Remember Velvet Underground? Mid 1960s, Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison – Andy Warhol as the background handler? Morrison died at age 51 of some kind of lymphoma; Reed died 3 years ago after a failed liver transplant. Cale is still with us – and the reason all this comes to mind is because I came across an old concert of his, Fragments of a Rainy Season. I had meant to write about the arrival of the rain, as a transitional theme.

But when I heard him sing Do not go gentle into the good night – rage, rage against the dying of the light  – I was hooked. He somehow added something with his music to the Dylan Thomas verses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42JTU4vuyEg  

So, today’s transition is NOT about death, but simply about the fading light. Fall light is simply extraordinary at times! It should not fade so fast!

And if you go inside and need a little magic lamp to brighten up your environment – here you go:

May 5777 be a year that offers us multiple paths to peace and sees us willing to take them. May it provide a garden of Eden with the sweet scent of an apple orchard that feeds the hungry and nurtures the bees who will bring sweetness with honey. May nature be restored to some kind of balance in 5777, may refugees find a home, and racism wiped out while justice prevails.

And if I have a New Year’s wish left over, let politics be rational again.  But that might be just wishing for too much…..

Interspersed are some montages from previous years all sent on Rosh Hashanah.

Actually less into the woods and more into trees: I find them most spectacular in the fall, when the light is reflected by rather than absorbed into their more brightly colored leaves. Here is a poems that points to something important:

Earth is the right place for love.

Birches

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay 
As ice-storms do.  Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain.  They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust--
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer.  He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground.  He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return.  Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.





Where are the politics, you ask? Far from me to disappoint you:

http://forward.com/culture/198181/even-trees-can-be-political/

Fall is the time to go mushrooming. That is, if you know the difference between fungi and mushrooms, the difference between edible and poisonous mushrooms, and the places where to look for them. And those place haven’t been logged recently. And you are prepared to run into people who defend their turfs with weapons. Yes, you read that right – although it looks like the mushroom wars have slowed down  bit. (You didn’t think you would read a blog without politics, did you?) Whether Montana, Washington or Oregon, groups of people fight over access to prized locations for morels as well as chanterelles.

http://billingsgazette.com/news/local/mushroom-madness-racism-causes-tensions-among-pickers/article_9f48409a-1e01-55f2-9f70-af1fc3e4494f.html

Too many requirements for me to go mushrooming, but I do like to eat them. A recent visit to “Little Bird”, one of my favorite but rarely experienced PDX restaurants, provided the best mushroom and spinach in puff pastry – lunch you could imagine!

Mushrooms played a large role in the fairy tales of my childhood, both those of the brothers Grimm and the Russian tales that were a staple. I now learn that they play a role in African folklore as well, and in the tales of the native peoples of Alaska. As so many repeated features in fairy tales do, they probably served an educational role. Mushrooms were an essential part of the fall/winter diet, they could be dried and used in soups. Important, then, to know that they could be dangerous, particularly if you went for the really pretty red ones with the white dots (Amanita muscaria or Fly Agaric.) It is not deadly, unless you eat 7 or so of them, but some of its cousins are. It is, however, psychotropic, and was used in religious ceremonies in numerous countries.

And talking about getting high: here is new evidence for a historical sniffler (and monster on drugs):

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/25/blitzed-norman-ohler-adolf-hitler-nazi-drug-abuse-interview?CMP=fb_gu

Prokofiev wrote a book of stories that were recently translated into German, alas I could once again not find an English translation. One of them is a fairytale about a mushroom prince….. it never made it into his music. So we’ll listen to and watch the autumn fairy, appropriate for the season, from his Cinderella. 

You can take a break from thinking hard, or worrying about November 8th, or nursing your sore throat after too much political debate these last days and just enjoy today’s landscape photographs all taken in fall.

Or you can add some new information to your brain about how agriculture changed the human genome when it arrived in Europe about 8500 years ago. It’s actually interesting, believe it or not.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/science/agriculture-linked-to-dna-changes-in-ancient-europe.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0