denebalgedi777

Greetings, I have returned to the bit mines yet again for a summer situation report. It has been a while since I last wrote, and that’s a bit of a sore point for me, because I’d intended this blog to be a lot more active than it has been. Since 2023, my responsibilities have increased with illness in the family and its associated troubles, so I just haven’t had the time to devote to posting, even though I’d like to do so. Despite not wholly favorable trends in my life since last year, this year has so far been pleasant enough, with occasional troubles. The summer began with some troubles related to my mother’s health, resolved for now it seems, and I had a health scare of my own as well, albeit one that was treated with antibiotics and now seems resolved. But this disrupted the plans I had for the summer, not least of which was to increase my diligence in both studying and writing in my spare time. I got a bit derailed since then, by a mix of good old fashioned lack of discipline, distraction, having other things to do, and travel. But that can’t be an excuse forever. My occult practices have helped me understand that a significant challenge I face in this life is the learning of order, structure, rigor and perseverance, and I must endure in my pursuits even if I sometimes wander off the path.

The character of this year has been markedly different than the previous one, or indeed any of the ones before it, if the signs and omens coming to us from the natural world are any indication. This blog was conceived as a worldview through the eyes of a Neo-Hellenistic heathen, so if you know me, you know that judging from signs and omens is a key piece of that worldview. And it became clear that we are dealing with a very different cosmic weather almost from the beginning of the year, and this was reflected in the condition of the natural world (one tenant of occult studies being that the trends of the higher planes are reflected in the lower, and here in the material world we are in the denser and lower planes of existence). The Pacific Ocean had an historically unprecedented warm water anomaly, and in my neck of the woods this translated into an historically mild winter, with green grass growing in the lawn in January. There was but little snow until March, whereupon the trends began again to change. The later springtime was so similar to the weather of a decade ago, in 2014, that I began to speculate as to whether we would see a very different summer than the ones we had seen since 2021, with historic droughts and smoke from wildfires in the Western USA and Canada constantly blowing in like some fell breath from Hades.

It was not long before my speculations were confirmed by the facts. In May, it was quite rainy and humid. The other thing in May was the giant solar storm which cast aurora as far south as the southern United States, which was an unprecedented thing in my lifetime. So, too, was my travel with friends to see the solar eclipse south of Saint Louis, Missouri. There were quite a few firsts this year, and while personal they were things many people could have observed, but the total effect of this has been to indicate via signs from the heavens that something very large is taking place. The last time I saw so many aggregated omens of change was in 2019, only about half a year before the Covid era took the entire world by storm. The solar storms were repeated more than once since then, too. During a sojourn with relatives in the beautiful northern woodlands and lake country of Minnesota, we once again beheld northern lights coinciding with the peak of the Perseid meteor showers. There are many other parts of life in which the image of change as indicated by the omens might be seen as well. For example, we might point to recent court decisions which might prove epochal, or geopolitical trends which are heading for the explosive and dangerous. Perhaps 2024 will stand as a major inflection point in history, and we are only dimly aware of its first stirrings as I write this.

As expected, a drought failed to occur in the Upper Midwest. Instead, it has been a mild and rainy summer. While there has been some heat, and a lot of rain, the heat waves of recent years seem a distant memory by now, but that’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Indeed, it’s is not very welcome for an outdoorsman like myself. The heat and humidity has meant insects, and a lot of them. Now, I realize this is selfish, since an abundance of insects is much better for the ecosystem than a paucity of them, which we’ve had so many years running. But insects mean that a walk in the woods is an opportunity to be swarmed by mosquitoes, flies, gnats, and other harmful pests. There were more ticks this year than in a long time, and an encounter with a tick was the source of the aforementioned health scare that manifested around the 4th of July (making it necessary for me to cancel my plans to meet up with family around that time). Lyme disease is no joke, and neither are heavy duty antibiotics for gut health. With the swarming insects I have stayed out of the woods and walked on the prairie or on the roads this summer, and though I love summer I find myself thinking very often that when this summer is over, I probably will not lament. Though there’s still a bit more excitement before it is finished, as I am just getting ready to go on a tour with an old friend. More on that later, perhaps.

It’s a custom of this blog to comment on nature, as when I first began blogging, I was influenced by the nature writers of times past like Aldo Leopold, Sigurd Olson and Helen Hoover, among others. This year has not disappointed on that front. The big news is that they finally burned a portion of the prairie at the nature preserve not far from my house. This summer, the part that was burned had something remarkable happen. The big bluestem in that area grew up to be so tall that it became like walking through a corn maze, with areas around 7-9 feet tall. I had read, once upon a time, that big bluestem could reach heights of 12 feet but I had never seen such a thing and frankly never believed it. Until this year, that is. With the right conditions of abundant rain and the fire to keep a prairie from becoming woodland, it grows monstrously. Having said that, the prairie flowers that are usually so much in evidence were much more muted this year. They were there, but not in great numbers, nor did the raspberries and blackberries produce much of a crop. Already we are entering August, the season of the goldenrods, and even some asters, usually associated with the tail end of summer are coming up now. Clearly, the bizarre weather shifts of this year have had some effect on the local biota.

The circle of life goes on. The wildlife produced a lot of offspring this year. We had deer fawns and I see turkey pults around, already good-sized by now. We had quite a few new regulars at the feeders, such as a scarlet tanager. But I’ve had to be quite religious about bringing in the feeders at night, something I never did before, because there have been bears in the area, and they tore down the feeders while we were out of town for a funeral in May. In not too long, the summer will be over, and the autumnal migration will begin, and a whole new chapter will then dawn. In the rock garden, native prairie plants have begun to colonize, even though they were kept out by the tireless efforts of the previous owner who was an obsessive gardener and loved to plant colorful perennials. But I can’t bring myself to remove them; they’re a part of the tapestry of the land and they’re adapted to these climes and represent what the land really wants to be. So I won’t touch them. The acorns have begun to fall from the trees and perhaps that’s the one thing about this year that’s like last year, when there were so many acorns on the ground that the squirrels could not eat them all. No doubt there’s plenty more I could write about on the nature front but time is running short and soon I must conclude this entry.

It’s a year in which a lot of things are in flux, in the wider world, as well as in my own life. The changes that began in 2016 have never slowed down. However, I have tried to cultivate a mental state of detachment because there has been a lot of ugliness in recent years and that’s not an egregore I want to get pulled into, though it can be hard to resist in an age of ubiquitous propaganda. Perhaps that’s why I take the time to write these missives, that I can induce in myself a state of reflection and contemplation and step out of the stream of time if only for a moment. In an age when frantic activity is the norm, it becomes fitting and even necessary to pause and take stock. Well, I’ve laid down some burdens for now, and with all luck I’ll be back soon to do it again. Until then, peace.

It is now over 1 year since I moved to the St. Croix River valley area and the time elapsed since then seems somewhat of a blur. Judging from this experience, a year is just enough time to settle in. It took months just to get unpacked and to learn the new locale. I had never lived in a rural township prior to last year, and it takes some getting used to for lifelong residents of suburbia who have very easy access to services. I used to live about 5 minutes drive from a retail area with “all mod cons” as the English say. There is a good sized town with all of that only a few miles away, but I am more efficient in my use of those services these days, after a crazy year of inflation in fuel and food. I have also, to date, explored but a small part of my local area, being more reluctant to drive around aimlessly, which was in earlier years a favorite pastime of mine. Something to look forward to for the next year, I suppose.

The Indian Summer lasted into November this year, which was rare. During the tail end of that I was guarding the house of a friend who was out of town for a milestone birthday. That afforded me the opportunity to visit some of my old haunts in the Western Suburbs. I visited Rice Marsh, Staring, and Hyland Lakes. The fall drought was so severe that the lakes have dropped over 20” from their high water levels. They had until recently continued to fall 0.5” each week. I have never seen the area’s lakes so low, and reportedly this is the region’s worst prolonged drought since the late 1980s when I was only a boy. There are long black and gray strands of dirt between the old shoreline and the new. I had always thought it a shame that more of Minnesota’s lakes didn’t have nice beaches, or that one couldn’t easily walk the perimeter of the lake – well, now you can. Still, even in their lowered condition they had a lot of ducks and geese passing through on migrations, and it was nice to see this, because waterfowl are now an exotic sight for me. The Wisconsin driftless has few lakes and wetlands, only rivers, and I don’t live right near a wetland like I used to. It’s not so many miles away, but practically a different world.

During that time the weather was very unusual for November: gray, cloudy, humid, and a temperature in the low 60s. It almost felt like later spring. But one day it was as if a switch got flicked. In the morning, near Hyland Lake where I went for a morning stroll before starting up work for the day, the sun had come out and the bluebirds were massed there by the visitor center singing. It felt in that moment like summertime. But only an hour or so later, a rainstorm blew in and the temperature fell precipitately. By the afternoon it was in the 30s and with a fierce wind. Nevertheless I braved the cold for a walk after work, just around sunset. No one else was out on foot in the cold gray dusk. I scarcely saw a face in cars driving by; only a suburbanite mom in a Porsche SUV who waved as she drove into her driveway. The suburbs, along with many other populated areas I have visited this year, had a strangely depopulated atmosphere. I can’t shake the uneasy feeling that life has never returned to normal after the COVID-19 era, even with the gradual opening up ongoing since the last year and a half or so. There are still crowded times and places, but enough places are obviously desolate that they give the impression there are just fewer people than before.

Ever since that odd week spent abroad, there has been a bipolar effect in the weather. There has been cold weather and the first lasting snows, but also a few days here and there reaching into the 50s. Both deer hunting season (with rifles, that is) – a major event in the Upper Midwest, and especially in Wisconsin, with a vast number of hunters – and Thanksgiving came and went in a flash. I am thankful this year that it was rather more peaceful than in the past two years, when anxiety, hysteria and anger were running amok on the populace. Thanksgiving with some of my sibling’s in-laws was quieter than in some years they have done it, with several people unable to make it, but everyone was in high spirits and it was one of the better Thanksgivings in recent years. This was definitely an improvement over the frayed nerves that sometimes accompanied that time of year in the last decade or so. I have looked on in horror as American politics became more and more damaging to the sanity of all who partake of such a vice for long enough that a year of respite was very welcome indeed.

The first significant snowfall of the season came and went yesterday. I had to make a trip out to the airport before dawn and the conditions were already extremely hazardous, and the snow raged on all day. Now it’s a bright, harsh, cold, windy day like January as I write this. It has been an interesting month as the winter pattern of wildlife begins. All the regulars at the bird feeder are still coming in, along with the juncos who arrived with the cold, as they always do. The meadowlarks and bluebirds finally went south for the winter. I saw sandhill cranes and tundra swans flying south in the past month, sometimes in great numbers. This year a large number of birds nested successfully and some of the new birds, like cardinals and tufted titmice, have been regulars since then. Just a few minutes ago I watched a sharp shinned hawk pursuing an unfortunate chickadee, and I’m not sure if it survived. The area has a thriving ecosystem, there is no doubt about that – the more species the merrier, and it is quite lively here. Large flocks of turkeys have been forming up for the cold months. The only conspicuous absentees are the deer, as hunting is ongoing, but they will return to daylight activity in time.

There’s a sense of quiet as the year 2022 fades away. Next month I will celebrate the first year of my blog’s existence and review the accomplishments of a year marked by some delays, difficulties and obstacles. I expect it will end as it began, with stargazing in the cold nights around the ragged ends of the year. I have watched as Saturn, Jupiter and Mars have all become visible again in the evening sky. It will not be long before Orion is rising to greet nighttime travelers. It’s already Sagittarius season, and the sense of ease and festivity that I always associate with that time is setting in. Soon it will be time to greet the coming year with a sense of optimism, resolve and renewed purpose. The 2020s are looking to be a difficult year for the world in general, yet I intend to make 2023 one of my best years yet.