Recently we had landscape people come in and reconfigure the upper part of the back yard, i.e., “Ginny’s part.”  The plan is to make it an entertainment area, and it’s coming along nicely.

However, one part of the renovation was inadequate:

The edge of the flowerbed was just messy.  The black mulch spilled onto the driveway, and worse, onto the new zoysia lawn.  You can barely see at the far end where I began edging it with brick, which contained the mulch—but I ran out of brick.  (All the brick in our landscaping came from the old coal furnace chimney that was toppled when we added on the back of the house.)

So I decided to build a wall:

Here’s the beginning of it, swerving out of the existing brickwork at the head of the flowerbed.  This is about 200 pounds of flagstone, my first day’s purchase.  It gave me about five feet of wall and was enough to figure out what I was doing and how much I might need to complete the entire 25 feet or so.

The first aesthetic issue I encountered (other than blending the start of the wall with the brickwork) was that if I just followed the paved driveway straight to the lawn area, it would be an incredible boring straight wall.  So I curved it:

That meant having to lay in larger pieces for the first row; I thought about leaving that setback area for planting, but decided against it.  The soil at that level is mostly clay.

That photo is after I bought 400 pounds more of flagstone. By this morning, I had used all of it:

Notice what I’ve done there at the juncture of the driveway and the lawn:

Since there has to be a “stepdown” in the level of the wall there anyway, I’ve added a little pillar that will be taller than either and which will serve as a platform for candles, etc.

All in all, an easy project and a fun one.  I’ll get the remaining flagstone tomorrow or Tuesday and have the whole thing finished by the middle of the week.

The labyrinth itself?

It doesn’t look quite this good at the moment.  A lot of the new grass which sprouted bounteously during the rains of a couple of weeks ago simply collapsed weakly without the rain.  Very frustrating.

I know, I haven’t written about the labyrinth recently.  For that matter, I haven’t written anything recently, but I’m hoping to change that in the next few days.

Yes, I lost my dream job and will probably never see the Magic Square again, but hey, let’s not bicker about who killed whom, let’s check in with my second-favorite spot on the planet.  (Seriously, I will blog about all that. Some day.)

The large problem this summer is that the place is absolutely sodden.  It’s a marsh out there, and the rain does not promise to let up even this week.  It let up enough last Tuesday for me to get out there and reseed it where it was absolutely nothing but bare dirt, and for that the constant rain has been a benefit: barely a week later and tiny little wires of fescue are poking out of the dirt now.

Hardly worth admiring at this point, and it certainly precludes any use of the facility for another couple of weeks.

But there are a few things to admire at this point.  I was out there this afternoon and was delighted to see these:

These are spider lilies, and what is now the labyrinth used to be covered with them.  This was 20 years ago before we added onto the house, and the excavation of the basement dumped three feet of clay onto what had been very luscious soil.  As the link discusses, they pop up out of nowhere, and they’re quite lovely.  I’d love to have more of them return.  Perhaps I should go back to that link and buy some?

Next to the lilies is our old friend Apollo:

Doesn’t he look radiant in the setting sun?  Those are Dixie Wood Ferns behind him, plus ivy which will be beaten back as soon as I can get back out there.  His patina is real, because he’s really bronze.

His counterpart, the Dancing Faun/Dionsyus:

His corner, downhill from all the rain as it is, definitely needs some cleaning up.  Those are bristle ferns behind him, I think, along with some errant ivy and vinca major.

And finally, the northpoint:

Some tidying to do, but the outgrowth of the peacock fern is exactly what I had planned.  The clusters of tall fescue are kind of nice as well, although for the life of me I can’t understand why it infests the northern bank and won’t grow just one stone over on the path.

With any luck, the rain will begin to clear out this week and I will be able to get back there and really do some maintenance in preparation for the Vernal Equinox.  In the meantime, I need to get out there right now and see if the full moon is at all visible…

(later: It is not.)

Today, in driving up through the back highways of middle Georgia, I passed a tiny church labeled BIBLE TRUTH TABERNACLE.

There’s lots to unpack here—there’s the traditional Southern Baptist/evangelical biblical inerrancy strain, with its claim that the Bible is absolute and infallible, the inerrant Word of God.  That belief is possible only if you exclude all knowledge of church history, of Aramaic/Greek originals, of the Council of Trent, etc., etc.  Too much has changed with that collection of texts to believe that King James took dictation from Jehovah.

There’s the subset strain that regards the Bible as a rulebook, God’s rulebook: “God said it, and I believe it.”  That one goes squirrelly as soon as you’re forced to examine even just the Pentateuch alone with anything approaching an attention to detail.  (The same can be said of treating the text as history or science—it just cannot be done without a lot of crippling cognitive dissonance.)

Have said all of this, here are my thoughts on the BIBLE TRUTH TABERNACLE, admitting that it is all my fantasy and not based on direct observation.  In other words, just like the inerrantists.

The pastor/preacher of the BTT is probably also the founder. He—it’s always a he—believes not only that the Bible is TRUE, he believes that he understands that TRUTH.  He reads the text closely—indeed, he reads it cover to cover every year—and as he reads, he sees the TRUTH—he constructs the TRUTH—and he transmits the TRUTH to his flock every Sunday morning and every Wednesday night.

But here’s the rub, of course: he has no knowledge of the historicity of the text, as an object of time and a subject of change.  It is completely outside his ken how that book developed—or even that it did develop.  It’s as if he were a lab experiment in religious thought—everything he thinks he understands about his religion is practically sui generis.

I don’t even need to impute any kind of restrictive/negative social attitudes towards the leader of BTT—although I would be astounded if he were a supporter of gay marriage, for example—to posit that much of what he has perceived to be TRUE isn’t really.

My model for this is Miss Sally Clovis [name changed to protect the innocent] at Newnan High School.  Poor woman, she was a holdover from an older time, and the only reason why she was allowed in the same room as the college bound students was that Richard Smith had decamped to The Heritage School that year.

The text we were studying was the Romantic poem “The Prisoner of Chillon,” Lord Byron, about a martyred family in the 16th century.  The narrator and two of his brothers were chained to pillars in the dungeon of the Castle of Chillon on the shores of Lake Geneva, and the two brothers die while the narrator lives.  (Their imprisonment was due to something about freedom.  It was political in nature.)

But Miss Clovis told us that the poem was about family—even the title was a clue, seeing as how it had the word chillun in it.

Well.

Even at seventeen—or perhaps especially at seventeen—I knew how hysterically wrong that was.  Sally Clovis had no French, and no context of European sociopolitical thought 1790-1830, and so she interpreted what was right in front of her as best as she knew how—and went splat on the unyielding Windshield of Pedagogy.

[To be fair, I don’t think anyone but me even understood how wrong she was.  I still use her as an example (not naming names, of course) of how GHP prepares students to take charge of their own learning: when I saw that I was not going to be taught English Lit, I knew it was up to me to learn it myself.  My classmates just saw a year off.]

Anyway, that is how I envision the pastor of BTT: he reads with no context, no exegesis, no sense of history or theology.  What he sees, he filters through his own experience.  When he runs into material that is resistant to immediate literalization, I’m sure he perseveres, works on it, gnaws on it, until he sees the pattern, sees the TRUTH.  It feels good, when God reveals to him His Words, the meaning of His Minds—he rejoices in the opportunity to share the TRUTH with his church—he is blessed.

Very mock-worthy, very pitiable, indeed.  But as these ideas formed in my head, zooming up through middle Georgia, I found myself rebutting myself almost immediately: why not?  Why not the chillun version of the TRUTH?  He is merely limiting God differently than I limit god, his misunderstanding differing from mine in ways that each of us would find inexplicable.  We all name the Tao—it is unavoidable—and if his naming connects him to the Mystery, to the Void, and comforts him, why should I find it risible or distressing?

I’m sure I’m condescending to the man.  I’m working on that.  No, I don’t believe his understanding of the Mystery is “correct,” and I’m equally sure that his beliefs are restrictive and damaging, but how can I privilege my interpretation of his sacred text over the only way he has to approach it?  What are my alternatives other than to set up my idol next to his and pray for flames to consume him?

Discuss.

We’ll see if this works.

I have planted dwarf mondo grass around the fire pit.  There’s a small batch in another part of the yard that actually feels very nice underfoot, so it’s worth a shot.  Unknowns: will it grow here?  Will it spread?  Will it tolerate the foot traffic?  Will it be the dickens to keep clear of twigs and pecans?

Only time will tell.  And then we’ll pave it over with stone.

It is with trepidation that I arrive home from a summer at GHP—how will the labyrinth have thrived?  (Thriven?)  In 2009, the grass was largely dead.  I stayed home in 2010, so it was fine, and last summer it was OK.

But this summer’s heat had me worried.  My lovely first wife assured me that she had watered it religiously and that the grass was greener than it had any right to be, although she was concerned about the peacock fern in the center.

So yesterday when I got home, after I had unloaded the U-Haul trailer and returned it, then driven into my new driveway with the six-inch steel pipe property line marker sticking up next to it and exploding my tire (separate story), I headed back to see what the situation was.

Short version: not too bad.

The grass is green, and in fact seems to be giving the clover a run for its money.  I may try this fall to kill off the clover after all and reseed those areas.

It hasn’t been mowed, of course, but the biggest problem is the fact that last year’s bumper crop of pecans is erupting from every surface.  There are oak seedlings as well, but mowing over those kills them off.  Not so with pecans: they are just a root system with leaves for decoration.  Mow over them, and they’ll be back within a week.  Not only that, but as they grow back, the stems are just as thick as before, essentially turning into little punji sticks, so walking barefoot in the labyrinth becomes dicey.

No, I will have to get down on my hands and knees and dig up each and every one.  Not a problem.  It will give me plenty of meditative time, and labor is beautiful.

We interrupt the muggings to bring you an update on the labyrinth.

My lovely first wife had been bugging me about what I wanted “to do” for my birthday, i.e., what exotic, extravagant trip would I like to take?  NYC, which is always good?  A quiet beach somewhere?  I found that whatever I considered, I didn’t really want/need it.

I finally realized that what I wanted to do was to stay home and work in my labyrinth. So I took Thursday and Friday off with definite plans.  I was going to a) build the permanent fire pit; b) create the stone circle for the westpoint; and c) install a sound system.

I wish I could relate a tale of hard work and satisfaction, a rebuilding of my soul and all that good stuff.  Alas, it didn’t quite turn out that way.  My spirit is not crushed and I am not defeated, but the whole thing is a bit of a shambles.

First, muscles in my lower back spasmed last weekend while I was moving firewood.  So there went the permanent fire pit, with its lifting of some four dozen heavy landscaping stones multiple times.  (It also means there’s still half a pile of firewood in the driveway.)

The stone circle was smoother on its path to failure.  For background, see here.  Simple idea, and not too terribly difficult in execution.  I set up my drill press on the work table:

I had measured where I wanted to drill the hole, and you can see my cleverly arranged piece of wood which gave me a uniform block against which to put the outer edge.  Drilling the pieces took very little time and was a pleasure.

I threaded each piece onto a cable:

Simple, simple, simple.  The big issue was the base pieces, but even that was simple: drill a hole for the cable to go through, and then from the bottom drill a larger hole for the rebar or whatever I was going to stick the thing on, and the smaller hole intersected the larger one.  Worked like a charm.

Lovely.  Perfect.  Except it didn’t work.

The theory was that like an arch the stones would be self-compressing; the cable was there to keep them in line.  However, the stones were too uneven to function like a classical arch, and the whole thing just flopped over when I tried to stand it up.  Not enough rigidity, and I’ll hear none of that from the likes of you, thank you.

So the westpoint once again lies dormant while I figure out the next step.

That was Thursday.  Friday, I tackled the sound system.  The goal was to install speakers that would a) be weather-resistant, i.e., I could leave them outside permanently; and b) spread the sound more evenly across the space.  For instance, when walking the labyrinth it was often hard to hear quiet music from the front of the labyrinth while rounding the far curves.

After much internet search, I found speakers that were in-ground and seemed to be just the thing.  No, I didn’t want the fake rock ones, or worse, squirrels or flower pots.  I ordered two, one for the northwest corner (by the dancing faun), and one for the front entrance.

I trenched in the cable (I now have 400 additional feet of bury-able speaker cable…) but left the speakers not buried so I can make final adjustments for the best sound.

The amp I ordered came in right after lunch, and I won’t bore you with the scrambling I had to do to get the bare speaker cables hooked up to the RCA inputs on the amp.  Short version: it seems to work and to work well.  I think the sound quality is not quite as good as the Califone portable boombox system I had been using—not enough highs or separation—but for basking in the labyrinth or hard sessions of meditative work, it should be fine.

The only glitch in my plan at the moment is that I awoke to rain, which puts the completion of the system on hold.  It also means that I won’t be able to be out in the labyrinth tonight to celebrate my birthday.

Oh well.  Successive approximation.  Onward, if not exactly excelsior.

I have some plans for updating some things around the labyrinth, and the easiest one will be replacing the metal fire pit with a built-in one.  I already had some stones for another project, so I’ve penciled in where it goes and how it looks:

I’d sink it one round of stones into the ground, then the two rounds above ground as you see here.  It’s tall enough to rest your feet on.

Advantages: it’s permanent, slightly larger.  Disadvantage: when it inevitably rains during the Annual Lichtenbergian Meeting, I’ll still have to own a portable metal one.

Also, should it be three stones high?  I’ll have to play with that.

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