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| Geese in smoky sky |
Our Outdoor World
June’s weather story in northern Michigan was a flood. July’s is smoke.
With over 800 wildfires burning in Minnesota and Canada, we are having evenings without sunset and mornings without sunrise. We catch a brief glimpse of the mid-morning sun before it is swallowed up by thick smoke (not haze, though it looks like haze), aromatic as a campfire but impossible to escape by walking away. A shifting orange-brown shroud hangs over almost half the country, though the flames are hundreds of miles away from us here in Leelanau. Will we get rain, and will it help dampen down the smoke? Time will tell. Meanwhile, I break out a mask for brief outdoor sorties.
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| Uncomfortable, but 95% protection is better than zero |
“How’s your summer going?” It’s half-over! comes the unwelcome thought. But that’s only if summer is June, July, and August, right? If it’s July, August, and September, as I like to think, it is barely underway. After all, my cucumbers and beans have produced only flowers as yet, edible portions still to come.
Black raspberries ripen continuously now and require twice-daily picking.
There will be only a handful of gooseberries, but I’m hoping for a good apple crop this year, after two dud years (first codling moth worms in 2024, then in 2025 a late freeze that killed blossoms).
General garden knowledge can be gathered from books, but site-specific knowledge home accumulates only through the years. Monarda, a.k.a. bee balm, seems happy in my hard and has been blooming steadily in the border, a number of plants providing various colors in sequence—pale lavender, bright fuchsia, deep pink, pale pink. Hellebores are very happy in one spot; in another they were miserable, and I’m hoping they will be happier in a new corner. Hollyhocks by the backyard clothesline didn’t come back this year at all. That was disappointing, as I thought I would have them for the rest of my life, thinking of my grandmother’s hollyhocks growing by the outhouse. (Maybe if I’d had a working outhouse, my hollyhocks would have lasted?) In wild areas it’s all Black-eyed Susans and sweet peas now.
My World of Books
Acquisition: It’s been two years since I made the big book buy from a former dealer in Leland. This year’s largest purchase wasn’t quite as big (only three carloads in 2026 rather than the eight trips in 2024, two with a pickup truck accompanying my car), but I am so well stocked that I almost passed on a chance to look at books from an estate—until I realized it was the home and the books of a very close friend of many years. The old friend’s house … his enormous book collection … some books he had written himself and many others by mutual friends … stray photographs and snapshots and prints by and of old friends … the yard engulfed by brambles, deck railings broken, electricity off in the house. As I went through shelves, selecting books, more and more memories kept coming to light. An emotional evening....
Authors: This past Tuesday Barbara Stark-Nemon was onstage at the Willowbrook, interviewed by another Northport author, Karen Mulvahill. It was the second in this year's Friends of the Leelanau Township Library summer author series and a lovely evening in every possible way!
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| Barbara's first embroidery project, a copy of her new novel's cover |
Reading: Although I’d only gotten to Chapter 6 of that fascinating book about Roger Williams (a little about it in this recent post), more recently I fell into another that I’d never heard of before, its contents spellbinding and thought-provoking.
THE GURU PAPERS: MASKS OF AUTHORITARIAN POWER, by Joel Kramer & Diana Alstad.
Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books/Frog Ltd., 1993
Here are some lines from the preface:
…We found authoritarianism embedded in people’s psyches, affecting much more of day-to-day existence than is generally conceived. This is because in most people’s minds authoritarianism is associated with political systems such as dictatorships rather than with worldview…. In the process of writing this book, we deepened our understanding of how authoritarianism in its varied guises has been and largely still is a primary mode of social cohesion—and also how it has now become a major factor in social disintegration.
Then toward the end of the preface:
This book presents a point of view and ideas that we want to stand or fall on their own merit. … Our major concern is clarity—namely, that anyone who cares to follow the train of thought will understand it, whether in agreement or not.
The authors' “enemy,” so to speak, is any individual who (or institution) that would encourage people to mistrust their own minds and impressions and perceptions. They hope to foster “self-trust as a foundation for living.”
Their view of authoritarianism, therefore, is broader than simply a study of dictatorships, and they use the guru relationship not as the only variety of authoritarian structure but as a paradigm. The first, early stage of the relationship they call messianic proselytizing, with the guru preaching a message of higher good, such as saving mankind. This phase offers a “celebratory, party-like atmosphere” to new recruits. The fully enlightened guru is at the peak of the group’s hierarchical pyramid, his inner circle just below, etc., but even the lowest can feel superior to outsiders who have not yet even realized their need to be on this particular path to enlightenment.
Then,
A time inevitably comes when the popularity and power of the group plateaus and then begins to wane.
People begin to doubt and must be pulled in more tightly. Our authors say either one of two things happen (I’m wondering if both can occur simultaneously): either the guru’s message will turn to a doomsday forecast of disaster, or he “makes increasingly extreme promises and bizarre claims….” It is dangerous, he tells his followers, to associate with anyone not on their path, and the mistrust the believers have for outsiders is
...not totally paranoid (there is a reason for it) because as the group becomes more closed and bizarre, outsiders react more negatively.
The chapter on “The Attractions of Cult Hierarchy” (the cult offers certainty in a tumultuously changing life or world—though the authors are careful to point out that a hierarchy in itself need not be authoritarian) ends on page 90, so I have a lot of ground yet to cover, but this is a fascinating book! I will not draw explicit parallels to our world today, which you can do for yourself. Oh, but here is one more bit before I get off the subject:
Looking carefully at a guru’s inner circle is extremely revealing. Those closest to him, his most dedicated students, display better than anything else where his teaching leads…. Are they strong and interesting in their own right or are they boring sycophants who continually feed his ego? It is also very enlightening to observe how gurus treat and refer to those who leave their fold.
Bad News/Good News/Bad News
The death-dealing ICE traffic stops struck once again. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was on his way to work, as usual, and he was not even the target ICE was seeking, but he is now dead (his wife a widow, his children orphans), and so is Juan Jairo Coronilla Duran, and so is a 28-year-old man in Florida—three deaths in one week—no charges made against them, let alone any opportunity for a trial.
One day we had surprisingly good news: ICE did not plan to cease traffic stops completely but would scale back on the number. Unexpected relief! Because otherwise, what could we do? Protest each succeeding death, with no hope that there would be an end to them? Hope surged.
The very next day came the bad news: the president told ICE not to reduce the number of traffic stops. The idea, apparently, is to keep people running scared.
It was hard for me to work up a lot of enthusiasm for the 4th of July 2026, the 250th birthday of our nation. I love my country. I love its ideals, and I love the progress we seemed to be making for decades. Now, from where I stand, we are going backward at rocket speed. I cannot think of a single aspect of our national life that has been improved under the current administration. In fact, it’s difficult to see any positive aspect of that same national life that has not been reduced, degraded, or outright eliminated.
Protections for workers and for the environment are stripped away. Public health is on the trash heap. There has been no real help for health care costs and inflation in general, despite the campaign promises. Is discrimination against minorities even illegal any more, or is bigotry what is now protected? The United States has become an aggressor country in the world theatre—the bully, not the one protecting others from bullies. And the president is so terrified that his party will be voted out of power that he threatens the election process itself. No surprise there. No surprise—and yet it is heartbreaking, maddening, so shameful!
One night I woke up with the thought: This isn’t even murder. It’s vivisection. A living entity, our country, is being tortured and torn apart and cut up in pieces. No more sleep that night!
Yet all of us go on with our lives, because we are alive and have no choice. Both those who oppose the current administration and those who—incredibly! inexplicably!—continue to support it live our lives as best we can one day after another, we the opposition with breaking hearts and determined, resolute hope.
Do their hearts not break, the hearts of the supporters? Do they not miss the neighborliness we used to share? Can they look unmoved upon the deaths of children, of children’s parents, of their own neighbors? If they are so certain that God’s will is ordering everything that happens, what explains their frantic politicking and their desperate denials of fact?
I do still hope, fervently, stubbornly, however, that our country will survive and turn once again toward freedom and the common good for all our grandchildren and great-grandchildren—. Don't you?
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Coming back to add another wandering thought I had this past week about Republicans in Congress: I was wondering whether they are simply spineless (afraid to lose favor with the naked emperor) or if they are terrified deer in the headlights of oncoming history, realizing full well that theirs is a doomed legacy of shame. The thing is that remaining paralyzed is no protection against history, which just keeps rollin’ along. The moving finger writes, and all that. In time, history itself throws cowards under the bus. Their only hope is to wake up, jump out of the road, and yell “Sorry!” as loud as they possibly can. A good first step would be to vote against confirmation of the most inappropriate candidate for U.S. Attorney General ever proposed to fill the position.
On the Home Front
Merging households, especially in a busy season like summer, involves a period of transition, so there’s a little chaos and a lot of clutter at Casa Bookseller-Tree Guy these days. Small items go missing on a daily basis. We had that big three-carload book move during the heat wave immediately preceding the holiday weekend, too! Despite it all, we are finding our new life together almost unbelievably easy and natural, and Naughty Barker goes right along with it, too. She now has company during the day when her momma goes to work, and she gets extra walks and extra attention and another someone willing to throw tennis balls for her. And have I mentioned that Tree Guy is a reader? Icing on the cake!
