Two wise women demonstrate the ancient wisdom, passed down millennia, of the Emerald Tablet: “That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above,”
The “Sibyl of the Rhine” is our first wise woman, the polymath writer, composer, philosopher, mystic and visionary of the High Middle Ages. The Abbess of several Benedictine monasteries, the breadth of her intellect included being a founder of scientific natural history in Germany. A truly remarkable and wise woman was Hildegard van Bingen.
Hildegard’s central theme was Vriditas, a Latin term meaning “greenness” but with added nuance of vitality, growth and lushness; the creative life-giving force of nature and spirit. Simply stated, physical well-being is the “greening power” of Gaia, that relates both to the physical and to the spiritual. As above, so below; all life is one, all is connected.
Her scientific master work is the Book of the Subtleties of the Diverse Nature of Creatures. Divided into two sections, the Physica is a comprehensive treatise and medicinal catalog of plants, fish, birds, insects and minerals, while the Causae et Curae emphasized the causes of disease and their corresponding natural treatments.
Hildegard closely observed the plants in her monastery’s garden and how – as Babs Mahany wrote – “stem and bud absorbed the sunlight [which] brought the fronds’ unfurling.” Her closely observed empirical observations combined with mystical visions detailed that which is above ground.
The “wood wide web” scientist, the forest ecologist and professor of the underground, is our second wise woman. Dr. Suzanne Simard is a titan among modern scientists, who challenged the conventional view that ecosystems are competitive and forests are simply the source of timber or pulp. Over decades she researched and discovered the cooperative nature of forests through roots and fungal networks, the mycorrhizal, that facilitate nutrient, water, sugar and carbon exchange; a chemical signaling between trees communicating stress and providing a network for communal support.
Dr. Simard identified century old “Mother Trees” that nurture younger seedlings, sending nutrients outward to feed and sustain the weaker, baby trees. Her Mother Tree Project is rooted in the idea that forests are deeply interconnected ecosystems, social creatures demonstrating traits of cooperative civil society.
Soil is not “dirt,” but a vital and complex life source of sharing and exchange, the basis upon which life unfurls. The soil maven Nance Klehm in her book, “The Soil Keepers,” described it: “When we stand on land, we stand on the ones who have come before us. We stand on our ancestors. We realize we have inherited their legacy, the way they perceived land, the way they lived with the ground, the way their hands worked the soil, or didn’t.”
As above there is light, so below there is darkness;
As above vriditas unfurling, so below nutrients and sugars flow;
As above oxygen creation, so below communication and exchange;
As above the lotus flower, so below the mud.
All is interconnected, the cosmic dance of Gaia.
The Emerald Tablet is a foundational text, attributed to the Hellenistic figure Hermes Trismegistus, who integrated Greek and Egyptian wisdom into a body of knowledge on the interrelationship between the material and the divine. The teachings influenced both Pythagorus and Plato, formed the basis of Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, were key to Renaissance humanists.
The Emerald Tablet was most likely written in the Syriac language of the Fertile Crescent, but the first extant text appeared in the Arabic, during the Islamic Golden Age, written by Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, the “Father of Chemistry.” From the 12th century onward multiple Latin translations followed, introducing the text to Europe and then in 1680, seven years before publishing his magnum opus The Principia, Isaac Newton made an English translation. More recently, it significantly influenced the work of Madame Blavatsky, William Butler Yeats, and Carl Jung.
And two wise women, 900 years apart, exemplify the enduring truth of “as above, so below,” the essence of the Emerald Tablet. Here is the full text in English from the Arabic of Jābir ibn Ḥayyān:
Truth! Certainty! That in which there is no doubt!
That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above,
working the miracles of one [thing]. As all things were from One.
Its father is the Sun and its mother the Moon.
The Earth carried it in her belly, and the Wind nourished it in her belly,
as Earth which shall become Fire.
Feed the Earth from that which is subtle,
with the greatest power. It ascends from the earth to the heaven
and becomes ruler over that which is above and that which is below.
حقا يقينا لا شك فيه إن الأعلى من الأسفل والأسفل من الأعلى عمل العجائب من واحد كما كانت الأشياء كلها من واحد وأبوه الشمس وأمه القمر حملته الأرض في بطنها وغذته الريح في بطنها نار صارت أرضا اغذوا الأرض من اللطيف بقوة القوى يصعد من الأرض إلى السماء فيكون مسلطا على الأعلى والأسفل
Henry Ford’s broad vision for business success included that his vendors and subcontractors should make a reasonable profit from doing business with the Ford Motor Company. Wholistic, he understood that everyone in the supply chain should be treated fairly for the system to thrive. He famously said, “A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”
My son and I talked about this during the summer, when he took a job seal-coating a 5,004 square foot parking lot. It was his job – I, his crew and driver – but I advised that he should issue a quote in advance, so the client knew what to expect. With great confidence he named his price including a modest profit. The client understood the final invoice would be on a time and materials basis.
The job went well, but in fact was more demanding that expected. The crew pulled it through, but when it came time to submit the final bill my son realized that what had seemed – in advance – like a windfall, felt too small after the fact. He learned what hard labor meant and wanted to charge more. And so we talked about Henry Ford and what a “reasonable profit” meant. In the end, he settled on a 20% profit which equalled $52.50. The client was pleased and paid the bill gladly.
About Henry Ford we have kept talking, and our history curriculum is built around the farm boy from Dearborn who quit school with a 6th grade education. Encouraged by Thomas Edison, in 1903 he founded the Ford Motor Company. Models N, T and A followed and his River Rouge Complex would become the world’s largest, iconic and most efficient integrated factory. Detroit has a rich history, and Mo-Town adds a phenomenal soundtrack.
To make history tangible, we drove to the Professor’s house in Lyman, Maine to work on a small internal combustion engine. The Professor is a journeyman carpenter/philosopher, who not only has every tool known to mankind, but knows how to use them all! Pedagogy unfolded under a shade tree at the Lyman town center.
The Professor sagely required my son to write a summary of the experience. Given the complexity, my son dictated while I was his scribe, and we then parsed the grammar – nouns, common or proper and concrete or abstract; verbs and adverbs; prepositional phrases and their objects; subordinate clauses – and ended up with his summation:
“With Professor Nate, I worked on a Toro Recycler lawn mower with a 22” deck. The first thing we did was try to start it. It would not start. We realized that it did not have an air filter.
“We put it up on a table and looked at the spark plug. The spark plug had a lot of carbon, so we tested the plug to see if it had a spark. It did, but it was orange. The color of the spark can determine how much voltage is being generated from the engine. Red is poor, orange means power but weak, a blue spark is a strong: voltage follows the rainbow spectrum. Our plug had an orange spark. Nate had a new plug that we tested, but it had no spark at all.
“So then we tried using some 1,000 grit sand paper to sand off some of the carbon from the tip. After trying that we tested the original plug again and it had improved. We put it back into the motor, tightened it first by hand and then used a torque wrench, with approximately 30 foot-pounds of torque.
“We checked the oil and gas. We drained the gas bowl, which is under the engine on the left, to see if there was dirt in the fuel. There were specks of dirt and rust, and the fuel was green from the stabilizer. After we drained it, the fuel looked good.
“The Toro Recycler is supposed to have front wheel drive but it wasn’t working. We took the cover off and one of the belts was completely snapped. There was a stick lodged in the belt and a lot of grass had built up inside the housing of the belt. We put the belt cover back on. That should be the problem for the drive.
“We took the blade off using a pneumatic impact driver. We sharpened the blade, simply grinding the edge down. We put the blade back on using the torque wrench.
“We put the mower back on the ground and it started. It did not sound great at first, but slowly the sound improved as the motor circulated the new gas through the engine. It mowed well.
“Next we will get a new air filter, new drive belts and a blade. We need to clean the mower. We are also studying Volts, Amps, Ohms and Watts as part of our science class.”
While the Professor teaches the “how-to,” my son’s cousin, the Lizard-whisperer, is teaching him the pure science of electricity and magnetism; voltage and current; protons, neutrons and electrostatic fields. From all angles we are unpacking the mystery and majesty of an internal combustion engine.
The lead photo above is my son’s Great Grandfather John, standing proudly beside his Ford Model A touring car, circa 1928. John was a coal salesman in the Ohio River Valley, who made frequent trips throughout the coal rich hills of Appalachia. His car was for work more than pleasure.
John’s customers included Detroit Edison; he would purchase the entire output of mines in Eastern Kentucky and Ohio and then ship the coal north by the train load. But John’s coal did not fire Henry’s furnaces.
Henry’s revolutionary self-sufficiency controlled costs by owning the entire production process: 16 coal mines powering the electric plants that generated the voltage to run the steel mills producing the parts for the cars ever rolling down that assembly line at the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge Complex.
A 6th grade drop out has much to teach our 7th grade home schooler.
In the annals of wise women, Lou Andreas-Salomé’s name is writ large. Born February 1861 in St. Petersburg, Russia to parents of French Huguenot and Northern German descent, she was the youngest of six children, the only girl. She attended her brothers’ classes learning Russian, German and French, rejected the orthodoxy of her family’s Protestant faith but embraced philosophy, literature and religion. She attended the University of Zurich – one of the few schools then accepting women – and studied logic, history of philosophy, ancient philosophy, psychology and theology.
At the age of 21 she met Friedrich Nietzsche, who immediately fell in love with her. But she rejected his advance, instead wanting to live and study as “brother and sister” and form an academic commune along with Paul Ree, a German author. Nietzsche accepted and they toured Italy with Salomé’s Mother.
One of the titans of German Philosophy, at the age of 24 Nietzsche had been named the Chair of the Department of Classical Philology at the University of Basel. He remains among the youngest tenured professors of Classics in the history of academia. His brilliance was to an extreme.
Walter Kaufmann, in his classic work “The Portable Nietzsche” wrote, “There are philosophers who can write and those who cannot. Most of the great philosophers belong to the first group. There are also, much more rarely, philosophers who can write too well for their own good – as philosophers.” Plato, he says is one example while “Nietzsche furnishes a more recent and no less striking example.”
Lou Salomé was his muse, which she later became to Rainer Maria Rilke – the great German poet – when he was the Personal Secretary to Auguste Rodin, one of the greatest stone carvers of all times, easily a peer of Phidias and the Ancient Greeks. In rarified artistic and intellectual circles, Lou Salomé was at the top of the game.
Dionysus is our subject, Salomé is our guide, but Nietzsche holds the key. Kaufmann wrote, “…few writers in any age were so full of ideas – fruitful, if not acceptable – and it is clear why [Nietzsche] has steadily exerted a unique fascination on the most diverse minds and why he is still so eminently worth reading.”
At the age of 25, Nietzsche wrote “The Birth of Tragedy” which is considered foundational, a revolutionary work of philosophy, aesthetics, and cultural criticism. His groundbreaking thesis argued that the greatest works of art – which define a society – combine the Apollonian (order, reason and form) with the Dionysian (chaos, ecstasy and raw emotion) into one complimentary whole. An example of the Apollonian would be Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Well Tempered Clavier” while Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile” is Dionysian. The Burning Man festival is pure Dionysian.
Classical Greek Tragedy, he reasoned, reached the apex of artistic expression by using an ordered beautiful form to give voice to the primal, universal unity. Nietzsche wrote, “The two creative tendencies [Apollo and Dionysus] developed alongside one another, usually in fierce opposition, each by its taunts forcing the other to more energetic production, both perpetuating in a discordant concord that agon which the term art but feebly denominates: until at last, by the thaumaturgy of an Hellenic act of will, the pair accepted the yoke of marriage and, in this condition, begot Attic tragedy, which exhibits the salient features of both parents.”
The result was cathartic; life’s meaninglessness overcome through art. Aesthetics became more central than rationalism, with art and psychology moved to the core pushing metaphysics and science to the side. Nietzsche forged a new paradigm, and his writing influenced Sigmund Freud, who also happened to be a close friend of Lou Salomé.
Greek tragedy came to my mind when a young friend, she herself on the path to wisdom, recently brought fresh home-pressed grape juice to our house. Grapes are the symbol of Dionysus and the connection was clear: her grape juice was the elixir of the God.
Having picked Concord grapes by the bushel with our other friends Rebekah, Peter and Mason, she explained, “We picked the grapes individually, sent them through a masher, then Peter heated them up before sending them through the juicing machine. He tried in the press but it kept sending the juice everywhere so he switched to a tomato juicer. That seemed to operate more like a standard juicer.” In other words the must was strained into juice rich, dark and sublime. With our children, we all broke bread and drank of the vine, the form of the Last Supper transformed as testimony to the raw and primal essence which is the end of summer; a new tradition born.
Truths held self-evident at our Art Farm include “art predates agriculture” and “the purpose of life is healing.” The Dionysian speaks to that, which simple truth the grape juice made manifest.
The often repeated phrase, “Give us this day, our daily bread” must be about soil fertility as much as about hope. The common collegiate phrase “alma mater” is Latin for “nourishing Mother” and so we turn our attention to Gaia, one wise soul herself, the Earth as our nourishing Mother, whose fertile soil gifts freely an abundance beyond compare.
Many soulful stewards of Gaia have I crossed paths with, one of whom was the “Corn Cart Queen.” The common cliche is “know your food, know your farmer,” but the Corn Cart Queen brought that to the fore in Chicago, during the summer season 2003, when she planted Golden Bantam in a shopping cart, then organized people to push the corn cart around the town: Meet your food, meet your farmer.
The Chicago Tribune wrote, “A woman of quiet dedication and passion, she initially planned to push the corn around the city by herself…. However, as word spread about the project, she happily surrendered the cart to a growing community of corn stewards, some of them artists or gardeners themselves. They water it, push it and distribute, if they choose, the small packets of blue corn seeds (three each)… taped to the cart. The seeds are pre-Depression-era corn, which she bought directly from a farmer when she visited Cuernavaca, Mexico.”
The Tribune quoted her, “When people talk about the environment in the city, they always see it as outside themselves. They talk about the lake or whatever. . . . I really want people to see how we consume nature, how we consume corn, how we eat, how we do things — it all has an effect on homelessness, on loss of farms, on history. There’s a 10,000-year history of the domestication of this grass called corn.”
Sandor Katz, the New York Times best selling author, in “The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved,” wrote about this, “Cornography…was a sort of performance art installation featuring a few stalks of this corn growing in a shopping cart and many different people taking turns, walking it across Chicago.” Katz quoted the Queen, “The corn cart has visited community gardens, toured supermarkets, politicized a street fair, gone out for coffee, and rested in many backyards. When you give someone a seed, it’s such a small gift, but it entails a responsibility to interact with the land.”
Nance Klehm is the “Corn Cart Queen.” As art predates agriculture, her work unfolds at those fertile crossroads; she teaches of our connection, our utter reliance upon, the earth, the sacred ground beneath us. She is a muse among us, having lectured and taught at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the University of Cincinnati, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. She has taught at the University of California – Los Angeles, Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and Dartington College in the United Kingdom, as well as for countless community groups worldwide. This Queen was honored in 2012 as one of Utne Reader’s “Twelve Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.”
It can be lonely at the vanguard, but Nance always works in community, teaching others the art and science of the soil. Along her path she worked with Flordemayo, a Mayan Elder, who founded The Seed Temple in Estancia, New Mexico. Nance helped assemble the “sacred heritage seeds for future generations.” My family was asked to grow heirloom beans and then give some back to help keep the Temple’s stock alive. For many years now we have grown those seven varieties annually, whereby my children learn first hand that food does not come from a grocery store, that harvesting is harder than consuming but the wild abundance of a fresh grown tomato or peach picked in late August is a joy beyond compare.
Flordemayo herself is one of the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, all of whom are “committed to supporting all people in reclaiming their relationship with Mother Earth, advocating for a shift toward a more conscious and harmonious connection with nature and all living beings.” The International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers come from around the world – Nepal, Brazil, South Dakota, Gabon, Montana, Mexico, Japan, France – as “a collective of women devoted to restoring and uplifting the sacred feminine wisdom that nurtures balance and harmony in the world. [They] stand for peace, justice, human rights, environmental protection, food sovereignty, and the health and welfare of children and the elderly, for today and generations to come.”
Nance and I crossed paths almost 30-years ago, both on Chicago’s west side, and in the LaSalle Street canyons of the financial district; she was outbound to WWOOF in Australia (Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms), while I was headed to Manila, the Philippines on a humanitarian finance quest to establish a currency based upon humans’ ability to communicate. Nance’s path always has been more rooted, more practical.
Among her challenges has been pursuing community-based work during the 50-year period – 1975 to 2025 – when American culture shifted dramatically towards rampant consumerism, free market ideology, and unchecked individualism. Talking about my generation – the Baby Boomers – Bill McKibben wrote, “So what the hell happened? How did we go from an America where that kind of modest [suburban] paradise seemed destined to spread to more and more of the country to the doubtful nation we inhabit fifty years later: a society strained by bleak racial and economic inequality, where life expectancy was falling even before a pandemic that deepened our divisions, on a heating planet whose physical future is dangerously in question?”
How did the forward thinking Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 give way to the radical gerrymandering of our era? Money, banking, free markets and power politics are the domain of mankind, human invention, while the Grandmothers and Queens of Gaia speak of the ground beneath our feet, the soil, everywhere beneath everyone all of the time.
Nance’s 2019 tome, “The Soil Keepers,” makes plain, in her preface, our path forward: “To the entire menagerie of animal, fungal, and plant beings, both the seen and unseen, thank you for your unflinching love and core teachings. I am forever your student.”
All life is one. Life calls to us. We are wise to heed her call.
Credit where credit is due, Elena’s photographs appear here.
Recently we drove north to nowhere, Cold Brook Road in Southern Aroostook County, Maine. Between 1793 and 1815 Northern Maine was a major producer of wheat, known as “the breadbasket of New England.” In the 1940s and 1950s Aroostook County was the top producer of potatoes in America. Big skies, open vistas, quiet abounds there. Our friend Kirk, a Master Electrician, Master Cabinetmaker, Builder and Humble Farmer welcomed us to his 157 acre-farm in Amish country.
The tradition of the Seven Sages is common to ancient China, India, Persia, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome. The sages, although different to each culture, always are the enlightened souls who brought wisdom.
To the Chinese, they were the “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove,” a group of scholars, writers and musicians of the 3rd century CE. In India, the “Saptarishi” are seven of semi-immortal status, the seers extolled in the Vedas, the sacred texts “not of a man, superhuman…authorless,” revelations of sacred sounds and texts heard by ancient sages after intense yogic meditation. To the Hindu, the seven stars of the Big Dipper represent these seven sages; the Dipper’s handle points to the North Star by which countless wise men have traveled the globe.
The “Apkallu” were the sages of Mesopotamia, the primordial beings, demigods, part man and part fish or bird, associated with human wisdom. In the 7th century BCE Greece, the seven were the philosophers, statesmen, poets and lawgivers renowned for their wisdom. Solon of Athens, a statesman and poet, is honored for his legal reforms, which shaped democracy. Pittacus of Mytilene governed Lesbos where he reduced the power of the nobility, to govern with the support of the common people. Thales of Miletus was a mathematician and astronomer, credited with predicting a solar eclipse, is said to have coined the aphorism “Know thyself,” which was engraved on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi.
The “Seven Wise Masters” is a cycle of stories of Sanskrit, Persian or Hebrew origins, which through the “Seven Sages of Rome” was passed down to German, English, French and Spanish in the form of popular street literature published throughout early modern Europe.
A modern version of this tradition resides above the doors of the House Chamber in the U.S. Capital, known as the “Relief Portrait Plaques of Lawgivers.” Seven (sic) sculptors carved bas relief plaques, using white Vermont marble, to honor 23 governing figures across world culture: Hammurabi, Justinian, Solon, Suleiman, Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson rank among these lawmakers, while Moses holds center court.
Of note, across all of these cultures, all of the sages are men.
In my experience, women rank among the sages who have helped shape my path. It is rather stunning to pause and consider the inherent bias, among world cultures, over millennia, that males alone are the sages. Wisdom, as an abstract concept, would be considered gender-neutral. But grammatically, the word “wisdom” – “hokmah” in Hebrew and “Sophia” in Greek – is feminine. Personified in literature, such as in the Book of Proverbs, wisdom is depicted as a female, referred to as “She” and “Lady Wisdom.
I should like to undertake a summer project to compile a list of the “Seven Women Sages.” It seems a Herculean task to select only seven, but such could be a worthy first pass at this project.
I should like to invite my readers to weigh in on this topic. Over coming weeks I shall endeavor to find stories of great women who have walked among us. Some may be a grandmother, or school nurse, others may be dominant figures of their times, but all shall be told as a counterpoint to the conventional wisdom of the Seven Sages.
In these chaotic times we do well to restore balance.
Note: Thanks go out to David Purpur who helped with information on the Vedic rishis.
______________________________
Our garden pushes ever higher: the Cuke climbs its trellis, fruit forms on the vine, pole beans push tendrils ever higher, greens come daily, grapes reach outward, lavendar is lush, potatoes have been hilled.
This week’s homeschool question was “How many US Presidents have suspended Habeas Corpus?” The answer, of course, is 7:
Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, by his sole order declared martial law (he was the commanding General, not yet the 7th USA President)
Abraham Lincoln, by Executive Order, to rein in the “Cooperheads” a/k/a the Peace Democrats
Ulysses S Grant, by Congressional act, suspended in nine counties in South Carolina
Theodore Roosevelt, 1902, by Congressional Act, suppressed civil unrest in the Philippines
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1941, by means of the Hawaiian Organic Act authorized suspension of habeas following the attack on Pearl Harbor, but in 1942, by Executive Order allowed a military tribunal to try and convict eight German saboteurs
Bill Clinton, following the Oklahoma City bombing, signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996
George W. Bush, in 2001, by the Presidential Military Order authorized enemy combatants to be held indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay. But in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004) the U.S. Supreme Court re-confirmed the right of every American citizen to access habeas corpus even when declared to be an enemy combatant.
All of these were in times of a crisis, and several of them included martial law. Given the dense history, my son’s Cousin, the Professor, zoomed in for a chat. The Professor has been published in the Stanford Law Review, where he argued that habeas is “a tool for We the People to insist that when our agents in government exercise our delegated penal powers, they remain faithful to our sovereign will.”
He went on to explain, “Given widespread consensus that English history should and does drive American habeas jurisprudence, and that the sovereigntist account of that history should now be treated as authoritative, it is puzzling that American courts and scholars have continued to cling to libertarian frameworks. Meanwhile, American habeas law is in crisis, with an ideologically cross-cutting array of scholars and jurists criticizing it as intellectually incoherent, practically ineffectual, and extravagantly wasteful. Over the Supreme Court’s past three Terms, Justice Neil Gorsuch has led a charge to hollow out federal postconviction habeas almost entirely, arguing that habeas courts should ask only whether the sentencing court was one of general criminal jurisdiction—and not whether it violated federal constitutional law en route to entering the petitioner’s judgment of conviction.”
My son and the Professor discussed all of this, at length. They compared the crisis of the Civil War to the current immigration brouhaha. My son reasoned that Mr. S Miller, “wants it to be really simple, immigrants get picked up, and locked up.” The Professor concurred, describing a “logistical simplicity.” My son continued, “There are many immigrants, some are illegal, but it is not like Abe Lincoln at the Civil War, now [suspension of habeas] is not really necessary. Suspending habeas should be a last resort. I don’t know what problems – it is about people’s free will – but on a large level it would fill up the jails.” The Professor concluded by speaking of Aristotle’s concept of the good.
As a counterbalance to these abstractions, we poured concrete. The front entry of a friend’s home was demolished when his neighbor drove her car backwards, at a very high speed, into the front of his home. Remarkably, the driver avoided the house but smashed the stairs. Insurance paid little – no surprise there – so our marching orders are to be frugal. We are making it work, and my son is part of the crew. Child labor laws do not pertain in our homeschooling.
The new entry will have a platform about 4’ high, with four steps to it. This is applied geometry and we discussed the area of a rectangle [width x length], the area of a triangle [1/2(width x length)] and the volume of a column [V=π r2 * h]. We needed to calculate the volume to know how much concrete to buy. To place the footings, we located two points at right angles and parallel to the house. Pythagorus solved that question. We used the 3,4,5 triangle; given a2 + b2 = c2 then 9 + 16 = 25 marked the exact locations where we would dig.
Like construction, learning requires a solid foundation. We began at the bottom and dug holes. We discussed the history of “Pi”, and its application to our task. “Pi” is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. The Babylonians approximated Pi at 3. The Egyptians refined it to 3.1605, and then Archimedes of Syracuse hit the mark by using the Pythagorean Theorem. He drew a circle and two boxes; one box fit inside the circle and one circumscribed the exterior. He reasoned the area of the circle was between the area of the polygons and thus Pi would be between 3.1408 and 3.14285. The Chinese mathematician Zu Chongzhi took a different route, performing lengthy calculations with hundreds of square roots to calculate the ratio at 355/113, which is 3.14159292035. Centuries later, in 1706, the Englishman William Jones decided to name the ratio “π” which is the first letter of the Greek word “perimetros”, which means “circumference”.
Our project’s head carpenter is a journeyman Master Carpenter, who has built homes on the islands of Maine for decades. Building on an island requires the ultimate resourcefulness; everything used is carried by boat to the job site and so waste is minimal. A calm and wise teacher, he explained use of a sight level, how to square the platform, how to measure and cut stair risers. The platform he built is remarkably strong and the client is pleased. My son hopes to handle the landscaping that follows.
Driving to and from the job site, my son spoke of the satisfaction of helping people using practical problem solving. My son also commented that jobs based upon information pay higher than jobs in physical labor. I will not sugar coat that truth: the annual salary of an average Professor of Law is $173,000 while the most skilled carpenter earns around $80,000 per year. Such are the values of this society (although AI looms large). My son’s path is unknown and we expose him to the yin and the yang, the full range of ideas and labor, as he comes of age.
About that volume, my son correctly calculated that each column was 2.8 cubic feet, which required 480 pounds of concrete. A heavy load, I was thankful for a young assistant.
This week in homeschooling, a true/false question arose: Is habeas corpus “…a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country”? We have, by coincidence, been studying habeas corpus for the past seven weeks so this question did not come out of the blue. What has been wildly surprising is to see the topic so hotly discussed in the news.
Our humanities seminar has been titled “Habeas Corpus, Habeas Vox,” which I described in my blog dated 11 April. We began by considering those words. My son knows that a hearse carries a dead body, which is a “corpse,” so the Latin word corpus was readily understood. Habeas corpus, he knows, has something to do with a body, rather than a Presidential right.
But what to make of that Latin verb habeas? We approached that by studying the Ancient Greeks. The Spartans governed by a combination of diarchy (two kings ruled), oligarchy with limited democracy. The Athenians, however, invented direct democracy, not representative democracy like our modern form. From Athens we jumped to Medieval England to read about the Magna Carta. In his “end-of-week” essay on 2 May my son wrote:
This week in Humanities we studied the legacy of Greece. Greece is located on the Mediterranean Sea. In Classical Greece, Athens was a city state that created democracy, but only the men citizens could vote; slaves and women could not vote.
The Greeks were known for the arts, architecture and philosophy. In Athens there was a teacher named Socrates, known for teaching by the “Socratic Method” which was asking questions to engage his students. Socrates was put to death by the courts because they thought he was corrupting his students. One of his students was Plato, who wrote the Republic, which is his views of democracy.
Something else we studied was English history. I read about the Magna Carta, a document that gives liberties granted to the English people. The English Barons and Nobles argued and threatened a Civil War unless King John granted those rights. King John was very greedy and selfish. The Magna Carta was settled on June 15, 1215 when King John affixed his seal.
The Magna Carta gives guarantees for the people as a whole. The people could not be convicted of their crimes unless they were lawfully convicted. The Barons (Nobles) had the right to declare war upon the King. The Magna Carta is considered one of the basic documents of British law.
Next week we will do studying more on English history!
We next proceeded to study the English Bill of Rights, and then the USA Constitution. Last week, my son wrote:
This week, Harvard University discovered they had an original copy of the Magna Carta. There are seven original copies, and Harvard just happened to have one. In 2007 an original copy of the Magna Carta sold for $21.3 Million Dollars. This could not have come at a better time!
The Magna Carta was written in cursive script on a sheepskin parchment 810 years ago. It is a legal document that gave power from the King to a small group of Men. What the Magna Carta did was similar to the Greek direct democracy, by including people in political discussion, instead of the King alone.
The British Bill of Rights, signed in 1689, which is 336 years ago, was a sort of New Age version of the Magna Carta. For nowadays, the new age of the Magna Carta would be the Declaration of Independence. The British Bill of Rights basically gave everyone a fair trial and banned cruel and unnecessary punishment.
All of these political texts – the Magna Carta, the British Bill of Rights, the American Declaration of Independence, and all other that I have not mentioned – have slowly but surely lead up to what we have today; having “freedom,” a fair trial, and due process. Whether you like the current President of the United States or not, he continues to challenge these monumental, historic and foundational concepts.
Next week we will study the 1st Amendment and Abraham Lincoln’s Habeas Corpus Suspension Act. Harvard University’s discovery of an original copy of the Magna Carta is a wild coincidence as we are studying all this!!
I should mention that the essays are entirely my son’s concepts and phrasing, but together we edit them. As his scribe, I raise questions of grammar, word choice and structure; using the Socratic method, I challenge him but he decides as he dictates. We use library books as primary sources to frame the concepts, which he rephrases into his own words. If he does not know the word “plagiarism” he most certainly knows to avoid the practice.
As the school year draws to its close, we are preparing for a debate – 6th grade version – on the essential nature of government. Plato, the Athenian philosopher, argued that democracy is not viable, and the ideal form of government is a “benevolent dictator” more politely referred to as the Philosopher King. This is an argument for absolute strength in the Executive branch. In the current American moment, the occupant of that office is reviled by some as a dictator, and praised by no one as benevolent. My son shall argue in the affirmative that the strong leader must not only be unchecked and absolute in his control, but guided by good will, even compassion.
My son’s cousin, a Professor of Law, shall present the challenging argument, that “We the people” is a most radical proposition, but ultimately, an essential truth. We shall leave to him to define precisely how the many can actively support the one well being of the state. He shall argue that habeas corpus, which is due process, which is the rule of law, is the key to that functioning: the “Great Writ of Popular Sovereignty.”
My son clearly knew the answer to the true/false question, and summed the matter up well, saying, “Do you know how embarrassing it is when a 12-year old knows habeas corpus better than an adult?!! That is really embarrassing! It just makes Americans look really dumb!” He shall be fully prepared to debate what is good, what is benevolent, what is effective leadership for the state.
______________________________
Summer is upon us! Our warm weather starts are ready to go into the ground: tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, basil, and potatoes. Our cold weather starts do well and grow ever upright.
I recently went driving at night with my children to go eat ice cream. Pope Francis having died, my daughter mentioned Tik Tok talk of the prophecy of Saint Malachy. As it were, I’m familiar with those prophecies, having heard about them almost 30 years ago.
Saint Malachy lived in Northern Ireland in the 1100s. Born Máel Máedóc, he served as Archbishop of Armagh and was the Primate of All Ireland – the highest ranking position in the Catholic and Episcopalian Church of Ireland. His predecessor was no less than Saint Patrick, known as the “Apostle of Ireland,” venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, the Church of Ireland, and in the Eastern Orthodox Church. ‘Tis no small role to be the Primate of All Ireland.
Malachy’s prophecy presaged 112 more popes before the Last Judgment. Pope Francis happens to be that 112th pope. The prophecy is widely debunked, but on social media it seems to be generating great interest.
My daughter explained the conventional view, that following the last Pope will come the rapture, when the dead and living believers will be lifted up in the air, ascending to heaven at the Second Coming of Christ. My son, a deep thinking Sagittarean, questioned, “what about the others?” I clarified, “…the Buddhist, the Muslim, the child of Indigenous parents…?”
My son questioned more deeply, “How can a God of love exclude half of the world’s population?” My daughter repeated the factual statement that the faithful believe theirs alone shall be redemption. When she spoke of the risen Christ, I queried about John 14:12 “These and greater deeds ye shall do” which means to raise the dead, to walk on water, to feed loaves and fishes to the masses…come one come all – he says – we the people all have that power. Who among us shall believe, and act?
And so we drove, into the dark night, eating our ice cream.
I reminded them that the world in fact came to an end on 12/12/12, just over 12 years ago. Such was the popular view, pre-Tik Tok. I spoke of the Mayan Long Count calendar, the end of a 5,126 year-long cycle. 250-950 AD was the Mayans’ Classic period, the peak of their large-scale construction, urbanism, monumental inscriptions, and significant intellectual and artistic development. Their flowering has been likened to that of Renaissance Italy or Classical Greece. Everyone reading this essay today knows that the world did not end on 12/12/12; the Mayan calendar’s end marked only a new beginning. In Hindu terms, this is Shiva’s cosmic dance, his never ending destruction creation cycle.
A friend has read the Book of Revelations and suggests that the current Commander in Chief is the 8th King of the Roman Empire, Revelation 17, “destined for destruction,” the Antichrist. Indeed we can read the “two beasts” as representing opposing forces of evil: one from the sea (Manhattan and Florida) is a political power that dominates the world, a healed gash to its head, seeking to establish himself as a pagan deity, while releasing scorpions. The beast from the earth (Africa), the False Prophet, helps the sea beast gain global control, sends fire from heaven and promotes the worship of the beast from the sea and works to deceive people through signs and wonder.
Carl Jung came to mind, in Psychology and Alchemy his observation that religions perfectly coopted the archetypes to their narrative. Scriptural writing to my mind seems symbolic more than a factual narrative. The end of one narrative is but the beginning of another.
Talk of the end of the world is not for the faint of heart. As we drove, as we ate our two scoops of ice cream in waffle cones, the popular song from 40 years ago by the band REM came to mind, “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.”
And so we ate our ice cream. We will figure it out in the light of day. The sun will rise, life will go on, world without end, amen.
__________________________________
Gaia pushes up the Garlic while cold weather starts go into the ground: Kale, Chard, Lettuce, Pac Choy, Snap Peas, Fennel, Shallots, Scallions, Rosemary, Parsley and Thyme.
And most importantly, Eve has come to our garden! A 4-in-1 semi-dwarf apple tree, a gift from Grammy Moana to Becca, with four varieties grafted onto the root stock: Fuji, Pink Lady, Honeycrisp, and Ginger Gold. Something for everyone! She joins our two peach trees and a sour cherry tree. I cannot tell a lie, my son cut down our sweet cherry tree last summer, at my instruction. The trunk had a serious gash and its time was ended. Every end is a new beginning, the circle of life, and Eve has taken its place!
The children and I recently walked the swamp trails at 29°56’33” N by 89°59’39” W, the Barataria Preserve in the Mississippi River Delta of Louisiana. Long ago this was the land of Jean Lafitte, a swashbuckling rogue of French or Spanish or Haitian descent, a pirate and slave trader, as handsome as he was cunning and shrewd, who played all sides against the others in the era when Thomas Jefferson purchased Louisiana from the French in 1803.
During the war of 1812, King George III of England offered Lafitte and his men citizenship and land grants if they would fight for the British. Lafitte shrewdly leveraged that offer to form an alliance with the Americans – his piracy was easier against US Revenue agents than the British Navy – but then after Andrew Jackson agreed to a full pardon for all of his men, Lafitte’s troops fought with Jackson to defeat the British at the battle of New Orleans. The pirates’ skill with artillery was greater than the British Navy and Andrew Jackson praised their “courage and fidelity.”
During the Mexican War of Independence in 1815, Lafitte and his brother acted as spies for Spain, which allowed them to develop Galveston Island as another smuggling base outside the authority of the United States. The swashbuckling history was of great interest to me, but my children only wanted to see an alligator. To no avail though, as the temperatures were warm enough that the gators laid low, hidden in the water to stay cool from the sun’s heat. We saw no gators, but plenty of snakes, frogs and spiders.
an Art Farm 