Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Happy New Year!


A year's end is neither an end
 nor a beginning but a going on, 
with all the wisdom 
that experience can instill in us. 

Hal Borland
 
While I agree with Hal, as a writer and publisher I must say that the end of a year feels like an end of a chapter and I am happily looking forward to the next one.
 
This blog is enjoying a growing popularity and I am grateful for all the support I receive from my readers.  For many of you this might have been a difficult year. Some of you may have noticed that this year I did not engage in controversial topics. 
 
There was so much sadness and negativity in the media in regard to the events that occurred in 2014 in many parts of the world, that I decided not to write about them. 
 
My decision was prompted not by indifference or a lack of engagement in current affairs, but by a heartfelt consideration for my readers who came to my blog for consolation and inspiration rather than a confirmation that something is horribly wrong in our societies. 
 
Like most of you I sincerely hope that the New Year brings a major change for many people. I hope that conflicts will be resolved without bloodshed, that all senseless abuse and suffering is gone, that love prevails over hatred, that no one will have to flee his home or go hungry... 
 
I wish you all the very Best in the coming New Year, but I would also like to remind you that success and happiness lie within you. Be the light you want to see in the world. Be the change you long for! 
 
Happy New Year To All! ~ Dominique

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Merry Christmas!

 
 
 I heard the bells on Christmas Day 
Their old, familiar carols play, 
And wild and sweet the words repeat 
Of peace on earth, good-will to men! 
 
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 
 
Wishing all my readers a very merry and peaceful Christmas ~ Dominique

Friday, December 19, 2014

Mistletoe - Evolution of a Christian Tradition



Why does this parasitic plant remind us of romance?

By Rob Dunn

Baldur, grandson of the Norse god Thor, woke up one morning certain that each and every plant and animal on earth wanted to kill him. His mother consoled him. His wife consoled him, but all to no avail. As Baldur cowered in his room, half-wild with fear, his mother and wife decided to ask every living thing to leave their poor Baldur in peace. They begged the kindness of the oak tree, the pig, the cow, the crow, the ant and even the worm. Each agreed. Then, as Baldur paused to celebrate his release from torment, he felt a pain in his chest. He had been stabbed and killed by an arrow made from the wood of a mistletoe plant. Mistletoe was the one species on earth his wife and mother had failed to notice.

Baldur died, but a lesson was learned: Never forget about the mistletoe. Mistletoe would come to hang over our doors as a reminder to never forget. We kiss beneath it to remember what Baldur’s wife and mother forgot. At least that is one version of the origin of our relationship with mistletoe.

Another story begins with druids who viewed the mistletoe as magical and hung it above their doors for luck. Others say it is hung for fertility; the seeds of mistletoe are sticky like semen. The modern story of mistletoe is one of kisses. As Washington Irving wrote in the 1800s, “young men have the privilege of kissing the girls under (mistletoe), plucking each time a berry from the bush. When the berries are all plucked the privilege ceases

The true story of mistletoe is the one I am going to tell here, the one of how it evolved in the first place, to hang on trees (and eventually above our doors). The ancestor of all mistletoes is the most ancient sandalwood. Modern sandalwoods include the species burned as incense on college campuses and in religious ceremonies the world over. Sandalwood trees are parasites; they grow on and steal from other trees. Their specialized roots (haustoria) sink like small arrows or spears into the roots of larger trees and suck water, sugar and nutrients from them.

Before there were forests, wispy plants fell on each other in their struggle to reach the sun, like clumsy teenagers unsure of their growing bodies. Then one plant evolved a simple woody stem. It could grow taller than the other plants, and it stole light from them. It poisoned them with shade. Wars ensued that have lasted hundreds of millions of years. Trees of many kinds arose and struggled with each other to be taller. Any species that does not participate in battle loses out in the darkness of the understory - any species except a few. Those in the clan of the sandalwood evolved a way out of the darkness. They survived by stealing from the trees what they had spent their tall stems fighting for.

Sandalwood discovered deceit. Its roots kissed the roots of trees and slipped inside them to steal. But sandalwood still needed to grow up a little and put out a few green leaves to have enough sugar to thrive. And then came mistletoes. Mistletoe is a common name for several independent lineages descended from sandalwood. Like their ancestors, mistletoe species sink their roots into trees. Unlike those ancestors, they do so in the sky.
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Mistletoes evolved the ability to grow not on the roots of trees, but instead on their branches. In doing so, they gained the same nutrients, water and sugars stolen by their ancestors, but they also gained a foothold up into the sky. As trees clambered for the sun, the mistletoe simply rode up on their branches, living off both the trees’ nutrients and the energy mistletoe could gather itself from the sun. The transition from root parasite to parasite of shoots was so successful that the ability evolved five times from the ancestral stock of the sandalwoods. Mistletoe diversified and spread around the world. Species of the genus Vismus are common in Europe. Phoradendron flavescens is common in North America. Hundreds of other species are found elsewhere around the world. But while theirs was a life with advantages, it also offered new challenges. Among the challenges was how to colonize trees in the first place. Unaided, the seeds of mistletoe would fall to the ground, unable to get to branches. Chance and wind were not enough for the offspring of mistletoe to find new trees, but the mistletoe had more than chance, it had natural selection. The mistletoe evolved seeds surrounded by berries. The berries attracted birds. The birds ate the berries and then flew to find more food. As they flew, or better yet, when they landed, they pooped. If everything went perfectly for the mistletoe, the poop landed on a branch where the seed might germinate.

Many more seeds were excreted midair and landed on the ground rather than onto branches, and so any seeds with additional advantages would have been more successful. So it was that another adaptation of the mistletoe evolved, its real kiss: seeds so sticky that even after passing through a bird they would stick to its bottom and then to its feet and then to anything else. When a bird pooped these seeds over a field, they did not fall. They clung. Birds who ate mistletoe seeds had to find a place to sit. They had to use their feet to get the seeds off of their feathers and scrape them onto other surfaces - like branches. So it is that mistletoe seeds today are passed with relatively high frequency to new trees.

The kiss of the mistletoe is the kiss of seeds through a bird, of those same seeds onto bare branches, and of roots slipping into tree branches and shoots. It is also the kiss of the leaves of the mistletoe, leaves that rise above all others through subterfuge. In a way, the mistletoe reminds us of days gone by, when there were no trees, and plants could simply grow short and stout and still find enough sun. Mistletoe still does so, just on its own elevated plane.

And so while there are historical explanations for why humans tend to kiss under mistletoe - a history of gods, demons, luck and a little lust - the evolutionary story of these plants with their sticky fruits and parasitic ways is more interesting. If this evolutionary story has a moral, it is complicated. On the one hand, mistletoe is a fruit of war, albeit one among trees. Let’s ignore that symbolism though, whatever it might mean for the holiday season. On the other hand, mistletoe is a measure of how many of the fruits in our daily lives, be they literal or figurative, depend on other species. We depend on the mistletoe for tradition. And it depends on its tree and its bird, just as we depend on thousands of species ourselves, species like the warring trees and the pooping birds, but also our crops, our Christmas trees and so many more, each of which evolved among evolution’s wild attempts to turn non-life - sun, soil, water and air - into life. I will pucker my lips to that, to the way evolution clings to us as beautifully as the kiss of a sticky seed.

About the author:

Rob Dunn is a biologist at North Carolina State University and the author of "The Wild Life of Our Bodies." He has written for Smithsonian about our ancestors’ predators, singing mice and the discovery of the hamster.

Article source Smithsonian Institution

Sunday, December 14, 2014

Leaving Santa Fe

 
Snow covered dried chiles, Santa Fe

From a coven of churches ring bells
that stop my thoughts, tender
solace to sinners - so many places
to pray. Tewas and Hopi offer
turquoise and dreams on altar
cloths beneath sacred trees.
I enter their temples. Crow Mother
rests on a branch nearby, gifts me
with corn for my faraway garden.
Leaving behind shops of art
and trinkets, my feet slow as sun
beats a past-noon descent.
Sky is high desert blue.
The air, wrung dry, shimmers
with heat, ancestral stories.
I feel the old ones stir my heart,
their whispers, my pulse.

By Carol Aronoff

Poem source here



Image by Martha Marks

Friday, December 12, 2014

New Mexico Biscochitos



By Cheryl Alters Jamison

The New Mexico state cookie, an anise- and cinnamon-scented delight, is served at every December gathering short of a fast-food breakfast. Lori Delgado shares this scrumptious recipe, which began with Agnes Trujillo, a friend of her mother-in-law, Angie’s. Whether you spell it biscochito or bizcochito, you’ll call these cookies wonderful. 

Makes about 6 dozen medium-size cookies.

Cookies
  • 5 to 6 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 tablespoon baking powder
  • ¼ teaspoon salt
  • 1 pound lard, at room temperature
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 3 large eggs
  • 1½ tablespoons ground anise seeds
  • ½ cup orange juice, preferably freshly pressed
  • 1 ounce (2 tablespoons) whiskey
Topping
  • ¼ cup granulated sugar
  • ¾ teaspoon ground cinnamon
For the cookies
  • Preheat oven to 425° F.
  • Sift together 5 cups flour, baking powder, and salt.
  • Beat lard in electric mixer, gradually adding sugar until extremely light and fluffy; about 8 minutes. Stop mixer every couple minutes to scrape down sides of mixing bowl. Add eggs singly, beating in each one before adding the next. 
  • Mix in dry ingredients, beating only until incorporated. Add anise seeds, whiskey, and orange juice. A stiff, pie-crust–like dough is what you’re after. Add some or all of remaining flour, as needed, to get proper consistency.
  • Spoon dough into cookie press, if you wish. Push out dough into shaped cookies onto cookie sheets. If you don’t have a cookie press or prefer to make them with cookie cutters, the dough can be rolled out ¼ inch thick on floured work surface and cut into favorite shapes, then arranged on cookie sheets. In either case, avoid handling the dough more than necessary.
  • Bake cookies 12 to 15 minutes.
For the topping
  • While cookies bake, stir together topping ingredients.
Assembly
  • Transfer cookies onto baking racks to cool.
  • Gently roll cookies in topping mixture. If not eaten sooner, cookies will keep for a week.

Enjoy!
*This article was first published in an online extra December 2013 issue of New Mexico Magazine




Friday, December 5, 2014

Wolves - The Endangered Species


A letter to the editor of the Idaho Mountain Express by Chris Albert

Humans have damaged wildlife more than wolves! 

Wolves are effective predators, but I am not sure why people insist on calling them “vicious.” With only teeth and fast strong bodies they hunt to live - that’s their role. 

They do not extirpate their prey. When researchers follow wolves, they find their success rate is usually less than 20 percent. That means the prey are not at all defenseless: their fast, strong bodies save them more than 80 percent of the time. Given the opportunity, wolves will surplus kill, but research shows us that they will go back to the site of surplus kills for months and feed. Assuming, of course, that people don’t lay in wait, to shoot, trap or poison at these sites. 

What puzzles me most of all is why we condemn the behavior in wolves that we, ourselves, engage in. We are outraged when a wolf “tears apart” a mother elk, but in a few months it is fine for us to go shoot the mother. Is it the “neatness” that makes it OK? We object to the “violence” of wolves against our livestock, but send the same livestock to premature violent and untimely deaths. To ask wolves to have a conscience is silly. They are wild animals. They are not supposed to have a conscience. That is a human trait. We humans are by far the worse in comparison: we do have a conscience, yet revel in the (often cruel) splintering and annihilation of wolf families. 

We nearly extirpated both elk and bison. We dare to think we are the only capable wildlife managers, refusing to admit that nature, before we came, was doing just fine. Once there were teeming herds of elk, bison and other game, living just fine with an estimated two million wolves. Why do you think it’s the wolves causing the problem?

~ . ~

Wolves are amazing creatures. They form social structures that could make any modern family blush. The Alpha male enters a lifelong bond with the Alpha female of a pack. Wolves love wolf babies. The Beta male is responsible for the welfare of the little ones, but the whole pack plays with them and is very protective. There are friendships and there are fights within a pack, but even the weakest of all, the Omega wolf, is taken care of if he is in need. 

Wolves are very territorial species and they will protect their territory from other wolf packs. They are predators. They kill big game and sometimes cattle, but seldom attack people. However, they kill to survive and not, as it is wrongly believed, out of pleasure of killing.

In 2013 grey wolves were taken off the list of protected species in the USA. Hunters can now organize hunting rallies and are permitted to use tracking dogs. They have the permit to kill not only the magnificent grey wolves, but also the endangered and rare Mexican red wolves. The plea of the conservationists and the nature lovers is ignored by the authorities in most States where wolf hunting is allowed. 

The subject is quite delicate. It is believed that hunters play important role in nature and I can understand hunting for food, but the "recreational" killing of animals is bare of any ethics. 

The argument that wolves decimate herds is a very weak one. In Poland, where wolves are protected species, the government reimburses farmers for their losses. Why this could not be done in one of the richest countries in the world is puzzling to me. 

By Dominique Teng


For centuries wolves have been characterized as bloodthirsty beasts and the bane of helpless livestock. Determined to overcome this misconception, film makers Jamie and Jim Dutcher, the creators of the Emmy Award Winning "Wolves at Our Door" documentary spent six years in a tented camp in the wilderness of Idaho living with a pack of wolves. Please watch and share this amazing documentary. It is quite eye-opening.



Also of interest: The Wolf Man -The Diary of Paul Balenovic and A Man Among Wolves

Image source here