Facing the main street at a church up the road from here is one of those illuminated signboards with the movable letters. For years, it amused me with its inadvertent proclamation:

SUN.WORSHIP
10-11 WEEKLY
ALL WELCOME

I’d always had to resist stealing the punctuation. “Get thee behind me, Loki!” I’d say quietly under my breath. And somehow I forbore.

Evidently, however, I was not the only one who interpreted the sign that way. So it’s been changed:

SUNDAY
WORSHIP 10-11
ALL WELCOME

But I still wonder if it bothers them that they’ve just abstracted the misunderstanding by one level. After all, the word “Sunday” originates in Pagan sun worship (refs: here which links to other sources, and numerous others).

McCarthy’s Bar, Pete McCarthy, 2000, Hodder and Stoughton.

Like Red Haired Girl from the Bog, McCarthy’s Bar starts with an author of Irish descent undertaking a search for identity in Ireland. McCarthy, however, has a much more down-to-earth approach, which begins with the rule that you should never pass up a bar with your name on it (sage advice for someone traveling in Ireland with the name of McCarthy, no doubt, but for us Goldsteins it should be understood that we might have to assume an alias to avoid serious sobriety and/or dehydration).

McCarthy’s writing is reminiscent of Bill Bryson — self-deprecating, incisive, descriptive, and howlingly funny in places. The humor shouldn’t suggest that he’s not very serious about his quest, nor does it soften the keen edge to his observations.

Monaghan’s writing makes it seem that she was relatively comfortable in accepting the mantle of identity. She is in many ways more distant from her heritage, and is able to project certain things on them (being poets and sennachie). McCarthy dwells more, perhaps, on what identity means to him. He meets more relatives on his trail, is accepted as a relative to people who may or may not be blood relations, and ruminates on non-Irish who are working at becoming Irish.

Of the two books, McCarthy’s Bar is probably a better travelogue. Reading it meshed more closely with our experiences, and sometimes this added to the humor (e.g., the derelict Titanic themed bar we passed in Cobh, which he describes as being planned but observes that the local predictions for it are not promising).

The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit,
Patricia Monaghan, 2004, New World Library.

I recently returned from three weeks traveling through Ireland with The Right Reverend Oakes. It was something of a whirlwind tour; we visited a lot of different places both on and off of the standard tourist track. Along the way, I finished up reading The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog, which is an interesting blend of Irish history, Irish mythology, and philosophy, along with a fair amount of rumination on the meaning of place, thoughts on personal relations, and observations on poetry, all wrapped loosely in a collection of personal anecdotes structured by regions in Ireland.

The book is not really a travelogue, per se, as it’s more concerned with mythology as it pertains to place, but it does provide counterpoint and commentary to someone traveling through the places described.

Monaghan starts the book with a not-very-mystical quest involving identity — what does Ireland tell a person about herself as a member of the Irish diaspora. It quickly goes beyond that, and shows the complex intertwining of the mythological layers in Ireland, from Pagan to early-Christian to Roman Catholic to neo-pagan. Monaghan also talks about how those beliefs may mesh and coexist in a way that is fairly alien to us Americans. The bulk of the book uses personal experiences as segues into mythology, and vice versa, in a very readable way.

Monaghan is clearly extremely well read, which allows her to bring together a broad perspective on topics, but also results in an overuse of descriptions of the form “what writer X has called ‘Y‘.” I appreciate the need for attribution, but personally find footnotes less disruptive. As someone who is at best marginally familiar with Celtic, Irish, and Christian mythology (or history, for that matter), I also found the flurry of names and references somewhat dizzying. Fortunately, if you’re as undisciplined as I, you can let the references wash over you without needing to absorb them all — Monaghan’s overall narrative is good enough that you don’t need all the specifics.

So today, on my walk home from work, I was almost knocked off the sidewalk by a frantically swerving, low-flying crow. It was flying erratically, fast, and croaking in a tone I haven’t heard before.

Why the corvid distress? It was trying to lose a humming bird, which was tight on its tail, and bombing in like a bird on a mission (I suspect it must have seen the crow too close to a nest or something). The hummer was probably no larger than the crow’s head, but it sure had the larger bird on the run. They did some crazy swerving over the road, between some trees, and vanished among the houses across the street.

Then, upon coming home, I saw a similar scene re-enacted in the back yard. This time, the pursuer was a mocking bird.

It’s impressive just how fast and agile they are. As Elizabeth phrased it, they were “hellbent for feather.”

The lupine in the front yard is tall and happy, with vast swaths of blue and blue-white flowers.

In one corner, however, closest to the street and driveway, a few plants have been overwhelmed by aphids. Not just your usual annoying aphids, the kinds you find attacking your roses, but massive, evil, green aphids that are larger than half the children that wander our neighborhood streets.

“So where are the aphid predators?” you may ask. Well, there are lots of ladybugs. But while they’re all hanging out in the lupine, the majority of the ladybugs seem much more interested in mating than eating.

Dr. Weil has a model for medicine and the human system, which can be summarized as

• Our immune system keeps us healthy by keeping a homeostatic equilibrium.
• When the immune system gets seriously overwhelmed by something, it cannot maintain equilibrium, which manifests as chronic sickness.
• Medical intervention should attempt to mitigate whatever is overwhelming the immune system, so it can succeed in its task of maintaining equilibrium.

In other words, the medicine doesn’t cure us, it balances things to the point where we can cure ourselves.

So what does this have to do with aphids? My theory is that the garden as a whole resembles a semihomeostatic organism under attack. Or rather, that I needed to restore an equilibrium where the predators were numerous enough to fight off the aphid plague. The predators were doing the population increase part themselves. It was up to me to reduce the plague population. So it was don the gloves, and go a-squishin’.

After fifteen minutes, vast gouts of green liquid flowed down my arms. It was a bleak day in aphid-dom.

That was two days ago. Today, there are twice as many ladybugs on the lupine, and the aphid population is smaller. It remains to be seen if equilibrium has been restored.