Full MIKIs Returning Moon

The Full MIKIs Returning Moon rises Monday about 730, just before sunset, clear sky on Gulf Rim, Yay!

Hey y'all! Happy Earth Day! I have an extra reasons to celebrate on April 22; Earth Day, son Jake's birthday (49) and the historic arrival date of MIKIs returning to Iberia Parish (MIKI=Mississippe Kite)

4-22-21 I step out of the Iberia Parish Courthouse where we have just filed Ol Ollie's (Father-in-Law) succession with the Clerk of Court, it has been a long time coming y'all, now to do battle with the financials to move what little money there is to where it needs to go. So then, I look up and there is the first MIKI of 2021 the only one that I've seen anywhere. Usually they show up in Lafayette and St Martin Parish before Iberia, even St Mary and Vermilion before Iberia. Yay! Anyway this is my first y'all. Summer is here! Did I say summer is here?

We have them around all summer and one day you listen and no MIKI calling, no distinct shadowy ballet of silhouettes floating around, dipping and diving in the periphery of your vision, so fine, just here one day gone the next. I don't think they like cool.

Anyway today is the day and here they are!  Yay!

4-23-21 Today at high noon we had a grand Earth Day celebration in front of Hamilton Hall on the ULL campus, just like the old days.

-Maggie, my granddaughter sang the National Anthem, so fine y'all, great voice and range.

-Kenny our in-house Wounded Warrion led us in the pledge of Allegiance. 

-Jess led us in a fine appropriate Earth prayer

-Sherry said a blessing in her native Chitimacha language

-Sam, Nya and Nona performed selected poems, thanks to David Lee for allowing us to use his yet unpublished poem.

-Robert (pronounced Ro-bear) with that wonderful God-like voice of his, read the Earth Day Proclamation

-then we planted two native trees. a Wild Cherry and a Southern Catalpa to complete the celebration. -I have dibs on any catobler worms it produces

Jorge took a fine set of photos, thankfully, bc I plain forgot, y'all!

Woo Hoo!

The only missing element was that I did not ask Pem the local elderer of the Atakapa Ishak tribe to come, as he did for our first earth day on campus, to lead us in the Rattle Circle Stomp Dance to the Earth. I left him out because of his age (94) and COVID. Next year y'all!

Promise, I will start prepping him next week for Earth Day '22

I think we must perform the Parable of Lawns for the beautiful message it contains.

Time for a Mary Oliver poem:

Hawk

 

This morning

        the hawk

                rose up

                        out of the meadow’s browse

and swung over the lake---

        it settled

                on the small black dome

                        of a dead pine,

alert as an admiral,

        its profile

                distinguished with sideburns

                        the color of smoke,

and I said: remember

        this is not something

                of the red fire, this is

                        heaven’s fistful

of death and destruction

        and the hawk hooked

                one exquisite foot

                        onto a last twig

to look deeper

        into the yellow reeds

                along the edges of the water

                        and I said: remember

the tree, the cave,

        the white lily of resurrection,

                and that’s when it simply lifted

                        its golden feet and floated

into the wind, belly-first,

        and then it cruised along the lake---

                all the time its eyes fastened

                        harder than love on some

unimportant rustling in the

        yellow reeds—and then it

                seemed to crouch high in the air, and then it

                        turned into a white blade, which fell.

 

Mary Oliver

As I researched and prepared for the all-important for Earth Day I rediscovered Janisse Ray, the "Rachel Carlson of the South", and her wonderful earth poems from House of Branches. I then remembered why I valued her work so much when "I found" the first book of hers that I ever read The Seed Underground this fine work begins with a Wendell Berry quote "When they want you to buy something, they will call you. When they want you to die for profit, they will let you know. So, friends, every day, do something that won't compute.

On her way home from the funeral of a young friend, while listening to bluegrass, Janisse is given this thought "What will you be building when you are called away?"

In response Janisse writes in her preface: "This book is for everyone, but it is especially for young people, in hopes that, given all the bad, you start building. Not skyscrapers or oil rigs, but lives that make sense, that contribute to a lighter, more intellegent, more beautiful way of living on the earth, lives that are lived as far outside and beyond corporate control as possible."

Janisse, a self poclaimed acitivist, in her "jouney" to do it better and learn more of seedsaving visited the mid-Vermont home of Sylvia Davatz, radical American gardner, "the Imelta Marcos of seeds", with 1000 varieties in her closet.

Sylvia changed Janisse that day. Early in their conversation Sylvia stated "The system is so broken", she said. "Not only broken, destructive and self-destructive. By "system" I figured she meant the entire agricultural or food system. Maybe she meant the entire political system,.But I didn't ask, I just listened. "I see in activism a kind of futility, " she said, brown eyes sincere. "The real power is in doing. The real power is in making the system irrevelant. That means nonparticipation in the existing broken system." 

"Sylvia wasn't protesting anything in her peaceful garden: 'What I am doing is making a broken system irrevalent'." That day Janisse changed from activist to nonparticipant.

WHOA! I'm reading Janisse Ray again, thank you Earth Day! Thanks Janisse.

gotta go, this is the last week of the semester, Thank God!

peace love possumhugs

BT