I guess I have to be a little bit less kind to my plants. I’ve been wondering about some coloration on my plants and I guess I finally figured out is ISN’T some kind of fungus or disease. My plants seem to have gotten SUNBURN!

You may recall that a couple months ago I chatted about adding artificial grow lights. And I still like the setup that I put together but after that long I think I’ve had the light timers set for longer than the plants needed — or could tolerate and there is sign of leaf burn. I turned the lights off yesterday midday and I reset the timers to a shorter duration. I’ll give them a few weeks of significantly reduced light and the take a look at the new growth to see if there’s evidence of sunburn.

Over time I’ll play with the lighting (up and down – more or less) to see if the reduced settings meet their needs or if I need to readjust again.

I really benefitted by joining a facebook group about the plants that I have — someone else gave a photo of the same conditions I have been seeing and I realized that what I had been thinking was the results of pests was in fact just over-lighting. You know how people say certain plants can’t get too much light — well, that’s not true.

Ok — that’s it for today. Just an update and the realization that you’re never too old to learn, and that no matter how late you start a new hobby there’s always new things to learn about.

Take care of yourself and your loved ones and I’ll be around tomorrow again. :-)

I could have chosen from millions of images but there was something about the utter flamboyance of this art nouveau entrance that just clicked with my brain. Isn’t it wonderful the way the human animal craves beauty?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. There are a gazillion humans whose way of living seems to produce the opposite — but that does not change the exorbitance of the individual examples of beauty created by human hands and brains.

There is something about the ability to sense, to feel, to respond to beauty that fascinates me. The definition of “beauty” boils down to something pleasing to “the aesthetic sense” but where do we get that aesthetic sense? We’re animals. Almost all of what we become is learned behavior. Children are born with a blank slate and develop it as they grow.

And yet from early on even un-educated children — those blank slates — appreciate the beauty of color and sound and smell. No one has had time to teach them any aesthetic — it’s ingrained in them.

And why are there so many artists and would-be artists in the world. People who would rather create something beautiful — and or useful (as usefulness is another form of beauty, surely) — than to work in a mine, or an office, or as police or surgeon. With art comes a sense of freedom from drudgery even though some forms of artistry are far more difficult and arduous and many forms of traditional “work.”

It’s interesting to me that the further we progress through the stages of Capitalism that there is less and less public inclination to beauty. Buildings are more and more practical with only the scantest attention being paid to their aesthetic appeal. Just like workers who are pressed harder and harder to produce more with less cost, buildings and products are less concerned with any artistic value and more concerned with cost per item.

I would not go so far as to say that beauty is universal. Certainly there are things some people think are beautiful that I fail to appreciate, Yet I think Emily Dickinson might have been write when she wrote that “Beauty is not caused. It is.” There have been studies that relate our sense of beauty to symmetry. But not all beautiful things are symmetrical. Definitions of beauty — which are only important if you are trying to “create” something beautiful — fail at describing any universal attributes, or even any predictable attributes.

And that is really the reason for today’s post. We don’t have to define beauty. It’s enough just to appreciate it. Definitions are destructive. They take away anything that does not fit the description — but beauty needn’t fit into a category, it’s sufficient for it simply TO BE.

Our digital world wants everything to be ON or OFF. That’s the nature of the way a computer “thinks”. But beauty isn’t about computers, or binary anything. Being obsessed with quicker, brighter, softer, all the fine points of interpretation and nuance mean nothing when you find a painting, or a flower, or a sunset that simply speaks to your heart and makes you smile. You can’t manufacture a smile. A smile results from a satisfaction of some sense that we have yet to understand in the same way that we fail to “understand” love and yet love is there to be experienced by everyone — without understanding.

I hope you have someone in your life to love. My dear wife just celebrated her 78th birthday a few days ago and with her wrinkly face and wavering steps and arthritic joints she is more beautiful today than ever. It’s not about defining what beauty is; it’s about recognizing it when you see it.

Take care and we can talk again tomorrow. :-)

There are a lot more Millennial and Gen-X YouTubers than there are retirees and seniors. And it’s fascinating getting a glimpse into the culture of other generations in ways that might not have been possible in earlier years.

I heard someone say, yesterday, “It was a different time.” That got me thinking about the fact that personally I never thought a lot about the fact that times change — not until I got older — maybe even retirement age. I suppose in some senses you have to have lived through some of those changes in order to realize that they are happening. When you’re young you just see “old” people behaving differently and you think that’s weird and may not realize that they are behaving they way they did in the world that they grew up in, and that was a different time than the one the youths know about.

I have always been interested in cross-generational learning. I was fortunate enough to have older folks who saw something in me they thought needed encouragement, so I had three or four mentors in my life whom I loved a great deal for all they helped me out with. As I went from my 30’s into my 40’s I started looking for folks I thought were “worthwhile” investing heavily in. After all, mentoring isn’t something that comes without obligations and to do it right you really have to be fair to them and give them the time they need.

I wonder how much of that goes on today? Then again, the world is so different, what with cellphones and instant everything. Instead of wondering about how other people behave it often seems as if behavior becomes the source of amusement or mockery — just because it IS different.

I grew up with Film Noir — black and white movies, lots of drinking, lots of smoking, sans drugs, sans sexual debauchery — a world of good and bad and cops and gangsters and lots of black and white that had nothing to do with film processing. Nowadays I don’t watch much U.S. television anymore. But when I do, there’s no where near as much smoking, different kinds of drinking, and a lot more debauchery. Watching TV or cinema from other countries changes that — there’s still a lot of smoking in French programming for example but various countries have their unique takes on the world and the differences do put into perspective the culture from which you come to the screen.

I suspect that most of us would just as soon the world never changed — we are accustomed to what we are living in, we know how to cope with it, and it would be nice if we could count on that continuing — sort of. Of course in our current cultural climate the youngest generations don’t see much hope for them. So, what I just said probably applies more to my generation than to them. A great many young folks might sooner welcome drastic revolution and anarchy over the rich-controlled society they find themselves in.

The choices about what the world become — and how different it will be — is much more in their hands than in mine. But I think it’s important to find a way of being aware of how culture has changed as we move forward. In the days of the American Revolution there were individual (read that: MEN) of words and action who framed a constitution out of the situations that troubled them. If we were to face another “revolution” I wonder who would do the framing of the world to come. The thing about revolutions is that they are entirely UN-predictable. And more importantly, anger doesn’t encourage clear thought. Anger clouds the brain. The French Revolution might have seen a lot of anger but there arose out of it some fundamentals: Equality, Fraternity, Liberty. A look at French legal code reveals that those principles keep showing up over and over again. What they learned through their revolution has been empowered in their culture. I wonder what will have been learned in the minds of U.S. citizens moving forward?

It was a different world — surely. The one we came from. And it will be a different world into which we tentatively place our feet over the next decade. The day will come when dRumpf will no longer be around — but those who accompanied him on his rampage through U.S. culture, morals, and economy will remain and they will need dealing with in some way. And what way this turns out to be will depend on the lessons we are learning about the world as it is today — and what we want the world to come to look like.

Providing, of course, we don’t end up in a nuclear war.

ON that happy note, I’ll say enough for today, and stop back tomorrow to chat some more. Take care and cheers. :-)