Posted by lucasdodd on

Storm and Sea thoughts today

Once again, I am in a hurry to work. I resent this 12-hour workday schedule. Just a quick thought. I was reading in a book called Eye of the Whale that some tribes in the PNW have a story about how the Thunderbird created the world, and was the only creature who could feast on the whale, thunder coming from the interaction between them. This is the parallel I have been looking for. Condors are the only major bird or animal to eat dead whale meat routinely, are the closest representation of thunderbird, and are widely known in lore across North America. During the Pleistocene, condors were more widespread across North America, eating dead megafauna like mammoths, bison, and ground sloths. The receding of the ice age left them in the southwest and west coast, where the high cliffs, big game, and marine mammal carcasses provided a sweetspot for their survival. Thunderbird is widespread in native american myths. Thunderbird and whale are the American Western analog of the storm god and sea dragon. Coincidentally, the condor and humpback whale are the animals with the most significance in my imagination. Condor is the bird of eber, of over, of transcendence, of ubermensch, of hebrews, of Yahweh, vultures eating the dead atop ziggurats. Whale is the creature of immanence, of being, of complexity and convolution. Birds have a pattern psychology—they act on patterns. Whales have an ontological psychology, they ruminate and reverberate, they are not thrown into patterns, they throw out patterns, generating them, genesis. Condor and humpback whale are not enemies, per se, but a story is lying latent inside the gorges of Cone Peak, above and below the water. The two sages of Big Sur: Condor and Whale, Thunderbird and Leviathan.

Posted by lucasdodd on

Aug 7, 2023

Today marks the high point of summer, exactly halfway between Jun 21 and Sep 21, for us northerners. Have you ever noticed that the hottest time of year does not correspond to the day of longest sunshine? Theoretically, the maximum amount of sunlight comes to us in the twelve weeks surrounding the summer solstice: six weeks prior, May 7, six weeks after, Aug 7. But the summer season is from the longest day to the autumnal equinox. Why isn’t summer from May 7 to Aug 7? Also, have you ever noticed that we celebrate the first day of a season rather than the peak of a season? Isn’t that strange? You would think that the height of a season is when that season is best represented with a holiday, rather than the first day.