You know it is a holy day today for several of the religious faiths. We are an inclusive bunch at Refuge Farm, as you are aware. We do our best to ensure that our diverse congregants, practicing or not, have the freedom to express and celebrate their views of their paths to eternity.

Sometimes that means sitting in the rain due to crowd loading factors around the Fire Ring, but most Sundays we can just shorten the varieties of necessary devotions to accommodate conditions. That necessity caused us some chaos this morning, since some of the old Science, Technology and Policy topics seemed to fit better earlier in the morning, when some important assertions could be made without having to provide justification for them. Not out of partisan motivation, of course. We all studied some of the unpleasant periods that arose between adherents of assorted theologic differences, and sure enough there was a minor one this morning.

It arose in part of a discussion about the nature of “unity” in philosophic issues regarding all that important stuff with which we constantly wrestle. Community. Concern. Effort. Direction. We are in general agreement on all of them, with the slight exception of the vector of direction. We have been interested in the new solar power project they are attempting to put into what is currently a horse property over by Stevensburg on RT-3. It could amount to a thousand acre installation of black glass by the road that services some of the historic sites here. The philosophy behind having to change the zoning to permit the project is that solar energy is “free” and “renewable.” It just makes sense, right?

But that is why we got hung up on “direction” this morning. Splash said that the solar panels they want to put in our town are renewable mostly in the context that the panels themselves need to be renewed every twenty-five or thirty years when they burn out. That is the part of the narrative we can’t talk about in the morning. See, we buy them from the companies that ship them across the world ocean on giant containerships after being manufactured by laborers who have assembled them from heavy metals mined in remote areas by youthful workers who would need papers if they tried to work here. The Experts also are having a problem figuring out what to do with the old panels, since presently they are not recyclable, which means we are converting heaps of raw materials into stacks. Those stacks are put in place for a few years and then wind up in other stacks slowly disintegrating into the raw soil from which the accumulating wreckage blocks the sun.

That conversation lasted only a couple minutes, since we have become accustomed to the conflict in the various narratives. We laughed, then agreed to put the “changing weather” thing in the morning list of things and leave the policy implications for the afternoon sessions when people can raise their voices if they feel like it. The agreement about Public Policy being different from theology is important to the Old Salts. They tend to accept that ‘systems’ that produce something useful and worth having arrive in a series of linked events and processes. The general feeling, based on painful experience with very large shipboard systems is that if you are going to embark on some really big project, you might want to try it out and see how they actually work. It used to be how Science was done, but they changed that part of it to the morning discussion when everyone just nods.

We can only talk about the hard work part in the afternoon session, since the morning is restricted to topics we don’t have to explain or justify. it also gets us to lunch faster.

Anyway, we all agreed the Sun is a good thing and we all like it. Whether we want to pave the Piedmont with black glass we will start replacing three or four times a century is a topic for the afternoon, and Splash said it was too bad the Belmont Farms Distillery was closed on Sundays, but he had something saved from Saturday that could help the conversation after lunch.

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