Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)
Corn Spiral May 2018
(Landscape orientation)
The photo is of our backyard, taken from the back third of lawn, while up on an eight foot step-ladder, facing the house.
The top third of the photo: the house in the upper left corner and the shed in the middle-top. The house is an brown-with-the-heart-of-a-pumpkin, the deck projects out from the ground level of the two glass doors. To the right of the house is, barely-visible, Una’s garden and then the shed which, in the photo, is simply a bunch of the natural shadows of the pine trees that surround the lawn, forced into a squarish-rectangle.
The lower two-thirds of the photo is innocent-enough looking lawn. The green of the ‘grass’ (aka anything that grows using photosynthesis and has enough pre-conscious intelligence to stay close to the ground, to avoid the terrible god, ‘Lawnboy-the-Destroyer’) is, as the style of those who write with an eye towards earning money in the lucrative greeting card industry, dappled by the sun through the surrounding pine trees. The effect is less impressive than the thought of someone who would earn living writing greeting cards, (surely this person would do so by sitting in the middle of suburban mall, spiral-bound stenographers pad in one hand, chewed-cap, blue Lindy pen in the other, gazing over the gurgling-stream of humanity that passes in real-life imitation of the rotary background of old, 1960s Saturday cartoons.)
The lawn, stops looking innocent as sound as the second dark circle is noticed. Patterns are funny like that. Seeing two leads to seeing the rest.
1) Phyllis. There’s an old saying from the Nearly-Enlightened Age of the late 17th Century, (‘If paint never dried, the most brilliant of still lifes, breath-robbing landscapes, heart-wrenching portraits would, to all but the artist, remain nothing but a rainbow puddle‘), is an apt illustration of the combination of a clark and a roger. The above future crop spiral would not exist without the rogerian drive to concretize dreams.
2) Una. (For providing us here with an irrepressibly-human element*).
3) Work. For allowing me the opportunity to find, learn and practice self-development in the context of the ‘real’ world. And get paid doing it. (Take a hike Tony Robbins, the Doctrines on the move.)
4) the Wakefield Doctrine
5) as always, grateful to Josie Two Shoes for her time, effort and heart in bringing this quiet place in the ‘tween world of the internet so that like-minded people might stop, however briefly, and gain strength by identifying with others who see the world as a place of opportunity.
6) the bloghops: FTSF, this TToT, the Six Sentence Story and, of course, the Gravity Challenge
7) THIS SPACE AVAILABLE
8) Sunday Supplement (holy moley! it is Sunday.) (hold on, it’s a long weekend, so lets just (adjust your sense of uni-directional temporality and this joke will be a whole lot funnier…. ready?) make a little retroactive change.
Monday Supplement
9)
10) Secret Rule 1.3
* surely the most precise of test question that separates students of the Doctrine from the rest of the world lol
About clarkscottroger
Very nice, I look forward to the corn spiral producing stalks.
You had me at corn. I think that stuff is written into my DNA…er…probably why I need to have it at most meals. :D
yeah, the deers be totally excited too!
So are the deer.
Looks like a mighty huge corn spiral! Future corn spiral :) Planting a garden is a most enjoyable activity. The more enjoyable? Eating what you grew!! Hope your harvests are in abundance.
Good luck keeping those rabbits from eating the lettuce lol
yeah this shaping up to a wildlife buffet… all you can eat (until the larger predators find out)…lol
That spiral is very interesting. How did you do it? I wanna build a labyrinth, so it looks like the mathematics (did you use math in this?) is actually pretty close to the Fibonacci spiral. And of course I would notice, that but still. :D These things FASCINATE me. I see some geometry with a side of future tomatoes. Pretty cool!
I hope you’re having a great Memorial Day weekend. I’m always grateful for the Doctrine and I have a number 7 for you: I’m grateful that you get a chance to work on Almira and have a friend edit – the story was fun to read, now…the editing part is where life can get so interesting and the story can take on even more turns. Fun stuff!
And…I’m studying the sofreggio frequency as part of my studies…not too far off from all that Fibonacci stuff…and totally why my mind has connected the two…
I imagine other clarks are going to be the ones who get what I’m saying first…lol
By eye.
I tried to figure a way to do it, ‘mechanically’ but my math is not powerful. (I thought, ‘Hey clark! Establish a stable central point, yeah, sure, stick that shovel handle into the ground…no! over there! good. Get some strong-enough twine and tie a loop that allows the twine to rotate (no, you totally don’t have a prayer of creating a cam system that will increase the radius at a deliberate rate…forget about it!) and then mark the roll of twine (the cardboard cylinder which had a decent enough circumference of about 2 inches or so). Then, I thought I could: step-mark, step-left-allowing-two-revolutions-mark and so on, around and around. (I still think that might have worked…).
I got about from ’12 o’clock to 8 o’clock doing it that way but, stepping back, it didn’t look right. (Remember from your visit, on the back of the house we have a deck with a bench at ground level and a deck off the dining area on the upper level. Standing on the bench allowed about 9′ and the upper deck about feet or so)… so I took a bunch of those thin, colored plastic rods we use to mark the edges of the driveways for the snow plows and walked around and stuck them in the ground and walked-around-and-spun-in-place-and-moved-them-a-little-and-got-mad-and-gave-up-and-came-back-and-walked-around-and-moved-them….lol
I used a post hole digger when I settled on a spot. In part ’cause it let me make a cool, round holes, plus the soil around here is kinda not good, so I put good dirt down the hole, with the seeds and topped it off with planting soil.
I suspect there is a math-grounded way to establish the pattern… but math and me has always been, like the first high school dance and, unfortunately, I waited by the bleachers too long and never took the chance that a little silliness, fully embraced, makes up for a lot of practice alone in my head. (sorry, tangential musings…)
I trust you and John will have a pleasant holiday (funny, seems like we only have one scott left in the neighborhood… a relatively short volley of firecrackers last night…. the common scottian ‘HEY!!’ was more, ‘hey?…anyone? hey?’ )
(looked up sofreggio frequency. cool stuff you get to be learnin)
Yeah, well…I LIKE THE IDEA of doing mathematical things. (I am a geek.) But…in practice, I would have *totally* done all this by eye…and all manner of incantations to make everything float right into place with no help from math at all…HAHAHA
Egads…how the world do they even DO those crop circles anyways?
I think (well, of course) that I get the incantations part…though I don’t do it formally, but I am aware, when in the execution mode of how important it is (for me) to dial back the analytical part (or as don Juan would have referred to it, ‘the tonal’) and try and trust my non-thinking side. Kinda fun practice (I’m also into jigsaw puzzles on line for the same purpose, ‘interrupting the internal dialogue’ (again with the Castaneda)… but this exercise is more immediate in feedback, when I am successful I simply move the pieces into their correct position.)
Fun with reality, non?
I looked at the Abby Road cover and began singing all the words to “You Never Give Me Your Money” without the music. Classic. I’m thinking that a spiral is metaphor for something. I hope you are planting sunflowers in those wholes. That would be amazing, although I’m sure anything that grows there will be wonderful. I’ll stay tuned.
one of the best (of their albums, top three, along with Sgt Pepper and the White Album).
hey! thats an idea (the deer surely will appreciate the variety for their dinners)…. (I have some corn seeds left over and it occurred to me that not I single neighbor (or anyone in southern New England) has a row of corn as border along their driveways! I must rectify this oversight.) no, fortunately there is no HOA in our area, too rural for that, even if it is a development, our house is at the end of a couple of hundred foot driveway (passing between the fences of the abutters who have normal front lawns.)
won’t they be surprised.
I dare you! Come back tomorrow and tell me the corn driveway is underway lol
That is a very cool spiral! The caption for the photo made me laugh at the point where you wrote, “The effect is less impressive than the thought of someone who would earn a living writing greeting cards.” Once upon a time, I looked into the prospects of writing greeting cards, but after digging a little further decided that was out of the question if I really expected to earn very much, if any, as a stay-at-home mom. LOL
I love your tribute to Phyllis in #1, and really to the two of you as you summed it up so well in the last line.
To “find, learn and practice self development” and get paid for your labors has got to be very satisfying.