If you want to really hurt your parents, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
A little game with the English language that I used to play with my middle school students. It always amused and sometimes amazed them when we were talking about how language works.
I would tell them to write this sentence: She told him that she loved him.
Nothing special about it. Then, I told them to rewrite it inserting “only” in some place.
They quickly discovered it could go any place and it would change the meaning.
Only she told him that she loved him. She only told him that she loved him. She told him only that she loved him. She told him that only she loved him. She told him that she only loved him. She told him that she loved only him. She told him that she loved him only.
Then we talked about what each sentence means. Are some the same or similar? Are they all grammatically correct? On what word do you place emphasis when you say it aloud? Which is the happiest and which is the saddest sentence?
Of course, this isn’t the only sentence you can play this game using, and it doesn’t only work in English. A good little lesson.
Below are some adapted excerpts from the Grafton text that I first posted on another of my blogs, One-Page Schoolhouse.
Reading Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s encyclopedic study of magic is like stumbling into a vast cabinet of curiosities, where toad bones boil water, witches transmit misery through optical darts, and numbers arranged correctly can harness the planets’ powers.
Agrippa was a Renaissance polymath. His occult insights into the structure of the universe were his attempts to discover a path that leads both upward and downward. Up toward complete knowledge of God, and down into every order of being on earth.
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s manual of learned magic, De occulta philosophia(1533), explicated the ways in which magicians understood and manipulated the cosmos more systematically than any of his predecessors.
He attempted to map the entire network of forces that passed from angels and demons, stars and planets, downward into the world of matter. Agrippa laid his work out in three books, on the elementary, astrological, and celestial worlds. But he saw all of them as connected.
It includes a massive taxonomy of magical animals, plants, and stones, with ample instructions for their preparation and use.
Though I read them once thinking I would uncover some ancient secrets, most of the information means nothing to us today, other than being curiosities.
Would you want to cure a sore throat by touching your neck to the hand of someone who had died prematurely? I have an early winter cough this week, but I don’t think I will be putting my spit in the mouths of green frogs and then letting them escape.
A natural history cabinet or “cabinet of curiosities”.
Grafton says “Any reader could find something of interest in this paroxysm of parataxis, a good bit of it taken directly from Pliny and none of it explicitly verified by anything resembling a test.” Agrippa gave his readers anecdotes and practices.
He also thought knowledge of mathematics was required to do magic. For example, the Pythagorean number patterns that gave the universe structure.
The therapies in Agrippa’s book often required the invocation of celestial or angelic powers, either to awake the slumbering, hidden forces of the magical things he wished to manipulate or to protect magus and clients against the more frightening sorts of supernatural powers.
Magic squares originated in the Arabic world, long before Agrippa’s time. Often they had their top row of cells filled with the letters of a divine name or with the first letters of a verse from the Koran, and the lower rows with permutations on them. Since Arabic letters, like Hebrew, have numerical values, each magic square automatically forms a mathematical figure, and it was in this form that they became most popular in the West.
All the stars have their own natures, properties, and conditions, and through their rays, they also produce signs and characters in inferior beings as well, in the elements, in stones, in plants, in animals, and their members. Agrippa’s book not only became the manual of magical practice, but it also made the formal claim that magic was a kind of philosophy in its own right.
The 2023 Winter Solstice occurs in Paradelle tonight, December 21, 2023, at 10:27 PM ET. Also called the hibernal solstice, it occurs when either of Earth’s poles reaches its maximum tilt away from the Sun. This actually happens twice yearly, if you take into account each hemisphere. Tomorrow begins winter in the north and summer in the south.
In some ways, I have come to celebrate the Winter Solstice in some ways more than Christmas or the New Year, because it is grounded in a physical reality. It is the shortest day. It is a still point around which the world turns. There is a real shift happening at this time to this beautiful planet that shelters us.
Not a bad thing for us to hold our collective breath for a moment today here in the Northern Hemisphere, and begin to believe in the slow return of the light. Tonight is the darkest night but then the light returns. Light a candle today.
The winter solstice has been a significant time of year in many cultures since prehistory. It marks the symbolic death and rebirth of the sun, as the gradual waning of daylight hours is reversed and begins to grow again. I consider it a very hopeful day, even though I do not like winter weather,
Winter solstice celebrations often symbolically honor things. You don’t need to visit Stonehenge or dance around a bonfire in the moonlight, but surely, a least one way of marking the solstice must connect with you. Here are some possibilities you might celebrate: Symbols or ceremonies marking fire and light that are symbolic of release and rebirth, or life and death; marking the rising Sun, and the rising Moon; note any type of harvest; make peace with the darkness outside or within; any ritual acts that for you give life meaning.
Do you remember back in December 2004 when giant tsunami waves slammed into Sri Lanka and the India coastlines? One story that kept getting retold was that wild and domestic animals seemed to know what was about to happen and fled to safety. Eyewitnesses reported that elephants screamed and ran for higher ground, and dogs refused to go outdoors, flamingos abandoned their low-lying breeding areas, and zoo animals rushed into their shelters and could not be enticed to come back out.
I was reminded of this while watching the new Netflix film Leave the World Behind (oddly produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company known more for documentaries). In the film, flamingoes, deer and other creatures seem to sense that something is wrong in he world.
Do animals possess a “sixth sense” that allows them to know in advance when natural events such as storms and earthquakes will occur? The first response to this question is generally that animals’ more acute hearing and other senses might give them a big advantage over humans.
After that 2004 tsunami, relatively few animals were reported dead. In the world’s most earthquake-prone country, Japan, researchers have long studied animals in hopes of discovering what they hear or feel before earthquakes in the hope of using it as a predictive tool.
Since earthquakes bring vibrational changes on land and in water and storms cause electromagnetic changes in the atmosphere, some people believe animals use their sense of hearing and smell to determine something is coming.
Did humans also have this early warning sense at one time, but lost it as they evolved and moved away from nature?
I posted years ago about something I saw on the Small Farm Life blog (no longer active) by Fritz Nordengren where he wrote that on a June day he was mowing when he noticed that his ducks had returned to their pen earlier than usual. Then he saw that a flock of geese changed direction over the farm and set down in a pond that they don’t normally go to. His dog, who usually watches him mow from under the deck, followed him back and forth in the field. He went inside and checked his computer for local radar and found that a tornado had struck about 30 minutes from his farm.
Many animals sense a change in pressure and other atmospheric factors. An old nature watcher told me when I was a kid that I should watch birds. he said some, like swallows, will fly much closer to the ground prior to a thunderstorms. Fly fishermen know that insects would fly lower and the birds followed to feed on them.
I saw a post that said that a survey done via Google Earth imagery showed that across the planet cattle and flock animals tend to face north. Do they sense the earth’s magnetic field? It makes sense. Researchers have shown that many birds do.
But scientists are not totally on board with animals having a living Doppler radar system.
I have written about a variety of nature signs that some people believe can be predictive, especially about the weather. The little woolly bear caterpillar supposedly predicts the severity of the coming winter locally. Perhaps that is more weather lore than science, but it is worth remembering that rather silly traditions such as Groundhog Day go back to a time when the careful observation of animal behaviors was predictive for things like planting, harvesting and even migration to warmer climates.
Weekends in Paradelle 