Analysis Paralysis

Analysis Paralysis. A multiply syllabic way to say the more we study, the less we know until the final grid lock of too much information. One of the side effects of this, and really the only solution is to make decisions based on partial information, and the effects are stunning. This lesson was taught to me by an older Greek engineer in the preliminary design group at GE jet engines. I asked why GE and Pratt had two completely different ways to handle compressor non-linearity during start up. His response was considered and philosophical, way beyond mechanical engineering. He said that it was like two trains headed west from New York that encountered tiny course changes going through rail switches, less than a degree to the north or south; at the end of the day one is in San Francisco and the other in New Orleans. So it goes with partial adoption of what we believe to be absolute truth. The only thing we know absolutely is that we know nothing, absolutely.

Truth is, we are simpler than we think, or can

We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?
You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back. More blessed in you than I know…
~Wendell Berry from “The Country of Marriage”
How is it that the chickens I dispatched last Saturday
know more of life than me?

Progress not perfection.

Progress not perfection. So we (the editorial we) the blog "Nulla dies sine linea" and have pathetically only posted 5/22's of days. The perfect is sometimes the enemy of the good, it has been said and so we have to accept progress: we are 5 blogs ahead of last year, and perhaps as thoughts are put on paper they can be dismounted from the tapes repeating in my head. The little squirrels that circle in the cages are the ones who bring in the nuts!

Attention

Mowing the fields is an education in soil and microclimate. I notice the differences in plants, thistles here in a wet pocket, bluets here on the hillside, Rudbeckia in the higher dryer areas.....not to mention the shift to blueberries where the soil becomes drier and acidic. So the plants tell us where they like to grow, wheras agribusiness feels that if you flood enough water and fertilizers you can grow anything. Back to pushing on a rope?

Success

As you wander through this life brother
Whatever be your goal
Keep your eye upon the doughnut
And not upon the hole....old homily on a farmhouse bathroom wall.

Songlines

In some traditions, it was our ancestors who sang reality into existence, and perhaps these tunes reflect the overall nature of our physical world. Jazz never would have come out of a lazy village in the south of Spain, in fact, there it took Flamenco to wake us up.

Farmanutricals

The subtlety of life is more like a well written song than we might think. A chemist was here a few months ago and I mentioned that we could really throw out chemistry as a separate discipline since the physics of atoms could be extended to encompass all the interactions we used to think of as chemical as more of a combination of energy that settle into a symbiotic relationship: that are singing the same tune. So when a couple of hydrogens pick up an oxygen they resonate in a simple dyad. Add a few more atoms and you can have a complex minor chord like ethyl alcohol: two carbons, six hydrogens and an oxygen. C2H5OH because we like the formula to be somewhat reflective of what we think of as the structure of the molecule, or perhaps because the last hydrogen is singing a high "C". More on this later.

Awareness

Took the ducks for a morning swim and look at my fat meat chickens. As they timidly swam into the cool pond, it was clear that their awareness was keenly engaged. Walking slowly back to the house for a second cup of coffee, their attention slowed me down enough to notice the feel of the soil under my feet after a night rain, and to look at every slope and hillock for the differences and opportunities. I have potatoes coming in from my attention to such a likely pocket that I noticed last Spring. No attention except a quick till, spread sprouting leftover potatoes, and watch the plants come up. Nothing I would have noticed if I had been speeding by in a car at 60 or even on a tractor at 10.