Today is officially (per Google search) the Spring Equinox. My wife had a small business called Turning the Wheel that was about passing on Celtic (mostly) traditions around the eight holidays, the four solstice-equinox orbit points, marking seasonal changes, and the four additional points between those four points. You might picture two squares, superimposed, at 45 degrees to one another, resulting in eight equally spaced points around a circle. 360//8 = 45.
Depicted above: a scalable recipe I usually use because it’s nutritious and vegan. It goes under savory versus sweet and is basically lentils with nuanced flavors added by molasses and soy sauce, apple cider vinegar, some flavor of oil. Spices (cloves, ginger, and what we call allspice, which is not a curry).
This recipe came to me through a couple, Joe and Teresina, who moved to Portland in their senior years and who started overlapping study groups my wife and I would attend, Teresina’s on Buddhism and Joe’s on Economics. They were a vital component of our Quaker Meetings (Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly) in North Pacific Yearly Meeting (NPYM).
Portland has two main unprogrammed Meetings (not called churches, nor temples). I’m much more proximal to one of them, within walking distance, whereas the other is adjacent to Reed College. Fittingly because College Park, a place in California, is a name from our Beanite past, referring to a family that went west from Iowa or someplace in the Midwest. We don’t usually get into the details. Quakers are full of schisms going back to the Hicksites and such, and only a few of us bother to memorize a lotta details about these developments. In geek world, branching and forking as taken for granted.
In Asylum District, a business moniker for our neighborhood, the Friends on Stark Street, the closer-to-me meeting (I can drive to Reedwood in a few minutes, where Bridge City Friends just had a newcomers gathering), have a shared history with Linus and Ava Helen Pauling through a mutual benefactor: Electro-Scientific Instruments, the owner of the Quakers’ meetinghouse after acquiring it from Jantzen, the swimming suit company. ESI used the Stark Street factory to make electronic instruments and later moved to bigger digs (which burned in a fire on Macadam, necessitating yet bigger digs).
ESI’s founder, Doug Strain, had studied under Linus Pauling at CalTech, plus shared the regional pacifism for which Cascadia has long been known. He helped the Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy restore the Linus Pauling boyhood home on Hawthorne Boulevard and make it a center, a hub, of Portland’s cultural vitality. A group calling itself the Wanderers still meets there, thanks to ISEPP (for which my wife had been bookkeeper (she had a lotta nonprofit clients; her Turning the Wheel was a side business)).
