What is technology good for?

Much less than everything but much more than merely more 
This text is not really about new technologies.  It's about the human priority and creativity involved in making them.  
And the infinite Divine Creativity in generating all

Lightning rod

Lightining rod (on church cross, as analogy to and how-to for imaging Christ in the world (think about letting the zaps bypass you mostly, by being grounded into the church triumphant))

Etherchapel

 This is a website/project I've been building on since 06.  It attempts to start doing with the web (and other materials) something akin to what the monks, masons, illuminators, and other builders did with what they had.

At it's simplest level - I'm just trying to make a quiet and beautiful space for God's grace to work.. But.. alongside and via a complex one.  One in which the web is developed as an icon to God (a lens and a lifeline),  rather than left to rot as an idol (hell's own mirror and scourge). 

Etherchapel as a visual sanctuary

Housing all, is something like a little romanesque abbey that I've been modeling. With it and its surroundings - courtyard gardens - sanctuary - ambulatory and side chapels I'm trying to image something..  So hopefully,  like all religious art, alongside (and via) the semi-beautiful imagery there's something deeper mysteriously communicated.
 Above this is a hidden layer of website that I call the devotions drawer.
At first I imagined and formed the visual walls merely to hold out the noise of the rest of the web, the drawer to hold traditional devotions digitized. It is at these two things that it works best, but E' is more..
Etherchapel tries to

• find some of the web's intrinsic (sacramental?)  potential that we've neglected (and the enemy uses to corrosive purposes)
•   use the artistic/theological traditions of the church as inspiration and jumping off points (icons, illuminated breviaries, devotionals, shrines, chapels, cathedrals, and cultures)
• provide for some of the needs in the church that I see
•  and, regardless of temporal success (for some of what I've looks really half-baked), start building at the foot of the altar again.

It's gone through three or four itterations, so I hesitate to write about how it will look/function whenever you get around to roaming through, but It's always had two or three sides:

•  Sanctuary - I've always tremendously admired what the artisans of their day did with parchment, beam, lintel, stone, arch, household and culture.   That last one especially. Even in and of this vale of tears medieval workers polished something other-worldly. So I've been trying to make a quiet place for grace to sink roots and grow, untwisting, setting-apart, and offering the humble bits of networked-graphical-information-presentation.  At first it was just a little one-room chapel and thus ether-chapel.  It has sprawled somewhat into something like a Romanesque monastery and its surroundings.  I like to cool down my eyeballs and soul by parking at the entrance for awhile before heading in.  It's hard for me to get anything out of exploring its nooks (most of which are still just on my computer's drawing board) but I had hoped that others would enjoy wandering, picking a favorite spot and opening up the devotional drawer .. 
• Nursery - Just what is the web (and other modern materials + opportunities) good for?  Pre-suppposing that every thing's job is to bring us closer to God in some unique way, it remains our job to figure out what those ways are.  For instance, parchment and pigment's first uses weren't as fliers, mass-mailings and other trash can liners, but capturing and incarnating the most important of ideas..  Thus illuminated bibles and breviaries.  With the web (a more potent but analogous medium) whole new salvific possibilities open up.  Obviously the web is capable of incarating the Word via the Image.. the Image via the Word.. and thus the entirety of Revelation via relation.  This, no doubt is is its strongest area, albeit massively underdeveloped.  But as well, it partakes somewhat of architecture's ability to form us, gather us, make a community,  and even somewhat of a family out of us. traditional, proven, and beloved devotional forms belong in this ubiquetous medium that humans move through and inhabit.  In journal, forum and field tests for a modern Christendom and "field tests" for resultant devotions

 

Weeds never say die, part I

Weeds and other pests grow 24/7.. twice as fast when its over 90.  There's only so much time you can and should spend on them.  Make it count.

(Strategy #1 If you can't beat 'em, make 'em join you) 

 

...

• Weeds as volunteer soil stewards
• Weeds as free soil test kits
• Weeds as home-gym + health spa
• Weeds as saint-makers

• Weeds as volunteer soil stewards

 This really is the bottom line of growing things:  Your job is to capture as much energy for life as possible (primarily from the sun) and put it intelligently into the cycle that supports you.

  At fairly rare but key points this life will come from the aesthtetics and enjoyment of a clean (bare) soil/mulch surface, or an absolute monoculture of crops/ornamentals. But MUCH more often every square inch of your soil needs to be making hay (stored chemical energy) while the sun shines...

If there's a weed growing there, it means there's energy, water, and fertility that would otherwise have been lost: Sunlight that would have just been baking the life out of your soil.  Nitrogen and other nutrients that would have been volatizing into the atmosphere or sinking into the subsoil. Moisture that would have been evaporated away. All kept in play.  All yours to harvest and harness when and if they actually do start competing with your crops.  

• Groom them with a rake ( I was surprised at how much this quick fix "helped" leading me to believe that half my compulsion to weed is aesthetic). 
• Give em a hair-cut with some lawn shears, and leave the clippings as "mulchpost". 
•  Pulling the easy ones up by the roots (automagically cultivates and loosen the soil for removing the noxious ones and can, again, automagically, mix soil on top of pre-scattered crop seed).
•   Toss them in the compost pile.
•  Give 'em to the chickens and rabbits as a treat.
•  Set them aside for mulch,

Use them as the fertilizer and subsoiling tools they are..  Next year, IF you think you can improve upon a free and already planted cover crop mix tailored to your area over many years, take a hint and plant something you want there.

• Weeds as free soil test kits.  

Dynamic accumulators.  Thats what some weeds are. They specialize in mopping up or mining out specific nutrients.  Some of your crops might need a boost of those nutrients. Next year plant them where those weeds grew best. This year.. well.. if Mohammed can't come to the mountain, rip it up by the roots and bring it to him.

Also.  Some weeds are remediation specialists (fancy name for soil rebuilders) when your soil has specific problems, you'll see these first. Let them do their work long enough and you'll have an improved garden. Atleast learn what their presence means so you can improve the soil.

• Weeds as home-gym

First though, an aside about Gardening in general, and a rant on the "back-breaking" work it supposedly demands..

1. Tending the soil is a labor of love.  In time you re-shape, grow, and adapt to meet it as much as the soil does to meet you and your needs.  If you don't love it, don't submit to it.
2. The only backs that are broken gardening are the ones that spend too much time hunched over trying to milk a living out of a machine or a computer..  The land doesn't work the way a machine does, try to work it harder or faster and you'll fail. Painfully.  Instead, enter into it's rhythms.  Make hay when the sun shines.  Make hot chocolate (and plans) when its cold and rainy.  It's a dance, if you want to lead, you do it with your eyes, your head, and subtle changes.. not with brawn, because nature weighs more than you do. 
3. In general there's two sides to all garden work. Some people might say it depends on whether you're a glass-is-half-full or a glass-is-half-empty sort of person as to which side is prominent, but I find it depends more on if the mosquitoes are out or not, so kill the mosquitoes:
4.  
   • It has actual value and is genuinely satisfying (it's hugely substantial, and not doing it has cumulative consequences)
   • It is quiet and contemplative (it's tedious)
   • It is familiar and even familial (it's repetitive, and never-ending)

Now, about the actual work that weeding (should you decide to do it) involves, and this is for the most intensive and effective way of weeding - completely by hand.

• Hands/fingers

There's no tool that has ever been made that is as good as human digits at getting stubborn weeds out.  There never will be.  Your hands know this.  From time to time you'll notice that they have mysteriously dropped your favorite tool half a row back and are happily, precisely, and successfully eradicating the exact weeds you don't want in and amongst the over babied crops you do want.  They don't gobble up vast acreages in mere minutes like waving a magic wand (a hoe) or draging a one ton plow, and this is always frustrating to those of us who've seen the quick cheap results such tools seem to yield.  But I repeat, there is no tool that is as good as a pair of human hands at getting rid of stubborn weeds.  And addiction to quick cheap results is something that needs weeding worse than an acre of crabgrass.

(If your doing alot of hand weeding, you might try getting some tough medical gloves (the puncture resistant kind that cops and emt folk have to wear) and luxuriate in being able to weed with surgical precision without getting dirty fingernails, and farmer fingers.  I haven't tried it yet, but it seems like it oughta help.)

• Torso, Legs, and Backs.. (broken and otherwise)

• With the exception of pulling up vast ammounts of mature grasses (like finished corn stalks or any other +4ft weed) weeding isn't the sort of exercise to quickly drain or build up individual muscles much.  It's the ten thousand slightly different repetitions of kneel down - lean in - support self - find weed - lean further in (without support) - hold aside crop plant with one hand - gently but irresistably tug out weed - toss into pile - lean further/ duck-walk down row - straighten up - walk elsewhere - repeat.. that gets you.  But

• Indefinables

Here's where the real benefits are.  Forget the specific muscles.  The activity of weeding is good for the whole you. Systemically.  Pumping lymphatic fluid around, Vitamin D production, Sweating out toxins, building up the endurance and willpower that make life possible and the evening's ease into something more re-creation-al than post 9-5 job couch-potatoing.  

• Weeds as Saint-makers

When you're repeatedly in the hot sun, facing tiny little things .. and  losing.. you begin to change.  City-folk mistake it for becoming a simpleton.  But to work with humus is to be humbled, to ponder what it means ".. you are dust, unto dust you shall return".

I admit.. The thoughts that come out there are simple and few.  Also theres a perennial temptation to dismiss them as silly and shallow in the face of all the desperate "real" goings-on out in the "real world".  But the schemes and fevered goings on of the world will soon return to the nothingness from whom they spirated..  Miles wide, millimeters deep, and moving nowhere at the speed of light. 

Besides,

To return to the weedpatch for an example... Lets say, I scrape the crown of this crabgrass plant.  The very next day it will be back,  because I think I'm done I've moved on.  In one week it will be just as hale as it ever was.  In the two or three weeks time it'll probably take for me return to that spot to be greeted by the disdain full laughter of the lower life forms it is I who'll be the weaker, not they.  

Welp, the heat of the day (the time I spend schemeing and writing blog stuff) is over.  Time to return to the weed patch.. I mean.. the garden.

(To be continued)

 

My Design Style (a rambling from an old notebook)

 ... In my "style" of building I want to approach this divine analogy.  Inspired by music, creation, and salvation history I want to proceed- finding elemental seed motiffs.. that generate parts.. that add up to entities.. that mature into insight.. that makes way for Inspiration...  Like revelation shining light upon its own parts and the larger things that flow from them I want to find the largest- who, containing the complexity of all things within himself, has no parts.

(Friday, April 1, 2005 1:59:17 PM)

(This text confuses even me in places, and I wrote it!  It was hastily and un-selfconsciously written (being intended only for my own idea sparking).  The result is something honest and unstudied, but also ponderous and, at times, embarrassingly incomprehensible.  Caveat browseor.)

Paths, patrols, routes, ruts, rewards, and routine

The most powerful and indispensable tools in working with your land are a habitual morning cup of coffee and walk.

...

• On routine and railroads ( the ongoing systemic power increase (or decrease) from un-consumed catalysts that grow)
• On the placement of flowerpots and manure piles (riches and rewards for each leg of the morning route from zone to zone)
• Of gardener's footprints as fertilizer ( seasonal and day to day observations/decisions)