Birthdays from yore.

 Birthday celebrations from my past.

(I hope this posts, but recognize that blogger has somehow pin-pointed myself as interested in photos of myself and family when we were younger...at least that's my guess as to why I suddenly have been dropped from comments and posts of my favorite blogs in a timely manner.)

After I took Home Ec classes, I started baking the birthday cakes for the family. Using mixes of course. Here I am also wearing a skirt I made, which was bright red. This might have been my 14th birthday. Living in St. Ann MO.

After our trip to Mexico to visit my great aunt, I posed with my pretty necklace, blouse and skirt - and my 16th birthday cake.

My little sister's 4th birthday in Houston TX. We both had Toni home perms. 

My sister on her February 3, 1958 birthday. She carried on the family tradition. But taking outdoor photos in Missouri meant different attire than my August birthdays!

For her 16th sister Mary also sat outside in St  Louis weather, then marked the photo with the wrong year, since it was 1960.

Fast forward to sharing a birthday in my mobile home in Tampa with my niece, Lisa and her father, Eric. Perhaps it was her birthday in April, 1973 or 74. Don't know where my sister was when this was taken.

Sharing with my Sepia Saturday friends who live all over the place and celebrate birthdays with cake!

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It seems suddenly I'm not receiving many comments, nor posts of my favorite blogs updated on the list in the right column. Is this happening to anyone else in blogger? Maybe whatever I'm writing is offensive to the great Blogger algorithm, if there is one. But I miss the social contacts. 

Ye Olde Beltane

 Sharing with Saturday's Critters!

Very small critters, ants are needed for peonies to bloom healthily.

Anthropomorphized May Pole Dancers

Maypole dancing in 2008 after I retired and moved to Black Mountain NC.

From The Crones Grove FaceBook page

Whisper in the Wind (circa 2018) by British textile artist Fiona Gill

A day late, my rabbit to wish good luck to everyone on the first of the month.

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May pole dance Sunday at 5 in Asheville NC sponsored by Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPS)

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Since few of my blog friends commented yesterday, I'll just add a couple of shots showing the results of the rallies in support of the laborers in our lives.

Raleigh NC had thousands of teachers march for better pay (they are at the bottom of the 50 states) and for the NC legislature to finally agree upon a budget...since they are the only state not to have done so yet.

Protesters gathered in Asheville below.

World wide efforts to have people over billionaires.

My attempt to capture the full moon the night of April 30/May 1...

At dusk...

At 1 am.

The people reclaim May Day

 

On May 1 (International Workers' Day), organizers are calling for a national "No Work, No School, No Shopping" boycott to display economic power, protest corporate exploitation, and support worker rights. The "May Day Strong" initiative urges citizens to avoid spending money to protest corporate power and demand economic equality, building on a history of labor actions.

Today is the first of May, a date that may have more holidays than any other. It’s the date when many countries celebrate Labor Day, a tradition with its roots in the 19th-century labor movement in the United States. In 1886, unions around the country went on strike in support of an eight-hour workday. Since many of the organizers of the strikes were communists, socialists, and anarchists, May Day has also come to be associated with communism, and was a big national holiday in the Soviet Union. President Eisenhower tried to take back May Day during the Cold War by declaring it Law Day and Loyalty Day. It remains a day of rallies and protests in many parts of the world, and in 2006, protest returned to the United States on May 1st to call attention to immigrants’ rights.

Beltane - Its roots as a holiday run much deeper than the labor movement, however. It’s been a celebration of spring and fertility in places like Egypt and India, and in pre-Christian Rome it was the time of the festival of Flora, the goddess of flowers. In medieval England, people gathered flowers to “bring in the May” and erected a maypole bedecked with garlands. It’s also the date of Beltane, a Celtic calendar festival celebrating the start of summer. Beltane was known for its bonfires, and has been revived by neo-pagans all over the world as a major religious holiday. In Germany, May 1st was the date of a pagan festival that was assimilated by the Christians and turned into the feast day of St. Walpurgis. The night before — Walpurgisnacht — is still celebrated in parts of rural Germany as a kind of Valentine’s Day, with the delivery of a tree, wrapped in streamers, to one’s beloved. It’s also a day to celebrate Hawaiian history and culture, and it’s known as Lei Day in Hawaii. One of the largest contemporary May Day celebrations in the United States takes place in Minneapolis, with a parade and pageant staged by the Heart of the Beast Puppet Theatre. It’s been going on since 1975 and attracts about 35,000 people every year.

(Thanks Writer's Almanac)

RIGHT HERE IN BLACK MOUNTAIN TODAY!

May Day Protest

When: Friday May 1st, 5:00pm - 6:00pm

Where: Black Mountain Town Square

A community gathering will take place at Black Mt Town Square, from 5-6. This event—part of a national day of action— includes a "Love-in-Action" request for food pantry donations. Dry food products, such as boxes of pasta, are encouraged.

While in Asheville NC...

May Day parades used to be full of workers! I did a bit of historic research at one time, finding old photos from New York and other cities of support of workers, much like Labor Day kind of does now.

The laborers used to parade down the streets on May Day...here are a few photos of New York parades.

These laborers in mills, factories, and food processing plants would take the day to display that they were doing the work that kept our world going.  They might just do it again today...

Today people have been urging each other to not shop, not work, nor go to school. (Unless of course you're an essential worker.)

So here in Black Mountain, or in nearby Asheville, there will be gatherings. There will be music. There will be justice oriented signs. And schools are closed!

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Recent reading which helps my own attitude:

We are bodies. We do not have bodies... If all our ‘inputs’ are visual and textual, and all we touch is frictionless surfaces, and if we have not reinstated the rich and varied physical life that lockdowns and contemporary electronic habits have stolen from us, then we will, very simply, be somewhat ill. One birth right of humans is a place in the ongoing physical life of earth. Without it, we are without context, (literally - not in the fabric), sullen, and prone to dubious medications peddled by the Machine.

Am I asking you to roll on the ground in the sunshine or push your faces into the hands of willing friends? Well, that would be a good start, as it would deliver a life-enhancing dose of the a vitamin we are mostly all deficient in - foolishness. Pioneers such as Moshe Feldenkrais and Thomas Hanna based their lives' work on returning people to natural movement. I would encourage us all to urgently attend to the state of our tactile lives, to touching and being touched, to feeling things under our hands and feet that are not manmade.

SOURCE: 

A Low Slanting Ray - Antidotes to the Hubriscene part 4, from the archive

by
Uncivil Savant <carolineross@substack.com>

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New post Inner Workings - a daily consideration of Living till Dying.

The Miraculous from The Marginalian

 From today's Marginalian

FROM THE ARCHIVE | The Warblers and the Wonder of Being: Loren Eiseley on Contacting the Miraculous

Every once in a while, the curtain of the ordinary parts and we touch the miraculous — the sense that there is another world not beyond this one but within it, a mirror-world any glimpse of which returns our own more luminous and full of wonder.

This can never be willed, but one can be willing for it — a willingness woven of two things: total wakefulness to reality and total openness to possibility.

It can happen while strolling in a garden, as it did for Virginia Woolf; it can happen while looking at a dandelion, as it did for G.K. Chesterton; it can happen in stumbling upon a piece of blue glass, as it did for me.

For paleontologist, anthropologist, philosopher of science, and poet Loren Eiseley (September 3, 1907–July 9, 1977), it happened in an encounter with a bouquet of warblers during a fossil-collecting expedition. He recounts the experience in his essay “The Judgment of the Birds,” originally published in 1957 in the first of his many exquisite essay collections — An Immense Journey, which inspired Ed Yong’s excellent An Immense World — and later included in the posthumous collection of his finest writing, The Star Thrower (public library), in the introduction to which W.H. Auden so poignantly captures Eiseley’s core ethos: “The first point he wishes to make is that in order to be a scientist, an artist, a doctor, a lawyer, or what-have-you, one has first to be a human being.”

Reflecting on that unbidden moment when he touched the miraculous — or, rather, the miraculous touched him — Eiseley observes:

The time has to be right; one has to be, by chance or intention, upon the border of two worlds. And sometimes these two borders may shift or interpenetrate and one sees the miraculous.

Art by Matthew Forsythe from The Gold Leaf

An experience of this sort, which Eiseley terms “a natural revelation,” comes about most readily in solitude and in nature. He recounts the particular revelation of his encounter with the warblers:

It was a late hour on a cold, wind-bitten autumn day when I climbed a great hill spined like a dinosaur’s back and tried to take my bearings. The tumbled waste fell away in waves in all directions. Blue air was darkening into purple along the bases of the hills. I shifted my knapsack, heavy with the petrified bones of long-vanished creatures, and studied my compass. I wanted to be out of there by nightfall, and already the sun was going sullenly down in the west.

It was then that I saw the flight coming on. It was moving like a little close-knit body of black specks that danced and darted and closed again. It was pouring from the north and heading toward me with the undeviating relentlessness of a compass needle. It streamed through the shadows rising out of monstrous gorges. It rushed over towering pinnacles in the red light of the sun or momentarily sank from sight within their shade. Across that desert of eroding clay and wind-worn stone they came with a faint wild twittering that filled all the air about me as those tiny living bullets hurtled past into the night.

Warblers from The Edinburgh Journal, 1830s. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

There is defiance in that many-winged rush of aliveness, of pure pulsating presence — a kind of stubborn insistence on the wonder of life, transient yet eternal, against the backdrop of the ossified past in Eiseley’s bag of fossils, the stratified time beneath his feet. With the knowledge that “we are all potential fossils,” he lenses through the birds the continuity of life across time, its consanguinity across the common chemistry that composes us:

It may not strike you as a marvel. It would not, perhaps, unless you stood in the middle of a dead world at sunset, but that was where I stood. Fifty million years lay under my feet, fifty million years of bellowing monsters moving in a green world now gone so utterly that its very light was traveling on the farther edge of space. The chemicals of all that vanished age lay about me in the ground. Around me still lay the shearing molars of dead titanotheres, the delicate sabers of soft-stepping cats, the hollow sockets that had held the eyes of many a strange, outmoded beast. Those eyes had looked out upon a world as real as ours; dark, savage brains had roamed and roared their challenges into the steaming night.

Now they were still here, or, put it as you will, the chemicals that made them were here about me in the ground. The carbon that had driven them ran blackly in the eroding stone. The stain of iron was in the clays. The iron did not remember the blood it had once moved within, the phosphorus had forgot the savage brain. The little individual moment had ebbed from all those strange combinations of chemicals as it would ebb from our living bodies into the sinks and runnels of oncoming time.

Geological strata from Geographical Portfolio by Levi Walter Yaggy, 1887. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Once, walking through a centuries-old gilded cathedral in a small Mexican town with a beloved companion, I found myself in tears at the thought of all the people now dead who once sat in those pews and lit candles at that altar and whispered their hopes to those saints; at the realization that we too will have been, that the sum total of our prayers and passions will one day be a votive melted in a pool of itself.

It is a mercy that we walk through the world half-blind to the reality of time and transience, or we would be walking through it in tears — through the immense cathedral of time that Earth is, with its neatly lined pews of geologic strata holding the history of life, which is the history of loss. And yet the very fact that any one life exists against the cosmic odds of eternal night and nothingness is miracle enough — a triumph of the possible over the probable, a concatenation of chemistry and chance gilded with wonder.

With an eye to the atomic chemistry we are and will return to, with an eye to the birds now swarming with the full force of life above him, the birds that evolved from those long-dead dinosaurs, Eiseley writes:

I had lifted up a fistful of that ground. I held it while that wild flight of south-bound warblers hurtled over me into the oncoming dark. There went phosphorus, there went iron, there went carbon, there beat the calcium in those hurrying wings. Alone on a dead planet I watched that incredible miracle speeding past. It ran by some true compass over field and waste land. It cried its individual ecstasies into the air until the gullies rang. It swerved like a single body, it knew itself, and, lonely, it bunched close in the racing darkness, its individual entities feeling about them the rising night. And so, crying to each other their identity, they passed away out of my view.

I dropped my fistful of earth. I heard it roll inanimate back into the gully at the base of the hill: iron, carbon, the chemicals of life. Like men from those wild tribes who had haunted these hills before me seeking visions, I made my sign to the great darkness. It was not a mocking sign, and I was not mocked. As I walked into my camp late that night, one man, rousing from his blankets beside the fire, asked sleepily, “What did you see?”

“I think, a miracle,” I said softly, but I said it to myself. Behind me that vast waste began to glow under the rising moon.

Couple with Eiseley’s miraculous encounter with a muskrat, then revisit Annie Dillard on finding the miraculous in the mundane and Helen Macdonald on what a hawk taught her about the meaning of life.

Eve of Beltane

 

Walpurgis Night is celebrated every year on the night of April 30th into May 1st. Historically, it marks the transition from spring to summer and is associated with bonfires, dancing, and old seasonal traditions.

The name comes from Saint Walpurga, an English nun from the 8th century who traveled to Germany as a Christian missionary. She was known for caring for the sick, promoting education, and founding religious communities. Her feast day became associated with May 1st after her relics were moved in 870 AD.

The connection to witches comes mainly from German folklore. During the Middle Ages, people believed that witches gathered on mountaintops—especially at Brocken in Germany—for rituals, dancing, and spiritual gatherings. Villagers lit large fires to protect themselves from evil spirits and to welcome the warmer season.

Walpurgis Night also has pagan roots because it overlaps with ancient spring fertility festivals such as Beltane. Over time, older folk traditions blended with the Christian celebration of Saint Walpurga.

Today, Walpurgis Night is still celebrated in parts of Northern and Central Europe with bonfires, music, costumes, and spring festivals.

The is the night of fertility celebration, welcoming spring and all the wonders of animal and plant life that regenerate at this time of the annual cycle of life on our planet. I wrote about Beltane and bonfires a bit in the past on Alchemy of Clay.

A May Day tradition was for children to pick flowers and then distribute them throughout the town. Of course the gardeners were not always happy to have kids trampling through their roses!

Sharing with Floral Friday Fotos

Wild roses or dog-roses

Wisteria brought home!

Unknown source, with Stonehenge included

Wear some artificial flowers in a crown, it does make one feel like a girl for May Day!

Of course many traditions start with bonfires on May Day Eve. I haven't ever taken part in those, but have read about them! With droughts so prevalent in the US, I hope there are very few bonfires this year. 

Tomorrow is called May Day. Historically this was a day workers would have marches until the Communists made big parades with military equipment which stopped the holiday celebrations in the US.

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Health care update.

No news from the insurance debacle, except late Tuesday I got a call from that Dr.’s office from a new person (Bonnie) who said they would make sure I could keep my appointment with my PCP (primary care provider) and have the certification meeting the insurance requirement by next week.

I’m not holding my breath! But they did send me a confirmation this morning that I have the appointment.

As of 1:30 pm Wednesday…

Nobody had called me back and I looked at my trembling hands and realized I could not put a needle into an IV line to save me as the nurse practitioner had told me I needed to do.

So I called the infectious disease (ID) office and left a message for the nurse to that effect,and mentioned that the nurse practitioner (Amy) hadn’t called me back yesterday afternoon.

So another nurse called within an hour to explain that the lab results that Amy had looked at were from  the hospital before I was discharged and then took antibiotics orally for 2 weeks. So I didn’t need any more antibiotics.

At the same time the lab results from my bloodwork at ID were on my patient portal, with normal range of white blood cells! You all probably know when they’re elevated, it means you have an infection.

I sighed with such relief. And I said how worried I’d been that I needed all this treatment still.

I remembered telling Amy the sputum test which showed the fungus had been taken the 7th and not reported till the 20th, but she didn’t hear that as meaning I was still in the hospital. Glad she conferred with the Dr. before any more mistakes were made.

The best part was then being able to look at the results of ID’s bloodwork and talk with this nurse about other things that weren’t normal! So since I don’t drink alcohol, we figured my high liver enzymes are due to taking Tylenol for pain. Fortunately now I can switch to ibuprofen. Nothing that needs treatment showed as of first tests, but there may be more results and this nurse said she’d call me and let me know when they come in. I’ll also be checking  the patient portal!

And I’m feeling better day by day. Didn’t make it to exercise, but I joined friends for lunch at least!