Friday, March 16, 2012

Spring in New Orleans

Posted at Nola.com by Brett Will Taylor... local blogger.

"Because I think there's a really awesome lesson to learn in the way that Spring really does bust out all over around here. The lesson is this: We live in a time when man actually thinks he is the master of Mother Earth. And, when it's spring in New Orleans, you can actually hear Mother Earth laugh at the foolishness of that notion!"

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Italian Immigrants in New Orleans

Our local newspaper the Times Picayune is 175 years old.  They also are on-line at

They recently published a list of 175 Events, People & Things that shaped New Orleans.

The article below by Laura Maggi on Italian Immigrants was one of the 175.

The tourists waiting patiently for muffulettas in the aisles of Central Grocery likely have no idea they are surrounded by what was once a standard fixture of many New Orleans neighborhoods: the Italian-owned corner store.
italian-immigrants.jpgView full size

These grocery stores once dotted the city’s landscape, built by immigrants who flocked to New Orleans and surrounding parishes beginning in the late 1800s. Unlike Italian immigrants to other major American cities — who hailed from all over the then recently unified country — New Orleans’ immigrants came almost entirely from the poverty-stricken island of Sicily.

The Sicilian transplants found work on sugar plantations upriver or toiling on New Orleans docks. Many who stayed in the city settled in the lower French Quarter, creating what was known at one point as Little Palermo. Macaroni factories popped up around the neighborhood, while Italian vendors sold fruit at the French Market.

Eventually, some immigrants were able to open small businesses, such as corner stores or restaurants. Some didn’t stay small, such as Progresso Foods, the soup and condiment giant, which began as a New Orleans import company.

As Italians prospered, many followed the path of earlier immigrants, leaving the city for suburban parishes. Their culinary traditions, New Orleans twists on Italian food, can be seen all over the metropolitan region. These traditions include, of course, the muffuletta: a sandwich of deli meat and cheeses smothered in olive salad. Many local kitchens offer up red gravy, a long-simmered tomato sauce.

Each March, local families descended from Sicilian immigrants erect elaborate altars laden with bread, cookies and other food in honor of St. Joseph’s Day. St. Joseph’s has also been adopted as one of the few non-Carnival days of celebration for the city’s Mardi Gras Indian tribes, which don their elaborate suits in the evening and parade in the streets.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Time and Direction and Circle Casting

We pagans put emphasis on the cardinal directions and meanings associated with directions.
East is where the sun rises and where seasons begun and from where new life and possibilities spring.
West is where the sun sets and where the path to the underworld begins. North is a position of power.
NorthEast an especialy important position for Streghe. This is where we enter our circles and where we interface with the gods.

Time and direction are woven together in our circles and our rituals.  When we set our circle and move through our rituals we are mirroring and influencing and interacting with "Time".

We pagans view the solar year as cyclical year, not quite linear time.The streghe view time as cyclical following the cycles inside of cycles approach. We have both the repeating annual solar cycle, monthly lunar cycle and the Ages which (I think) are stellar. 

A 2010 study looked at time and direction and shows that what we do in our rituals is essentially an innate tendency of humantiy but is also influenced by culture. The Science News article below talks about this study and is interesting in the way is shows different peoples will view time and direction differently. Time and direction are influenced by culture and these days technology. 

To quote from the article below:
For the Pormpuraawans {from a remote community in Australia}
"... time flows from left to right when facing south, from right to left when facing north, toward the body when facing east and away from the body when facing west."

"... studies have indicated that people use their bodies as a reference to lay out time."
Isn't that what we are doing when we lay out a circle?
"In the United States, time is generally thought of as running from left to right. Other populations arrange time from right to left, back to front, or front to back."  

Aboriginal time runs east to west
Sun’s trajectory may channel time’s flow for one remote groupBy Bruce Bower December 4th, 2010; Vol.178 #12 (p. 11)


Time rises in the east and sets in the west in a remote part of Australia. Aborigines living there assume that time moves westward, apparently in accord with the sun’s daily arc across the sky, say Stanford University psychologist Lera Boroditsky and linguist Alice Gaby of the University of California, Berkeley.

Unlike any other group studied to date, these hardy foragers think about the day after tomorrow as two days to the west, the olden days as times far to the east, and the progression of a person’s life from infancy to old age as running from east to west, Boroditsky and Gaby report in an upcoming Psychological Science.

Grounding time in absolute directions makes it imperative for these people, called Pormpuraawans, to know which way they’re facing at all times. For them, time flows from left to right when facing south, from right to left when facing north, toward the body when facing east and away from the body when facing west.

Pormpuraawans rarely use terms for right and left and instead refer to absolute directions, making statements such as “Move your cup over to the north-northwest a little bit.”

Culture powerfully influences how people conceive of time, in Boroditsky’s view. “Pormpuraawans think about time in ways that other groups cannot, because those groups lack the necessary spatial knowledge,” she says.

Previous studies have indicated that people use their bodies as a reference to lay out time. In the United States, time is generally thought of as running from left to right. Other populations arrange time from right to left, back to front, or front to back.

“This new finding is of great significance since cognitive scientists have assumed that time representations must be body-based,” remarks psychologist Asifa Majid of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Cultural differences in thinking about spatial orientation shape time representations, proposes psychologist Daniel Haun, also of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. In 2009, Haun reported that Namibian hunter-gatherers remember dance steps and other body movements according to absolute directions. Time perception has yet to be studied in this group.

Some evidence suggests that an innate tendency to navigate by consulting external landmarks and absolute directions gets transformed into a body-centered viewpoint in certain cultures (SN: 2/10/07, p. 89).

Boroditsky and Gaby studied 14 Pormpuraawans and 14 Stanford students. Each group contained seven men and seven women. Aborigines ranged in age from the late 40s to the mid 70s.

In one task, participants examined six to 12 sets of cards. Each four-card set depicted a progression over time, such as a man at different ages. On each trial, participants received a shuffled deck and were asked to lay the cards out in the correct order.

In a second task, an experimenter placed a marker on the ground and asked volunteers to denote time periods with their own markers. If the experimenter’s stone represented today, volunteers indicated spots for yesterday and tomorrow. In other trials, volunteers arranged markers for morning, noon and evening, and for olden days, nowadays and far in the future.

Halfway through each task, each participant switched his or her sitting position to face in a different direction.

U.S. students always portrayed time as moving from left to right. Most Pormpuraawans depicted time as moving from east to west, so time’s flow systematically shifted course as the direction they faced changed.

The few body-based responses among Aborigines may reflect increasing exposure to television and other facets of Western life, as well as unfamiliarity with arranging objects in sequences, Boroditsky suggests.

Monday, March 12, 2012

Natural Resiliance

Below is an article published in the Times Picayune that talks about a community's resiliance.   If you've read any news in the past 6 years you've probably heard about at least 2 of the disasters that affected the Barataria community: Katrina & the BP Oil Spill.  While the article is short on detail the fact that these communities are made up of individuals who live close to nature and who understand how they are interdependent on nature *and* each other is at the core of their capacity to survive.

It makes a unique kind of South Louisiana sense when you come from an area named after the immeniently adaptable Pirate, Jean Lafitte, when you live in an area named for the Pirate Jean Lafitte  will you get someone saying that the secret to their success is that they are like a Pirate, Jean Laffite.
They were able to adapt and change in order to continue,” Peterson said. “It’s kind of the lessons from what we can learn from Jean Lafitte.”


Full Article captured for reference below:
Barataria area is model of resiliance.
Allen Powell II - March 11, 2011 - Times Picayune

Most communities couldn’t survive six natural disasters in six consecutive years, particularly if they destroyed hundreds of homes and cost hundreds of people their jobs. But if you ask residents of Lafitte, Barataria and Crown Point, they’ll tell you they aren’t most people, and according to a recent study from the University of New Orleans’ Center for Hazards Assessment, Response and Technology, they’re right.
Researchers found that residents of the fishing enclave are extremely resilient, which is evident in how quickly their communities have rebounded from hurricanes, floods and the BP oil spill, said Kristina Peterson, a senior researcher with CHART. The group studied those communities to determine the root cause of their resiliency in the hope that it might help others.

“They were able to adapt and change in order to continue,” Peterson said. “It’s kind of the lessons from what we can learn from Jean Lafitte.”

Researchers used “participatory action research,” a method that lets residents drive the focus of the study. Peterson said researchers spent four years meeting with residents and developed an oral history of the communities. They discovered the skill sets and practices that made the areas stronger and made residents more willing to reinvest despite the damage caused by hurricanes like Katrina, Rita and Ike.
Peterson said researchers presented their findings to residents several times, and then residents would tell them whether those findings were accurate to provide a complete picture. She said this type of research is more valuable than simple surveys or data mined from the U.S. Census Bureau.
“They told us their story,” Peterson said.
What researchers found was that despite the lack of outstanding public infrastructure, the communities had intense and extensive private bonds that provided a helpful social network. In addition, certain skills that were essential to disaster recovery, like carpentry, were often tied to the livelihoods of many residents. Residents said they had a close relationship with public officials, and that allowed them to minimize or eliminate the red tape that slowed recovery in other areas, she said.
Jean Lafitte Mayor Tim Kerner said the study validates what he already knew about the area. Residents in those communities are willing and able to do their part to recover, but they do need a helping hand from politicians to make certain that things are not too difficult.

Lafitte, Barataria and Crown Point, Kerner said, play an important role in the Louisiana economy as well as the nation because of its fishers, and oil and gas workers. He said he hopes the study will stand as testament to the will of those individuals.

“I think what they saw is that the people here bounce back faster and stronger than some other areas,” Kerner said. “If you look, we’ve been through six disasters in six years, and if you drive through Jean Lafitte, Crown Point and Barataria, it doesn’t look like we’ve had one.”
Allen Powell II can be reached at apowell@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3793.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Nature Deficit Disorder

Click the link and read about Richard Louv and how critical it is to connect with Nature.

It makes me glad I have spent time this weekend with my hands in the dirt, planting and weeding.  This always centers and calms me.  

It always seems to come back "Nature is the Great Teacher."

Or as Richard Louv says it:
"Simply put, the Nature Principle maintains that a reconnection with the natural world is fundamental to human health, well-being and survival."

Read more in Richard Louv's  "The Nature Principle"

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

The stars and our connection...

Astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson was asked in an interview with TIME magazine, "What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe?" This is his answer.