Earth Art

Have you ever checked out Earth Art?

We can view Earth through the photographic images from satellites. The swirls, colors, shapes. The images are taken by the Landsat-7 satellite and the Terra Satellite's Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER).

"Meandering wadis combine to form dense, branching networks across the stark, arid landscape of southeastern Jordan. The Arabic word 'wadi' means a gully or streambed that typically remains dry except after drenching, seasonal rains."

Jordan: Image taken 5/17/2001 by ASTER

"The Dasht-e Kevir, or valley of desert, is the largest desert in Iran. It is a primarily uninhabited wasteland, composed of mud and salt marshes covered with crusts of salt that protect the meager moisture from completely evaporating."

Dasht-e Kevir: Image taken 10/24/2000

"Vivid colors belie the arid landscape of northern Chile where the Atacama Desert, one of the world's driest, meets the foothills of the Andes. Here salt pans and gorges choked with mineral-streaked sediments give way to white-capped volcanoes."

The Andes: Image taken 10/28/2001 by ASTER

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March madness

As much as I love men's college basketball (well, the MSU team that is), that's not what this is about. (Go Spartans, Friday against George Mason.)

It's the weather!

I know, I know, I live in Michigan. Why do we Michiganders keep talking about the crazy weather as if it's something new? It's kind of like a relative, a character in our story. Unpredictable, tempestuous at times, and we don't appreciate it enough when it's "cooperating."

Yesterday was glorious with sunshine in the mid-60s. Last night thunderstorms rattled the windows. Today it's in the high 60s, wind is racing clouds across the sky, we have a tornado watch, and tomorrow it's supposed to snow.

I love the four seasons, and you couldn't pay me to live in Florida (sorry, Mungers), as beautiful as it can be. These photos are the farm this morning before leaving for work, with remnants of last night’s storm.

I think this photo looks surreal. Is that really a reflection of the corn crib? Too bad my lens isn't big enough to get the roof and trees at the top, but maybe that helps with the surreal feel.



The barn.

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Astrology: Fun, Evil or Science?

"Acrobat" sculpture by Lar Braun

I’ve been digging up information about my grandfather, Sidney K. Bennett, aka “Wynn” – a prominent American astrologer in the first half of the 20th century.

I remember my parents being rather embarrassed by my mother’s father’s occupation. It was frowned upon in church, it was considered telling the future, which the Bible has rules against.

For years I’ve read my horoscope for fun, usually at http://www.cainer.com/. I like this British guy, Jonathan Cainer, because of his sense of humor.

Click here for a transcription of talks Osho gave about astrology that are quite long, if you’re interested. He gives some history. Do you have an open mind?

What do you think of astrology? Do you:

1. Think it’s fun to read your horoscope, but you don’t change your daily habits based on it;
2. Never read horoscopes because you think they’re silly;
3. Never read horoscopes because you think they’re ungodly;
4. Never read horoscopes because you don’t know why;
5. Read your horoscope pretty regularly and find truths that must be more than mere coincidence; or
6. Study astrology and charts and really get into it.

I choose #5.

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William Stafford

My friend Inge reminded me this week what a great poet William Stafford is. He gives people like me hope because his poems were first published when he was in his late 40s. He was born in Kansas but moved to Oregon, where he wrote this poem. I lived in Oregon and California, and I can attest to the mountains being there one day, and not the next. In fact the day I left Oregon, there had been an ice storm, and every twig was encased in ice, AND there was fog. It was like a fairyland. But then, of course, the poetic perspective makes it even more beautiful, as Stafford shows. As Donald Hall wrote, Stafford's "ordinariness doth tease us out of thought; while we are thoughtless, the second language of poetry speaks to us."

"Mountain Frost" Photo free for any use from visualparadox.com


A Valley Like This


Sometimes you look at an empty valley like this,
and suddenly the air is filled with snow.
That is the way the whole world happened
"there was nothing, and then"

But maybe some time you will look out and even
the mountains are gone, the world become nothing
again. What can a person do to help
bring back the world?

We have to watch it and then look at each other.
Together we hold it close and carefully
save it, like a bubble that can disappear
if we don't watch out.

Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world.
Hold out your hands to it. When mornings and evenings
roll along, watch how they open and close, how they
invite you to the long party that your life is.

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Pruning the grapes

It's March, and that means it's time for pruning grapevines in Michigan. We have a half dozen grapevines, both white concord and purple concord.

Since we moved to the farm in November 2003 we hadn't pruned ours, which is why they looked like this:

But even with such a tangled mess, last fall I picked a large cooler-ful, plus a bushel basket of grapes and still left some on the vines. However, half the grapes were wilted or dried, which we believe is because of the lack of pruning.

Don and his dad canned grape juice, both white and purple, and Don periodically makes jelly out of the juice. Sometimes we enjoy the luxury of just drinking the juice with breakfast.

Yesterday, Don and I tackled the chaos of our vines. Each vine needs to be left with several branches with ten or so buds. Untangling the dead wood from the live, finding what is worth keeping, and trimming just the right amount is confusing.

Here's the result. We'll see this fall if we get many grapes!

Here's one of the sweet amethysts (grape jelly) Don made:

I remember a sermon I heard as a young person in which the pastor said the husbandman cuts back the vine to almost nothing, and likened it to our own spiritual vitality. It looks as though nothing good can come of such drastic pruning. But it's out of great emptiness that productive growth comes.

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Turkish Mantı, part two

Don, Peter and I worked for about two hours rolling the dough, cutting the dough and filling the dough with meat filling. What a lot of work!

The dough was very stiff, which made the rolling out difficult.

But when we finally got the dough thin enough, it turned out perfectly.

The result was delicious!

But we're thinking the imported dried pasta works pretty well and is a close facsimile. I don't know that we'll ever do it from scratch again!

At least we can say we did it once.

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Turkish mantı

Turkish mantı (photo courtesy http://www.istanbulguide.net/istguide/vivre/)

I’m getting ready to try making my favorite food in the world – Turkish mantı – from scratch this weekend. Mantı is pronounced mahn-tih, the “i” like the “i” in “it.” The "i" should not have a dot, but I don't have access to a multi-lingual font in blogger. (Or do you know a secret?) Update: Thank you for the idea, Boots. I had thought of cutting and pasting from a Word doc, and then I forgot to do it! Glad it worked!

You make a simple egg and flour dough, roll it out very thin, cut into 1-inch squares, then fill with a mixture of ground meat (I’ll use half beef, half lamb) and finely chopped parsley and onion, squeezing the dough closed around the filling like a hobo bag. You boil these tortellini-type pasta until nice and soft.

The best part of mantı is what you put on top before eating. On top of the hot pasta stuffed with the meat mixture, you pour a few spoonfuls of plain yogurt mixed with lots of crushed garlic, then atop it all, a good spoonful of melted butter that’s been simmering with crushed tomato and red pepper. Yum!

The first time I ate mantı in Kadıköy, Turkey, when we first moved to Istanbul in 1986, I wasn’t too sure about it. The flavors were unlike anything I’d ever tried. But soon it became my favorite dish ever.

Kadıköy, Turkey (photo courtesy http://www.living-turkey.com/living_in_turkey/photos_from_istanbul_Kadikoy.htm)

Kadıköy at night (photo courtesy www-star.stanford.edu/ ~bbaas/trips/)

When I've made it before, I've used frozen ravioli or imported dried mantı. So this will be my first attempt to make it from scratch since first tasting it!

Wish me luck! Maybe tomorrow I'll have my own pics of mantı.

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