Keep looking up

.

These are such sad and terrible times inside and just across our borders lately, I have to keep urging myself:  "Keep looking up."

Especially now, on Hoshana Raba and on Simchat Torah, which is supposed to be a joyous holiday.
Simchat Torah mean Rejoicing in the Torah.
In Orthodox synagogues the men dance and sing with the Torah scrolls, while in Reform and liberal congregations the women and children join in in carrying the scrolls and everyone celebrates together.
The last parasha or portion of the last book, Deuteronomy, is chanted.
To keep the reading cycle going unbroken, the scroll is either rewound or a different scroll is opened and the first chapter of Genesis is begun immediately.

And so life goes on, at least for the lucky ones.
.

The Kettle is almost on

Ted gets moon-eyed

… we had a lunar eclipse last week, a very special one, as the Harvest Moon also became a “blood” moon. If you were lucky enough to be in a place with little or no light population, like Scotland, and you’d been geeky enough to take your high powered telescope with you then you would have had a spectacular view that would have made it well worth getting up at 3am (you know who you are Mandy).

So what makes it a blood moon Ted? Well for a start it glows red, and the reason for this complicated, but in a nutshell, dispersed light from all the Earth’s sunrises and sunsets falls on the face of the moon at mid-eclipse when we are between it and the sun and bingo 40 watt red light-bulb effect.

The Harvest Moon is the moon closest to the autumn equinox. It’s been celebrated by Chinese and South East Asian cultures for many centuries, pretty much like our own European traditions of Harvest Festivals, where we celebrate the end of the harvest and the abundance (hopefully) of Nature’s bounty to provide our winter supplies. Chinatown in Soho is a great place to go for the Harvest (Happy) Moon festival as they really get into the swing with little parades, lots of lanterns, and most importantly, this is the only time of year when you can buy fresh mooncakes.

Making (or nowadays buying them from the shop ready-made and nicely packaged) and sharing mooncakes is one of the traditions of the festival. The Chinese believe that the round shape of the cakes signifies completeness and unity, and thus sharing them with friends and family during the festival completes the circle and unifies us all for another year.

The Doll loves mooncakes and so she took no convincing at all to hotfoot it down to Chinatown and return with the goods. There are 2 main types of filling, the red bean paste and lotus paste with egg yolks. I am not so keen on the lotus paste and egg ones as I think it reminds me of my rather unsuccessful attempt to eat another stalwart of Chinese cuisine, a 1000 year old egg … erg …

The red bean paste one was delicious, the pastry is soft and biscuit like, the filling sweet and earthy and nutty all at the same time – the overall package is what I think we’d describe as “toothsome” … and it was reddish … so hence it kinda sorta looked like a blood moon.

Clayton

Still inching my way forward through The Lou's September and October events. I've gotten to the Clayton Art Fair, one of our two big outdoor exhibitions, held three weeks ago. Clayton is an inner suburb, seat of St. Louis County and, in a way, a second, sanitized downtown. The work on display there tends to be of a high level of craft and lacking in originality.

The best photos are in the details. Susan Stone was there, of course (she's always there, everywhere). The still life in the second picture was just sitting on a table in front of me. I made no attempt to arrange it but I suspect someone else did. 

Early Autumn Shot

Ich war auf dem Weinwanderweg oberhalb des Neckars unterwegs. Ein sehr schöner Weg mit beeindruckenden Ausblicken.

I was on the move at the vineyard trail above the Neckar. It's a wonderful pathway which offers impressive views.