Spring?

Finally saw a cabbage butterfly on April 30th, some three weeks later than usual and as much as six weeks later than during the warmest springs back east, when I once saw them in mid March...So that signifies the cold weather we have had this season and the delayed spring generally in these mountains. I saw a mourning cloak butterfly (they overwinter as adults)about a week ago, and that too was three weeks later than back east. The spring azures (little blue butterflies) have been out for two days and today I saw the first angle wing butterfly.Only in the past week has the landscape begun to explode with plant life, with colts foot and adders tongue (trout lilies)blooming, and beginning today they share the roadside with some wild mustard blooms and more abundant dandelion. The mountaintop canopy looks as if it has been lightly brushed with green, although here in the valley the forsythia and magnolia have been blooming a week.So it's been a mixed, hesitant season,hardly reflecting global warming this year except in its bizarre extremes. The news today reports a foot of snow in Minnesota and Wisconsin,so the atmosphere is certainly erratic. The extended forecast finally indicates sunshine and warm (65-70F ) temperatures,so I finished putting new shingles on the garage roof yesterday and soon Beth and I will do some exterior painting and landscaping that the house needs.

Death of a Tree

This is a Blue Spruce that my mother had planted some 19 years ago after using it as a Christmas tree. Although I lament killing any living thing, I have no particular attachment for this particular tree so Beth and I have agreed to do new landscaping.Where the tree had stood likely will be bird feeders and baths and flowers and grasses-maybe a fire pit-and whatever else we need to create a new sanctuary.

Porcupines, Coyotes, & Men

Took a walk with the dog in the woods about three miles outside of town, where the snow had finally melted although the landscape still displayed the look of mid November, brown and gray and lifeless. About a mile and a half along a logging road we came upon a porcupine in a culvert feeding on one of the few shoots of new grass. This particularly individual showed absolutely no fear or concern that we were approaching, and only raised its head to gaze at me when I deliberately made noise and moved into its line of sight. By that time I had picked up the dog to prevent her from getting too close, for she had had an encounter with a porcupine several years ago after which I had had to yank a half dozen quills from her snout. Together we stared at the porcupine as it nonchalantly chewed the grass five feet away from us, for it had learned from experience that it possessed few enemies-including us- willing to brave its needles. At length we left it where we found it, and I marveled at what a slow, clumsy animal it was-slower and with poorer eyesight than an opossum I thought-but obviously adept at surviving in the harsh mountains. As we were walking back we were passed by two men shouldering rifles, one of whom said “Out walking with your killer dog I see”…for people commonly misjudge Chelsee’s prowess because of her small size, not realizing that her terrier half easily outruns many breeds twice her height. I replied that she was a “great little dog” to which he began boasting that there was a least one coyote that would not bother us because “I killed it three weeks ago!” Apparently the two of them were on another coyote hunt, and when I remarked that coyotes had never bothered us, this particular fellow remarked a second time, with obvious pride, that he had shot one, as though to him the animals were the devil incarnate.Sometimes coyotes were hazardous to small dogs and chickens when people encroached on their living space and them on ours, but to deliberately hunt them down in their wild habitat bordered on sadism in my opinion. In my youth I too had shot my BB gun at birds and frogs and grasshoppers and felt no remorse, but I was as ignorant at the age of 15 as some men my present age remained,and I eventually had concluded that killing for ‘sport’ merely reflected a state of emotional and spiritual immaturity. During our five years of walking the dog and I had only encountered a single coyote, and that animal wisely had maintained a distance of fifty yards from us as it slowly retreated. Like most member of it’s species it had been more curious than threatening to us, and intelligent enough to be wary of humanity’s dangers. When the two men turned onto another trail and we parted ways, I was glad that they would not encounter the aforementioned porcupine, because I assumed that one of them would have gladly shot the hapless animal and called it fun, or fair game, or some other such nonsense. By contrast, hunting for food rather than consuming a pen raised animal showed a respectful understanding of the natural ecology of the woods, and in that regard many local gun owners were far savvier about the real world than people isolated in metropolitan areas. As the federal government and corporations confiscated more and more power from individuals,those who "cling to guns " appeared wiser than many of those who feared them.

Science And NDE's

THIS IS FROM 'SCIENCE DAILY' ONLINE >> "Seeing a bright light, going through a tunnel, having the feeling of ending up in another 'reality' or leaving one's own body are very well known features of the complex phenomena known as 'Near-Death Experiences ' (NDE), which people who are close to death can experience in particular. Products of the mind? Psychological defence mechanisms? Hallucinations? These phenomena have been widely documented in the media and have generated numerous beliefs and theories of every kind. From a scientific point of view, these experiences are all the more difficult to understand in that they come into being in chaotic conditions, which make studying them in real time almost impossible. The University of Liège's researchers have thus tried a different approach. Working together, researchers at the Coma Science Group (Directed by Steven Laureys) and the University of Liège's Cognitive Psychology Research (Professor Serge Brédart and Hedwige Dehon), have looked into the memories of NDE with the hypothesis that if the memories of NDE were pure products of the imagination, their phenomenological characteristics (e.g., sensorial, self referential, emotional, etc. details) should be closer to those of imagined memories. Conversely, if the NDE are experienced in a way similar to that of reality, their characteristics would be closer to the memories of real events. The researchers compared the responses provided by three groups of patients, each of which had survived (in a different manner) a coma, and a group of healthy volunteers. They studied the memories of NDE and the memories of real events and imagined events with the help of a questionnaire which evaluated the phenomenological characteristics of the memories. The results were surprising. From the perspective being studied, not only were the NDEs not similar to the memories of imagined events, but the phenomenological characteristics inherent to the memories of real events (e.g. memories of sensorial details) are even more numerous in the memories of NDE than in the memories of real events. The brain, in conditions conducive to such phenomena occurring, is prey to chaos. Physiological and pharmacological mechanisms are completely disturbed, exacerbated or, conversely, diminished. Certain studies have put forward a physiological explanation for certain components of NDE, such as Out-of-Body Experiences, which could be explained by dysfunctions of the temporo-parietal lobe. In this context the study published in PLOS ONE suggests that these same mechanisms could also could also 'create' a perception - which would thus be processed by the individual as coming from the exterior - of reality. In a kind of way their brain is lying to them, like in a hallucination. These events being particularly surprising and especially important from an emotional and personal perspective, the conditions are ripe for the memory of this event being extremely detailed, precise and durable. Numerous studies have looked into the physiological mechanisms of NDE, the production of these phenomena by the brain, but, taken separately, these two theories are incapable of explaining these experiences in their entirety. The study published in PLOS ONE does not claim to offer a unique explanation for NDE, but it contributes to study pathways which take into account psychological phenomena as factors associated with, and not contradictory to, physiological phenomena." >> NOW MY TAKE ON IT ALL >>... the Key error made by science is the assumption that there is an “exterior” which defines " reality". Rather,an NDE,or any true spiritual experience, is an acute perception that there are NO BORDERS between the mind and the outside of the skull. Instead, think of skin, bones and the brain on a quantum level-as shifting, merging energy fields- and the absence of borders is easier to visualize. As Einstein said "the field is the only reality". To me,consciousness is a constructed ‘reality’ arising from within and without,part of a 'universal intelligence' of which we are a conduit, and which perhaps also explains and validates our mystical sense of 'oneness'..?

Winter

It is still winter here in the western woods, with boot deep snow on the mountaintops and solid ice covering the dirt roads. It has been a mixed winter of bitter cold interspersed with thaws, but generally it has been below freezing and snowy since December 22nd. Little things turn my eye towards spring and help break the monotony of mid winter, like the chipmunk I saw yesterday and a small stonefly walking on the crust the day before, but February is always the doldrums of the year. This oil and natural gas substation is one of many scattered around the National forest, and hundreds of new wells have been drilled in the past few years. The companies are required to display their permits and often place them in a mailbox they install near their drilling sites. Although fracking is not yet common around here, some of the blueprints show both conventional and fracking wells among their plans. After the permits are obtained the trucks and bulldozers clear the trees and install the culverts and do all the other preparations required before the drilling begins. On paper the regulations appear stringent, but how well they are enforced miles from civilization I do not know. This particular substation is about two miles from the nearest macadam, and others are more isolated. The building houses a huge diesel engine that powers pumps that move the gas and oil through the miles of pipes buried all over the woods. Many of the individual drill pumps-which can be miles from a substation-are powered by electricity, so no doubt the diesels run generators as well. Electric wires are strung all over the forest, sometimes attached to a tree with a piece of rope or lifted from the ground with a 'Y' shaped branch, so not all of this is high tech. Personally,I have seen no real problems associated with the drilling, for other than the smell of gas near the substations and storage tanks, they become part of the landscape in the same manner that nobody notices telephone poles on a city street. They are there but the eye learns to ignore them. I use many of the logging and gas roads as trails through what would otherwise be a wilderness, and they enable me to keep my bearings. There is so much gas here that the companies are scrambling to find new markets in which to sell it to keep their profits up, although utility companies are claiming they need to raise gas rates-probably to cover their lower margins due to the glut of gas. POSTSCRIPT: March 14th- Not much has changed in the general landscape, and I walked this morning through two inches of new snow in what to the skin still feels like a January wind. But there are more signs of the coming spring, with streams that are clear of ice and running deep from melt off. On the 9th Beth and I saw the first robins, grackles and red wing blackbirds, and a few crocuses blooming the next day, but those species are in hiding today,buried beneath the snow, waiting for the thaws to become trustworthy. POSTSCRIPT: March 26th-Still clouds and snow showers and boot deep snow on the mountains, high temperatures in the upper 30's F ...It is a late spring no doubt... I asked an Amish guy what he thought of the snow and he replied "It's time to plow!" ...so most locals are ready for winter to leave...Is this an effect of global climate change-with extremes that we all simply have to adapt to?

Home

We finally finished the major work and moved in successfully on December 22nd, but both of us have been recovering from flu in the month since then...no doubt stress compromised our emotional and physical well being... The good news is that normalcy seems to be returning at last! We have some basement work to do and landscaping in the spring and other odd jobs, but the house is looking good:)Warren currently has been experiencing a prolonged cold snap, with daytime highs below 20*F(...so cold that the dog has not wanted to walk with me?)thus it's nice to have a warm comfortable house to come home to... Otherwise, not much new happening around here,or rather,it would be mere gossip to talk about, which is not my strong suit. In early March my daughter in law is being sent to a conference in Prague to give a presentation for her work with Merck,so my sons are flying with her to make a vacation of it. They plan to travel by train to Germany and fly home from Munich. This will be the first time to Europe for Barb and Forrest, although Skylar has been to Italy so he can add two more countries to his list!

Beth and I have been busy working on my mom's house, painting and doing floors and other things, with the hope to be moved in by Christmas. We are becoming a bit burned out by it all, but the end is in sight and the house will be a perfect home for us to live in-probably for the rest of our lives. Real estate in Warren is dirt cheap by the standards of the rest of the country, so the isolation and relative poverty of this part of the country make it a perfect retirement haven for prospective 'snowbirds' such as ourselves. Eventually,we plan to buy a small motor home in which to travel during the winters, and God willing still have a few good years left to enjoy life!