MandoBob's Blog

Our Wee Trip to Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 13:19:00 +0000

From Strange Lands, a poem by Billy Collins

The photographs of the summer trip are spread

across the table now like little mirrors

reflecting our place in European history.

They are the booty of travel, bordered and colorful,

split seconds that we pass to friends after dinner

one by one to make them believe we really found

some sweet elsewhere, away from here.

Our Wee Trip to Ireland, Fall 2024

October 29^th and 30^th, Tuesday and Wednesday

We boarded our American Airlines flight mid-day at XNA, connecting in Charlotte, NC for another AA flight to London-Heathrow, flying through the night to catch a morning British Airways flight to Dublin, arriving about noon Dublin-time.

We got enough sleep on the plane to carry on for a time in Dublin. Turns out that sleeping as much as possible on that flight over really does help to adjust to local time in Ireland and minimize jet lag because they are six hours earlier. Otherwise, you will want to go to bed for the night while it is still daytime. (The principle is: you try to sleep when the people at your destination are sleeping.) We picked up our rental car at the airport, checked into our airport-area hotel (The Clayton Airport Hotel) and drove to the Howth Peninsula where Dublin meets the coast of the Irish Sea. This is Bob’s introduction into driving on the left side of the road. Baptism by fire, so to speak, after some brief coaching by the rental agency staff. At least Howth is not as crazy with traffic as the city center of Dublin.

Our friend, Richy McCusker, had recommended the area and a good seafood restaurant. But first, a wee pint at O’Connell’s Pub in Howth. Then to Octopussy, Richy’s favorite, right along the pier where they bring in fish for the restaurants daily (there is a seafood market right next door), and you look out over the sea of masts from the boats in the harbor. Wonderful people and food at Octopussy—seafood chowder, fish and chips, shrimp and mussels, etc.

October 31^st, Thursday

After a night’s sleep at the Clayton Airport Hotel, we are up and cruising out the north bypass of Dublin headed southwest towards Dingle in County Kerry in the west of Ireland, as they say. For much
of the way, the roads are equivalent to our interstate system, which gives me time to adjust my brain to driving on the left.

As we reached County Kerry, we decided to take the scenic route over Conor Pass and see the Conor Pass Waterfall. Well, the waterfall was not that impressive (small), but the road was a trip! Very narrow and winding. When a car came from the other direction, you had to hope to find a place with a side spot to pull over to get out of the way. It was a one-lane road with no shoulder, bordered by boulders, with only an occasional wide spot in the road to get out of the way. Fortunately, the most perilous part only lasted a few kilometers. Very exciting …

We came down from the mountains of the Dingle Peninsula into Dingle itself and checked into a wonderful B&B called Dingle Marina Lodge, right across from the harbor overlooking Dingle Bay.

After walking around town a bit, we ate some appetizers at a fancy-pants place called Solas. It was an upscale wine place that served elegant and tasty pastries with meat and herbs. Very good, but very expensive with kind of a snooty atmosphere. So, we called that good for dinner and headed out to find a pub. We walked all the way up to Neligan’s because it was on Richy’s list for good sessions. There was one older guy sitting in the corner with some uillean pipes, which got me quite excited, but no other musicians appeared. After we finished our drinks, I went over and asked him if there would be a session tonight. He said they’d had a dozen musicians the night before and he was hoping for another session tonight, but you just never know. We finally gave up and headed back towards our B&B to find another pub on the way.

Bob Griffin’s Bar did not disappoint. The pub was crowded, and the music was coming from a tiny

room just to the right as you entered the front door. We squeezed in to have a listen to a very good

fiddler, Jeremy Spencer (not of Fleetwood Mac fame), with lots of rosin dust collected over the top of his fiddle. He was accompanied by Matt Griffin playing a nylon string guitar. The accompaniment was vigorous with lots of fast changes using alternative chords, but did not seem to be DADGAD or other open tuning. The only tune all night that I thought I recognized was “The Sailor’s Bonnet”. I afterwards asked if that was the name of it and the fiddler looked up, surprised, and said, “ah, there’s the man!”

To our left was a man, his wife, and daughter sitting around a small table in the corner of the small room. He invited Julie, and then me, to join them for a seat. We had a wonderful conversation for the rest of the night with them as the musicians pounded out the Irish fiddle tunes. Sean was his name, with his wife, Joanne, and teenage daughter, Amy, from Co. Tipperary. Joanne is a schoolteacher. Amy goes in the summer to the west of Ireland--like Americans go to summer camp--but Irish kids go to learn to speak Irish.

We talked politics. They are very keen on American politics, and can’t stand Donald Trump, so they were keen to talk to us since it was only five days before the election. We felt as though we had made some new friends. Julie and Joanne bonded over teaching. Amy told us some about her student life. At one point a guy behind me who had overheard our political discussion, announced that he had dual citizenship and had early voted for Donald Trump. This was something like a public challenge to me, I felt. As I turned to try a diplomatic response, I noticed a look on his face that did not quite fit the challenging statement. His wife was cringing beside him. It turns out that he was pulling my leg in that Irish humor sort of way, and we soon were getting to know he and his wife as well. Just part of the pub craic.

November 1^st, Friday

We woke up to a lovely homemade breakfast downstairs at Dingle Marina Lodge. Scrambled eggs and bacon, boxty (traditional Irish potato fritters/pancakes), fresh smoked salmon (tasty, but cold and a little mushy), etc. We loved everything about the Dingle Marina Lodge. Orla, the lady behind the help desk, was friendly and helpful.

We took a brief shopping tour along the main drag in Dingle. I stopped into a place that Richy had mentioned called Foxy John’s Bar & Hardware while the pub was quite dead—three old guys sipping on Guiness together at the bar and the owner. No music, not even recorded music playing. He asked me if he could help me. I said, “No, I’m just stepping in to see the place because my Irish friend in America recommended it. Perhaps I’ll be back later.” The three old guys looked at me curiously and one said, “I think maybe your friend was just winding you up.”

We started out in the car for a self-tour of the Dingle Peninsula on a remote road called Slea Head Drive. Robyn had Rick Steve’s Ireland book in hand, calling out the upcoming sites with our odometer synced to Rick’s odometer readings. That worked out well and we saw not only beautiful scenery, but some incredible ancient ruins—such as Cathair ui Mhurchu Cashel Murphy, a settlement of five rock

“beehive” huts, the whole surrounded by a rock wall. Some of the beehive huts, or clochans (named for their shape), are still totally intact after thousands of years due to the intricate rock placement, despite the complete absence of any kind of mortar. Several features are aligned with the sun at the Equinox and date back 5,200 years from present. Many of these types of relics sit on private farmland.
This site was behind the corral where a farmer was gathering his sheep. Five shepherd dogs made sure we did not step towards their beloved sheep.

Another ruin was the Reask Monastic Site in the north-central part of the Dingle Peninsula. These are ruins of a community of Christian monks from the 500’s AD, not that long after St. Patrick himself (late 400’s AD).

The entire Dingle Peninsula was scenically spectacular and well worth the time—amazing views of Dingle Bay, offshore islands, rugged coast, and the Atlantic Ocean. Not to mention skinny roads, farms, and brightly painted sheep (each farmer paints his sheep with his own bright colors and patterns. Apparently, the paint can be washed off at shearing time.

That night, after some lovely stew, we got a table at John Benny Moriarty’s Pub to hear again the fiddling of Jeremy Spencer, this time with Gerry O’Beirn playing the 12-string guitar (in open G tuning with a drop C bass) on the fiddle tunes and six-string guitar (in standard tuning) on the songs. He reminded me, both in his playing and in his songs, of the American songwriter, Michael Peter Smith, from Chicago. I mentioned this during a break, and he said he was not familiar with Michael Smith’s music, but he had been told that by others. The third one in the trio that night was a lady, Eilis Kennedy, who sang, in both English and Irish Gaelic, and played pennywhistle and Irish flute. We bought CDs from each of them. Although it was a fairly intimate setting, they were amplified—the only amplified music we heard the entire trip.

November 2^nd, Saturday

After another wonderful breakfast, we said goodbye to our hosts at Dingle Marina Lodge and did one

more quick shopping trip walking the streets of Dingle. We then hit the road north for Doolin in County Clare. As we drove along Shannon Bay in northern Co. Kerry, we came across an old castle, five stories high, called Carrigafoyle Castle, that looks out at Carrig Island in the estuary where the River Shannon meets the Atlantic Ocean. Built in the 1400’s AD by a local Irish chief, Conor Liath O’Connor. He would have his men to intercept ships sailing up-river to deliver goods to Limerick and Shannon and demand a percentage of the value of the cargo.( I think we call that extortion.) It has been abandoned since 1580 when the rebel Earl of Desmond, supported by Irish and Spanish troops, was defeated by the British under Queen Elizabeth I. This is one of many historical sites out in the countryside that are not staffed or restored. There is not so much as a port-a-potty on site (so I had to pee behind one of the outer walls).

We decided to save some driving by crossing the Shannon on a ferry from Tarbert, Co. Kerry to Killimer, Co. Clare. Then it was on past Kilrush and Donald Trump’s golf club at Doonbeg to the lovely little town of Milltown Malbay, home of the famous uilleann piper, Willie Clancy (1918-1973). Since 1973, they have held here, in early July, the annual Willie Clancy Summer School and Music Festival in his honor, with teaching workshops for all instruments used in Irish music, plus dance.

We stopped at Cogan’s Restaurant to meet the proprietor, Tony Cogan. Robyn worked with Tony’s cousin, Mick, for many years at BNSF Railroad in Ft. Worth, TX. Once Robyn introduced herself, Tony became very animated and wanted pictures and insisted we sit down for a drink and some food.

He served us a pint and some delicious root-vegetable chowder with brown soda bread that was equally wonderful. At no charge. When Robyn protested, Tony said, “I’ll put it on Mick’s bill next time he is in.” Tony was one of so many delightful Irish people that we met over the course of our visit who were

so keyed-in to American politics. This was three days before the election. I mentioned to him that we voted early and not for the owner of the golf course just 16 kilometers south down the road at Doonbeg. I asked Tony if he ever played golf there. He said, “I wouldn’t walk through the front door.”

Tony asked, “There are 334 million people in America. Is Donald Trump the best you could come up with?” Then he mentioned the two assassination attempts on Trump and asked, “You had two perfectly good opportunities to do away with him; is that the best you Americans can do?” To which I asked, “So do you think an Irishman would have got him the first time?” To which Tony replied, “A drunk Irishman . . . with one eye closed.”

We made our way northward to our B&B for the next two nights, Glasha Meadows, in the countryside between Doolin and Lisdoonvarna (yes, yes, on The Road to Lisdoonvarna). The B&B is in a very rural setting across the road from a working farm, 3 kilometers from Doolin (less than 2 miles; 1.6 km/mile) and 6 kilometers from Lisdoonvarna.

We made our way to the far side of Doolin on Fisher St. to Gus O’Conner’s Pub. There were three fellows playing tunes on button accordion, tenor/plectrum banjo, and Irish flute. After a time, they called an older gentleman up to sing a song with them. That is when we first laid eyes on Harry.

Harry Hurst of Doolin, Co. Clare, formerly of upper Co. Kildare just to the west of Dublin, is a 75-year

old retired contractor that built houses for most of his career. He was now part of the local color of Doolin. A lover of music and craic. A singer. A songwriter. A pub dweller. A lovely human being as far as I can tell. A devotee of Pete Seeger. He also sings songs of Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, and the Clancy Brothers. But Pete Seeger taught him that Harry, too, can write songs about his own life and times. And it is not necessary to compose new melodies every time. Pete learned that from Woody Guthrie. So, Harry composed his song about Donald Trump on the model of an old folk song called, “I Was Born Ten Thousand Years Ago”, that I first heard from Doc Watson’s first album. Harry always ends one of his unaccompanied songs by raising his glass in the air.

Harry indicates that he has spent a lot of time in the pubs over the years. He said that, in his younger years, he could easily knock down ten or more pints in an evening. And if he started in the afternoon on a weekend, he was known to demolish 20 pints in one day. But then he realized he was not demolishing the pints; the pints were demolishing him. Nowadays, Harry will first order a pint of water, then drink it down to half. Then he will order a glass of wine and pour it into his half-pint of water and sip on it slowly. He calls it “turning water into wine”. It is a matter of his survival--he already is running along with the help of a pacemaker. The wine trick allows him to join the pub craic without destroying himself.

Harry sang—unaccompanied—whenever there was a break in the action, all from memory, all without missing a beat, all on pitch, and with a nice, strong voice. The entire pub quieted down as he sang his songs (which they did not do while the instruments played). He sang his own songs, like “The World’s Biggest Liar” and “Oh, To Be In Doolin”. He sang American folk songs like Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”, songs from Bob Dylan and Michael Peter Smith, even the anti-war song “No More Waltzing Matilda For Me”. He also did more traditional songs, like “Come By the Hills”. It demonstrated that a singer who is not an instrument player can pull off practically any song as an unaccompanied ballad if done well, even in a rowdy pub.

We stayed and sang along with Harry until they kicked us out of Gus O’Conner’s at closing time.

November 3^rd, Sunday

After a nice breakfast (not as good as Dingle Marina Lodge), we headed over to see the Cliffs of Moher,

only a ten-minute drive from Doolin (11 km from our B&B). The drive over was quite scenic itself. The day was breezy and partly sunny, not at all unpleasant. In fact, it had not really rained, so far, the entire trip. We saw yet another castle rising up out of the countryside on the road over to the Cliffs. The Cliffs themselves were spectacular. I’m not sure I would bother with them during the height of the tourist season and fight the throngs to see them. But we were glad to experience them in the offseason.

Afterwards, we headed back towards our B&B on the other side of Doolin and then decided to make a quick trip to Lisdoonvarna. “The Road to Lisdoonvarna” was perhaps the first Irish fiddle tune I ever learned, back around 1980 or so, from a recording of a live concert of The Chieftains. Now, 45 years later, we play it at every session in Fayetteville and every show of The McCloud’s Ceili Band at Crisis Brewing. I had no choice. We hit the road to Lisdoonvarna for a little lunch; it was only a few minutes away from our B&B.

We ate at the Irish Arms Pub in Lisdoonvarna. The menu was typical of the pubs and restaurants we visited throughout Ireland. Usually, a root vegetable soup/chowder (actually, more of a bisque) and usually, a “roast of the day”—one day, roast beef, another roast lamb, another roast pork, another duck, etc. The meal was quite good. Julie had an Irish coffee with hers. The owner or manager was friendly and talkative once we got him engaged. Being two days before the US election, that is where the conversation went as soon as he heard our accent. He asked what part of America we hailed from. As soon as we said, “Arkansas/Oklahoma”, he replied like nearly everyone else, “Arkansas? Ah . . . Bill Clinton!” They all know about Bill Clinton because he brokered the Good Friday Peace Accords that brought an end to The Troubles--a forty-year violent struggle between Catholics and Protestants, especially in Northern Ireland. All of Ireland, it seems, is watching the US election to be held two days from now. Here is the local news broadcast (in Gaelic) from our B&B:

After a nice return trip down tiny backroads (most of the roads seem like backroads), we re-grouped atour B&B, then headed to McGann’s Pub in Doolin where our new friend, Harry, promised to meet us. The featured musician at McGann’s was Blackie O’Connell, a renowned uillean pipes player local to Doolin, but who has toured around the globe, including Broadway and Carnegie Hall (according to my internet search). You can find lots of clips of Blackie on YouTube. The uillean pipes look like an armload of plumbing with two bags attached and have an otherworldly sound to them that I cannot describe; they can only be experienced. They are quintessentially Irish but are not common in most bands or sessions because they are so damn hard to play and take so many years to master.

Blackie had with him an Irish harp player and another lady who played bodhrán and sang vocals on a few songs. The two ladies had never played together before but blended quite well. Of course, they invited Harry up to sing a song or two, and another of their friends in the audience sang an unaccompanied song from her table in the pub. We also met Harry’s good friend, Pascal, and Pascal’s wife, Helen. Pascal and Helen retired to Doolin after a lifetime in Dublin where Pascal worked in an ice cream factory (maybe Murphy’s, we saw their shops several times). I mentioned that I already had Harry’s song being shared on FaceBook. And that, perhaps, I could help Harry publish his Trump song (I suggested the title, “The World’s Biggest Liar”) and help make him famous. With a twinkle in his eye and slight smile on his lips, Pascal said, “It’s true that I am retired, but I still am looking for some work. I’m Harry’s agent you know--don’t forget about me.”

After the band finished up, we sat and visited with our new Irish friends as well as some who were visiting from various points of the globe. One was a musician and studio producer who was coming off a band tour of Australia. He asked Robyn to dance with him earlier in the evening. We talked with he and his wife, both from the States. Another was a European businessman there on holiday.

Harry sang several unaccompanied songs, including some we knew, like "The Dutchman" (I later figured out that Liam Clancy of the Clancy Brothers had recorded it), and some we didn’t. One of my favorites was a traditional song, “Come By the Hills” which includes a recitation of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, a poem by William Butler Yeats, an Irish hero of the arts. Harry also sang a song that he put to music from a poem about Doolin. Before the night was over, we had experienced firsthand the song he sang:

Oh, to be in Doolin on any given day

a stranger can become a friend in that special Doolin way

You can go down to McDermott’s as the evening it descends

And you get that special feeling when you sit down with your friend

(Note: when you read or sing the lyrics to any Irish song, make sure you leave out the “h” anytime it is written “th”; so “with” is “wit” and “thoughts” is “toughts”.)

By the end of the night, the manager and crew of McGann’s were trying to close and only reluctantly agreed to one last round at Harry’s coaxing. (I suspect they tolerate Harry because he is good for business during the tourist season.) Finally, they shooed us out the door: Julie, Robyn, and I, Harry, Pascal and Helen, and a young American couple that had joined us near the end. Harry continued with his songs out on the sidewalk in front of the pub. Of course, he reprised his “The World’s Biggest Liar” for the American couple. Then Harry pointed out that we had the rare treat of new friends gathered under a clear sky sparkling with stars. He had us all join hands in a circle as we sang one last song together (I can’t remember which one). But it was a lovely ending to a lovely evening, and only later back home, when I typed out the words to his song, “Oh, To Be In Doolin”, did I realize that we had literally lived out the words of his song:

Oh, to be in Doolin on a balmy, starlit night

When your heart beats a crescendo and your soul has taken flight

You could sing a song beneath those stars where your thoughts can freely roam

Once more embrace that special place, my home away from home

November 4^th, Monday

After a simple breakfast at Glasha Meadows B&B, we headed north towards Galway, crossing the edge of The Burren in route. (Note: Glasha Meadows was an okay place to stay but not as special as the B&B in Dingle).

A word now about the roads. It wasn’t nearly as challenging as I envisioned it to be to drive on the left side of the road. I worried about this for weeks before our trip. After the first day of driving on the left side, I was fairly confident about it, though I had to stay consistently focused on what I was doing, more than I normally would in the States. The biggest challenge was the rural roads. There are three size classes of roads in Ireland: the big “interstates” are the M roads—the M4 goes across the middle of the country from Dublin to Galway and is equivalent to driving I-40 or I-35 in the US. Some of these are toll roads, but by paying extra at the car leasing place, you can get a payment device put on the windshield. You only slow down at the toll gates, but don’t have to transact business.

The next level down are the N roads, like the N67 we took from Lisdoonvarna to Galway on this day. These would be equivalent to our two-lane state highways--plenty of room to drive, but without any shoulders. The R roads are the rural roads, like R478 that goes from Doolin to Lisdoonvarna (there it is again, The Road to Lisdoonvarna is R478). These roads vary considerably--usually about one and a half lanes wide, maybe with a grassy edge on either side, to sometimes one lane wide with hedgerows on

either side. The hedgerows are often populated with thorny shrubs and vines, like hawthorn or blackberry, which can easily scratch the rented car. Car agencies check immediately for this when you return the car. Sometimes, under the mangle of plants, the hedgerow is actually stacked rocks which can do even more damage to your rented car. Sometimes, the road is only wide enough for one small car with no room to spare (we had a VW). Fortunately, we avoided the tourist crowds by coming in November. I would think it to be a nightmare to travel on these R roads with ten times the amount of traffic on them, maybe even tour buses.

The trip to Galway took about an hour and a half, through parts of The Burren, an almost otherworldly landscape of bare rock, scraped clean by the receding glaciers 15,000 years ago. Southeast of Galway, you pass by Oranmore, famous to me by the fiddle tune we play back home, “The Bucks of Oranmore”. Of course, there is also Steve Earle’s song, “The Galway Girl”, that was the darling of the Temple Bar pubs in Dublin when I was there in 2015.

We had lunch in the City Centre area of Galway in a wonderful seafood diner called McDonagh’s. I

had to have at least one more fish & chips. You could choose between cod, salmon, whiting, mackerel, smoked fish, hake, or sting ray for your fish portion. It was awesome. We had to navigate the downtown parking garage, which is an urban version of the R roads, the parking spots are tiny! You are parking almost mirror-to-mirror with other cars, and even the entrance/exits are extremely narrow. When the travel guides advise you to rent the smallest car that will accommodate your passengers and gear, believe them!

After a stroll around the City Centre, and a little shopping, we drove to the west side of Galway to Salthill Promenade, a lovely sidewalk stroll along Galway Bay, an inlet of the Wild Atlantic. We had to say we did it since it was in the song (even the couple in the song didn’t make it there because “the rain came down”. We saw a few people mucking around in the mudflats at the edge of the bay—real life “mudlarks”.

It is only a little over a 2-hour drive across Ireland on the M4 from Galway to the car rental place near the airport in Dublin. We turned in our car—no sweat—and got a ride on the rental shuttle to the airport terminal, then a city bus to the City Centre of Dublin. That took quite a long time. After figuring out which stop to get off, we dragged our suitcases down the streets to our hotel, The Temple Bar Inn—the same place that son-in-law, Josh, and I stayed back in 2015.

That first night, we stayed in the Temple Bar district, named not for the myriad of drinking establishments, but for the Temple Bar in London. Historically, a “bar” was a city gate erected across a thoroughfare that extended beyond the original city wall of London, functioning to control entry and exit without building another actual wall. British nobility built large, fancy houses with large, fancy gardens along the River Liffey in the 1600’s and named the area, and several of the streets, after their beloved Temple Bar area of London. Apparently, they didn’t stay long, because Dublin’s Temple Bar area became a center of prostitution in the 1700’s and suffered urban decay over the next 200 years.

The rents became cheap enough that small shop owners and pub owners began to move in. In the 1970’s, real estate developers proposed to bulldoze the entire district and build shopping centers, car parks, and a huge bus terminal. After major protests from residents and shop owners, the Irish government cancelled the project, set up a not-for-profit company, and redeveloped Temple Bar into a cultural district. That’s how democracy is supposed to work.

We ate that first night in Dublin at the Oliver St. John Gogarty Bar & Restaurant, a noisy tourist mecca with over-priced food, crowded even in November.

November 5^th, Tuesday

I’m sure the restaurant in the Temple Bar Inn has a good breakfast—in fact, I had one there nine years ago—but is too pricey for our blood on this trip. We struck out instead over to the O’Connell Street Bridge and over the River Liffey, to catch the Hop-On, Hop-Off tour bus we had got tickets for. This was a worthy investment as we got a good history tour of Dublin from a double-decker bus with an open-air top level. Somewhere around St. Stephen’s Green we hopped off and toured by foot for a while.

We had a nice lunch at O’Donoghue’s Bar and Lounge near the park—the pub that was home base for The Dubliner’s, a world-famous Irish band from the 1970’s. There is a statue in nearby St. Stephen’s Green park of Patrick Kavanagh, a beloved Irish poet who wrote the poem/song, “On Ragland Road”, a street nearby to both the park and O’Donoghue’s pub. Kavanagh the poet met Luke Kelly of the Dubliner’s in another local pub and taught him the song he had adapted with his poem for lyrics. The Dubliner’s turned it into a classic. Ragland Road itself is now a string of high-end fashion stores and tourist shops. We all agreed Ragland Road was not up our alley for this trip.

One thing I noticed walking around Dublin was the nearly complete absence of homeless people on the streets. During all our travels around Ireland, I saw one apparently homeless person asking for money in Dublin and one in Galway. You would see that many at any busy street corner in Fayetteville, Arkansas or Oklahoma City. Dublin is a city of 1.5 million people and Galway is about the size of Fayetteville. Even after some internet searching, I still can’t understand the difference between here and there. It must be something about the differing social safety nets systems.

We walked to the beautiful Irish Museum of Archeology and saw Irish artifacts 5,000 years old and more. We visited a private Museum of Dublin History operated by a professor of history, Eamon somebody. He gave us a great presentation with lots of pictures on the walls and artifacts of Dublin history. He was also quite humorous.

“What is the difference between God and Bono? . . . God doesn’t think he is Bono.” This is a great example of Irish humor and could easily be repurposed, we all agreed, for describing Donald Trump. On the back of Eamon’s business card is a quote from Oscar Wilde that is equally apropos for Donald Trump: “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

We got back on the bus and saw more sites from the open-air upper deck, including the original Guinness brewery, established in 1759. The bus swung through Phoenix Park in NW Dublin then back east towards the center of town along the north side of the River Liffey. We hopped off in the Smithfield area and walked towards ground zero of trad music in Dublin: The Cobblestone Pub.

We arrived just at 5:00 as it was starting to get dark, good timing for a spot near the music session which is always just to your left as you enter from the front door. The sessions begin between 2:00 and 4:30, depending on the day of the week, and run until closing time, usually somewhere around midnight—EVERYDAY!

These are top-notch musicians--both locals and others from all around Ireland who find themselves in Dublin. I chatted with a red-haired uillean piper near me who said he was from St. Louis. There are one or two musicians who lead the sessions, each of which lasts about two and a half hours. Then new leaders come in, many but not all the musicians give up their seats to other musicians, and they continue almost unnoticed.

One of the leaders of the first group playing when we arrived was a dark-haired young lady playing the concertina and sitting in the corner of the room with her back to the front window. I remembered a dark-haired girl in that very same spot back in 2015 when I first came to The Cobblestone. The owner, Tom Mulligan, had been sitting right next to her playing the Irish flute. He later mentioned to me the concertina girl was his teenage daughter.

Now, nine years later in 2024, the young lady gets up to take a break and, as she is passing us, I stop here and ask, “Is your father Tom Mulligan?” Surprised, she responds, “Why, yes!”

I told her my story of remembering her sitting in the same spot back in 2015 playing the concertina. Julie, Robyn, and I introduced ourselves. Her name is Méabh (pronounced “Maeve”). She said she was a high school senior in 2015. She is now a schoolteacher teaching Irish Gaelic to children in Dublin. She seemed so glad to meet us all and hoped her dad would be in soon to lead the next session. Tom Mulligan got held up and never made it, but Méabh gave us a Cobblestone cloth tote bag with four Cobblestone t-shirts and three stocking hats.

Méabh then introduced us to a big, hairy guy that just walked in the door, her brother, Tomás Mulligan. Tomás is a touring musician and told us he has played in Little Rock. We bought one of his cd’s and invited his band, Ispíní nah Éireann (The Sausages of Ireland) to stay with us the next time he tours the US.

We stayed at The Cobblestone for much of the evening, then grabbed some dinner at a restaurant off nearby Smithfield Square before walking down the north side of the River Liffey, amongst the sparkling lights of the water and bridges, back to Temple Bar. We crossed over on the Ha’ Penny Bridge and back to our hotel—a really full day in Dublin.

November 6^h, Wednesday

One last day in Dublin for a brief walking tour. The old flower and vegetable market I remember in the working-class neighborhood around Smithfield was closed for renovations. We bought some trinkets in the stores at the old Jameson Whiskey Distillery, then just wandered around to see what we might see—my favorite way of touring. We ended up at noon at The Brazen Head, advertised as Ireland’s oldest pub, established in 1198. This would have been right after Richard “Strongbow” de Clare, the Anglo-Norman leader seized Dublin and Waterford in the name of the English. Old Strongbow is entombed just a few

blocks over at Christ Church Cathedral.

The pub is very much updated and active for music, good food, and Guinness. After lunch, as we left the pub, a young red-haired lady followed us out and said, “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice your accents as I walked by. If it’s not too much, I would love to know your thoughts about yesterday’s election.”

Her name was Allana. She was intelligent and very informed about US politics. She said that people in Ireland watch American political news like others might watch Survivor or The Biggest Loser. That is, for entertainment. Secondarily, however, it is a

fact that what happens in America also affects them in Ireland. Plus, many in Ireland have family living in the States. Concerning her own country’s politics, she replied, “ours is deliciously boring”.

After a little more touring on foot, we went back to the Temple Bar Inn to check out, lugged our bags to the train station a few blocks away, and rode the metro train to the end of the line at Howth to eat dinner one last time at Octopussy by the docks. The food was great, the waitress was very personable and able, and stored our suitcases for us while we ate some fabulous seafood and had a toast to a wonderful trip to Ireland.

November 7^h, Thursday

We checked out of the Hotel Clayton (close to the airport with a shuttle service, but otherwise nothing much to recommend it), and made it through the lines at Dublin Airport. Went by way of London and Chicago on the way home (Charlotte on the way over). Next time, we want to skip the London stop, which is an extra hassle, and fly from the US straight to Dublin or maybe Shannon.

We made it home without incident—and without any illness--at about midnight.

I think we all agreed that our wee trip to Ireland was a resounding success. Even magical. The landscape. The friendly people. The food. The history and old ruins. The music. We want to return. Travel is good for the soul.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on those accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” -- Mark Twain

Butterfly Drive-Thru

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 02:06:00 +0000

Maybe you've seen the line of cars slowly creeping along through the drive-thru at McDonald's at breakfast time or a Chick-Fil-A at lunch--these places are crazy busy at times where I live. Native wildflowers are like that for pollinating insects. Here, a Great Spangled Fritillary butterfly (large one in center) is slurping up sweet nectar from a Purple Coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) in our yard. A Silver-Spotted Skipper (back left) and another type of Skipper wait in line. For these little fellows, it is not just about having a sweet tooth, it is a matter of life and death for the calories. Plant native wildflowers for the pollinators in your neighborhood. A good place to start is with the Butterfly Wildflowers Mix at Holland Wildflower Farm.com. You'll be surprised how busy your garden becomes!

New Spring Leaves

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 02:28:00 +0000

It's spring again--a little earlier this year, so they say. It is always exciting to me somehow to see the new leaves pushing out from all the various species of plants. It's like a promise of sorts. By late summer, those same leaves will be chewed on by insects, stippled by mites, and spotted by diseases; but right now, they are pristine. Most were formed last fall inside the bud as tiny versions of themselves. All of the cells are there in the bud. In spring, they puff up with water, like water balloons, and push out of the buds, swelling to their natural size before they harden their cell walls. Sometimes they don't have their complete level of chlorophyll yet, so they have a red blush--like the little oak leaves in the pics below. Click on an image to see an enlarged view.

Here's a sampling of what I'm seeing:

Red Buckeye in bud (native forest tree in our backyard) -- hummingbirds love it!

Mistletoe

New fiddlehead of Cinnamon Fern on the east side of our house.

Flower bud of Wisteria vine in Fayetteville.

Shumard Oak in our backyard.

Shumard Oak again.

'Forest Pansy' Redbud in Fayetteville.

Flowering Almond

Thirty foot-tall Bald Cypress in my yard, once a tiny seedling in a Southern Arkansas swamp.

Strawberry.

Dogwood

Viburnum

Virginia Creeper

Poison Ivy

Variegated Iris and Lily Pads in our water garden.

Elm leaves & seeds.

Native Virginia Bluebells by our water garden.

The Castration of Folk Music -- Performance Copyrights, Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 03:11:00 +0000

I left for college (Oklahoma State University) in the fall of 1972. The following year, I took an elective class, unrelated to my major, which would have a profound effect on me to this day. It was called The Geography of Country Music—a sociology course taught by Dr. George Carney. God bless you, George, for connecting me with my passion. I also taught myself to play guitar that year, using an Lp instruction record I picked up somewhere and an old pawnshop Kay guitar with f-holes.

In his class, I found my way into a whole new world of music: from ancient British Isle ballads--locked up for safekeeping in Appalachia--to old-time hillbilly, fiddle and banjo music, to bluegrass and early country music--before the Grand Old Opry was even old. And I learned of the social forces and changes in our nation’s history that determined where music migrated to.

And oh, the blues, and how that morphed, with European instruments, into jazz, and how it all blended together like gumbo into rhythm and blues in the ‘40’s before emerging, butterfly-like, into rock and roll in the ‘50’s. [it’s ironic that rock & roll put so many performers of these ancestral genres out of business for a number of years—Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, Muddy Waters—these guys couldn’t get gigs when rock & roll burst upon the scene!]

My new musical heroes were the Woody Guthrie’s and Pete Seegers. And Pete’s brother, Mike, and his New Lost City Ramblers with their academic fidelity to old-time string band music. And the Highwoods String Band, the Fuzzy Mountain String Band, and the eclectic Red Clay Ramblers. There were hot pickers like Norman Blake and Doc Watson. And blues guys like Robert Johnson, Elmore James, and Brownie & Sonny. Jazz guys like Django. And all the bluegrass, too. The year I started college, the borderline-hippie Nitty Gritty Dirt Band recorded their historic sessions with many of the legends of country, folk, and bluegrass music and released the Will The Circle Be Unbroken album. I devoured it.

But the core of it, for me, was the folk music. The whole process of it. Pete Seeger is fond of telling his story about jamming with Woody Guthrie and, even with traditional songs (public domain), Pete was never sure which verses were the original ones and which were ones that Woody added. And Woody thought this was the way it should be--how new songs came to be. He once commented on another songwriter to Pete saying, “Oh, he just stole from me, but I steal from everybody!” Pete termed this “the folk process” of music evolution—a healthy, natural cultural phenomenon. Like biological/ecological succession.

Pete helped to start Sing Out! Magazine in the 1960’s which is still published today. In each issue, they would have the music and lyrics to new songs from the folk singers of the day. Some of Bob Dylan’s iconic songs were first learned by baby boomer musicians by leafing through the pages of Sing Out!. And that was the point: getting people to sing the songs! And the songs were such a part of what the Sixties cultural revolution was about. Music was the vehicle that moved the movements. Pete Seeger dusted off an old hymn and offered it up at a civil rights gathering. Martin Luther King loved it and We Shall Overcome soon became the unofficial anthem of the movement.

On the weekends, in the college years, I played rhythm guitar for old ranchers at the Old Time Fiddlers’ Association meetings in Ripley, OK. I jammed with my new musical friends and even played in a coffeehouse on campus with a couple of buds as The South Sea Drifters (we played folk and bluegrass while dressed in Hawaiian shirts). We played whatever we liked—and whatever we could pull off!

Flash forward a few decades: the band I now play in, the Hogeye Ramblers, is having trouble finding a venue to play in because of some strange legal issues involving performance rights to copyrighted music.

In my next post, I’ll share about how this simple folk process of music performance and free sharing of songs has been corrupted (can I say castrated?) by the same sort of corporate interests that alarm the Occupy Wall Street folks and that caused a groundswell of reaction against the SOPA/PITA legislation (i.e., regulating the internet in the name of copyright infringement). I promise you, the music nazi’s are lurking in your town, too! It threatens coffeehouse owners, restaurants, clubs and even yoga instructors with hefty lawsuits. Those of you who know me well, know that I am not ordinarily an alarmist or a loose cannon, but this is real. More to come …

PostScript: You are more than welcome to visit the Hogeye Ramblers on YouTube but be forewarned—some of the songs may involve copyright infringement over performance rights! And for heaven’s sake, don’t let anyone see you tapping your foot or, even worse, start singing the songs yourself …

Ice Flowers and Frostweed

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 02:02:00 +0000

About three years ago, my wife and I were taking a winter walk to the back of our property. It was a nice, sunny morning, but had frosted hard during the night and the air temperature was still below freezing. After crossing the creek we walked into a clearing between two tree-lined areas. We saw the strangest meadow of flowers we'd ever seen--the flowers were made of ice! Scores of them!

We determined that each was coming from the broken stub of a woody stalk from a perennial plant that grew the previous season. We eventually learned that they were a perennial composite wildflower called Frostweed (Verbesina virginica). The next year we were able to establish them in our backyard. (I also learned not to allow the pretty white flowers to go to seed else all of my non-mowed areas will become a meadow of Frostweed).

The stalks grow 5-7 feet tall and can attract butterflies and other insects. The Wildflowers of Arkansas book says that the leaves are eaten by deer. They grow along streams, roadsides, open slopes and valleys and bloom in late summer and fall.

The really cool thing is that in late fall or on certain days of winter--when the ground is well-saturated and unfrozen, but the nights are cold--the bottom of the frostweed stems will still actively pump water from the perennial roots up through the base of the stem. Since the above ground portion of the stem is dead wood and usually has broken off, the water has nowhere to go but out. The water hits the cold air and immediately turns to ice. The water pressure inside the plant continues to push it out in gorgeous ribbons of ice called "ice flowers" or "frost flowers". Each one is unique. The thin ribbons are adorned with minute striations or lines--like spun ice--when viewed up close, formed by ribs in the tissues at the base of the plant. By late morning they have all disappeared due to the warm sun. Their ephemeral beauty makes them all the more special.

I've seen this nondescript plant for years without giving it any special thought or knowing its name. Now I notice it all along the roadsides and bordering riparian areas (wooded corridors along creeks and rivers). I've seen the pretty ice flowers along Hwy 16 as I drive to work.

Here are some more photos of our frost flowers ...

Here's where I stripped the outer layer of lower stem to see where the "frost" is coming from:

Proto-Rap and Bob Dylan

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 02:12:00 +0000

I confess that I am not a fan of rap "music". The quotation marks symbolize my problem with it, and with its twin, hip-hop--they simply are not musical to my ear. This genre sounds like angry people talking fast as if they are making a game of it, so I'll have to listen over and over to slowly unwrap their message. Some are crude and vulgar and demeaning to women. No thanks. Lest I be viewed as a crusty, old musical curmudgeon, let me offer a couple of positive points before I move into my thesis. I will say that rap has provided a platform for many people--black, white, and brown--to give voice to the issues in their lives. And rap/hip-hop has penetrated and expanded into middle-class white America and pop radio maybe beyond even that of the 1960's musical icons. That said, let's move to Mr. '60's Protest Icon, himself--Bob Dylan.

For the last several years, a recurring thought to me has been that maybe Bob Dylan invented rap. Every time I hear his song, Subterranean Homesick Blues, I think, "that is not rap, but it sounds like its parent". It was recorded way back in 1965 (when I was 11), on the Bringing It All Back Home album, which, by the way, also included his iconic Mr. Tambourine Man. (if I'm overusing the word "iconic", it's hard to think about Bob Dylan in the context of the '60's without using it. Dylan is the one that moved popular music out of the rut of silly songs like the Beatles "I love you, yeah, yeah, yeah" and on to more substantial ideas.) Here is a video from a 1967 documentary--before there were music videos--of Bob Dylan creatively fooling around with his song playing in the audio.

Check out the bearded guy in the background who is the last to meander away. He is Allen Ginsburg, famous beat poet of the 1950's and one of the mentors of Bob Dylan and scads of other hippie generation movers and shakers.

Let me know what you think of my thesis about Bob Dylan being the first rapper. By the way, Dylan's song is just another incarnation of various talking blues songs that Dylan heard from his other mentor, Woody Guthrie. It seems that even the most creative artists reshape other artists' ideas, add their own reflection, and present them to a new audience. That's good . . . what Pete Seeger calls "the folk process".

A Short History of Strawberries

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 02:37:00 +0000

Here’s a photo of some strawberries my daughter and her family in Oregon picked this summer. Last year, my wife and I picked strawberries at a small farm near our other daughter/son-in-law in North Carolina. Strawberries are wonderful! (I hated them as a kid because of a texture issue I had with the seeds; what was I thinking!) They are grown in pockets throughout most of the country. Sometimes I’m curious as to where a particular food came from, its history, so to speak. So why not strawberries?

Also, I was intrigued by the description of vast meadows of wild strawberries in early America--acres upon acres of them--given in a book I am reading, called Travels of William Bartram. Bartram was a second generation plant explorer/collector from Pennsylvania who kept a detailed log of a 2-year long trip he spent exploring the wilds of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida in the early 1770's, shortly before the Revolutionary War. It is a fascinating account of encounters with alligators in the middle of the night, beautiful wilderness, and friendly encounters with native Indian cultures. Here is an excerpt about coming upon a huge field of wild strawberries in Cherokee country of North Georgia (note: the spelling and grammar are all his):

Proceeding on our return to town, continued through part of this high forest skirting on the meadows: began to ascend the hills of a ridge which we were under the necessity of crossing; and having gained its summit, enjoyed a most enchanting view; a vast expanse of green meadows and strawberry fields; a meandering river gliding through, saluting in its various turnings the swelling, green, turfy knolls, embellished with parterres of flowers and fruitful strawberry beds; flocks of turkies strolling about them; herds of deer prancing in the meads or bounding over the hills; companies of young, innocent Cherokee virgins, some busy gathering the rich fragrant fruit, others having already filled their baskets, lay reclined under the shade of floriferous and fragrant native bowers of Magnolia, Azalea, . . . disclosing their beauties to the fluttering breeze, and bathing their limbs in the cool fleeting streams; whilst other parties, more gay and libertine, were yet collecting strawberries, or wantonly chasing their companions, tantalising them, staining their lips and cheeks with the rich fruit.

The sylvan scene of primitive innocence was enchanting, and perhaps too enticing for hearty young men long to continue idle spectators. In fine, nature prevailing over reason, we wished at least to have a more active part in their delicious sports.

Bartram and his companion, a local trader, were soon discovered by some older Cherokee matrons who sounded an alarm that sent the young ladies scattering for cover. Some of them subsequently emerged and offered the travelers some fresh strawberries:

We accepted a basket, sat down and regaled ourselves on the delicious fruit, encircled by the whole assembly of the innocent jocose sylvan nymphs: by this time the several parties, under the conduct of the elder matrons, had disposed themselves in companies on the green, turfy banks.

My young companion, the trader, by concessions and suitable apologies for the bold intrusion, having compromised the matter with them, engaged them to bring their collections to his house at a stipulated price: we parted friendly.

I began to wonder if the strawberry was indeed a native plant or had been introduced by early colonists from Europe. After all, Europeans had been a constant presence in the area since the founding of St. Augustine in 1565. By Bartram's time, it had been well over 200 years--nearly as long as his colonial times to our own.

The story of the strawberry is really pretty cool. When Europeans came to Massachusetts the native Indians were already cultivating beds of native strawberries (Fragaria virginiana). When the Spanish arrived to conquer Chile and Peru in the 1500's, the natives had been cultivating and trading strawberries (Frageria chiloensis), probably for many centuries. Unfortunately, the eastern strawberries were very small compared to today's strawberries (actually the native strawberry still grows in wild in parts of the Eastern US); and the western strawberry (grows from Chile to Alaska along the western mountains) was larger but not as flavorful.

It wasn't until 1712 when an enterprising Frenchman named Frezier brought back seven plants from Chile with particularly large fruit. He planted them in France and for 30 years they were propagated and flourished, but never produced fruit. Finally, someone happened to plant some strawberries from the American colonies next to these beds. What Frezier didn't know was that the western strawberry (F. chiloensis) had male and female flowers on different plants. He had only collected female plants. The male pollen from the eastern strawberry plants (F. virginiana) fertilized the Chilean female flowers and the fortuitous result was a large, flavor-packed hybrid. All of our cultivated strawberry varieties today (except ever-bearing types) are descended from this bed of strawberries growing in France. Isn't it ironic that our two native species of strawberry had to go all the way to France to get together, then come back home and fill our baskets.

Remember this bit of botanical serendipity next time you bite into a big 'ol juicy strawberry!

Post Script: William Bartram also spent time, on numerous occasions, as a guest in native Indian villages. There he observed another way to eat strawberries: the women would grind the fruit with mortar and pestle into a mush, then mix it in with corn mush and drop it in hot bear fat for strawberry corn fritters or bake it for strawberry corn bread. Try it out! (maybe sans the bear fat ...)

[facts gleaned from Plants For Man by Robert Schery and the website of Vegetarians in Paradise; for a more complete account, go to this link)]

The Down Side of Democracy

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 17:13:00 +0000

The projected date of default of U.S. treasury obligations looms like the shadow of El Capitan does over pretty Yosemite Valley. As I write this post, the deadline arrives next week. Congress is busy, but at the wrong things . . . busy voting on partisan legislation as they prepare for the next round of elections in 2012--knowing full well that the current bills will never pass both House and Senate or be signed by the President. Even within each political party there is wide disagreement. All observers agree that the Congress is pathetically dysfunctional.

We are witnessing one of the downsides of democracy. Our leaders are producing political campaign fodder instead of skillful agreements. All this pushing and shoving is just jacking around on a narrow trail that leads the country past a dangerous ledge--way down at the bottom of which is a wrecked economy . . . and the beginning of our new chapter in world history as a second-rate, has-been world power. Did you know that the Netherlands was once the world superpower? Portugal was big time! It can happen. China and Brazil are no longer economic slouches.

At the risk of sounding somehow unAmerican, I must pass on what I learned from the teaching of Charles Simpson, an Alabama pastor in the 1980's. He said that democracy is not the best form of government, but monarchy by an all-powerful, all-wise, all-merciful king. In other words, democracy may be the best government formed by men on earth. But as we are witnessing now, democracy can be weak and indecisive, even foolish. A king who knows the right thing to do simply declares it. 'Nuf said. The kingdom of heaven will some day rule the earth in the person of King Jesus. And only then will we have the perfect government.

Beauty Upon Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 21:24:00 +0000

It is hard to look at a sunset without stopping to appreciate the utter beauty of it. To then connect that beauty to God’s beauty is an appropriate response of worship. The beauty that we see in God’s creation is only a reflection of His own beauty and majesty.

Three hour-long sunset during the summer soltice in Alaska; taken at midnight
(courtesy of my daughter, Nellie, and her husband, Dustin Vail, 2008 )

My wife and I sometimes try to name all the colors that we see in a sunset. There are problems with that: I’m not an artist, so my vocabulary of color names is limited to something like the 24-pack of Crayolas™ (remember "periwinkle"?). God’s palette is much richer than my vocabulary. Another problem is my lack of perception of all the subtle nuances of color, one ever so slightly different from another. And then, as soon as I try to describe the colors in one single cloud, the colors have all changed as the angle of the sun shifts down or as the cloud itself shifts.

Sunsets are a dynamic art; kind of like those little tubular kaleidoscopes you looked through as a kid, the colors and patterns constantly changing as you twist the end of the cardboard tube. Beauty upon beauty. Sunsets are like that. God is like that … beauty upon beauty if we will stop to notice. Lifestyle worship is about stopping to notice the beauty, the attributes and nature of God—how He impacts our lives, how we don’t deserve it—and then responding appropriately in praise and thanksgiving to Him . . . lavish praise, free and unbridled praise.

Did you know that the LORD is listening and hears when you praise Him? . . . And that He responds? . . . And that it makes Him smile? . . . The Bible says:

“For the LORD takes delight in his people …

Psalm 145 is like a hymn of praise to God, written by King David nearly 3000 years ago. Praise is very much a verb, an action. Our English word, “praise”, is from an Old French word meaning “to prize”.

Check out Psalm 145. As you read through it, notice all the verbs, I will:

praise…exalt…extol…commend…tell…speak…meditate…proclaim…celebrate…joyfully sing.

You can use Psalm 145 to look at a few of the many sides of God, like a God-kaleidoscope, to see Him as He truly is: beauty upon beauty.

No Wonder They Make Such A Racket!

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 04:51:00 +0000

The sound is pervading, it’s unrelenting . . . surreal. Heard from a distance, one imagines some kind of industrial equipment humming along; or maybe a mass cheer from a far off football stadium—a cheer that doesn’t end. Up close, it sounds like thousands of rattlesnakes in the trees. It’s been thirteen years in the making and now one month of noise-making. We’ve been invaded by the Thirteen Year Cicada.

The love calls begin at daybreak and end at dark . . . until the next daybreak when it starts all over again. Unless you happen to hear an individual cicada (a.k.a. “locust”) zip by or on a branch just above you, what you hear is the mass of cicadas—all doing their thing at once without a break.

Julie and I recently took a jaunt down to our creek to look at some wildflowers. We began to notice the classic empty “shells” of locusts on tree trunks and plant leaves. But it wasn’t the occasional ones that you see every summer in the Ozarks. They were everywhere! And a couple of days later the noise started. It is so constant that the mind unconsciously ignores it—selecting it out as unimportant background--until someone points it out to you. And then you hear it and you are amazed. And it doesn’t go away.

Finally, I saw a live one on our picnic table. The most striking feature is the almost glowing brick-red eyes. I didn’t remember our regular locusts with those eyes. A quick internet search told me that this was not the regular Dog Day Locust that we have each year (so called because they emerge during the hot, dog-days of July and August). This was the first week of May. I determined by its markings that we had Magicicada tredecula. There are basically three species of periodical or cyclical cicadas in the U.S. All three species have a 13-year and a 17-year version of the same insect.

Weirder than those eyes is the fact that these little guys and gals have been waiting since 1998 for this big moment. One month of non-stop flirting and mating. (They do stop at night, apparently, but non-stop in the sense that apparently the adult stage doesn’t even bother to eat) They’re here for one thing only. The noise is from the massive congregation of males calling to the females, trying to attract a mate--like thugs catcalling and talkin’ trash at the girls walking down the street. Check out a wonderful video short from the BBC with David Attenborough of Planet Earth fame.

The males have two little flaps on their segmented bellies covering a hollow chamber. Stretched across the Inside of the chamber is a thin membrane like the skin of a drum, with muscles that it can use to vibrate the drum to make its sound. The female, on the other hand, has no such structure; she only makes a clicking sound with her wings to indicate that she is hot to trot and likes what she hears from her bug-eyed Romeo. After they mate, she uses a saw-like appendage on the end of her belly to cut a couple of slits into a nearby tree stem. She then lays her eggs in a neat row in each slit.

Dime-size emergence holes under our water oak tree.

The eggs will hatch after a few days, and tiny larval versions crawl out of the slit and drop to the ground. They burrow about one foot deep into the earth and start sucking sap from tree roots for the next thirteen summers, buried in the dark, not hearing a sound. God only knows (I mean that literally) how each cicada knows when the thirteen years are up and it’s time for everyone to emerge again.

Geographic range of Brood XIX

It turns out there are different groups or “broods” of these bugs around the country. Each brood might be dispersed over many states in the Upper South and Midwest. Another brood may only be in a couple of states on the Atlantic Seaboard. All of the individual cicadas of a certain brood emerge at the same time: every thirteen or seventeen years, depending on which brood. Ours is Brood Nineteen (XIX) which stretches from the Gulf Coast to Indiana and from Oklahoma to Virginia. [map from Cicadia Mania] The last emergence was in 1998; the next will be in 2024—clean as clockwork. There is a brood of 17-yr cicadas in New England which were first noted by European colonists in the early 1600’s. Four hundred years later the same brood is still emerging every 17 years. They’ve been doing that, no doubt, since the last glaciers retreated from New England ten thousand years ago or so.

Thirteen summers … thirteen winters … thirteen springs and falls … that’s a long time to wait for . . . well, you know. No wonder they make such a racket!

[all photos by Bob Holland; first video by Julie Holland]

A Winter Commute’s Glorious Diversion

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 20:38:00 +0000

As I drove to work from my little bedroom community into Fayetteville, AR this winter, I spotted what I at first thought was a white plastic bag caught in the top of a tree about forty yards from the highway (known generically in these parts as “a WalMart bag”). After a classic double-take, I realized it was a lone bird—absolutely pure white—sitting in this lone tree in a pasture. It was obviously a raptor of some type, but the only pure white raptor I knew of was a Snowy Owl which, according to my bird book, does migrate from the Arctic in winter as far south as Missouri. A quick internet search informed me that Snowy Owls have been sighted in Arkansas three times over the years. But this just didn’t seem right.

This is as close as it ever let me come.

I saw the same bird in the same tree two more times and again in some riparian woods lining the Middle Fork of the White River about a hundred yards from the highway. Still, these were only observations at 55 mph without binoculars. One Saturday, I grabbed my binoculars, bird books and camera, and drove to the spot that I’d seen the bird before. I was better prepared this time, but no bird. On a lark, I decided to drive down a side road to the back of a subdivision which butts up against pastures and scattered woodlots along the Middle Fork. As I pulled into the last cul-de-sac there was the bird: facing me from seventy-five yards away sitting in an old dead tree behind a house. I snapped a preliminary photo (through my windshield), and grabbed my binocs. It looked like a pure white hawk. It had bright yellow feet (talons). I then slipped open the car door and snuck around the side of the house to try to out-flank the bird. Of course, being a raptor, the bird’s eyesight is much better than my own, maybe even with my binoculars, I don’t know. The bird had flown.

The next week I tried again. Trolling again down the side road, I quickly spotted the bird in a tree at the edge of a 2-acre woodlot where it gives way to a pasture which runs through the Middle Fork valley. I decided to hop the fence and sneak through the woods to try to get a close look. I saw some interesting things in the woods, like this pretty orange Bolete—a wood-rotting mushroom fungus with pores instead of gills. But the bird knew what I was up to and was gone by the time I emerged on the other end.

And then I heard the call.

A long, single, descending “screeeeee ….” rang out from the other side of the pasture. I made my way to that side of the woods and again heard the call. Sure enough, in that direction, was the brilliant white bird sitting in a tree on the other side of the pasture. It was a hawk call, probably a red-tail. As I began to walk across the pasture, the hawk took flight, cursing me with scree! Up until this moment, I had only seen the hawk from the front. As he/she flew away, from my right to left, I could see the wings and sides—pure blazing, beautiful white! All over!

Now I can spot the bird from quite a distance because of the color (or lack thereof). But I have given up harassing the poor thing when I don’t even have a spotting scope to get a better look. I googled pure white hawks and found a website with some really nice photos of albino hawks that look just like my Middle Fork friend. Unfortunately, the site did not give permission to re-use the images, but here are three others from other sites:

white Red-Tailed Hawk, Albany, NY (R. Guthrie)

white Red-tail in rehab center

How gorgeous is this white Red-tail!

I also emailed an ornithologist at the University of Arkansas, Joe Neal, about what I was seeing. He told me that a local birder from Round Mountain, near my town, had been watching this bird for years. Fifteen years to be exact! Joe put me in touch with Jim Morgan who said that the bird has been wintering here since at least 1995, but normally stays up-river about a quarter mile or more, away from the highway and more out of sight.

There has been some discussion about whether this is a red-tail or a red-shouldered hawk. The call is that of a red-tail (a red-shouldered hawk will cry out several times in a row). And Jim saw it once, backlit by the sun, revealing a faint, pink band on the tail like a red-tail. The biggest question is whether it is a true albino or is very leucistic. Joe Neal says that even an albino can have color in the feet and bill. But the eyes will be pink. I can’t get close enough to see the eye color on this bird. Leucism is a genetic trait caused by separate genes those that cause albinism. Leucism can be complete or partial, and can affect all kinds of critters, not just birds. I have a musician friend who has small leucistic patches of white amongst his generally dark, brown hair.

Here are some further distinctions from about.com: Albinism is another genetic condition that can turn a bird’s plumage pale, but there are distinct differences between albino and leucistic birds. Leucism affects only the bird’s feathers, and typically only those with melanin pigment – usually dark feathers. A leucistic bird with different colors may show some colors brightly, especially red, orange or yellow, while feathers that should be brown or black are instead pale or white. Some leucistic birds, however, can lose all the pigment in their feathers and may appear pure white.

Albinism, on the other hand, affects all the pigments, and albino birds show no color whatsoever in their feathers. Furthermore, an albino mutation also affects the bird’s other pigments in the skin and eyes, and albino birds show pale pink or reddish eyes, legs, feet and a pale bill, while leucistic birds often have normally colored eyes, legs, feet and bills.

While leucism can be unusual and exciting for a birder to see, birds with the condition face special challenges in the wild. Lighter plumage may rob the birds of protective camouflage and make them more vulnerable to predators such as hawks and feral cats. Because plumage colors play an important role in courtship rituals, birds with leucism may be unable to find strong, healthy mates. Melanin is also an important structural component of feathers, and birds with extensive leucism have weaker feathers that will wear out more swiftly, making flight more difficult and eliminating some of the bird’s insulation against harsh weather. White feathers also reflect heat more efficiently, which can be fatal for birds that rely on sunbathing and solar radiation for heat in northern climates.

While I can’t vouch for his/her’s sex life, our Middle Fork red-tail seems to be doing quite well and has been for at least 15 years . . . a glorious bit of God’s green earth, and a real treat for me--spicing up an otherwise dull commute on a winter’s morning.

Thoughts on Faith and Evolution

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 17:10:00 +0000

Someone recently expressed interest in my thoughts--as a committed Christian, a former atheist, and a working scientist—about the contentious topic of evolution. For many years I have simply avoided this discussion. I am ready now to address it. I write this to as broad an audience as possible—Christians, atheists, scientists, and non-scientists, and everyone in-between. And I would love to hear your thoughts back at me, whatever they may be. Let me say a couple of things right up front: as when I was as an atheist, I am only interested in Truth, regardless of what that turns out to be—whether God created the world, much as it is now, in six 24-hr days or gradually over millions and even billions of years. I personally have nothing to gain or lose either way.

My beliefs fall into a category that some have called “theistic evolution”. I believe in the theory of evolution, as presented by Darwin 150 years ago, and developed into the paradigm accepted amongst nearly all practicing biologists today. I also believe that evolution is compatible with my Christian beliefs. I simply believe that evolution is God-driven. This position presents all sorts of questions and objections from either side of the Great Divide of opinion on this topic. I will explore a few of these and tell my story in the next paragraphs. I hope that it provokes fresh, profitable thought in your own mind, and perhaps an interesting, respectful discussion in future blog comments. Here goes . . .

My Journey

I graduated from Oklahoma State University in the spring of 1976 with a B.S. in wildlife ecology. I got my first real job as a scientist the very next month, collecting field data for various environmental studies. The next sixteen years, including graduate school, were spent as a working scientist, initially in the field of plant ecology, later in plant pathology (plant diseases). After many years as an unabashed atheist, somewhere in all of that, I had a spiritual encounter with God and became a born-again Christian. After my university position was relocated to another city to which I didn’t care to move, I spent eleven years in the landscaping industry. Eventually I found myself as pastor of a small church. Now I am back at the same university again as a research scientist.

During all of my years in science, I've never had a colleague question me about my faith (how can I be a born-again Christian and be a scientist at the same time?) or made to feel second rate as a professional scientist because of my faith (which I freely made known). Never did my faith waiver in the university climate. Never even did the debate about evolution and creation arise on the job—until my job was as pastor of a church. There it was assumed that I agreed that the whole bunk about evolution was just that--bunk. I was teetering now at the very edge of The Great Divide: the false dichotomy that one must believe in God or believe in evolution, but never shall the twain meet. I don’t remember a single Christian admitting to me that they believed in the process of evolution (that doesn’t mean there were no such people in my midst; if so, they simply, like me, kept their mouths shut). I don’t believe this Great Divide of opinion necessarily exists in all parts of the country or in all Christian circles.

During the pastor years, I had successfully evaded the notion to reconcile my belief in God with my steadfast confidence in the “theory” (see below) of evolution as the only plausible explanation for the natural order of things that scientists study on a daily basis. As mentioned before, I never felt any pressure from university colleagues to explain the seeming contradiction, despite a thick cloud of controversy in the air--my adopted state of Arkansas had recently made national news for its part in a contentious legal case, McLean vs. Arkansas Board of Education, involving the teaching of creation science in public schools (ruled unconstitutional by a federal court in 1982 as “religion, not science”). It would be another decade before I felt inclined to tackle the issue.

My time in the landscaping business only fueled my awe of nature and my appreciation of God as its Creator. The how orwhen of creation was--and is--a secondary issue for me. As a theologically conservative Christian, I was considerably torn, being told that we were in a culture war and that believing in evolution was tantamount to siding with the enemy. Because of my science background, I could not let go of the notion that natural selection over a long period of time--whereby individuals with genetic traits that are most compatible with their current circumstances and environment are most likely to live long enough to breed and reproduce those genetic traits--and the genetic interrelatedness of creatures, is the best explanation for the innumerable observations that researchers make on a daily basis. As a pastor, my convictions about evolution by natural selection remained solid. However, such a stance is considered heretical in many conservative circles, so I simply kept my opinions to myself.

An Unprofitable Debate

Here is as good a place as any to make an important point: I truly doubt that Jesus is pleased about the premier role that the evolution-creation debate has taken in the spiritual life of America. This debate has hijacked the more critical issues of faith, love, grace, eternity and the purpose of life. It seems that what one’s stance is on the creation-evolution question often becomes a litmus test for being a Christian or an intellectual—that is, you cannot be a Christian if you believe in Darwin’s theory; you cannot be an intellectual if you are a Christian. This is hooey! And many good people, possibly open to spiritual truth, have needlessly fled as a result. If you believe that there is a Satan (I do), then believe this: he loves the creation-evolution debate!

So Exactly What Do I Think?

During my five years as pastor of an evangelical Christian church, my ideas quietly solidified into the following nine convictions:

(1) Natural Selection.

The natural world that we see today developed gradually over millions of years by the process of speciation (descent) by natural selection (i.e., evolution). I believe that God directed this process, and continues to oversee or observe it, because evolution is, by definition, an on-going process. I believe that, although the process appears to be random from a scientific perspective, it is not. Evolution is God-engineered (the original genetic engineer), perhaps from a distance, so to speak, by creating the process and then letting it run its course; or by close involvement in the various turns that speciation has taken over time. Since He lives eternally, time is something that God has plenty of.

(2) The Big Bang. The physical earth and the physical universe developed as a consequence of what is known as The Big Bang—an incredible explosion of energy that became matter (remember E = mc² ?). Power-packed matter expanded from something the size of a pin head to the universe we know today, containing an estimated 100 billion galaxies, each with from millions to a hundred trillion stars (suns) and innumerable planets. It is estimated that there is a total of
1, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars like our Sun! (that’s 24 zeroes—a trillion trillion.) God said, “Let there be light”, and buddy, there was light! We can’t look directly at the sun because the intense light (solar radiation) can damage our retina. Think of the total amount of light, and heat energy, coming from a trillion trillion suns. Let there be light indeed!

Scientists have formed a consensus around the Big Bang Theory that is very well documented and reasoned, and yet they don’t hesitate to say that how or why or what existed before is totally out of their purview. By their own admission, it can’t be known. They can explain the physics of everything back to microseconds after the initial bang (13 to 14 billion years ago), but they can’t know what was before—physics does not apply on that side.

(3) God Lit the Fuse. The God described in the Bible (by both Jews and Christians) is responsible for the Big Bang. The Big Bang is not a threat to people of faith or an affront to God in any way. If you cannot believe that God could create such a big bang, then perhaps your own picture of God is not big enough. This applies whether you or secular or religious.

(4) Genesis tells Who, not how. The creation account in chapter one of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, is an allegorical account (symbolic) meant to say Who created what we see and are. It is not meant to be a scientific treatise or literal timeline of the creation. I realize that this part of the discussion—the interpretation of Genesis--is the real sticky point for many Christians, and perhaps many Jews as well. I do not take lightly how we interpret this or any other part of the Bible. Perhaps one could think of the creation account in chapter one as a story, along the lines of the many parables (representative stories that convey important truths) that Jesus told, such as, “There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father …” (the Prodigal Son parable). I believe the creation account in Genesis is meant simply to convey what David summarized in Psalm 24: “The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; for he founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters.”

Genesis is the cliff note version of creation. The Apostle John said that there are a lot of things left out of the Bible. In the last sentence of his Gospel account of Jesus, John said: “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” So the Bible tells the essentials of the story, but not all the details.

If God had shared the scientific details with Moses in writing the Genesis account, it would have remained confusing nonsense for another four thousand or so years, until scientific understanding caught up with it. Can you imagine the Israelites trying to piece together what a guanine-cytosine base pair is, what DNA/RNA and proteins are? And what any of this has to do with why a hyrax (small mammal mentioned in the Bible) is so different from a stork, and yet shares so many genes and basic characteristics of metabolism? Read through the following link and see if you think such an account would have been appropriate reading for people of Moses’ time who were still more than 3,000 years ahead of even figuring out the germ theory of disease (i.e., that most diseases are caused by “invisible” microorganisms, not by spontaneous generation, moon phases or black cats). Check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_evolution .

(5) The Human Species. This God-directed process, begun on earth around 4 billion years ago, evolved many branches, including various hominid genera (human-like mammals), with the genus Homo appearing around 2.5 million years ago. Various Homo species developed--some living at the same time--all but Homo sapiens eventually dying out. At some point, probably about 200,000 years ago (see the proposed timeline link above), the only human species left was Homo sapiens, subspecies sapiens.

(6) An Animal of a Different Sort. At this point, around 200,000 years ago, God intervened, I hypothesize, and supernaturally endowed Homo sapiens--either an individual pair (Adam and Eve), a small group of humans (consider the argument: where did Cain’s wife come from?), or the entire species--with a whole new dimension. He gave them an eternal soul and a concomitant knowledge of the Moral Law (that is, knowledge of right from wrong). Note: If you cannot accept this because you do not believe in the existence of God, the spiritual realm, or immortal souls, I understand. Neither did I for many years, and I know that neither I nor anyone else can argue you into it. Or perhaps you are a person of faith, but cannot accept it because it requires an alternative view of the Creation story and the Garden of Eden. Either way, please bear with me and let’s see where this goes . . .

(7) Spread of Mankind and Development of Religion. Mankind developed into many cultures and races, beginning in Africa, spreading to the Middle East, Europe and Asia--all with a consciousness of the supernatural realm and a felt need to search for meaning in life. Anthropologists and archaeologists have documented a near universal interest in the supernatural amongst primitive people groups, present and past. By 40,000-60,000 years ago, early humans had island-hopped across stretches of ocean (up to 60 miles at a time) to populate Australia. Around 16,000 years ago, some crossed a frozen land bridge over the Bering Strait, during the most recent of four great ice ages, and “quickly” colonized North, Central, and South America. God had imparted a supernatural or God-consciousness to humans, but had not begun any personal relationships. No human knew God.

.Perhaps around 2000 B.C., God got personal with a fellow named Abram in what is now considered southern Iraq. After a name change to Abraham, he became a central figure in three great world religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. You can read about Abraham and his progeny--the patriarchs Isaac and Jacob—beginning in Genesis 11 to the end of that book. Around 1400 B.C., God got personal again with one of Abraham’s descendents, a Hebrew-Egyptian named Moses. God did many incredible, even miraculous, things during Moses’ lifetime. Moses began writing down these and other things that God has done--and why he did them. Moses was the first of many biblical authors, writing the first five books of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, including Genesis. Of course, other people groups throughout the world developed alternative religious beliefs, often based on the natural environment around them.

(8) God’s Glory Displayed By Nature. The vast array of plants, animals, microbes, physical elements and physical laws of nature—all—are a part of God’s glory. [go watch a few episodes of Planet Earth if you want to get a sense of this; or just go take a nature hike.] Natural phenomena should bring each of us to a sense of awe in God. The more we observe and learn of the intricacies of His creation, the more awe we should feel. Worship is an appropriate response to this feeling.

There is nothing in science that people of faith should fear or obstruct. God and faith are beyond the purview of science and yet are compatible with it. For me, seeing something new under the microscope and then reading the incredible nature stories that others have uncovered about it, brings me to an attitude of worship to the Creator. I could bore you for hours about the intricate biochemical warfare going on all around us between plants and fungi. The more we peer into the invisible worlds of biochemistry and quantum physics (the “solar system” of atoms), and ecology, the better we can appreciate our powerfully creative and intelligent God. Beauty in nature and the beauty of God are part of the same thing. Science merely pulls back the curtain from the masterpiece and enables us to see it better.

(9) God Is Totally Interested in Me and You. God is intimately familiar with--and interested in--every individual human being, including you. Yes, you! (insert your name here …). He is interested in your well-being and He is interested in what you think about Him. He wants you to know Him. I don’t believe that God simply started the process of evolution and remained aloof ever after, or that Homo sapiens just happened into existence by chance after the ball got rolling. I believe that H. sapiens was always a part of God’s plan in evolution and, in fact, His primary purpose. I also believe that God is intimately involved in forming each individual person.

I live in a rural area with little "light pollution" and a clear view of the sky. I oftentimes have had the experience on a clear night, looking up at the expanse of stars that we call the Milky Way galaxy, and wondering how the One that made all of that could give a hoot about me. King David, about 1000 B.C., expressed the same thing in a poem that we call Psalm 8: “O LORD, our Lord . . .When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” As we shall see, God does very much care about you. One implication is that, if God can design and implement such a grand, complex universe, can He not make things happen in your life and mine? Can He not help fix a marriage, a career, or an addiction?

Even as the ideas presented above began to gel in my mind, I was still not interested in devoting study time to these issues. I felt (and still feel) that way too much time and negative emotional energy has been expended on the creation-evolution debate. Disrespectful, ugly behaviors and haughty attitudes on both sides often kill the conversation. The discussion has been largely unproductive, even destructive. Way too many secular people have fled from faith because of this argument; and way too many believers have fled from science, perhaps in a misguided attempt to somehow defend God, as if that were necessary. And yet, I felt a need to clarify my position in my own mind.

I read several books about the evolution-creation debate, including books by real scientists who are also committed Christians. (Note: not all who write about the science part of this debate are real scientists. Some who write about science in books or popular literature are merely parroting the arguments of someone else who are parroting someone else, very few of whom are practicing scientists. Others “masquerade” as creation-scientists, dabbling outside of the realm of peer-reviewed journals and legitimate scientific institutions, in order to “prove” that the scientific establishment is wrong about its evolution paradigm.) [Note: I will concede--after receiving an email critical of this article, and doing an internet search--that there are a few exceptions within the creation science/intellegent design camp, who indeed have published scientific articles in bonifide, peer-reviewed journals, who work as faculty members of major university science departments, and who are, undoubtably brilliant scientists. The views of some of these scientists are not accepted within their own university departments. I accept the ideal of scientific freedom to advance unpopular theories--Galileo and Einstein had the same problem. However, I stand by my previous statement that many creation-scientists are not ligitimate scientists in the sense of engaging the scientific community within the realm of accepted journals and meetings.] At the end of this paper I’ve listed a few authors that I think understand both science and God.

What Some Others Think

I suppose I am like most other folks in being especially attracted to authors and books that confirm what I already think or who point in the direction I am already inclined to go. What they do is help us to consolidate and order our own ideas and to articulate them for us. One book that details the history of the debate is Saving Darwin—How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution by Karl W. Giberson. I hope soon to post his section called A Brief History of Everything , a succinct account of the Big Bang (not to be confused with similarly titled books by Ken Wilber and Bill Bryson).

My favorite book that I read is The Language of God—A Scientist Presents Evidence For Belief by Dr. Francis S. Collins (2006). Collins was head of the Human Genome Project, a worldwide collaborative effort that successfully translated the entire human DNA code. In 2009, he was appointed head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), the lead government agency funding health research projects. Collins is a serious scientist, a physician, and a Christian philosopher.

Dr. Collins gives a good summary on the origins of the universe, the expansion of life on planet Earth, and a primer on how genes tell us so much about where we came from. He discusses the biblical description of creation and how Galileo and Darwin unintentionally rankled (irritated) the Church. He then spends a chapter each on atheists and agnostics, on Creation Science, Intelligent Design, and Theistic Evolution --science and faith in harmony. I consider myself in the latter category. Below, I’ve listed six premises that Collins says are common to a theistic evolution stance:

1. The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago.

2. Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life. [in other words, physical laws, such as the speed of light, the force of gravity, electromagnetic forces between subatomic particles, etc.]

3. While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time.

4. Once evolution got under way, no special supernatural intervention was required. [I don’t subscribe to this part necessarily ...]

5. Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes. [This is not the same as saying that we came from monkeys or chimpanzees, which is not true.]

6. But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.

About Theories and Evolution

A sidebar is in order here. I have purposely avoided using the phrase, The “Theory of Evolution”, for a reason. There is sort of myth that is widespread among non-scientists, particularly those who oppose evolution, about what a “theory” is. It often goes something like this:

“Well, the Theory of Evolution is just that—it is only a theory. Evolution has not been proven.”

Scientists have a different take on this word. Allow Francis Collins to clarify the issue:

My Funk & Wagnall’s dictionary provides the following two alternative definitions for the word “theory”: “(1) a speculative or conjectural view of something; (2) fundamental principles underlying a science, art, etc: music theory, theory of equations.”

It is this second usage that scientists intend when they talk about evolutionary theory, just as when they mention gravitational theory or the germ theory of infectious disease. In this context, the word ‘theory’ is not intended to convey uncertainty; for that purpose a scientist would use the word “hypothesis”. In common, everyday usage, however, “theory” takes on a much more casual context, as reflected in Funk & Wagnall’s option 1: “I have a theory that Bill has a crush on Mary,” or “Linda’s theory is that the butler did it.” It is too bad that our language lacks the necessary subtleties of distinction here, as clearly this simple confusion of the meaning of the word has made things worse in the contentious dialogue between science and faith about how living things are related.

In other words, when scientists and educators talk about evolution as a theory, it is like talking about gravitational theory, electromagnetic theory, or music theory. A major tonic chord in music is made up of the root note, together with the third and fifth tones of that scale. Even though every music professor, teacher or musician in the country could agree on what tones make a tonic chord, we still call it “music theory”, that is, the theoretical aspects of music. Think of this when you hear a scientist talk about evolutionary theory. Evolution is the working paradigm amongst mainstream biologists the world over. They are not arguing over its merits, and haven’t during my lifetime and before.

The uncertainties in evolutionary theory arise over specific questions such as what ecological factors force biochemical changes in a certain group of organisms. But if a person has scriptural or faith issues with the concept of evolution, it is an entirely different debate--one that, like other issues of faith, will not be resolved in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Is Evolution a Scientifically Sound Idea?

Some people will argue that the Theory of Evolution is based on faulty data (“Carbon¹⁴ dating of fossils is not accurate”) or lacks adequate evidence (“No one has ever found the missing links—the intermediate species between major animal groups.”). These are empty claims by well-meaning people who are parroting others who are parroting others who don’t know better. In fact, a great number of what are called variously transitional or intermediate species have been uncovered in fossil form. Clink the link to see a web page with graphics and information (with more links) on these transitional fossils:

Ichthyornis, a transitional reptile/bird that retains small teeth.

The total number of fossilized species is less than paleontologists would like. The necessary conditions for fossilization are so narrow that it is an extremely rare phenomenon, and for someone that knows what they are looking at to unearth it is even rarer. Organisms without hard shells or bones almost never undergo fossilization. Compared to the number of species that are alive today, the number of fossilized species that have been unearthed is only 5% of the total number of current species that have been so far described. It is estimated that of all the species that have ever lived, only 1% have been discovered as fossils.

In fact, we haven’t even yet discovered all of the species that are living right now on this earth. New species are discovered and described by scientists every week. In just two months of a survey of Papua New Guinea, researchers in 2009 discovered 200 new species of plants and animals, including newly described mammal species.. The Amazon Basin is so diverse that 1,200 new species have been described over the last ten years. That’s 120 new species every year from the Amazon alone. Is it any wonder that we haven’t found all of the ancient, extinct species?

Fortunately, great strides in evolutionary research have been made in recent years without fossils. The field of cladistics utilizes biochemical data of genetic nucleotide sequences and the amino acid sequences from proteins of various organisms to analyze statistically to estimate relatedness of organisms. The “family trees” that are produced by this research corroborate those based on physical, structural relatedness, but are able to go well beyond the limitations of classical morphological study.

Boiling It Down

Much of this debate boils down to faith or no faith. And one cannot muster faith from thin air; I believe it is a gift of God. One can not prove faith or argue one into or out of faith. Everyone must play what I call The Great Cosmic Card Game—we all have to decide one way or another what to do about God and about Jesus. (I’ll try to write a blog on that sometime.) This paper is meant merely to throw out ideas, to start a conversation, not to prove anything, especially something that, by its essence, cannot be proven—which is what faith is about.

This paper is perhaps more challenging or pertinent to Christians who have not settled in their mind the gulf between the creation account in Genesis and accepted science. Or maybe for Christians who ascribe to Creation Science or its twin, Intelligent Design. I do not consider either of these to be good science. You can jumble geologic and genetic evidence all you want in order to force it to fit your stance, but it is still bad science.

Humans running around at the same time as dinosaurs may assuage your religious sensibilities but it is bad science in my opinion, and is not necessary. And if a thinking secular person gets the impression that they must swallow the tenets of Creation Science in order to follow Jesus Christ, they may well opt out at worst, or be mightily conflicted at the least.

What If I’m Wrong About Theistic Evolution

Even if I am all wrong about evolution and my notion about God instilling an immortal soul into a couple or a larger group of evolved Homo sapiens—it doesn’t matter! These are all peripheral issues that don’t alter the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which is the only thing in the universe that ultimately matters. Some of my views about the how’s and when’s of the creation may change even yet with time; but the truth of the Gospel does not change. The Gospel is like a scientific physical constant—like the speed of light—but perhaps even more unshakeable than that. Who knows if the speed of light is the same on the other side of the universe or in potential universes in other dimensions of time and space. Still there is one Gospel. … Believe the Gospel or not … it is your call. It is a matter of faith.

The Gospel

There is a God, there is Jesus (one with God), there are angels and demons, and the lead demon is Satan, the devil. Satan opposes God in every way possible as long as he can (the timeline is determined by God). One way that Satan opposes God is to force a wedge between mankind and God. Because God is pure and holy to the nth degree, He cannot be in the presence of impurity and unholiness. That is why God initiated the Gospel: He Himself pays the penalty of sin (rebellion) for His humans, so they are transformed to become as pure as God, Himself, in order to commune with Him. This is through human faith in the sacrificial, final death of Jesus, the Son of God. God Himself provides the solution. There is nothing we can possibly do to earn it.

So what is this sin thing that Satan uses against us? I believe that most sin is simply our human animal nature which God calls us to rise above. When God imparted a spirit into mankind, He provided a connection to Himself. He also revealed Himself and imparted to humans the Moral Law, giving them a sense of right and wrong. He said essentially that you are no longer just an animal, but you will become like Me in order to commune with Me. He said, “I have chosen you as a species and, further, I have chosen you as an individual.”

From an evolutionary perspective, God directed a physical change—an enormous frontal lobe of the brain—in order to enable a spiritual outcome: As scientists have discovered, the oldest parts of our brain, from an evolutionary perspective, control our most primal instincts, such as our sex drive, our reaction to pain, hunger, thirst, cold, danger, etc. This part of our brain is quite similar both in physical shape, makeup and function as that of, say, a lizard, which is much, much older and more primitive in the paradigm of evolution. A frontal lobe, on the other hand, is much more recent, and culminates in Homo sapiens subspecies sapiens. This part of the brain is used for higher thinking, logic, projection of future outcomes of various scenarios, planning, etc.

Using biochemical and electrical impulse studies, researchers can see the real-time struggle going on in the various parts of the brain—the battle between instinct (hard-wired into the old brain) and higher thinking (in the frontal lobe). In other words, it is the weighing of right and wrong. And not only are the physical lobes of the brain important, but more so the complex wiring of the nerve cells--the connections that enable this higher thinking. That is why teenagers often have trouble with higher thinking and weighing outcomes before they act. Our brains are still developing these complex wiring connections even into our early 20’s. This is no joke.

God has given us this ability to know right from wrong (perhaps even this Moral Law is instinctive in us) and has given us the mental ability to rise above instinct in matters of right and wrong, So He holds us responsible for the outcome. And yet He knows that often we will fail. We all fall short of God’s purity and righteous standards. That is why the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That is where Satan works to keep humans and God apart.

A Few Words About Science and Scientists

The vast majority of scientists are not terribly interested in the evolution-creation debate. It is settled for them; they don’t take it seriously as a debate. Contrary to what a large number of conservative Christians believe, most scientists are not part of any agenda or conspiracy to usurp God or belittle Christianity by forcing data or inventing techniques that produce false data. Scientists are truth-seekers at their very core—truth about the natural world. Since supernatural truth is beyond their scope, they do not concern themselves, in their scientific work, with such things. Scientists are also competitive and accountable to each other. If one scientist uses shakey techniques or flawed interpretation, other scientists will call them out on it. In fact, such work would probably never even appear in a respectable peer-reviewed scientific journal where the standards are incredibly high.

Our research group recently helped to host a meeting of scientists working on the genetics and ecology of a particular devastating disease of soybeans (yes, soybeans get sick, too). I was taken with the intelligence and diligence with which these men and women attack this problem. They discussed advanced genetic techniques and hypotheses that left me in a haze of incomprehension. They blew my mind with the agility of their minds. Talking with some of them socially, I could see how much they loved the scientific work they do. And they collaborated so freely with one another, all in the common purpose of finding ways to defeat this threat to world food production. Nearly all scientists are this way. They have a narrow area of expertise in which they focus all of their energy and genius. They are not thinking about how to denigrate God or people of faith.

This antipathy of some Christians against science has not always been so. In fact, apart from Galileo (a Christian himself) and his problems with the Catholic Church, Darwin’s descent by natural selection is the only other major issue the church as had with science. Eventually Christians got over the contentious issue of Galileo’s day and accepted his theory that the universe does not revolve around God’s green earth and that, in fact, the earth revolves around the sun just like other planets, and that the sun itself moves about our galaxy like other stars. No big deal. God is still God. Hopefully, today’s Christians can get over the evolution issue in a similar way. The book list at the end of this paper could be of some use if you desire further understanding of the scientific side of the issues.

My Motive

Lest readers get the impression that I am somehow anti-Christian: NO, NO, NO! I am one! I am committed, to the core of my being, to Jesus Christ as LORD and Savior. In fact, my great desire is for secular scientists to experience the joy of seeing a more complete picture of what they are now observing in nature; that is, to couple their appreciation of natural beauty and order with an indelible awe of God . I desire, as well, for Christians who are non-scientists to more fully appreciate God’s incredible universe through the details that scientists are continually uncovering. In other words, I desire that walls come down, the two sides respect each other, and both more fully experience the glory of God.

John Muir, the 19^th century naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club, understood it: “Everything is so inseparably united. As soon as one begins to describe a flower or a tree or a storm or an Indian or a chipmunk, up jumps the whole heavens and earth and God Himself in one inseparable glory!”

I have more to say about God in nature, evolution, and the like. Hopefully, I’ll post some of it on future blogs. If you hung in with me this far, perhaps you will go a little further in the future. And I would love to hear your thoughts as well. I feel very sure that many of you disagree with me, in whole or in part: maybe with the God part; maybe the evolution part. That’s okay . . . I invite you to make comments at the bottom of this blog entry. Or write me an email (mandobobholland@yahoo.com). Or write your own blog and send me the link. I would be interested in seeing some discussion develop between readers--friendly, respectful discussion--where we can agree to disagree and still enjoy each other’s company. Remember, we won’t likely argue each other into a completely different stance than we already have. But perhaps we can scatter some seeds for thought in each other’s mental garden that weren’t there before.

Peace on Earth and goodwill towards men,

Bob Holland, December, 2010

P.S. There are probably way too many books on this subject; but if you are interested in looking further into the slant that I have taken, here are a few good ones (I like the first one best):

The Language of God by Dr. Francis Collins (medical doctor and biochemist; 2006)

Saving Darwin by Karl W. Giberson

The Fingerprint of God by Dr. Hugh Ross (an astrophysicist; 1991)

Beyond the Cosmos by Dr. Hugh Ross (an astrophysicist; 1999)

A Biblical Case for An Old Earth by Dr. David Snoke (a physicist and theologian; 2006)

Is God a Creationist? Edited by Roland Mushat Frye (a professor of English and Theology)

Fall Photos at 290 O'Neal Ln

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 05:29:00 +0000

It has been a gorgeous fall here in NW Arkansas. Here are a few images of fall foliage I've taken, mostly at 290 O'Neal Lane (our place)--some from our yard, or our fenceline, or our ditch. A few towards the end are from the Univ. of Arkansas campus. All but four images are of native shrubs and trees. Fall beauty can show up in some surprising places if you have the eye to see it. Click on the image to see a slight enlargement, then hit the reverse arrow to return.

native Arrowleaf Viburnum

ash tree

bald cypress

wild cherry fragrant sumac hickory hickory hyacinth bean with green stink bug nymphs hybrid red maple "wooly booger" (Isabella moth larva) ... a sure sign of fall itea poison ivy . red buckeye (top) and smooth sumac (bottom) sweetgum tulip tree winged elm winged sumac
Viburnum (top) and American beauty berry (bottom) Shumard Oak Northern red oak witch hazel crepe myrtle ginkgo witch hazel flowers (fall blooming) American holly sugar maple Northern red oak

Only A Shadow

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 18:55:00 +0000

This is a photo of a window curtain in our living room, with the early morning sun behind it casting the shadow of a an 8-ft tall native wildflower, Joe Pye Weed (Eupatorium fistulosum) that graces the east side of our house:

It brings to mind some scripture verses from Hebrews 9 & 10:
"The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming--not the realities themselves. . . . For Christ did not enter a man-made sanctuary that was only a copy of the true one; he entered heaven itself, now to appear for us in God's presence. . . . Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him."

The shadow on the curtain is interesting, but is not as beautiful as the real thing. The shadow is a lifeless caricature of the real thing, which is full of life--buzzing with bees and butterflies that pollinate its airy, lavender blooms. Similarly, all that we know on earth that is good and beautiful is only a shadow of the goodness and beauty that we will come to know in heaven. Our life here is only a shadow of the glorious life to come, made possible by our faith--however tenuous--in Jesus Christ, who is bringing salvation to those who are waiting for him.

P.S. Here are some pics of the living, breathing, pollinating Joe Pye Weed:

Bees--bumble and honey--pollinating a Joe Pye Weed bloom

Tree frog waiting in the Joe Pye Weed for a little pollinator lunch.

Primordial Ooze on My Boxwood

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 04:01:00 +0000

I was shearing a large boxwood hedge at the corner of our house recently when I had a little Planet Earth moment. As I reached down to clip some low hanging shoots that rested on the ground, I noticed a striking pattern of small gray-colored balls covering every leaflet of several shoots, actually somewhat suspended above the deep green of the leaf. A tiny pattern of beauty for the eye of whomever would pause long enough, stoop low enough, and look closely enough to see and appreciate it. The pattern extended even to some dead boxwood leaves on the ground and even to a section of rubber garden hose lying in that spot. It was a slime mold . . . one of God’s most ancient and mysterious of creatures . . . part fungus, part animal. Biologists and taxonomists must throw up their hands and classify it somewhere in-between, in the Myxomycota.

Slime molds actually move! Or ooze or flow, actually. Generally unseen, beneath the surface layer of decaying leaves and mulch in your yard, and in wild forested areas all over the world, they scarf up bacteria that are decaying the fallen vegetation. At some point, this gooey blob of ooze dries up and forms itself into little balls of dried spores, like powdery seeds, often climbing onto some vegetation, or even a garden hose, and lifting itself on a home-made stalk to catch a breeze and scatter itself hither and yon to a new spot to colonize. This process has been going on probably for hundreds of millions of years.

My house is quite old, by human standards (especially by Arkansas standards)—a little more than one hundred years old. Julie, my wife, planted that boxwood I’m trimming maybe 20 years ago. Now, at one time, this valley I live in didn’t exist. The tops of these “mountains”—the Ozark Plateau—were actually the bottom of an ancient, shallow tropical sea. Ever since the waters receded and land plants colonized and covered the land here, slime molds have been doing what they do, year after year, over countless millennia. Only recently have me and my boxwood shown up on the scene.

All of this—the beauty, the complexity, and the incredible span of time and years—just reinforces in my mind those same qualities of God which He possesses to an even greater degree. Who or what is older than God? Who or what is more creative, more complex, more full of beauty than the One who dreamed it all up in the first place . . . a long time ago.

Happy gardening . . .

A Hard Teacher

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 04:29:00 +0000

I once knew a sharp-minded old-timer that lived way up in the hills around here. He was a retired schoolteacher (from back in the one-room country school house days) named Carl Van Landingham, or simply, Mr. Carl. Talking about how people learn best, he once told me, "Experience is a hard teacher, but she is also the most effective!" I recently came across a similar quote attributed to Vernon Sanders Law: "Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards."

It reminds me of a story my father told me. When he was a little boy, in the 1920's, he once came upon his uncle hunkered over the engine of a car. As the uncle listened to the purr of the motor, little Charles' curiosity brought him up close. The uncle issued a challenge: "Say Charles, I bet you can't pee on that spark plug--I bet you couldn't even hit it." Well, Charles had undoubtedly spent some time learning to aim and shoot as he relieved himself. So he was up to the challenge. It didn't occur to him that it might matter that the engine was running. He climbed up on the fender and soon summoned a stream which he deftly directed straight onto the target.

He suddenly found himself lying on his back--on the ground. Charles gathered himself and stood, shaking his head in dazed wonder. Eventually the uncle was able to stifle his laughter,and he explained to my dad that cars produce electricity that flows through the spark plug when the motor is running. Little Charles also learned that day that water--and pee--are great conductors of electricity. The spark climbed the stream as his poor little unit completed the circuit. It was "... the test first, the lesson afterwards." I'm pretty sure that my dad never peed on another spark plug in all of his 87 years. He learned his lesson well. I guess he learned something about that uncle as well.

Sounds of Spring--"Love" is in the Air

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 01:40:00 +0000

Spring hit here in NW Arkansas, about a week ago--with a wallop! As a nature lover, there are many little signs of spring that are nostalgic for me. Like catching up with old friends. There is something about the predictability and the rhythm of it all. One of the first things is the chorus of Spring Peepers--tiny frogs that come out of hibernation all at once and immediately begin advertising for a mate. It's crazy! It is an amphibian version of a high school prom that lasts for a month. It's a four week spring break at Daytona Beach with males and females clamoring for attention, advertising their wares all night, all at once.

We have three ponds near our house. One is about 150 feet in front of our house; one is a hundred yards behind our house; and another is a hundred yards to the side of our house, across the road. All three sites are crazy with sexual passion all through the month of April. These little guys and gals have been in a self-imposed stupor since late last fall, buried in mud. Suddenly the mud warms, the sun comes out, and buddy . . . when the sun goes down, it's every guy and every gal for him or herself! The males are like hundreds of carnival barkers crying out why they are the best game in town. Check out these links to get an idea of what I'm talking about. To get back to this blog, just keep hitting the left-pointing arrow at the top-left of your screen until you are back to the blog. The first one is poor video, but a good audio of exactly what we hear at 290 O'Neal Lane from three directions every night this time of year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SM6leUVorY

The next is a close-up video of one of these little frogs making all of that noise: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhBsNqF7Hkk&NR=1

A little later on, we will start hearing a slightly different sound--the gray tree frog (which can be either gray or bright green at any one time). They live in our trees and shrubs and love to "pig-out" on the insects that flock to our porch lights in the summer. They leave frog poop on our front window and air conditioner. I posted a blog article last year on them: http://mandobobsblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/tree-frogs.html
Check out this video of a gray tree frog calling raucously for some female company:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k5CTLNw04w&feature=related

As it happens, your landscape and mine are much like the jungles of the Amazon or Congo, or the Serengeti Plains of East Africa, in this: it is a wild, unnoticed drama of sex, violence, and just making a living, being played out in a myriad of connected ways. The same basic biology is happening in your backyard as is happening on those Planet Earth episodes. And if you can swallow one more thing: God orchestrates it all as a testament to His beauty and creativity.

Take notice of the natural rhythms going on around you. It can bring you a bit of peace and connection--even in your own backyard. I'll leave you with a line from T.S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Peace . . .

Community

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 04:10:00 +0000

Here’s a little ecology lesson . . . It starts with trees and it ends with you. When you look at a tree, realize this one thing: it is not just a tree—it is a community. Kind of a micro-ecosystem. I have a large Post Oak in my back yard that is three feet in diameter! (I measured it …) Periodically, on a windy day, it drops dead stems and branches. They are absolutely filled with a fascinating (to me, anyway) array of organisms. Various colorful lichens and fungi mostly. This is a fungus on a stem from my oak:

But that is only the beginning—a tree is a vast community of bacteria, viruses, mycoplasmas, fungi, lichens, mosses, liverworts, nematodes, mollusks, worms, insects, mites, birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles even—my little friends, the northern fence lizards and lined skinks. Here's another shot with three snails crawling over a fallen stem of my oak tree and scarfing up lichens. Can you imagine literally crawling through your salad--head high--as you eat it?

Probably hundreds of species of organisms interact with my Post Oak tree--each with their own intricate associations with this tree. It reminds me a little of Jesus’ parable of the mustard seed in Matthew 13:31-32: “He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches.” That is, the kingdom of heaven is where life happens, and is a haven for those who need God’s shelter and the community of abundant, spiritual life He provides.

I heard a story recently on NPR (a common opening phrase for me …) about Noah Fierer, a University of Colorado at Boulder microbiologist, who immerses himself into the strange world of bacteria—one of the most primitive, yet numerous life forms on the planet. He is trying to develop a method of using bacterial profiles on human skin to identify criminals for CSI investigations. He made the point that our bodies are huge repositories of bacteria—on our skin, in our gut, our hair, under our fingernails, between our toes, in our mouth . . . shall I go on? He even made the claim that there are more bacterial cells in and on our bodies than there are human cells. Now, I’m not sure how to check on the accuracy of that, but that is a rather amazing—and unsettling—statement. In other words, you are more germs than you are you!

Bacterial cells are much smaller than human cells, so perhaps this could be true in terms of number of cells instead of volume. [About 500 average-size human cells would fit inside the period at the end of this sentence; about 25,000 bacterial cells would fit into it.] The point is that, biologically speaking, you are not just you. Your body is a community of species—bacteria, viruses, fungi, mites, and mycoplasmas. Depending on where you live, maybe even a few rikettsia, worm larvae, ticks, etc. But that’s okay, that’s the way it is—like a tree or a mustard plant--you are a community.

Here’s a sideline story: A recent study at San Diego State University, funded by the Clorox Co., tested the assumption known variously as the “Three Second Rule” or the “Five Second Rule”. You know: if you drop some food on the floor, you have a certain number of seconds before it becomes contaminated. Pick it up quickly and you can still eat it. Microbiologists tested microbial activity of baby carrots before and after dropping on a tile floor, a kitchen sink, a carpeted floor, etc. Their results? …. Turns out, whatever “germs” (that is, bacteria and fungi) the carrot picked up was picked up instantaneously—it doesn’t take five seconds. The good news is that nearly all bacteria and fungi that occur on your home surfaces won’t hurt you. (the rim of your toilet is another matter). Of the thousands of microbe species out there, your body has the ability to neutralize nearly all of them. Only a very few have developed ways to overcome our body’s natural defenses. In fact, some medical researchers have suggested that young children of overly fastidious (meticulous, easily disgusted, squeamish) parents--who clean their floors and counter tops like operating tables--may be more vulnerable to infections than those whose parents are less hung-up about it. That’s because our bodies develop defenses early-on against most germs. Children who are not exposed to germs don’t develop the defenses. Or so goes the theory. So, make your own judgment on the Five Second Rule.

If there is a central theme to this rambling blog: community is built into the system—to nature, to your body, to the human condition, to Christian believers. Embrace community.

Another Side of Me

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:39:00 +0000

This posting is a follow-up to the previous posting, “My Alter Ego?”. Maybe that alter ego—the irresponsible, but harmless vagabond—is a piece of me in an unrealistic dream world, but not in the real world. I was out of work for six months and was not myself. It gives me empathy for anyone in this depressed economy that is looking for work, especially those looking for a career.

There is a side to many of us, I suspect, that stares dreamily into the distance of time and reality at the thought of being irresponsible and self-indulgent and carefree. The vagabond, Mr. Browne, played by Buddy Ebson in one of the old Andy Griffith episodes, tells Andy: “I live the kind of life that most men only dream about because they don’t have the courage to live it.” Well, when you have a wife and especially a wife and kids, all bets are off, Mr. Browne.

The neurobiologist, Robert M. Sapolski, author of Monkeyluv—And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals (2005) says that behavioral studies of other primates have shown that it is not just the physical studs that attract female monkeys or baboons for mating; or the ones who intimidate other weaker potential male suitors to flee out of the picture (think Biff vs. Michael J. Foxe’s nerd dad in Back to the Future). But often, the males who “get the girl” are the ones who demonstrate relationally that they are the kind of guy who is in it for the long haul. Biologically, that means that a female somehow senses which potential mates will likely be around to help her do the heavy lifting of raising this child, and who will partner with her through the travails of life. Sapolski essentially says that, even amongst monkeys, responsible can be sexy.

As a pastor, I used to counsel young couples who were preparing to be married. One story that I often used was one that I heard on the radio many years before. It goes something like this: the radio show guest said that he was pastor of a church and one of the elderly women in his congregation was incapacitated, living in a nursing home. Periodically the minister would call on her as part of his pastoral duties. One day he walked down the nursing home hallway to her room and found the door slightly ajar. He peaked in, not wanting to enter at an inopportune moment. What he saw was the ultimate love story.

He saw an elderly gentleman leaning over his wife’s bed with a spoon hovering before her blank face. He coaxed, “Please dear, one more bite … you need to take one more bite.” Her unresponsive eyes told him that she didn’t comprehend, or maybe that she had given up on life altogether. He was undeterred. “The doctor says that you need to eat, dear. Please… you can do it … I know you can do it … open up one more time.” She opens her mouth briefly and he shoves the spoon home. Some of the food drips unattractively down her chin and on to her gown. He patiently grabs a cloth and dabs her clean, all the while praising her effort. Then he begins anew: “That was wonderful! … Okay, one more bite … you can take one more bite, just for me …”

She probably didn’t even know who he was--didn’t remember they had been married for sixty years or more. Maybe she had Alzheimer’s disease. I don’t know. But what a love scene! I used to tell the young husbands-to-be the same as I told my two sons-in-law when they asked for my daughters’ hands in marriage: this is the kind of guy that girls ultimately want. This is the kind of guy that I want for my daughter—one who will love her when she is gray and wrinkled and no longer sexy. Who will love her for the long haul, even into the nursing home. (By the way, at the end of the program I finally heard the name of the radio guest and pastor: then Arkansas governor, Mike Huckabee.) My favorite love songs are the rare ones about old people still in love, like Michael Smith’s The Dutchman (from Steve Goodman) and Eva Cassidy singing Anniversary Song.

So what is it like when a young man transitions from carefree, unattached player to provider and care-giver and sacrificial partner for life? Here is an interesting poem that I heard on the Garrison Keiller’s Writers’ Almanac on National Public Radio (9:00 am weekdays on 91.3 FM in my part of the world). It is a poem by Thomas C. Hunley called, “Father to a Man”. You can see the transition happening before your very eyes in this young husband’s life, much like it happened to me when my Junius Maltby went into hibernation. But, as it turns out, I’m a much happier man for it. Follow the action:

Father to the Man

The OBGYN said babies almost never
arrive right on their due dates, so
the night before my firstborn was due
to make his debut, I went out with the guys

until a guilt-twinge convinced me to convince them
to leave the sports bar and watch game six
on my 20-inch, rabbit eared, crap TV. After we
arrived, my wife whispered, "My water broke"

as the guys cheered and spilled potato chips
for our little dog to eat up. I can't remember
who was playing whom, but someone got called
for a technical, as the crowd made a noise

that could have been a quick wind, high-fiving
leaf after leaf after leaf. I grabbed our suitcase
and told the guys they could stay put, but we
were heading for the hospital and the rest of

our lives. No, we're out of here, they said.
Part of me wanted to head out with them,
back to the smell of hot wings and microbrews,
then maybe to a night club full of heavy bass

and perfume, or just into a beater Ford with a full
ash tray, speeding farther and farther into
the night, into nowhere in particular. Instead I walked
my wife to our minivan, held her hand as she

stepped down from the curb, opened her door,
shut the suitcases into the trunk, and
ran right over that part of me, left it
bleeding and limping like a poor, stupid squirrel.

"Father to the Man" by Tom C. Hunley, from Octopus. © Logan House, 2008.

My Alter Ego?

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 06:50:00 +0000

There’s this recurring character in several of my all-time favorite movies and stories. I think maybe he is my alter ego: the character, Murray, in A Thousand Clowns ; Junius Maltby, the main character in a short story of the same name by John Steinbeck; a little bit of Doc from John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row; Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey. Maybe some Woody Guthrie thrown in for good measure. There are probably more. The intelligent, thoughtful, pleasant, humble, harmless, humorous, unsuccessful, under-achieving, ‘ner-do-well who piddles away great gobs of time with no regret. In some of these stories, he is a tragic or near-tragic figure as well. Perhaps I see a part of me in them . . .

A Thousand Clowns and Junius Maltby are practically the same story except the former is an urban version taking place in New York City; the latter a rural version in Central California. The Steinbeck story used to be a sort of appendage to Bantam copies of The Red Pony, but is not in any of the ones at our Barnes & Noble. It was originally a chapter of Pastures of Heaven published in 1932. I found it on-line at one time, but not today. Here is a site where you can listen to an audio recording (podcast) of someone reading you Junius Maltby. It will take you 49 minutes, sure. About the length of one episode of “Survivor” or “Biggest Loser”. Do you get my drift? Check it out: http://audiolingo.org/?p=112

Harvey is available from Netflix and other outlets. It was a 1950 film starring Jimmy Stewart, from a Mary Chase play (that my mom saw performed, I think, on Broadway, back in the day). Elwood P. Dowd is as kooky as he can be—his best friend is a six foot three-inch invisible rabbit. But at the same time, he exemplifies all the characteristics of humility, empathy, politeness, consideration, justice, love, and humor that every Christian should live out habitually. It won an Oscar and was nominated for another.

If you ever get a chance to see A Thousand Clowns--a black-and-white movie from 1965, starring Jason Robards, Jr.--by all means take it. I always thought that To Kill A Mockingbird was my all-time favorite. But it’s been a long time since I saw Thousand Clowns. I just happened to catch it recently on Turner Classic Movies on regular TV, and now I’m not so sure anymore about my all-time favorite. Wow … and you can’t rent it on Netflix or buy it from Amazon. There must be some weird contractual thing whereby corporate lawyers keep it mostly out of circulation. It won an Oscar and was nominated for three others. It was originally a play, written by Herb Gardener, which I read when I was in my twenties. It’s good, too.

I don’t know what this all means--that I somehow identify with these goofy characters. Those of you who know me can draw your own conclusions, especially if you've been able to see any of these movies/plays/books . Do you have fictional characters that you identify with? Who? Why? You can comment at the bottom of this blog just for kicks …

Here’s a Wikipedia synopsis of Steinbeck’s short story:

Junius Maltby

The short story concerns a man named Junius Maltby, who, unsatisfied with his life as an accountant in San Francisco, finally breaks with that life on the advice of his doctor, who recommends drier weather for his respiratory illness. Junius, in fairer climate, takes boarding with a widow and her children in his convalescence. After some time, with the townsfolk beginning to talk about the single man living so long with the widow, Junius promptly marries his landlord and becomes the head of the well-kept, profitable ranch/farm. The widow releases her working man and tries to put Junius to work on the farmstead, but Junius, having become accustomed to a life of leisure, ignores his duties. Eventually the farm falls into disrepair, the family goes broke and without enough food or clothes, and the widow and her own children succumb to disease.

Only Junius and his lone son by the widow survive. Junius, with his barefoot child and a hired servant as lazy as he, spends his time reading books and having fanciful discussions with his companions, never actually working. Because of this, his son is raised in rags, though well trained to independent thought and flights of the imagination. Despite his appearance and the intentions of the other children to torment him, the child is well-received at school and indeed becomes a leader of the children. So influenced by him are they, the other children begin to spurn their shoes and tear holes in their clothes.

Except for the teacher, who finds the man and his son to be romantically dignified, the rest of the community has nothing but scorn for Junius and sympathy for his child. The story ends with members of the school board attempting to give the child some shoes and new clothes as a present. Upon realizing the regard in which he is held by society, he loses the last of his innocence and becomes ashamed, realizing for the first time that he is poor. The last scene has the sympathetic teacher see Junius and his son, cleaned and well dressed though painfully so, on their way back to San Francisco where Junius will go back to dull work and ill-health in order to provide for his unwilling son.

Now, lest you get an incomplete picture of me, tune-in to the next installment: http://mandobobsblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/another-side-of-me.html

Fallow Times

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 01:52:00 +0000

Fallow: land plowed but not planted; land that is resting, waiting; derived from a word for “pale skin”

We have had so much winter this year in Arkansas thanks to El Nino, the tropical condition whereby warmer than usual ocean waters in tropical zones affect temperate regions in unusual ways—for the Southeast USA it is colder than normal temperatures in the winter (by goofing up the normal position of the Jet Stream) and wetter than normal precipitation (warm oceans mean moist air). Our last snow was exactly three weeks ago. And yet, today, in a parking lot, I saw a pile of snow that was about three-and-a-half feet tall and nine feet wide. Still there after 3 weeks because of our extra cool temps. Now they are predicting more snow or sleet on Friday.

Like many fellow Arkansans, I’m ready for spring, when nature awakens from its slumber. And yet, I must appreciate every season for what it is—even a long, cold winter. We need to accept down times.

Rest is a fundamental aspect of life that is built into the universe. Birds rest: most birds sleep at night in protected places; owls "work" the night shift and sleep during the day. Insects rest, many at night, like bees, wasps, flies, beetles, etc. Others are most active at night, like fireflies, moths, and orb spiders that build the big complex webs (most of them tear them down at sunrise and rebuild the next evening). Temperate zone insects "rest" all winter as dormant adults or larvae, as cocoons, pupae, or eggs. Even plants "rest". Plants do not photosynthesize at night (no sunlight), which is the main "work" of a plant: manufacturing the carbohydrates that all nature--including humans--are ultimately dependent on for energy. Most Temperate zone plants also go dormant for the winter. All mammals rest: again some during the night (most humans), some during the day (mice, coyotes, etc.).

Time-off is built into the fabric of nature. It's part of the Biblical concept of Sabbath rest. Even the non-religious appreciate their Saturday or Sunday off. Sometimes our rest is forced on us, as when we get sick or injured. There is a sense in which our "fallow time" may even represent an entire season of our life.

Here are the lyrics to a song from the 60’s/70’s folk musician, Judy Collins. Check it out on this YouTube link if you will—it’s beautiful. Drink in the words and be content with your own down times. It is part of the rhythm of life. Let's be content with the fallow seasons of our lives. Maybe I’m in one now. It’s okay. I’ve included a couple of photos I took of some fallow fields in our area. After her lyrics, I’ll leave you with a little wisdom from King Solomon in Ecclesiastes (written while he still had wisdom). Here’s Judy Collins . . .

Fallow Way
Words and Music by Judy Collins
Universal Music Corp. (ASCAP)/ The Wildflowers Company (ASCAP)
(Administered by Universal Music Corp.)

I'll learn to love the fallow way
When winter draws the valley down
And stills the rivers in their storm
And freezes all the little brooks
Time when our steps slow to the song
Of falling flakes and crackling flames
When silver stars are high and still
Deep in the velvet of the night sky

The crystal time the silence times
I'll learn to love their quietness
While deep beneath the glistening snow
The black earth dreams of violets
I'll learn to love the fallow way

I'll learn to love the fallow way
When all my colors fade to white
And flying birds fold back their wings
Upon my anxious wonderings
The sun has slanted all her rays
Across the vast and harvest plains
My memories mingle in the dawn
I dream a joyful vagabonds

The crystal times the silence times
I'll learn to love their quietness
When deep beneath the glistening snow
The black earth dreams in of violets
I'll learn to love the fallow times

No drummer comes across the plains
To tell of triumph or of pain
No word far off battle's cry
To draw me out or draw me nigh
I'll learn to love the fallow way

I'll learn to love the fallow way
And gather in the patient fruits
And after autumns blaze and burn
I'll know the full still, deep roots
That nothing seem to know or need

That crack the ice in frozen ponds
And slumbering in winter's folds
Have dreams of green and blue and gold
I'll learn to love the fallow way
And listening for blossoming
Of my own heart once more in spring

As sure as time, as sure as snow
As sure as moonlight, wind and stars
The fallow time will fall away
The sun will bring an April day
And I will yield to Summer's way

This reminds me that there is a time for everything and every season … check out Ecclesiastes 3:1-11

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,

a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

a time to embrace and a time to refrain,

a time to search and a time to give up,

a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend,

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace . . .

I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

Another winter storm in NW Arkansas

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 06:15:00 +0000

Here we go again. Winter storms like this used to be rare in Arkansas, but not so over the last couple of years. At least this one was more snow than ice and the power stayed on. At first it was freezing rain which turned to sleet and then to snow. All and all, we received about one-third inch of ice and then five inches of snow. Here are a few pics I took. At the end of the first day we had a pretty blanket of snow that made our patio somehow festive even in January.

For those of you who know her, here is Talulah in the water garden.

Statues look somehow comical in the snow. We have another one near the upper part of the water garden who is supposed to be blowing something in her hand. I've photographed her before. She had icecycles dripping off her toes.. How about a nature shot . . . below is a witch hazel tree between our driveway and house. Witch hazel is an interesting small-statured tree. Interesting because it blooms in the winter. There are two species in Arkansas; I think this one is Hamamelis virginiana, or common witch hazel, as opposed to Ozark witchhazel. Here are two pics: one with the flower buds encased in ice and sort of magnified by it. The other is a flower that, I think, bloomed today, because there was no snow or ice on it. The petals are only about a centimeter long (2.5 cm to an inch) and look up close like gaudy Mardi Gras decorations. The woody fruit dries over the summer, winding it's fibers down like a coiled spring. When conditions are right in early fall, the fruit splits explodes open under pressure, flinging the two seeds up to 30 feet away. Extracts from the stems and bark were used by Indians and later by Europeans as an astringent to stop bleeding or swelling among other things. It is still used commonly in shaving lotions, acne medicine, and hemorroidal creams. We have a bottle of it right now in our medicine cabinet. I have no idea why and have never used any.

As I walked around my place, I noticed these speckles on the fresh snow (see below). As I looked more closely, I realized the speckles were freshly dispersed seeds from the sycamore tree in my front yard. Sycamore trees produce round, dangling fruit in the fall that look like brown Christmas ornaments hanging all over the tree. The seeds are crammed into this hard little ball and are not released for a while. In fact, it is oftentimes not until early spring when the seeds are released. I've never really seen them being released and would not have noticed these had it not been for the white background provided by the snow. These seed will seep into the soil surface as the snow melts to be ready to germinate this spring. In fact, the tree that produced these seed itself came from a sycamore ball that I pulled off a tree along the creek at the back of my land. I broke the ball apart and sowed the seed in a flat in the greenhouse. It produced a small lawn of sycamore seedlings. I planted three of these in my yard about 25 years ago. Two were cut down over the years and this is the sole survivor, now producing its own crop of seed.

Here's the seedling grown up about 40 feet tall:

Seeds are important, not only for making next years seedlings, but also as food for birds and small mammals. These left over seed heads are from Sawtooth Sunflower, a native

perennial that loves the wet, boggy area behind our back yard. Encased in ice, these seeds are unavailable for birds during this rather desperate weather event for wildlife. Fortunately for the birds, there is an ample supply of berries up and down the fence rows of our street--from a rampant weedy shrub called privet (below). This is a European ornamental that has escaped into the American countryside and displaced a lot of our native vegetation. Join me in learning to love to hate this escaped alien plant. But that's a whole other blog . . .

Then there is the native Buckbrush or Indian Currant. This grows along the edges of woods throughout Arkansas and Oklahoma, and planted itself along the back of our house. It is great food for deer, quail, turkey and lots of song birds. The berries are somewhat magnified by the ice.

And check out the frost on these buttonbush fruit (Cephalanthus occidentalis). Buttonbush is native to moist areas along creeks, rivers, ponds, and lakes. But it likes our yard just fine, and is--hands down--our best shrub for butterflies. They flock to the round white blossoms in the summer. So do other insects. I have a photo of a bright green tree frog lying in wait in the green foliage quietly eying its next meal of some unaware pollinator (see post on Tree Frogs in this blog for June 24, 2009) . All of those characters are somewhere laying out the winter right now; summer flowers and insect meals seem far away when you look at this photo.

I also saw Julie's lavender plant that's been growing in that spot for several years now. A really fragrant herb that is incredibly tough--the snow graces the lovely lavendar leaves but does them no harm.

Here's an old bell attached to our shade house, sharing a post with twining trunks of trumpet vine. This is the very bell that my mother would ring when I was a kid to call me in for meals as I played with my friends in the woods behind my house. The bell is now cracked and doesn't really work. You'll have to ask her if it ever did work in rousting me out of those woods.

We have lots of gray squirrels around our place. They grow fat off the leftover dog food in the dishes and rob the bird feeder. Our dogs seemed to have lost their fascination with chasing them. Every now and then I see a fox squirrel pass through. These are the kind we had where I grew up in southeastern Oklahoma. I think they are more handsome than the grays, what with that big bushy, reddish tail. It seems this one had a close shave with some trouble. Check out the reverse mohawk down his back.

Well, that's about it for now. I'll leave with a moon rise over the snowy Boston Mountains that we saw at the end of the day.

Check out the beauty in your own backyard soon. Peace . . .

Snow

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:15:00 +0000

It’s January again and we are experiencing, in NW Arkansas, our third or fourth snow of the winter. I’m already losing track. Not a big deal for Northerners, but significant for us. Even more significant is the temperature and windchill: At 7:08 AM right now on a Thursday, it is 9^o F, with a wind chill of -7^o. It is projected to be -1^o when I awake tomorrow, with a high of 9^o. Pretty chilly for the mid-South. I’m glad of two things right now. First, that I am not experiencing temperatures like those in Minnesota and the Dakotas. Secondly, that we are not under a layer of ice, as we were this time last year—see last January’s blog.

We had a pretty, 3-inch snow on Christmas a couple of weeks ago—the first white one here since 1983, the year I moved into this house. Here is a poem from a contemporary poet, named George Bilgere. He writes poetry I can digest. Google him and check it out. Some of you may be put off by this poem, especially wives, and perhaps grown children, but it is sweetly philosophical for me.

Snow

A heavy snow, and men my age
all over the city
are having heart attacks in their driveways,

dropping their nice new shovels
with the ergonomic handles
that finally did them no good.

Gray-headed men who meant no harm,
who abided by the rules and worked hard
for modest rewards, are slipping

softly from their mortgages,
falling out of their marriages.
How gracefully they swoon—

that lovely, old-fashioned word—
from grandkids, pension plans,
winters in Florida.

They should have known better
than to shovel snow at their age.
If only they’d heeded

the sensible advice of their wives
and hired a snow removal service.
But there’s more to life

than merely being sensible. Sometimes
a man must take up his shovel
and head out alone into the snow.

George Bilgere's latest book, Haywire, won the May Swenson Poetry Award in 2006, and he received the Ohioana Poetry Award in 2007. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at John Carroll University.

The Awe-Inspiring Beauty of Nature (let's call a truce).

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 01:35:00 +0000

I am routinely struck by intricacies in nature that I see as I go about my day. I am literally awed by many of the things that I observe or learn about. As awe-inspiring as our natural world is, I am convinced that it is only a shadow of the beauty and complexities of heaven, which are really only reflections of God Himself.

The Depression-era hobo of the desert Southwest, Everett Ruess, [thanks, Dustin, for bringing him to my attention--see Adventure magazine, from National Geographic, the April/May, 2009 issue] wrote to his brother from Southern Utah or Northern Arizona saying, "I've seen almost more beauty than I can stand." I don't think Everett--or anyone on earth--has seen the half of it.

And it's too bad, this enmity between people of faith and people of science. The Christian knows God but often understands poorly the many natural reflections of His glory; the scientist understands the creation, but often not the Creator. Perhaps some dialog between them--and some mutual respect!--would be of benefit to both sides. If the people of faith would quit trying to protect God from Science [He does not need the "help".]. And if scientists would quit trying to protect science from God, maybe more people could learn to see God in His greater glory, and appreciate nature for all that it is.

Where Geometry, Biology and Poetry Meet

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Holland) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:33:00 +0000

Here is a little poem about lost love from Robert W. Service that should be a humerous brush-up in geometry (and biology) for you . . . enjoy.

Maternity

There once was a Square, such a square little Square,
And he loved a trim Triangle;
But she was a flirt and around her skirt
Vainly she made him dangle.
Oh he wanted to wed and he had no dread
Of domestic woes and wrangles;
For he thought that his fate was to procreate
Cute little Squares and Triangles.

Now it happened one day on that geometric way
There swaggered a big bold Cube,
With a haughty stare and he made that Square
Have the air of a perfect boob;
To his solid spell the Triangle fell,
And she thrilled with love's sweet sickness,
For she took delight in his breadth and height--
But how she adored his thickness!

So that poor little Square just died of despair,
For his love he could not strangle;
While the bold Cube led to the bridal bed
That cute and acute Triangle.
The Square's sad lot she has long forgot, And his passionate pretensions . . .
For she dotes on her kids--Oh such cute Pyramids
In a world of three dimensions.

-- Robert W. Service (1874-1958)