hmmm. i must be not getting this quite right. i believe the part about worms. a wholely new type of worm found in the trees that are not on the ground.

but plankton? don’t they need sea~water?

tell me if you find out anything about this because i am extremely intrigued.

it’s not at all googleable, as far as i can tell.

Back in December I wanted to see falling stars so badly I could hardly stand it. Somewhere I had read that there was a great chance of seeing the Geminids in mid-December if you could get far enough away from the city lights. They were supposed to be really big and bright and colorful. Once or twice I’ve seen a really colorful shooting star, so when I read that these ones could be green and yellow and blue I was even more intent on seeing them.

    My mom was in the hospital the nights they were supposed to be falling and I was so tired and I would’ve had to have driven really far to escape the city lights so I didn’t see them.

  Well.

  I read that there were shooting stars, the Ursids, that you could possibly see around Dec 22. But that week it rained and the skies were so cloudy, so of course no stars. Which was fine, we need the rain.On Christmas Eve, my friend Nick gave me Sufjan Steven’s Christmas CD. There’s a song on there called Star of Wonder. Its’s swirling and gorgeous, like the Milky Way*.     Here are the words to it:

  I call you
From the comet’s cradle
I found you
Trembling by yourself
When the night falls
Lightly on your right-wing shoulder
Wonderful know-it-all
Slightly where the night gets colder Oh, conscience,
Where will you carry me?
I found you
Star of terrifying effigies
When the night falls
I carry myself to the fortress
Of your glorious cause
Oh, I may seek your fortressWhen the night falls
We see the star of wonder
Wonderful night falls
We see you
We see youI see the stars coming down there
Coming down there to the yard
I see the stars coming down there
Coming down there to my heart
[Repeat x 10]

Sufjan keeps singing the chorus over + over + over for a long time and he uses instruments like harps and bells and banjos and triangles.** I hope you get to hear the song some day. It’s absolutely star music.  It sounds like stars. It sounds like when young Prince Caspian was up in the tower (the old tower that never got used) with his tutor and he realized that his tutor was not a regular human being after all but actually maybe a dwarf(!) and he started wondering if there could have been any truth to all those old stories his nurse used to tell him about Old Narnia.   That night, Christmas Eve, after eating with my friends and getting this wonderful music from Nick, I drove around the city. I wanted to go to a Christmas Eve service. I drove to Trinity Cathedral downtown. It was around ten and the service had proly started at 9 and I didn’t have the courage to walk in so late, so I just stood in the bathroom listening to their music. They have a huge organ there and the sound was huge, I could hear it even though I was locked in a little room.     I still wanted to go remember a long ago night with people so I drove up Central Ave to a Methodist church. They were between services and  people were outside around a fire and mingling in a side room eating from tables covered with cookies, punch, cheese and crackers and those little quiche things that I hear you get at Costco that taste so good.

   Hi, I imagine myself saying, I don’t know any of you people and that makes me feel lonely, but there are enough of you here that you don’t notice me and it is Christmas Eve, so I’ll take another quiche-thing if you don’t mind. Mmmmm, tasty. Mind if I have another?

   So I went to sit down in this big old red velvet vaulted ceiling church and looked around at the people. There was an old white-haired lady near me by herself. I got this idea in my head the second I noticed her: she’s a widow, she’s here alone. Her husband will not be at home when she goes back there tonight.(Of course, who knows, maybe not…..)

   The service hadn’t begun yet, I was sitting there with my candle and suddenly decided I just couldn’t be there and so I got up and went out into the courtyard and headed to my car. It was going to be lonely sitting there and I was exhausted and I was going to have to drive home 30 miles afterwards.

   I feel at this point I should tell you I did grab another quiche or two, before I zoomed off….. 

   Okay, so what does this have to do with worship? Or with meteorites….?

   Yes, well, I’m not that good a writer. Go read Dry Bones Dance or old Junkmail for Blankets if you are looking for well-connected thoughts….anyways…

   Right after Christmas, my co-worker showed me an article online about how there was another chance to see falling stars. If they happen they happen for at least a couple nights and already people in Cave Creek had seen them. Real live meteorites! The Quadtranids! 

   This time I was really going to go see them. I would get up at 3 am, drive to Cave Creek and be at work by 7.3 am came and of course I reset my alarm and fell right back to sleep and was kinda relieved to learn later that the skies clouded up anyways that night.

   I so wonder what it would be like to lay back on the cold ground wrapped in all my blankets and staring up at the cold, crisp clear winter sky. So snuggly in blankets, a billion stars……and all the anticipation and expectation of seeing falling stars…see it’s really kinda hard to describe because experientially I can barely remember what it’s like.

   Where do you live? Do you know what I mean? How far would you have to go to actually see the Milky Way? I’ve read that our sun is too young and  too cool*** to manufacture any element heavier than helium and since helium is number 2(?) on the periodic table, that leaves 90 plus elements that were not produced in our solar system. We are made of stars. We’re star remnants. But not from our star.

   I picture going to a remote place, laying down on the ground and staring up as being more worship than anything I’ve ever experienced in church. Do you know what I mean? Holy, holy, holy. Billions of stars, billions of years old. And too many spacey mysteries to delve into if you lived a billion years.

    A little before I got obsessed with going out to see meteorites I read this post ( http://www.reallivepreacher.com/node/830by  ) by Real Live Preacher. Some people got disgruntled by RLP’s f-word, some people started debating stuff, others goo-goo gaw- gawed over RLP’s writing and I got this idea in my head after reading it:

   Mercury-Venus-Earth-Mars-Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus-Neptune-Pluto

  Once I went to a museum where they placed models of the planets at different sizes and distances to represent them. You started with Mercury, the size of a golf ball and then walked like a hundred feet and got to Venus the size of a baseball and then walk a couple hundred feet to Earth, the size of a small bowling ball or something like that. By the time you get to Pluto, it’s a mustard seed way on the other side of the hill, so far away you forget what you came for and head back to the gift shop.

   So I thought, I bet you could make something like this yourself. I looked online and found some resources like this:      http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/planetarium/ssscale.htm

   And then I decided I wanted to make something like this in my neighborhood for my friends. Maybe I would use chalk and draw Mercury on my sidewalk and then further down all the other planets. I would love to draw Sarturn and Jupiter. Oh my gorgeousness, you know? Especially the rings and the storm. I would look up planet facts on the internet and then write down pretty words about them (for example: Since Neptune was discovered in 1846, it has not yet completed a single revolution around the sun.)

  Then, as we walked to the places where the chalk planets were, my friends could read their little papers. Maybe I would use scrolled up paper tied with ribbons and type everything out in some pretty font. Maybe we would do this at night and I would use glow in the dark chalk. Maybe we could have food and drinks when we got back to the house.I was only thinking about it for a bit when I also started thinking about Johnny Bakers Alternative worship tricks. It seems like something that he would add to his list.

 http://jonnybaker.blogs.com/jonnybaker/worship_tricks/wtindex.html  *I

  *I saw the Milky Way once in Zion National Park in Utah. June 1995.  ** Well maybe not exactly those instruments. *** and maybe just a little too hip?

  **** At this point, I have to say that I actually did go out to the desert-mountains with 2 friends last night and there were stars. Oh my, were there stars. I could write more about that later, but all I will say for now is that next time I go, there will be no making of fires and absolutely no flashlights, they blot out the stars so badly and we are too dependent on having light when actually star light would have been all we really needed.

http://www.nativetech.org/cornhusk/threesisters.html

Corn in the middle, squash and beans planted once the corn gets 6″ tall, corn provides a trellis for the beans or squash.  One plant cools another and when one of them dies, it provides nutrients for the other. You have to plant enough corn though because they pollinate each other, but only if there is enough wind, otherwise you might have to do it yourself by brushing corn silk or tassels (or something) on the other corn, the man said. This man had dreadlocked hair down to his waist.

There were 12 people in the class. Two older ladies named Pauline and Julia. Pauline told me that she didn’t actually have a yard and so she couldn’t do anything but a little bit of container gardening, but she liked to help other people with their gardens.

There was one couple with a small child and the rest of the people in the class were men about my age. They were all married. The way I know this is because they were all wearing wedding rings. Later a woman around my age and her mother came in.

The teacher said we need to attract bees to our gardens and told us ways to do it. Some people lamented that they never see bees and then they talked about the nation-wide decline in bee populations. May be due to genitically modified foods,  I had heard on the radio.

I didn’t really want to brag that I have 2 bee colonies at my house, so I kept quiet and began to realize that I really need to baby my bees. Blessed enough to have bees around, I really ought to do something for them.

The teacher metioned something called the eco~hood. I looked it up and found out it’s people committed to moving into a neighborhood and making their homes and lives sustainable. Making their homes green and energy-efficient, creating community with their neighbors and growing food to share and trade. Using solar power and collecting rain water and using grey water.

It’s near Pierson and 7th Av.

Around March 1st is supposed to be a good time to plant here. I have this crazy dream of planting so much food that I could reduce my consumption of bought food to maybe 10-20%. I’d grow so much food I would share it with my friends and co-workers. Eventually I would grow so much that I would sell it to area restaurant and stores. And that’s the way I would make a living.

There’s a family in Pasadena who does this. They have a house on only a fifth of an acre and yet manage to farm intensively and get great results.

http://www.pathtofreedom.com/about/urbanhomestead.shtml

 I love the idea of cutting down all the oil that is used to get me my food. The more I think about it, it seems so incredibly not at all a good idea to be eating food that had to travel 500-1000-1500 miles to get to my plate. Or more. I shouldn’t be eating blueberries from New Zealand like I did the other day.

Ok, well I didn’t even plan to write anything here and now I just did. Once again I was going to try to go see Pan’s Labyrinth tonight with my friend and once again I am so incredibly exhausted. Friday night but all I want to do is sleep. I think my job is just too un-sustainable—-it’s just too incredibly far from where I live—-I just can’t think of what else I would do and I like it there. But I leave when it’s dark, I get home when it’s dark. The only way to garden would be to quit!

I was thinking right now of calling Nick up and see if he wants to go see Pan’s Labrynth. I’ve seen all the other good movies slated for awards created by Mexican directors that I don’t want to miss out on this one too. I keep hearing radio interviews of the director which makes me want to see it even more, although it might be scary.

But it couldn’t possibly be scarier than my room and if I go see a movie, I will put off cleaning til man~ana. (Heh, picture the tilde over the “n”, would ya?)

Mom, it’s not a pony, it’s a horse, Vidi said, waving the wand I gave her at her new toy.

The plush horse with the rainbow bright yarn hair stood in the center of the room and we were all staring down at it. Christine and I sank to the carpet. My ex-boss’s boss and his wife stared down at it. So did my sister.

 Then, pretty much, every body said their goodbyes and left.

It is time to go to bed and i just got home. Here is a poem I came across that I like because of the last line.

epiphany

Deep midwinter, the dark centre of the year,
Wake, O earth, awake,
Out on the hills a star appears,
Here lies the way for pilgrim kings,
Three magi on an ancient path,
Black hours begin their journeyings.Their star has risen in our hearts,
Empty thrones, abandoned fears,
Out on the hills their journey starts,
In dazzling darkness God appears.

 Eh, here’s another one:

Labor Day Weekend. Hurricane John up from Mexico and dumping unusual amounts pouring rain on the desert. I was getting ready to go to a Chinese restaurant and went out to the car to get my hair brush. There was no noise, no reason to cause me to look up, but I looked up and saw an owl flying above. Except in pictures, I have only seen an owl once in real life, on my cousin’s ranch north of Globe, but this had to be an owl. Huge wingspan, silent, flying in the dark, it looked just like an owl. It flew into the eucalyptus tree, so I ran under the tree and looked up to see if I could see, but it was completely hidden.

 Later on, at the dark and noisy restaurant, sitting in the corner booth, outside the rain fell down, never stopping, I was enjoying the red glow of the lights and my coke, and so thrilled because I had a mystery on my hands: Did I really see an owl? A real live owl?

My fortune cookie read: Seeing is believing.

II.

Weeks later, coming home late on a Tuesday from Jamie’s house. Driving east on Houston towards Lindsay, I saw a whoosh in the corner of my eye and knew immediately what I was seeing. Still driving, but with my eyes no longer on the road, I followed that owl the length of two houses as she flew into an elm tree.

My heart was beating so fast. Ok, so she was real. I really did see an owl……right?

III.

Taking a walk with Becky, this was days or even a couple weeks later, again, at night, of course, rounding the corner onto Melody Road, near the house where the post man lives (the post man who uses a toilet bowl as a flower pot). He seemed like he was working on his car but he was shining a bright light up into the towering eucalyptus on his property and then I heard the faintest sound: whoo……..whoo…….whoo.

Wait, is he making that noise? I asked. We got nearer and then kept walking down the street and we really couldn’t decide. It kind of sounded like a human saying whoo……..whoo…….whoo. But then further down the street, we recognized the sound had to be coming from up high, from up in the tree’s branches.

So that had been pretty much proof. An owl had taken up residence in this neighborhood. I started reading about owls and identified her as a XXX. She had the wingspan. She had the ears.

Maybe she was displaced by all the development that is happening around here in all directions. I hope this place works out for her. There are so many cars and people and buildings, but there are lots of small birds and I’ve seen mice, so maybe it’s a good place.

IV.

One morning, leaving for work, it was about half past 5 am, I heard the whoo…..whoo….whoo again.

V.

The last time I’ve had any clue of the presence of the owl was at least a month ago, a little before Thanksgiving. Again a very light whoo…..whoo….whoo at the end of the street coming from the Eucalyptus trees.

i didn’t see any Geminids meteorites last nite. which isnt to say i didnt look. there’s just too many city lights and it would’ve taken a long time to outdrive the city lights. not that i didnt try. at least i started to drive south but then realized it wasnt going to work, its not like i could stay up for hours just to get far enough away.

yay, i can wear jeans to work tomorrow. i really need to go to sleep soon so that i can be productive tomorrow. i’ve been dragging so much this week.

and then tomorrow night is the Advent service of friends of friends. and K’s brother’s Christmas party. i havent been in a “Christmas-y” mood, whatever that would mean or be. i had had this idea that i would write stuff in a blog all during Advent and i can write the stuff in my head, but everything seems to fade when i try to write it.

i know a lot of people who take creative writing type classes are given the assignment to just randomly write a few pages everyday—a stream of consciousness sort of thing. i think that is what i will do in this blog, not caring too much if it makes sense to folks who might happen upon it.

i was hearing last night on the radio about this study that i have been paying attention to for a while in Africa thta circumcison reduces the chances of getting HIV. i first heard of this study months ago and found it so interesting, there was the group of circumsized men and the control group, well they have quit the study because they say yes circumcision reduces the chances of getting HIV, not that its a magic bullet, obviously. anyways, any thing to do with Africa, aids, helping Africa, etc etc i find hugely fascinating.

i need to go drink some water. tea and soda are not water. y tambien nesicito ir a cama. ahorita!

Well, let’s just skip to the evening. As I was coming home, about to get off at Gilbert on the 202, Becky called to say they were going to admit Mom due to her infection/wound on her foot. So I told Beck I would come get Dad to bring him home. Went to the hospital, saw her, and got him home and he just went to bed. I’m hoping he won’t get up, I did everything I could to make sure he would go to bed, like getting him soup, letting him turn all the lights off, talking about the pets and saying he needed to go to bed so the cats could get in bed with him. Now I’m here in the computer room hoping he will stay in bed. Since his head injury two years ago, he has to be taken care of  like he’s a child.

I was just reading today about methods for getting children to sleep thru the night. One is the let them cry it out method so they will learn to sleep on their own, but of course this one is really hard on parents…..anyways….

 As for my mom, I hope they figure out what the infection is soon. Possibly she got it because her body is weakened by the chemo she had for the past since summer.

 It’s cold in this house and I really need to go to bed but this is the first moment i have had to myself all day and i don’t feel like giving up yet.

 As the Arcade Fire song says, “sleeping is giving in”.