PRESIDENT'S CORNER - August 5, 2016

Happy Mid-Quarter Day – Lughnasa - (tomorrow): See below for details.

Book Club: My last plea for titles has borne fruit, so here are some suggestions…

I loved The End of Life Book Club" by Will Schwalbe -- Would read it again. I loved the way they shared favorite books and copied all the titles to read someday. Also the devotional she mentioned I put on my Kindle to read daily. Just a good read. [Laura Garlitz]

I just read this little novel, and thought it may appeal to some in OLLI. The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks. A quick read, a novel, but deals with Alzheimer's. [Kathryn Madison]

I have just read Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor (whom I first learned of at Chautauqua!). It's about both physical darkness - night - as well as the dark of the soul. You probably know it.  It's interesting and ties in with Wiesel.  [Betty Maxwell]

Midsummer: Last week I posed this question about when, exactly, Midsummer would fall. Thanks to Connie and Steve McCluskey, all can now be revealed:  What you want is a mid-quarter day.  The Greeks and Romans divided the year into quarters, with two solstices (June and December) and two equinoxes (March and September).  And others decided to divide the year up differently, to include the middle of summer even.  The mid-quarter days were very important to many people, especially the Celts.  So half way between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox is the mid-quarter day:  August 6. [Connie] Steve then offered the following:

Ancient Astronomy: An Encyclopedia of Cosmologies and Myth by Clive Ruggles

Mid-Quarter Days

The solstices and equinoxes divide the year into four almost equal parts. If one further divides each of these parts into two, the additional dates are what are known variously as the mid-quarter or cross-quarter days, or sometimes as the Scottish quarter days, since in Scotland, as opposed to England, they—and not the solstices and equinoxes—were used as the basis of the legal division of the year into four. The dates are February 4, May 6, August 6, and November 5.

A number of later prehistoric monuments in Britain and Ireland are aligned upon sunrise or sunset close to one of the mid-quarter days, although whether these alignments were intended and hence reflect a widespread calendrical practice is a matter of considerable doubt. Perhaps the earliest example is a U-shaped setting of large timber posts constructed in the Earlier Neolithic (fifth century B.C.E.) at Godmanchester in Cambridgeshire, England, which was aligned upon sunrise in early May and early August. Others include the longer passage at the Neolithic passage tomb of Dowth, County Meath, Ireland (one of three large tombs in the Boyne valley), which is aligned upon sunset in early November and early February.

Four of the eight festivals traditionally associated with the Celtic calendar were also associated with mid-quarter days, namely Imbolc (early February), Beltaine (early May), Lughnasa (early August), and Samhain (early November), and these same dates found their way into pagan and Christianized calendrical festivals, most notably the feast of All Saints on November 1.

Did we need to know this? Who cares!  We are here to keep learning and we are a vital community of learners with all sorts of esoteric knowledge readily to hand. I am very glad to learn about mid-quarter days. Thank you Connie and Steve!

So do something special tomorrow to mark Lughnasa, but I would not recommend getting over comfy with too much wine and then processing down to the river to “swim in the wine-dark sea” like the ancient Greek Baccantes, a movie or picnic would be fine.

Jim Held, President