Compostable Holiday Decor

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Yesterday evening I was out in the back yard trimming our perennials (yep, it’s very California to be working in the yard the day before Thanksgiving) and afterward I twisted together a wreath out of what I’d cut: mostly lavender, with some strawberry tree branches, white sage and toyon berries. All I did was attach the green bits with wire to a thin branch I’d bent in a circle.

The wreath was spectacular last night. This morning it is a bit wilted, as the picture shows, but still nice. Properly, if a wreath is to last, it should be made of dried stuff and/or evergreen boughs. We’ll see what this one does over the next couple of days. I’m not bothered if it doesn’t work, as it only took about a half hour to make, and I made it more for the pleasure of the making than anything else.

It is worth remembering that you can throw together a wreath or swag or centerpiece out of whatever fresh plant matter you can find, and it will look fresh for the rest of the day. It’s really nice to have fresh, fragrant greenery on the walls and tables for parties. Here’s a thoughtstyling for you: maybe holiday decor should be as compost-able as the food, so we don’t end up burdened with boxes full of low-grade novelty holiday items which have no future outside a thrift store–kid art and family treasures excepted, of course!

Behold the Ant Lion

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Speaking of astonishment, I learned something new last weekend, and I love learning new things, especially things which remind me of how strange and wonderful the world is.

Have you ever heard of an ant lion or antlion?

I was out tracking with the lovely Channel Islands Tracking Team (if you live near Ventura, CA and want to learn how to track animals for fun, look them up). We were under a tagged-up bridge, in a dry river bed.  Someone pointed out a hole or divot in the sand and quizzed us: what made the hole?  I had no idea. It was a divot that could have been made by a big man’s thumb. I might think it was made by dripping water, if there was ever any water anywhere in this dry land.

The answer was “ant lion” —  and I was the only one among them who did not know the answer. Ant lion??? It was such as strange conjunction of terms  (see jackalope) that I thought they were pulling my leg. When I got home and checked the Internets, I realized that, as always, truth is stranger than fiction.

The name ant lion is a simple translation of their genus name, Myrmeleon— “ant-lion”.  Ant lion because they eat ants rather fiercely. This activity, and so the name, only applies to the larval stage of the insect. The larvae are also sometimes called “doodlebugs” in North America because of the linear, wandering trails they leave in the sand when not killing ants. Ant lions are found all over the world, in any region which has a dry, warm climate–and sandy soil.

Dry sand is necessary for their predation style. They dig holes in which to capture their prey. The hole I saw, like the hole above, is called a lion ant trap. (And a wicked trap it is! Arrggg matey!)

What dug the hole?  This:

Antlion1_by_Jonathan_Numer
This is an ant lion in its larval stage. And believe me, there are scarier pictures of these guys on the Internets, but none free of copyright restrictions. Go look at them if you’d like to have nightmares.

So, this creature digs sand pits and hides in the bottom of them waiting for a hapless ant to wander by. The ant slips on the crumbling edge of the pit and tumbles in. The ant lion is waiting in hiding at the bottom and may grab the ant when it first falls. If the ant  is lucky enough to regain its feet and start out of the hole, the ant lion kicks sand at it, barraging the ant with heavy fire until it slides back down to the bottom of the death pit and is caught in those fearsome pincher jaws. There is no escape from the ant lion.

Cunning. Efficient. Voracious. This is the ant lion. This is a baby ant lion, the larval stage. It makes you shudder to think what it’s like when it’s grown up, right?

Behold the adult ant lion:

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It looks like a damselfly or dragonfly but is not related to either. The adult ant lion is sometimes called an antlion lacewing. They are not much seen by humans, because despite those beautiful wings, they are weak fliers, and mostly lurch around in the bushes at night trying to find another bumbling antlion, so they can mate. In the daylight hours they rest on branches, where they are well camouflaged.

From pinchered, death pit-digging predator to delicate, bumbling, romance-seeking nectar drinker. You just never know where life will take you.

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Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for all of the photographs in this post.

Three lessons about life

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I’m home with a cold while Erik is off getting himself all worked into a tizzy at the state beekeeping convention.

In my couch-potato-ing, I ran across this delicate piece of wisdom while watching a video of a lecture by Matthew Fox. During the lecture, he tells the story of how he saw the poet Mary Oliver at a reading in San Francisco. At that time, she was 84 years old and she said to the crowd (as paraphrased by Fox), “I’m getting old and I want to leave you young people these three lessons I’ve learned about life. Everything else is details.”:

  1. Pay Attention
  2. Be Astonished
  3. Share your astonishment

“Interstellar”: Leaving the farm for the stars

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Erik: Every once in awhile I like to see a big budget Hollywood movie, especially when I think it might be a window into the cultural episteme. I had a hunch Interstellar might touch on some themes related to this blog so I suggested we go.

Kelly: And I went for the popcorn.

Erik: I wasn’t disappointed, at least with the epistemological bits.  The movie itself was a mess.

Kelly: You and your big words. We should tell people who don’t know that this is a science fiction film set in a near-ish future, in the wake of Something Bad happening which causes massive depopulation of the Earth. I think the food supply failed.

Now, everyone left is a farmer, and working hard to keep failing monocrops going. We seem to be living on an all-corn diet. There are no animals to be seen, anywhere. Not even a cat. I’m assuming we ate them. There seems to be plenty of gas left, perhaps because there are so few people. At any rate, things aren’t good–there are constant dust storms and disease threatening the crops. It seems that humanity isn’t out of hot water quite yet.  And our hero, Cooper, who is a ex-NASA pilot forced to play farmer, discovers that NASA still exists, in skeletal form, in an underground bunker. (For Angelinos: The NASA bunker is the Bonaventure Hotel!!!!)  From there the plot turns to “How can we get all of us off this sorry rock before humanity expires?” aka “Space will save us.”

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Kelly’s photo of the Bonaventure Hotel: the set for underground NASA.

Erik: Two more big words for you: eschatological panic. To me that’s what the movie is about. That panic is intertwined with, as you note, a profound disrespect for Mother Earth. We screwed up the source of all life, but thankfully we can shoot ourselves up into heaven (through the Bonaventure!). Anyone who thinks otherwise (like the school bureaucrats depicted in an early parent/teacher meeting scene) are cranks.

Kelly:  I think we should spell out that scene with the teachers which Erik is referring to, because it is important to what I’ll have to say later.  In this scene, the hero/pilot, Cooper, goes to a parent teacher conference where his son’s high-school teacher blithely states that the Apollo landings were all a brilliant CIA hoax designed to drive the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. She believes this as absolute truth, and shows him that it is written into all the revised textbooks. Cooper is horrified. Somehow he has missed the re-education program that came after the big die-off.

This is important to me because it is a good example of the typical, lazy — and typically lazy– thinking about science and nature and philosophy which goes on in popular culture. There is a central narrative which tells us that science will save us, and that science must be protected at all costs from backward thinking nutjobs–whether these be religious zealots or brain dead bureaucrats.

In the world of Interstellar it seems a new sort of political correctness has been developed which privileges some very narrow band of ag studies over all other kinds of learning, and downplays the achievements of science in the past. There are hints that this may be because the failures of science are what got them into their predicament to begin with– this is not clear.

But what is clear is that the only hope for humanity, both physically and spiritually, is abandoning the planet.  We see this played out in Cooper’s adult children: one is a farmer, one is a scientist. The farmer is blind, blind even to the suffering of his own family, while the scientist literally saves mankind.

This dualistic set-up–Science vs. Farming or really, as the story plays out, Science vs. Earth is a very bad model, yet it is the one we are presented with over and over again. You’ve heard the quote attributed to Einstein that says something along the lines of “We’re not going to solve our problems by using the same thinking we used to get into trouble”?  I feel like we are swimming deep in those problematic waters, and this false duality is an example of it.

Erik: Interstellar, like most Hollywood movies, takes the techo-utopian side of that dualism. So does Richard Branson with his plans to sell expensive eschatological roller coaster rides. On the other side of that dualism you have pseudo-science and a kind of rainbows and unicorns denial of the physical plane.

Two things really bug me about Interstellar: first it’s the ultimate expression of suburban flight. We screwed things up here, but thankfully a wormhole has opened and we can (spoiler alert) repopulate a new planet that looks like Joshua Tree. It’s dry but there’s some great rock climbing!

Secondly Interstellar’s denial of the sanctity and beauty of Earth. And, I want to be clear that I’m not misanthropic: I believe in human civilization. I’m saying that there is something special about this planet and that it is our place in the universe. And, practically speaking, the rest of this solar system is inhospitable to life and the stars are so remote we’ll never reach them. We really need to tell different stories than this one.

Kelly: Yup. And to be clear, neither of us is anti-science — we just want to look a little more closely at the stories we tell ourselves in this culture.

For instance, why can’t we see a story which tells about people rebuilding after the Bad Thing happens, and being happier than they were before?

Instead, the story is always apocalyptic. In Interstellar they make passing reference to the greed and blindness of the before-times, but the present reality for the survivors is grim. Everyone is “stuck on the farm” and Cooper’s farm house needs a paint job real bad and there’s not much to do except watch for dust storms. Leaving the planet becomes our manifest destiny.  As Cooper says at one point, “I was born on Earth–I wasn’t meant to die here.”

Here’s a different story. In the wake of the bad times, people awaken to their true humanity? What if we let go of materialism and greed  and fear and live in more cohesive communities? We develop a positive, living spirituality and a deep bond with nature,  to which we are now devoted to healing?

What if we celebrated the role of the caretaker as much as we do the explorer?

I know, I know, that would be a boring movie because it would have no spaceships or explosions.

Erik: I can think of some positive examples from science fiction with both spaceship and explosions. First, Frank Herbert’s Dune which values human abilities over machines. Then there’s Tarkovsky’s Solaris, which, among other ideas, explores what happens when we become detached from nature. And in some ways Gravity is the inverse of Interstellar. Gravity celebrates humanity and culture (Remember the radio conversation? See the short the director’s son made about the other side of that conversation with the Inuit man–very worth watching) with a plot about how inhospitable space actually is and how good it is to be standing on the living earth.

Kelly:  All true. But my obsession right now is not with SciFi but with real life. I’m tired of our culture’s hostile and dismissive attitude toward nature. I’m more than tired of narratives which have already given up on nature. This includes the “Let’s get off this rock” narrative of this movie, but it also includes the “Don’t worry, the Rapture is coming” narrative and the “It’s too late to do anything, the planet is doomed anyway” narrative and the related “Humans are doomed for X Y or Z reason and the planet will be glad to see us go” and the most pernicious narrative of all, “It won’t happen in my lifetime, so why should I care?”

I want new narratives. We deserve more. Our children deserve more. Our planet deserves more.

Diyas: oil lamps from India

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[Oops! We accidentally posted Thursday’s post today–Wednesday. Please don’t miss our regular scheduled Wednesday podcast, below.]

As readers of this blog and our books know, I’m a big fan of little vegetable oil lamps–the type that can be easily improvised with any shallow vessel, from sea shells to Altoid tins. If the tabletop aesthetic of oyster shells and recyclables doesn’t quite appeal to you, may I interest you in diyas?

Diyas are little clay lamps used in India. They usually burn ghee, but any vegetable oil works well in them, too. I just found them being sold at our local Indian supermarket. There, the fancy molded ones, like the one pictured above (one of many shapes) were 3 for $1.00. The simplest ones, which are basically teardrop shaped pinch pots, go for 5 for a dollar.

That’s a lot of fun for a dollar, and a good way to light up a party with a hundred warm little lights–if you can keep your guests from catching themselves on fire! (For more info, see my post at the first link above for all the deets on making and using a vegetable oil lamp.)

Also, it occurs to me that it would be a great lesson for kids to make a pinch pot out of clay dug from the ground, and then make some ghee and a wick, and then see how prettily butter burns.  (And whenever I say something would be a good lesson for kids, this means it’s something I want to do myself.)