Notes from my Knapsack 4-15-21

Notes from my Knapsack 4-15-21

Jeff Gill

Moonlight on daffodils

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Daffodils are much in evidence around Granville, and here on the southern edge of the Welsh Hills of Licking County, it's only right that we identify so strongly with the spring flower, a symbol of Wales itself.

Across the pond, they're a big part of St. David's Day, which comes March 1, the national festival of Wales, but around here the daffodils tend to open up later than that. And to me, as the yellow or white blossoms start to wither and fade, that's when it feels as if spring is ending.

My dogwood hasn't opened up yet, and I'd say the dropping of the flowers from that tree that really signals the start of the summer season in my mind. In deeper forest, the tulip poplar, or yellow poplar, has glorious blossoms that we only tend to see past peak and after they fall, and so later in May and into June: yellow-green petals and bands of a soft orange, showing their best only to those occupants and passers-by of the forest canopy, squirrels and butterflies and warblers on their way through.

And I love the Latin name for tulip trees: Liriodendron tulipifera. You can say it as a magic spell to summon the wonders of the blossoming world, as they finish their term above and flutter down to cast their beauty onto woodland trails. Liriodendron tulipifera . . .

For now, we still have full beds of daffodils, and some evenings as I head up to bed, I'll look out across the front porch to the mounded clumps of blossom, and see the luminous white of those deeply yellow trumpets under the moonlight above. It's a very particular white that I associate with this time of year, daffodils and night time and the weeks after Easter when the sun is in a hurry to rise earlier and earlier each day, and in general so am I.

Now that I can go to bed with windows open, I believe I sleep better, and find it easier to get up sooner, and coffee may taste better to me in the spring than it does any other time of year, and trust me I've been running a long-term, year-round experiment on this vital question.

Earlier in the spring, it was warm enough of an evening to try sitting out on my patio for the first time in what seemed like a year — last summer I was much on the road and too little at home — and saw my first insects of 2021, small black ovals so inoffensive and unstingery as to be welcome companions. We're told in national media that a major cicada brood will be out this year, which usually means "around DC and New York City" but in fact Brood X is probably the largest seventeen year cycle group of cicadas, and they have an interesting and complicated range, which includes western Ohio.

In Licking County, we're mostly in Brood V territory (entomologists use Roman numerals for the various brood cycles, which gives Brood X a wonderfully ominous name for no particular reason), but it's also well known that cicadas can't read maps, so it wouldn't be odd for a few batches of Brood X to show up especially in the western half of the county.

As we wait for the cicadas to start their drone, I'll just sit here and whisper: Liriodendron tulipifera.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's ready to be outside more this summer. Tell him what you love about nature at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 4-10-21

Faith Works 4-10-21

Jeff Gill

Relics in the modern world

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In Jerusalem deep beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and in the west of Ohio at the Relic Chapel of the Maria Stein Shrine, I've been in the presence of what are believed to be fragments of the cross on which Jesus was crucified. These relics, actual objects directly associated with Christ or a saint, are considered by many faithful to be an aid to devotion.

American nineteenth century writer Washington Irving, on the other hand (he of Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow fame), wrote that if all of the splinters he'd seen in Europe said to be taken from "the one true cross" were put together, you'd have enough lumber to construct a ship on which to sail back across the Atlantic.

Relics are not something that makes much sense to the modern mindset. A rationalistic, scientific world view isn't ready to call a scrap of cloth or a lock of hair from a long deceased holy person a means through which we can learn how to live today.

Or is it?

You may have heard in the last few weeks about the latest NASA rover to land on the surface of Mars, some 140 million miles away (depending on where our respective orbit put each planet). The NASA Perseverance rover carries with it the Ingenuity helicopter, a four pound piece of carbon fiber and titanium and aluminum, with bits of copper and foam holding it all together. Weight is at a premium, and the flying experiment is about four pounds total.

To have and use a working helicopter on surface of Mars is certainly a "Wright Brothers moment." And in honor of that, 118 years after the world's first powered and controlled heavier-than-air flight at Kitty Hawk, a piece of history, a piece of the 1903 Wright Flyer itself — a piece of Ohio I might add — is attached to the Ingenuity flyer, just below the solar panel on the top of it.

Not unlike a holy relic, a scrap of cloth from the Wright brothers's wing covers is adding to the weight, however modestly, of the Martian aircraft. And it turns out this isn't the first time: a fragment of Wright Flyer wood and fabric flew to the moon with Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong in 1969. A swatch of 1903 muslin was also with John Glenn when he flew with space shuttle Discovery in 1998. Both astronauts, I hope you notice, were from Ohio. (Another swatch went to the International Space Station in 2000.)

NASA representatives explained they felt that this move honored "A deep connection in history." As a person with a deep connection to spirituality, I respect their intention around marking the historic aspect of this first flight on a different planet, but I think the potential contrast with science here makes the decision interesting. On a device where every decision about its construction is about saving weight for an un-precedented experiment in flight, adding even a modest scrap of cloth is an odd choice. If you're cutting everything you can to ensure success, why add a piece of anything that's not mission critical?

Which is the point, or so I infer. It makes no "sense" to do, yet the impulse is strong. Deep, even. To find that connection beyond electronics and wiring and torque, from past to future, between what once was, and what is about to become. Those sorts of connections are mysteries when they happen, and can't always be rationally explained. It's the sort of connection that relics represent as a presumed existing reality. Connection is possible, it's been seen in the flesh before, and it could and surely will happen again.

Over a century ago, Wilbur and Orville Wright bought a roll of plain, unbleached "Pride of the West" muslin fabric at a Dayton, Ohio department store, stitched it into shape using a Singer sewing machine in their bicycle shop, and stretched it across their unprecedented aircraft's wings, rudder and elevator. After years of successes, setbacks, and struggle, the Wright brothers finally made controlled flight a reality on this planet, and a piece of that struggle is now part of humanity's attempt to do so on Mars.

This is what relics are about in a personal and spiritual sense, to connect us to how what seems impossible to us now has happened before, and can happen again. As amazing as flight on Mars, the idea that we might indeed love one another here on Earth.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he was called a space cadet in elementary school and didn't even mind. Tell him where you find inspiration in our modern world at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Photo: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/mastcam-z-gives-ingenuity-a-close-up