Sunset, Saturday, 3 October 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Although the rising of the full moon here would appear to be tomorrow night – our moonrise tomorrow will coincide with sunset – for many Asian people living all over the world tonight is the most important night of the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival. The Moon Festival is a major holiday for the Chinese, and is also observed, wth variations, by people from Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

We spent part of the afternoon putting together battery-operated paper lanterns to give tonight to friends who own a Chinese restaurant; they gave us beautiful lotus-flavored ‘mooncakes’. I often paint the Mid-Autumn moonrise for them, although possibly they’re sick of them by now!

I was thinking it’s a little sad that in Western culture, although we have major holidays keyed to a phase of the moon, such as Easter and Passover, I couldn’t come up with any holidays that are in any way about the sun or the moon. I guess those went the way of the pagans. We do have one holiday of sorts on behalf of a heavenly body, and that would be Earth Day.

Tonight I found a possible connection between the ancient, 3,000-year-old Chinese Moon Festival and our modern Earth Day. Among the many stories associated with the Moon Festival is a myth that always begins with the premise that the earth once had ten suns. Each day a different one of the ten suns would light the earth. (I love this idea, of course; you could tell me there were a million different suns and I would believe you.) But one day all ten suns showed up at once, and so threatened to burn up the world.

The hero of the myth is an archer who shot down nine of the suns. That’s where Earth Day comes in, and climate change. Perhaps one day our heroes will be the archers who shoot down our nine too many suns.

Coal and the Power Lines

The ominous, vaguely bituminous look of last night’s sky inspires me to add this as a note here.

Today I was happy to find, up in the branches of a black cherry tree, a few wild blackberries ready to eat, along with just-ripened black cherries. It reminded me of one of the most frequently asked questions in American life: “Would you like to try our combo today?” Finally, I was able to say yes.

But the scarcity of blackberries around here, which I have previously attributed chiefly to the land-clearing activities of crews under contract to Rappahannock Electric, also reminded me that I had just received a most unfortunate mailing from that utility.

REC urged me to call my Senators and urge them to oppose the climate change bill already passed by the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill, REC warned, might make electricity more expensive.

Well, I guess so! Any time you can’t just burn any old cheap dirty coal you want to, anywhere you want, something’s gotta give. (On the subject of coal and climate change, this article from The New Yorker is worth registering in order to read, and I believe this blog item doesn’t require signing in.)

As a customer-member (incredibly tiny minority shareholder) of the Rappahannock Electric Cooperative, I was not happy to see my money being spent in this lobbying effort. If electricity’s going to become more expensive, let’s not waste funds now on futile efforts aimed at halting human progress.

And despite the importance of coal to the economy, I thought I would register my dissent partly in the name of my grandfather, a Czechoslovakian immigrant who was a coal miner in Pennsylvania. I think working in the mines was probably not the primary cause of his very unpleasant death from throat cancer, but I doubt that it helped. I’d like to think that Grandfather Bezilla would be on my side of the climate change issue today.

After the blackberries and cherries, I saw something on my walk that made me feel a little better about this year’s aggressive land-clearing. Along the track we call the Power Line Road, growing out of the Nagasaki-like devastation, two bright green paulownia trees were shooting up like rockets – already some eight feet high, with enormous healthy leaves as big as the ear of a young elephant. Despite their rapid rate of growth, these paulownias could not come close to endangering the lines if they grew another 150 years. That may not save them when the crews come through again, but in the meantime – and regardless of how botanists may feel about them as an exotic species – their beautiful attempt to flourish is the best revenge.