technique grew and became routine.

In our trip to Mille Lacs Kathio State Park, we hiked a short trail behind the Interpretive Center called the “Touch the Earth” trail.  We were equipped with a pamphlet that explained various trees and vegetation along the trail, most of which were very familiar to us.  And then we came to site #7—“You are entering an unusual and fragile plant community known as a bog.  There are trees in this area, so it is technically called a bog forest.”

The boardwalk was constructed because the ground surface of this area is covered with moss with a wet area below it and could easily be damaged by people walking on it—damage that would take years to regenerate.  It was like walking into another world!  A tree had fallen and exposed the layer of water underneath the shallow ‘ground’ of  sphagnum moss.

The trees in the bog forest are mainly Tamarack and Black Spruce with a number of young Birch trees.  Birch trees don’t survive long in the bog—their roots grow downward, suitable for other forest soil, but they cannot support a taller tree in the floating soil of the bog.  The wind blows them over.  Black Spruce and Tamarack trees send out many horizontal roots that keep them more stable in the bog conditions.

Black spruce have scaly bark, short needles, and small rounded cones.

Tamarack or Eastern Larch are deciduous conifers—they turn a brilliant yellow in the fall then drop their needles for the winter.  Tamarack is the Algonquian name for the tree, meaning ‘wood used for snowshoes,’ thus describing the tough and flexible characteristics of the wood.  Tamaracks are very cold tolerant, often live in boggy areas, and have dense clusters of needles on woody spurs.

Long ago the Mille Lacs area had a higher water level, and this bog was a small lake.  When water levels dropped, grass-like sedges grew in the shallow lake eventually making a mat of dead plant material where sphagnum moss grew.  This mat of sedge and moss becomes a slowly decaying peat, a cold, acidic, and oxygen-poor environment that is only compatible for certain plants.  One of the small shrubs that grows here is Labrador Tea, an evergreen Rhododendron.

Blueberries also grow in the acidic soil, along with Bog Laurel, Leatherleaf, and Pink Lady’s Slippers, all of which bloom in April and June.

The unusual, almost eerie landscape of the bog is beautiful in its uniqueness.  Moss, lichens, roots, and fallen trees create the floating ground above the tannin-stained dark water.  It’s a graveyard of sorts of slowly decaying plant material that nourishes and sustains the next generation of bog-tolerant flora.

 

Life in the bog, the mire, the quagmire…I’ve been there in mind, body, and spirit at various times in my life.  It’s when you can’t grasp a new way of thinking or doing things, try as you may.  It’s when you are so burdened with pain or fatigue that all you can do is slowly lift your feet in the next step, pulling each foot out of the muck as it tries to suck you back in, willing yourself forward as time slows to a sloth’s crawl.  It’s when your spirit feels so fragile, so exposed that normal life can easily damage it, when stalwart ideals are no longer stable and topple over in the wind of change.  It’s when your heart is broken, and you cross a bridge into another world that you never, ever wanted to go to.  And then what?!  Well, you stay there for a while.  The changing quality of time actually becomes your friend as it forces you to examine your inner ecosystem.  You start to put out horizontal roots of awareness, courage, strength, and integrity that stabilize you—you become more tough and flexible.  You begin to notice the ‘blueberries’—not only the things that sustain you, but those that are really good for you.  Eventually, with God’s grace and days, months, or years of time, your mind, body, spirit, and heart regenerate.  You realize you are no longer in the quagmire, and you can finally see the full beauty of the bog.