denebalgedi777

Well, as I sit down to write this from my Wisconsin redoubt, Taurus Season has already come and gone. And it was busy enough that I didn’t have time to write, either in my perpetually (of late) behind journal or on my web log. So now, as I do, we’re already a bit into Gemini Season and the terminus of the spring season is just around the corner. The woods are getting that distinctive look they always have around this time of year, when the transition into summertime is almost complete. There are flowers on the bushes and growing wild as forbs in the ditches. There is lupine coming up in the nearby prairie, which is the only place it grows around here, as far as anyone knows. That is always the first of the flowers to come up in late spring, and there is more of it this year than I have ever seen before. Spring migration has ended, with all of the summer residents already here by the middle of May, and the leaves have fully leafed out into summer foliage, and the flowers on the apple trees are already long gone. This was an early green up by our standards, compared with previous years, and everything I would guess is about 7-10 days ahead. That’s not really surprising given the odd year we had so far, with almost no winter and a strong humid pattern since spring.

I have documented on this journal so far the dryness of the previous years and I have an inkling that this summer will not be so dry. Often, this May, my mind wandered back to specific days I remember 10 years ago in the May of 2014, so striking was the similitude. Sometimes there are years that rhyme; 2013 and 2014 were like that. They were both years with long, almost paused winters that encroached upon spring. But eventually come May there was some absolutely beautiful weather, and I spent that time, as much as possible, as was my wont in those latter days, walking in the woods or otherwise outdoors. There was also a pronounced wetness that persisted into the summertime. This of course made walking in certain areas a bit of a challenge. Ensconced in suburbia, the surrounds are usually shot full of pesticides and a walk in the neighborhood park is fine; but go down by the river or deep into the woods and the mosquitoes can quickly become intolerable at this time of year. It’s too early to say whether I’ll be right about this – it may be that this spring wetness is a fake-out and we have yet another arduous, hot, dry summer and the drought afflicting the land comes surging back once again. But there’s this urgent feeling that the pattern has flipped somehow. Partly based on superstition I suppose: There have been unusual signs this year, which might be messages from the divine that something has changed, including the eclipse which I drove down to see, and aurora borealis visible from my home, which never happens.

The spring migration felt a bit rushed this year. Often, what will happen is that there is a patch of bad weather and waves of migrants will get bottled up for maybe as much as two weeks before heading on. There was little of that this year. The juncos were gone by April and the yellow-throated warblers were already well on their way to the border with Canada by early May. I know, because I was there visiting my old “home away from home” in the central lake country of Minnesota for a funeral around that time. One of my grandmother’s old friends finally passed away. The quick migration in the spring and the passing kind of symbolize what’s happening right now, all around me. That is, huge changes. The lake country had its own pioneer families who were well-known to one another and often dwelt in the area for generations. At the funeral, I noticed that the numbers in attendance since the last ones I attended in the area – which were for members of my own family – had gone down noticeably. There just aren’t as many of the old generation around, and the number of old families as a whole has also declined. There are a lot of newcomers to the lake country, and they don’t have much connection to the old, nor do they seem much to care about it. That’s the way of things, I suppose. It’s very clear that we are in an age of transition when little can be taken for granted, and this one corner of the known world is just a local case study in that much wider trend.

I always like visiting the north country though, because the transit takes you out of your usual context, which for me this past year has been so urgent with family difficulties and business in general. It’s just far enough away that everything is different. In the lake country, there are some remnants of the old majestic white pine forest that once covered much of that land. It has a kind of primeval and timeless grandeur to it that is rarely matched by anything in this part of the world. And I greatly love this area with its mix of oak, maple and pine forests. We’re at the intersection of two worlds here in the Upper Midwest, right on the northernmost edge of the broadleaf forest which is so congenial to the imagination of Western civilization – being so similar to that of the European plain on which it began, and right on the southernmost edge of those trackless, deep, dark coniferous woods that stretch all the way up into the wilds of far Canada, and which have their Old World equivalent in the depths of Scandinavia and the East Baltic region, a land still beset by fearsome and unfathomable pagans in an age when the Western civilization was still in its infancy. Today, there still seems to be a noticeable cultural divide between the peoples living in these two parallel regions, even if we live in a much more settled and homogenized age – the land never fails to put its stamp on the people.

I suppose if I had to describe the character of Taurus Season this year, it was one of earthly delights, albeit often of a quite or mysterious or wondrous character. In the north country, I watched loons battle all morning for the attention of a female. On occasion they were menaced by an eagle, who once was described by the early settlers of this land as the tyrant of the skies, who occasionally swooped threateningly at the loons as their dance went on. Rains came and went, leaving the land filled with a lush green I haven’t seen the equal of in years. The volume was enough to wipe out the droughts of recent years and bring the river to a flood from which it hasn’t yet come down. On occasion, there were clear, bright, warm days which conjured up the spirit of a decade ago. The forest floors were absolutely filled with carpets of wildflowers, the ephemerals of spring that bloom before the canopy crowds them out of all light. Even some thunderstorms, like unto the old summer storms of my youth, moved through in recent weeks, suffusing the entire scene with a character of nostalgia, though not wistful in spite of all that has happened. So, if I have been absent from my office, which is documenting the history of my times, it is not because I was shirking – I was simply enraptured by the unfolding life around me and for the moment had let it carry me away from my duties.

Writer's postscript: Events delayed my publishing of this piece until Gemini Season was almost over as well.

Technically I was born into the Millennial generational cohort, and one thing I remember vividly about my generation from my youth and young manhood was that people were on the move. In high school, people couldn’t wait to move out of the suburbs and into the big city. In college, people fantasized about moving to the “big city” and striking it rich. Now this was funny, because I grew up in the Minneapolis suburbs, and that metropolitan area is hardly either a small city (it’s the 16th largest in the USA) or a poor one. Well, the way it’s going now, who knows, but for a long time it was a big and prosperous city. Anyway, that’s not the point. In those days, New York or Los Angeles would be the destination of choice and ending up there would’ve been a sign of one’s having “made it”. Maybe Chicago, Boston or the Bay Area might be a suitable substitute, but it was a pretty narrow range of options. The big city on the coasts, or maybe Chicago, was where it was at, and accept no substitute. This was a myth, of course, but it was the goal of many in my generation, and many of them did it – for a time.

I must have been the only one in my group who stayed in the suburbs and had no desire to move to one of those prestigious locales. Perhaps I had an advantage. My parents traveled a lot when they were working, and they took their kids along on these trips. This included international travel. As a result, by the time I reached college age, I had already seen what life was like in other states and even on other continents. So I did not have any illusions of the “grass being greener”. The truth is, and this is probably still unfashionable to say but who cares, there are not a lot of better places in the world than the Midwest. I always felt a deep connection to the land there, even despite the hazards of its many seasons – heat, bugs and crowding in the summertime, frigid and snowy or icy winters. Not many places on earth have such an abundance of wetlands naturally – in much of the USA, lakes are mostly reservoirs – and the rolling meadows and forests of western Hennepin County where I used to roam are among the most beautiful landscapes on earth. And as for amenities, it compared favorably with the best parts of the “prestigious” areas, never mind what people say – that was just marketing.

It’s also the case that any place you spend enough time, it becomes a part of you as much as you are a part of it. This would make sense in light of the traditional view that you, the human, are “mikrokosmos” – a little world, a reflection of the greater cosmos. But it seems that a great deal of humanity was, for some time, missing this primal impulse that tied them to the land. Oswald Spengler would say this was because we live in the age of the “fellaheen” – the uprooted masses of people that form when a high culture transitions into a civilization. They range from the dirt-poor farmer forced off of his land in a third world country to the younger sons of aristocrats who don’t stand to inherit a thing and are forced to strike out on their own. And be it known that these types of people exist in every age, except that in the age of the fellaheen their numbers are much greater and their impact more destabilizing. America in particular was a land shaped by this phenomenon since its inception. But the phenomenon peaked in my lifetime, which makes the Millennials something of a hinge generation, who got to see the optimum of the process and then its decline.

Their dreams were shaped by the unsettled conditions that Western civilization has been in since the dawn of the civilized period in the early 19th century. But I, for whatever reason, did not feel the same calling to wandering and migration as they did. For some reason, the idea of staying in one place appealed to me. If you’re like me, and believe in reincarnation and so on, this might have something to do with past lives and karma. If I recall correctly, in my most recent previous life I was forced out of my own homeland (Nazi Germany) and lived my whole remaining life in another country (the UK) and mostly in one city (London). There are other more personal details I won’t share just now. Anyway, having experienced exile and instability in one life, I suppose that might explain my longing for a home in this one. At the same time, as a Sagittarius, I always have been comfortable on the road, where “home is where you lay your hat” as was the case on my many travels. That’s why I was never averse to moving. But always, the longing for a place to call my own was there. I didn’t share in the typical American idea, especially among Millennials, that one simply must be blown by the winds of fate to another part of the realm in the chasing after money, status and whatever other dream.

In staying in a particular locale, you build up ties to it in your soul. I experienced this in two particular places during my lifetime. The first was the area west of Minneapolis where I grew up. The deciduous forests, lakes and fields of that area still stir fond memories, and I miss dwelling there much more than I thought I would. The other was the central lakes area of Minnesota where my mother grew up. It’s in the transition zone between broadleaf forest and the conifers of the far north, and it is a land of lakes as well, but much more wooded, a mix of pines and maples, drained by rivers. It’s a strange land in that it feels more open and light in the winter, while the dense cover of green makes it a bit dark and mysterious in high summer. I spent countless hours of my life in both of these regions and they made a very strong imprint on me, so much that I don’t think their influence would ever fade even if I would move away and not return. I got much more enjoyment from walking the wooded trails and backstreets of these places than I’d ever have got living in a big city far from the land of my birth where I’d be just another number, another cog in the machine.

So, it must be said, I never wanted to leave where I grew up. It seemed like the central conceit of our age to want to do so, and to chase after a dream, and have it end the way such things usually do (since dreams are hazy and they come to an end) – in disappointment. That was the fate of many who left. Some of my friends were among them. Interestingly, many came back, some after a short time, and some after long absences. However, I was eventually driven out of my homeland by the ravages of time and change. That was in 2021. Increasingly punitive systems of social control had forced the economy into lockdown, and the irresponsible actions of government led to an enormous increase in the cost of living. It would be an understatement to say that the events of the pandemic years were the most disturbing I have seen in my life. It was as if a collective madness had gripped the world and I had been sucked into the epicenter of it. Areas that were historically liberal, like my own homeland, often were among the leaders of irrational, aggressive and punitive government action against the populace, not unlike what I imagined the conditions in Communist China, or the Airstrip One of 1984 infamy might be. I had to get out – and I wasn’t alone. There was quite a migration out of Hennepin County in those days, and it continues to some extent into the present day.

Now I can say that it was the policy that made me leave, but it was just as much the unsustainable rise in the cost of living and the expanding ring of crime in that area. These things had been building even before the pandemic occurred, but they accelerated during that time to an intolerable degree. At the beginning of the 2010s, the Minneapolis area had the amenities of a big city without the big city cost or crowding. All of that has changed by now. It’s not the place it once was, although its natural setting still has the timeless beauty that it always had – where it isn’t chopped down or filled in to make densely packed apartment blocks and cookie-cutter burbclaves, that is. I suppose that must be for somebody, because they’re moving in, but it wasn’t for me. I should point out that I moved only across the St. Croix River, into neighboring Wisconsin. And in some ways, I still feel like a stranger in a strange land here. It is less than an hour’s drive from where I grew up, but it might as well be a different world. There are no wetlands here, apart from rivers and creeks, and the land has a much different hill-and-dale aspect not unlike New England. It’s beautiful in its own way, but I have not yet dwelt here so long that I could properly think of it as home. Nor, given the instability of our times and in my own life, can I be sure I will be so fortunate as to stay long enough that it might one day be home.
This part of the world has always been fascinating. The Minneapolis-St. Paul area sits on the confluence of four rivers – the Mississippi, the Minnesota, the Crow and the St. Croix. The first of those is the great divider of the nation. East of it begins the East, and West of it begins the West. It’s more of a continental divider than the actual divide. Minneapolis is a Western city, and St. Paul is an Eastern city. This is no lie – you can feel it as soon as you explore. The latter has much more of an “old world” feel, right down to its architecture and the rather medieval feeling of certain neighborhoods and the parochial character of its natives. On the Minneapolis end of the river, towns begin to get the “prairie gothic” look, while in the St. Croix valley they have the Yankee look of towns farther east. Not only is the state of Minnesota highly regional, but so is the metropolitan area. I’ve often thought that the districts of large cities in our time are not unlike small regions in themselves – and rightly so, given the aggregations of people living in the same, oftentimes of quite different character than the next suburb over. In any given locale, there is probably a lifetime worth of things to explore and people to meet.

I have therefore made it one of my life’s principles to repudiate the wandering mentality that defined the American people for so long, and my generation in particular. America is not a frontier nation anymore, like it was from the 17th to the 19th centuries, nor is it a strong industrial economy as it was in parts of the 20th, when a young couple could afford a home and family on a single income. This probably means that Americans will start to rediscover the importance of home, family and community, and also that there will be more intergenerational households, and so on. My generation was perhaps the first to see a world in which the wandering mentality did not pay off or in fact became a liability. Maybe I simply had an intuition that it was all an impossible dream and chose not to take part in it from a young age, and instead focus on getting to know and love a place. Now, what I cannot say just now is whether this attitude of mine will allow me to stay in one place, or whether events will impel me to again uproot. Wanderings, as I know well, aren’t always a matter of choice. But sense of place is important, it has been missing from our people for a long time, and wherever I end up, I will try to come to love that place as much as I have all the other places that I’ve given a part of myself to in the past.

Well, as I write this, it is already well into Aries season. But as a matter of fact, it made sense to wait a bit before writing again. The winter ended up being quite monotonous, with continual snows. They persisted into the very beginning of April. There was a large snowstorm ending the morning of April 1st that dropped about a foot of snow in my area and did frightful damage to the trees all around. This was an impressive front and it included thunder snow, power outages, and a tree falling on my deck and across my driveway. It was the most damaging late winter storm I have seen in a long time.

Be that as it may, signs of spring began showing up in March, even with persistent cold and snow. Already by the middle of March, I was hearing sandhill cranes in the nearby fields. Owing to the amount of snowfall, the fields remained mostly covered in snow, yet the migrants came up as if it was no problem. About a week after that, the first turkey vultures were seen. Now there are large numbers of them congregating around the ridges and hilltops in the area. Perhaps as a harbinger of this, before the coming of the vultures, large numbers of eagles also began to be seen as well by late February. They had remained a rare sight with the ice and deep snow of this winter.

The nearby Minneapolis metro area got just shy of 90 inches of snow this winter. I don't know what the official tally was for Western Wisconsin, but the piles of snow took weeks to melt off. The end result of this was, despite more mild conditions the second half of March, that the air temperature remained quite cool. Too much of the sun's energy was going into melting the snow and not enough into warming the air. As a result, March had a quite chilly character. It didn't help that occasional storms kept adding to the pile of snow. The last one in particular dropped over 1 inch per hour. As bad as all of this sounds, we have it easy in some ways, as the northern parts of Minnesota and Wisconsin as well as large parts of the Dakotas are still covered in snow, while most of ours has finally gone with a wave of much warmer weather.

The warm weather is definitely a mixed blessing. The nearby St. Croix River appears to have risen by about a foot in the last day. Flood warnings are already being put up. Similar warnings have been issued for certain watersheds in the Minneapolis metro area, including for the Crow River Valley, which I used to visit regularly. The ice on Lake St. Croix has a mottled and rotten look about it, as if the ice is all going to break up soon. Along with the surge from melting farther north, the situation could get ugly for low lying properties and roads. Last year the river was very high by late spring. With a recent summerlike pattern, a rapid meltdown of the snow cover up north – still quite profuse in places like the North Shore, with over 2 feet on the ground – could drive the rivers into flood stage. Last time I saw a very severe flooding was in 2019, and that in the Minnesota River Valley with submerged highways. This is something we could see again soon.

So, with the sudden change in weather, is there evidence of spring migration beginning? Absolutely! We still have large numbers of juncos, holdovers from the cold weather and snow, but they will probably be flying north fairly soon. It never got cold enough that we had pine siskins or redpolls this year. But now there are signs of things changing. Goldfinches are getting into breeding plumage. Serious numbers of migrants are starting to appear, having been bottled up for some time in the more rapidly maturing spring of the Lower Midwest. In the past week there have been bluebirds, towhees, meadowlarks, and phoebes appearing in the surrounding area. Just today, I saw flickers and white-throated sparrows as well. Very large flocks of robins have been here ever since March, though they hid out during some of the storms. But the most iconic thing of this time of year is the woodcock migration. I have gone out to listen to them calling from the hillsides these three nights. I heard more of them this year than ever before, but was not so lucky as to see one as I had last year. This is a classic moment in the spring migration not to be missed.

There is a palpable sense of pent up energy from this delayed meltdown. Even at nightfall, I can hear the turkeys gobbling from their hilltop roosts. They are full into their battling for the breeding season, and the females are also visiting the feeder regularly. All of the locals who stay year-round have picked up their activities. Woodpecker displays, chickadees singing their spring song, the piercing call of the tufted titmouse, deafening robin songs at dusk, the warbling of the Cardinals, crows building nests, nuthatches hogging the feeders, and so on. These are daily events. The deer have been constant visitors in fair weather and foul. The coyotes have mostly moved on from this place, the last time I saw the red fox was a few weeks ago. All the signs are very clear, spring is here. Given our part of the world, another wintry setback is not impossible, maybe this weekend even, but by the second half of April I expect spring to take hold for good.

I had wanted to write before now, but I got distracted by a number of things. From the time of my birthday in Sagittarius season until my brother-in-law's birthday in Pisces season, I had an unusually busy time, with many social events including a friend's wedding. The eventual end of this pageantry came as a relief. But by that time other things had happened. For one thing, I had to go up north to my mother's ancestral homeland on an errand, but it ended up being less productive than I thought because the conditions were still quite cold, snowy and wintry up there. The work I had hoped to get done was hopelessly delayed by it. As a result, I will be returning later this month. As part of my pilgrimage up there, I ended up getting caught in a blizzard for one day, and having to wait another one to get plowed out. Nevertheless, it felt good to get back up there, as I had not visited since October. A visit to the Lake country always has a salutary spiritual effect, at least on me.

The other distracting thing was the recent turmoil in the American economy. Ever since the last crisis in 2008, I have done my best to be resilient and recession proof. Nevertheless, I did find it dismaying that so few lessons appeared to be learned from the last crisis. America's banking system was in need of serious reform 15 years ago, and that didn't happen; rather, the corruption continued but on different lines than before. The crisis involving silvergate, silicon Valley Bank, and the signature Bank of New York were as much owing to foolishness as anything corrupt. The basic problem is that interest rates finally have gone up with high inflation, a well-known monetary phenomenon (that is, before our current school of central banking unsuccessfully tried to rewrite the rules of money) and some banks have been caught flat-footed, not wanting to adjust to the times and thinking that the central banks will give them free money again. That ship has sailed. I look at this recent banking crisis as sort of a warning shot across the bow. Obviously this was not Lehman Brothers Mark II, but I can't look at all the signs without feeling a might uneasy. That topic is worth an entry of its own, but I wanted to touch on it briefly as it was part of the backdrop of the past month or so.

There is a strong feeling in the air of things in flux. My own commitments are going to be changing sharply in the next month or so. By late April, the character of 2023 could shift a great deal. A number of things are changing all at once. Economic indicators, social situations, projects needing finishing, upcoming travels, and so on. All of these are conspiring to command a lot of attention for the remaining three quarters of the year. Well, I commenced this piece at the beginning of the hour of mercury, and I now conclude it just as the hour of the moon is struck. I will have more to say on this and other topics as time advances. Until next time, I remain–

Yours cordially,

Deneb Algedi 777

It’s well into Capricorn season, so it is past due to get writing again. I missed the date of the anniversary retrospective that I had planned last month. However, there were good reasons for this. The holiday season ended up being unusually frenetic. All of a sudden group events materialized in quick succession and, along with the distractions of mundane life, it made the whole period from the Saturnalia until well into the New Calendar Year something of a blur. Then there was the small matter of the Mercury Retrograde, which happened just before New Year’s weekend. This is advantageous, though, because it is a capital period of time for looking backward.

The week before Christmas involved a major winter storm that had crippling effects across the entire country. The Pacific Northwest was encased in ice, the South received damaging thunderstorms and winds, and the Midwest, the place of my domicile, was hit by a heavy winter storm followed by brutal cold. This storm ended up going out to the East Coast and causing frightful blizzards there, while the polar wave of cold brought chilly weather as far south as Florida. The timing of the storm seemed ominous to say the least, but it also fits into the larger pattern of this winter season that began in November. There have been a lot of winter storms, and I now am most reluctant to brave them unless it is absolutely necessary. I already had to retrieve one relative’s car from a ditch.

2022 was a wild year, during which time so many of the verities of the period before were called into question or even reversed. It was the first “opened up” year in the world since the pandemic era, but the developments of the year were quite momentous albeit in a quiet sort of way (apart from the Russo-Ukrainian War of course). The age of high globalization appears to be receding before our very eyes. For me specifically, using the John Gilbert-style numerology introduced by John Michael Greer early last year, it was a 7 year. Seven years are always ones of considerable obstacles, but they usually also possess very clarifying spiritual lessons. That was certainly my experience of it, just like the previous ones I can recall (2013, 2004).

This writing project focused so far on the fairly narrow perspective of my own life, and that will probably change in the coming year. There will be more discussion of general interest, although I cannot help sharing anecdotes from my own life to some degree, since I like that sort of narrative and firsthand accounts of life as we navigate our way through this strange era of mankind’s history will no doubt add some individual character to an age defined by massively scaled and coldly impersonal collective institutions. There will be some discussions of (meta-level) politics, economics, culture, social relations and so on, albeit with my usual esoteric spin on things. Somewhere along the journey of my life, my earlier materialism fell apart and slowly I’ve come around to a more spiritual worldview.

The inception of this project came from reflections on John Michael Greer’s Ecosophian worldview, which I have followed with interest for some time. My idea originally was a reflective project involving both the careful observation of nature, and also my continually-unfolding spiritual ideals. The two could feed one another. The ancient Hellenes believed that nature sent signs and omens in the same way that the stars and dreams did. And to an extent, all of the living things on this earth share with us the “great work of creation” that Mr. Greer discussed on his blog when trying to describe the meaning of the word “magic”. In part, writing also provides the motivation to learn my land after a chaotic period of moving to a new locale.

I also blended a theme of local history with this as well, because I believe this is one of the central yearnings of the American spirit in this the new phase of our development as a nation. In Spenglerian terms, the United States of America were founded at a time when the Western or Faustian high culture was just reaching its period of civilization, defined here as the period when the majority of the populace lives in an urban environment and the cultural milieu shifts most of its energies to urban pursuits, particularly projects of scale. This period was in some ways very chaotic and filled with upheavals, and tended to make this country’s inhabitants rootless and wandering, the proverbial Fellaheen described in Spengler’s works.
However, there is in the American identity also a yearning for settlement and belonging, and for sense of place that was lost in the great age of upheaval. It has been seen in various times and places – the Transcendentalists and John Muir expressed a version of this in the 19th century, and then again in the 20th we saw it in people like Aldo Leopold, Sigurd F. Olson and even August Derleth to name a few. If the Faustian spirit is increasingly rootless and wandering, a tendency that will be with us for a long time to come, the American spirit has a spiritual connection with the land, and often to a town or region of birth as well. This spirit needs to be renewed from time to time, and I think the Ecosophian worldview is part of an attempt to recreate it anew in the public consciousness.

I have not visited a foreign country since 2019. Obviously, this was partly from necessity and through no fault of my own. I chose to interpret it as a call from the gods to reacquaint myself with my own country, so long neglected. I had started to do just this a few years before, during the time of my spiritual awakening. The image of a pilgrimage to parts of the country I’d never before seen took shape in my mind’s eye, and I began a series of camping trips to various regions, often ones that are well off the beaten path of tourists right down to the present moment. America is certainly still ripe for a rediscovery.

That was taken to the next level when a friend of mine proposed the idea of taking day trips to explore key features of the state. That project began in 2019 and has continued to the present day. We are not anywhere near exhausting the possibilities for this latter-day pilgrimage, and I don’t imagine we will be even in old age, should it continue for so long. If there is one piece of advice I could offer to wandering souls in an age of uncertainty, it is that there is often much of interest right under your nose if only you will go and see it. It does not require a fortune to see it. Some of the best times of my life in recent years required very small sums of money.

No matter where you happen to live, be it in America or in some other part of the world, there are probably areas of great interest within a drive of only a few hours. Or in the range of trains or hiking, should you be so minded. This, at any rate, was what I discovered in my travels around the Midwestern USA over the last 7 years. I suppose if there is one way I differ from the Ecosophians, it’s that I see some beautiful things about the Plutonian age that we live in. The motor car has eliminated distance in a way that allows whirlwind tours never seen in the history of mankind. It’s not an opportunity to be missed.

Happy 2023 and look for more frequent writings from Yours Truly,

Deneb Algedi 777

Attending an event yesterday in the city, the sky was cloudless and everything had a faded look in the pale November sunshine. The mercury reached as high as 68 fahrenheit. It was only a couple of weeks past an early snowfall, but in the city, there were maple trees that had not yet shed their leaves. In the meadows farther out, bluebirds still sing in the treetops and the sound of insects is still heard. The drought that began in the summer is still going strong, and even a late season thunderstorm made little impact on it. Scorpio season has arrived along with the feeling that the year 2022 has flown past in the blink of an eye. The year had no shortage of personal events, but it seems somehow quiet and unremarkable in comparison with the past few years.

I have been around to various corners of my region, though not nearly so much as on some previous years, and there are very strange things to be seen all over. The Minneapolis metropolitan area and its immediate surroundings are filled with lakes, though my current location is not. The lakes are all as low as I’ve ever seen them. Some of the ones I have visited lately included Hyland Lake, Wolsfeld Lake, and White Bear Lake. These lakes used to have very high water – small observation: the 2010s were probably historically high water periods and unusually moist years for the most part – and now they have dirt beaches that you could use to walk the entire perimeter. Nevertheless, the eagles and fish hawks remain in the area so things must not be totally dire. Perhaps the fish are easier to catch.

Owing to the high gas prices and a ridiculous amount of road work, I limited car travel during the summertime. Both of these conditions have improved somewhat. Premium fuel is back under $4/gallon, and the road closures that made transit across the region a nightmare have been scaled back to the level of a minor inconvenience. There was but little maintenance the past two years, a situation that had to be remedied. In fact, more of the same is planned for next year – the interstate is in dire shape, filled with divots holes, only some of which were fixed in the past year, and there will be much more to come. However, these conditions did not keep people inside during the summer: it was very busy on the roads. The combination of a long winter and pent-up frustration from a roller coaster two years led to frantic activity.

Still, there is a strange sense under the surface that something is not quite right. There’s a hint of desperation in all of this frantic activity. The social fabric of America was already in something of a shambles before the pandemic hit, and after it, most of the trends that were already well-established have got even worse. Sociologists have been studying the problem for some time[1], and the general condition is alienation and isolation. Friendships have withered for many people, and family formation is way down. Interacting with some younger folks on occasion, I see that social skills have attenuated to a level that would’ve been considered quite barbaric in my youth. And this, I add, is among the children of what remains of the bourgeoisie, who would’ve known better in a previous time. I do not, however, blame them entirely for this: rather, it’s an indictment of everyone that things progressed to this.

I have striven to make this space more or less apolitical, because I’ve lost faith in the ability of the political process to work in a meaningful way for average people. There is an election coming up, and American politics have turned into an ever more bizarre clown show. I half suspect this is being done on purpose to suck people back into a dysfunctional system from which they have increasingly tended to disengage. Disengagement is actually dangerous, far more so to the people benefiting from the system, than opposition or insurrection would be. There need to be participants for a spectacle to go on. I can’t blame those wanting to disengage for not wanting to be on the menu as the next sacrificial lamb in an age of violent mob hysteria and intemperance. If one thing remains worthwhile, it would probably be engagement with one’s local politics – however, a great effort has been made to divert all attention to the national scale, which seems increasingly meaningless in such a gigantic and heterodox country. Perhaps we can see ourselves as a confederation, but we are long past the point that we are really one country at all, and the largely artificial pop culture driven by centralized media in the past century is falling apart at the seams.

So at present, there’s just an uneasy feeling of watching and waiting. But in noting some of the things that have gone wrong in this country, we can also see some obvious solutions. Community is what is lacking. This is difficult to remedy when the mode of life for Americans for so long has been endless migration, like grazers from one watering hole to the next. We are not a country of peasants rooted to the land for generations (although the gods know the Amish are trying to become something like this). I was reflecting on this today before I wrote this piece. I’ve been guilty of excessive selfishness in the past, and in my own personal life, I could improve the situation by giving and helping more in the communities that matter to me. This is mainly how good will is built, and I’ve been too neglectful of that. I can make it a resolution to do my part to remedy this; however, I can’t control what the other person is going to do. However, I imagine there’s a kind of karmic exchange here and that good will is at least partly repaid from good intentions.

These are the thoughts on my mind as I watch an unusually beautiful late October Sunday unfold before me. Hunting season is coming soon and it will change the pattern of the local wildlife, but until then I can count on seeing deer and turkeys regularly at the feeder. All of the local birds are still coming in regularly. The first sign of changes ahead did, however, make itself known, with flocks of juncos (a kind of black and white sparrow that comes with cold weather) arriving with the snow a couple of weeks back. Migrants have been passing through since the autumn began in earnest, and even on a day like today there is a whisper of the inevitable winter to come. Uneasy feelings aside, the pageant of nature once again instills a sense that all is as it should be. The prolonged Indian summer, with all the local wildlife going on their merry way blissfully unaware of the troubles in the world of mankind, has added an edge of optimism to my will in spite of it all.

[1] - a recent example.

The Sun is in Virgo, and just as I suspected, the feeling of industriousness returned around the time of the Ingress. I have always associated the early fall season with a return to hard work for obvious reasons. But this year it is particularly strong because the autumnal conditions began before the second part of August came to its end. Up to that point, we had a very hot spell in July and a prolonged dry spell from late May until the end of July. The heat only abated in the middle of August, and the dryness came to a dramatic end with a series of strong thunderstorms. The weather represents a decisively shift in the pattern.

The past month has been very busy, which is why I have not kept up my local reports to any degree of consistency. The month of July ended with a friend’s bachelor party stretched over 2 days. It was sunny and the heat was blazing. The weekend involved jet-skiing, lunches and dinners out, gaming, and clay pigeon shooting. I met some new and interesting people, talked to some old friends, had novel experiences and got a sunburn, which I really try hard to avoid. The crowds and bustling activity were the most I’d seen since before the pandemic.

There was a very strong sense of 1990s nostalgia in this kind of a gathering. It reminded me of the gatherings of my youth. I say this in a spirit of optimism and good times. It was the distilled spirit of the Sun in Leo energy. There were no quarrels beyond the good-natured kind, most of the talk was very constructive, and many stories were told of the olden times. The only tragedy of this kind of thing is that it takes place so much less often as one ages. People spend too much time bustling about and not enough time enjoying the simpler and better things in life, and camaraderie is one of these.

The incident of the bear was never properly resolved. Though they set out traps for the miscreant, he gave them the slip. He never was caught, he just wandered off one day, and I never saw him again. The gentleman across the street, who is slowly recovering from cancer treatment, seemed to know much about bears, and said that he would be looking to mate around this time of year. So, there being no females of his kind around the valley, his impulse was to move on, and so he did. Evidently, the region around St. Croix and Pierce counties still is home to many bears owing to much contiguous wild land for them to hide out in.

Apart from that, the wildlife visiting the yard now is stable. For a while after breeding season, we regularly had the indigo buntings in once again, though they seem to have disappeared in the past week. We had many orioles visiting in the past month also, though they were mostly absent since the start of breeding season. Many birds are going through a late summer molt and look scruffy. But all of our regulars are still around: the crows, jays, chickadees, woodpeckers, titmice, finches and cardinals. I have seen turkeys and deer but with less frequency. Everything is looking a bit greener than was the case a month ago, and so the look and feel of late summer represents a night and day difference from a month ago.

The most notable thing of all is that the trees began to turn very early. I went on a day trip with a friend in the middle of August. Already, some maple trees were showing signs of turning in his area (Carver County MN). This has now begun in earnest in my area as well. Trees and forbs are turning in the Kinnickinnic Valley and environs. Already one can see reds, violets, oranges and yellows, though it will be a good while yet before this is a universal thing. But autumn is unfolding well in advance of its usual course, even if it will be delayed a bit by a late summer warm spell that’s only just beginning. It does not appear that it will be a lasting one.

Meteorological summer is over after today. September looks to start out with a run of fantastic weather of the sort usually encountered in California – sun, mildly warm, comfortable humidity, and a breeze. The summer went by very quickly in a way that really shocks me. This summer was undistinguished relative to events – I did not do so many adventures as in past years, I did not visit the old social dance club, nor did I attend many events or go much to the office. There were good reasons for that. The gas prices remained high since my May-June trip, and this influenced my choice for a “lying low” kind of summer. But still it passed with celerity. The only unusual events apart from the bachelor party were going out a handful of times, some day trips, and my customary summer voyages to the lake country which is kind of an ancestral home and pilgrimage destination for me now.

Time has had a strange quality ever since the lockdowns that began in 2020. It has an unpredictable and almost nonlinear character ever since the whole rhythm of everyday life was disrupted by the shutdowns. For example, the past year went by blurrily fast. My adventures in the north country and around these parts a year ago could have been yesterday. The intervening time seems to be filled with a hypnotic sameness for much of the time. Perhaps this was to be expected with moving to a new place. On the other hand, the events of 5-6 years ago seem to be twice as long ago as that. So much has recently changed in the world that perception is completely thrown off.

The summer felt very leisurely despite its sedate character. Perhaps such a period of rest was needed after the frantic activity of much of last year. But now, with the fall onrushing, I feel the very strong urge to return to industry. The cool mornings, the mist, the colors are all things that spur me to activity. I have a book to finish, edit and publish, among other irons in the fire. There are many new things I still want to learn. I have people to correspond with and new people to meet. There are important events and travels upcoming. With summer’s end, not for a long time has the feeling been so strong that a new chapter of my life is now unfolding.

The first pink strands of rosy-fingered dawn were evident when I conceived to write this piece. It is only a few days since a large blizzard, the largest in years, turned the entire landscape white, a condition that I rather suspect will persist until spring. This was the scene that I woke up to, which seemed all too fitting for a time to reflect on an old project. Last year, I began a series of observations of the natural world which ran weekly. The idea was to chart the course of the seasons in my small corner of Creation, here in the Upper Midwest of the United States. Fate intervened however, which I will describe in a moment, and so it is that I now begin the project again after an absence.

The project took the form of chronicles. For some years I had lived on the Marsh, and the idea came to me to describe the nature on the marsh, and also the nature that I observed on my many wanderings around the area. I was a native of the Western Suburbs of the Twin Cities (for that is what the metro area of Minneapolis-St. Paul is called by natives, or just “the Cities”), and as anyone who is familiar with the area will know, there are many parks and reserves for the adventurous soul to explore. Given the extra free time that came with the pandemic era, I took the occasion to visit them, and then to write about what I took away, as well as my regular observations of the Marsh as well. So far so good, no?

The project came abruptly to a halt last January, that is early this year. The last entry I believe concerned a trip to the ancestral homeland of my mother's family, well to the north of the twin cities. We arrived on New Year's Day and I ended up staying a week. In the process, I saw some wondrous sights, including the most extensive ice fog events in my lifetime, turning the whole north woods into a crystal forest, and some of the most spectacular sundowns I've ever seen. Sigurd F. Olson, who wrote many reflections on life in the north woods, often described sundowns like this and it was only on this occasion that I noticed goings down of the sun that matched his descriptions. No doubt I was filled with optimism, hoping that it would inspire me to further chronicles of the natural world.

As a matter of fact, after this time, I was distracted from the project and it lapsed for quite some time. The year became a flurry of activity, some of it planned but most of it a surprise. After the trip, I went back to work and the rest of January passed rather uneventfully. February saw the coming of a deep chill, but by the end of the month, it was already evident that an early spring would dawn soon. March was an active month, with plenty of outdoor adventures beginning almost from the start of the month, and no doubt, there would have been ample material for the chronicles except that I found out near the end of the month that I would be moving to a new location. This created a definite stir, and in practical terms it meant the effective disruption of my projects for some time to come. To make matters worse, I took a cross-country road trip in April, only a short time after finding out I would move. That trip could be the subject of a book on its own.

In May, I began the long-winded process of getting the property ready to sell. I will spare the details except to say that it involved a lot of boxing and putting things into storage, cleaning things up and so on. This persisted into June. The meteorological summer had only just begun, and buyers were found almost immediately. The sale was completed, and I straight away took a week off and went back up north to the same location previously described. It came as kind of a shock, as at the beginning of the year, I had no idea or intention of moving. And to be quite honest, I had hit a bit of a rut, and was experiencing a feeling of dejection. 2020 was a difficult year for many people and it was no exception for me. For things to change so suddenly, it put my head to spinning.

Luckily, The buyers gave quite a generous term to get out of the place, so it was not until August that I had to leave for good. This was a blessing, because if you live in the same place for some years, things can get quite cluttered, and most of July was used up in making preparations. Furthermore, additional complications came into the picture. The location that I was moving to required construction, so it happened that I would have to live up north in my mother's ancestral homeland whilst the renovations were made. In a twist of fate, I ended up living in a third location temporarily. This involved quite a balancing act of moving, transporting goods, and moving again. I also had to negotiate working from home, and for a time I also had to use public Wi-Fi due to a very serious hiccup in internet service in the rural area I had moved to. It was a novel situation for me.

Not only did I move once, I moved twice this year. I ended up, completely unplanned, living in the country for an entire season -- that is, from August until November. This was in the Northwoods of Minnesota. Then in November, I finally moved to the ultimate destination, western Wisconsin, not far from the grandeur of the St Croix River. The whole thing was rather dreamlike and nostalgic. Both were places that I had spent time in my boyhood, yet never dreamed that I would live in, and certainly not so suddenly after a long and seemingly complacent period in the Western Suburbs of Minneapolis. And both afforded very different views of the natural world. It ought to go without saying at this point, that these experiences will be the jumping off point for a series of entries. The chaotic events of 2021 will go down in my personal annals as a time when the sheer momentum of events shook me out of a trance.

Hopefully, it will now be evident why a rundown of the events of this year were necessary to explain the lapse in the project, but also its rebirth. I have now in the course of a single year, lived in three very different biomes, and I've seen the changing seasons in three locales that were very dear to me since the time I was young. That provides a unique opportunity to describe the natural world from a number of perspectives that would not have been available to me in any previous year of my life. I should also note in concluding, that the previous series of entries will be published in time, to give additional context to the reader. This is intended to be the inception of a longer range project, one that I hope will prove inexhaustible, given the short life of man and the immensity of the topic at hand. A good part of science is simply industry, taking the time to record one's observations for posterity so that the subject or his successors may profit thereby.