AncienTrails

A Kick-Back Day

Lughnasa                                        Waning Artemis Moon

A fine kick-back watch the blue sky and the white clouds kind of day.  Sunshine.  Not too hot and not too cold.  A late northern summer day or an early northern fall day.  As good as weather gets, anywhere.  We’ve not done much today.  I took Kate out to lunch to thank her for help with the honey extraction.  We took a nap.  I got out our passports so we could see if we needed to update them.  Kate’s is a year out of date; mine’s good until 2018.  Walked the fence line to be sure last night’s barking hadn’t occasioned a digging frenzy on our Rigel’s part.  No.

A college football saturday.  Even though I didn’t and don’t particularly enjoy college football.  Gotta work out.

Sitting Back

Lughnasa                                       Waning  Artemis Moon

The big push on honey extraction, preceded by the push to mulch the orchard and the vegetable garden, has left both Kate and me happy the weather has soured.  She sews, now in the room right above my study, and I tap tap tap away following this lead and that down the cyber rabbit hole.

After reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Blind Descent, I’ve veered off into fiction, a sort of relief has taken my reading and I’ve plowed through 2 1/2 novels this last week +.  None of it so far is noteworthy, just pleasant diversions.

Worked this last week on a project for the office of Learning and Innovation at the Museum.  It involved responding to a new exhibition of heads and masks to be installed in the hallway in front of the antiquities galleries.  It’s part of the Art Remix concept.  Thinking in this way, finding connections between the new installation and other parts of the museum, stimulated me, shot off a spark or two.

Eternal Tru Luv

Lughnasa                               Waning Artemis Moon

Kate’s at work.  Two months almost to the day after her hip surgery she has returned to the Allina Clinic in Coon Rapids for her last four months of full time practice.  I anticipate a successful evening and final four months for her, having seen a remarkable recovery in terms of her day-to-day pain.  The hip is wonderful, the back’s pretty good, the only clinker right now is her bursitis on her left hip.  Still, compared to the awful weeks just prior to her surgery, she’s a different woman and it’s great to see.

Having her home full time, practice retirement, helped us see the possibilities in the next phase of our life together.  We’ll manage our gardens and our orchard and our bees with greater ease, two persons engaged from the start of the growing season.  We’ll have time to go into art galleries, out to lunch, just wander around more.

Other people must find the one who gets them, around whom they can be their authentic selves, I’m glad to say I’m among them.  And that the experience is reciprocal.

Eternal tru luv, as we used to say.

Shame, Guilt, Fear

Lughnasa                                                  Waning Artemis Moon

While it’s fresh.  A meeting this morning with our financial manager where we went over, again, the various moving parts of our investments.  It resulted in a down feeling, almost defensive.  What was this?  He said we’d be fine financially and I believed him.  We overhauled our whole approach to money now over ten years ago and have a great track record since then.  When I mentioned my feelings to Kate, she said she trusted in our ability to adapt.  Again, I believed her.  We have and will adapt to changed circumstances.

It took a while to delayer my feelings.  First, I noticed anxiety (my unfortunately favorite response to the unknown), as if a vast pit were about to open ahead of us.  A pit of this and then a possible that and more stuff we didn’t know, or have impact on.  A little deeper I recognized a fear about being dependent on a bag of gold held in some financial dragon’s lair and only won back by dint of great effort.  Silly.  Obtuse.  Still, the case.

Pushing a little further, a different layer.  Retirement.  When Kate retires, my long tenuous connection to the world of work would fray, then vanish.  It’s as if she’s retiring for both of us.  Or, rather, that I feel the imminence of retirement perhaps in a manner similar to the couvade, a strange situation in some cultures where a husband takes on the characteristics of his wife’s pregnancy, often placing a heavy rock on the belly near the birth moment and heaving it off.  So, there’s the unknown, the strange sense of money coming in from a pot somewhere far away, a feeling of retiring that is sympathetic or empathetic rather than actual.  But, that wasn’t the end.

What finally came to me was a mixture of shame, guilt and fear, all related to no longer having a viable connection to the world of work.  This is my middle class roots talking.  As long as Kate practices, I have a tangible though fragile link to work and the income it produces.  After she retires, all semblance of that relationship vanishes.  In the central Indiana world where I grew up not to work was shameful, weak, irresponsible.  Kate responded with, “Well, I’m upper middle class and I don’t care! (about the abandoning work)”

All of our life comes along for the ride and we never knew when one part or another will express itself, rise up and claim attention.

An Aging Bull Moose

Lughnasa                                    Waning Artemis Moon

Easton and Ray, both soon to be seniors at Andover High, worked this morning, moving wood chips, laying them down on the paths Kate and I cleared of weeds yesterday.  Both fit and energetic they kept at it, moving 9 cubic yards of wood chips with a wheel barrow.  That’s minus the maybe one cubic yard I moved to mulch some parts of the further away vegetable patch.  The orchard looks great and completes a job started by Kate a few weeks ago, one she saw through to a beautiful conclusion.  The orchard looks its best ever.  Right after Ecological Gardens finished the installation now 3 years ago, it looked pretty good, but the trees were small and the  plants in the guilds around them were also young.  Now the trees have begun to bear fruit, the guild plants have matured and the place looks like a real orchard.  Pictures tomorrow.

Working alongside the boys made me oddly competitive.  I wanted them to see me as an old man who could really work.  Not quite sure where this came from but it felt like the aging bull moose in the presence of young, high testosterone males.  Instinctive rather than even subconscious.  It passed, though.

Now, after a day and a half of physical labor, I’m weary, in need of a nap.

Work

Lughnasa                                         Full Artemis Moon

Kate now gardens like she used to, full speed ahead, churning up weed piles and moving on, like a gopher of weeds.  She’s constantly in motion, going hard, being busy.  Now that her long-arm quilter only awaits plugging in, she’ll have another tool to use.  Kate’s work ethic doesn’t seem to have an off switch.

It’s good, most of the time.  My work ethic, however, is not hers.  Sometimes I feel as if I need to get in motion, too, be doing something.  This is moving against my nature, which requires solitary, reflective time.  She doesn’t press this on me, instead my inner Teuton responds to her activity, feels guilty.  It’s a hard balance for me to maintain.  Part of the delicate dance of a long term love affair.

Grand-daughter Ruth has started pre-school.  Kate sent her a bouquet of pink flowers and I sent along some fairy tale books and two books on starting school.  Showing that she will do well in the educational system, Ruth plucked individual flowers out of the bouquet and took them to her teachers.

In reflecting on her starting pre-school, the momentousness struck me in a way Joseph’s didn’t.  Having the experience of my own education–long–and Kate’s–long–and Joseph’s–longish, I got, maybe for the first time, what a journey the formal education process requires.  She may be at this 20 years from now, when she’s 24 and I’m, oh my, 83.

We turn over a good, large part of our lives to education in class rooms, handing in assignments, following required curriculum, reading what others tell us to read.  In part, I know, this means giving ourselves a chance to mature without clogging up the work force.  In part the system tries to occupy our time in meaningful and useful ways; in other parts it attempts to restrain, to lock us into a hierarchical system with rigid expectations.

Good luck, Ruthie.  A 20 year journey starts with the first pre-school day.

The Buddha

Lughnasa                                   Full Artemis Moon

No.  Not that Buddha.  A small, bald, slightly pudgy baby Buddha.  That was what we called my sister when she was still an infant.  Mary had an inscrutable baldness going for her.  Now she lives in the land of the Buddha, the oldest Buddhism of all, Theravada, and has long since shed her Buddha appearance.  She’s traded the robes, or the diapers, of the Buddha for academic regalia, Indiana for Singapore, North America for Asia.

She’s been over there a while now, a long while, living a good part of her adult life on the Malay Peninsula, first in Kuala Lumpur and now in the Air Conditioned Nation of Singapore, a city state like days of old.

The life of an ex patriate had no texture, no reality for me until first Mary, then Mark ended up in Southeast Asia, both spending at least two decades there, plus a little.  That left me the only stay at home, still rooted in the Midwest.

As things go, however, I developed an ongoing interest in Asia art and from that Asian history and, in particular, Chinese philosophy, so we all share a common fascination with the Far East, though mine is more bookish and museum oriented while theirs is everyday life.

Mary has gone faraway and built a life in a land with lifeways and assumptions often very different from our own.  It’s an impressive achievement and as she nears her 58th birthday I wanted to acknowledge it.  Happy Birthday!  Dr. Sis.

Feeling Better. Me. Dwindling. Hilo.

Lughnasa                                    Waxing Artemis Moon

Ah.  It seems the nasties have journeyed on to other warm bloody creatures, leaving me in peace for now.  I hope my body now recognizes and will fend off these creatures that live only to replicate and in so doing make us feel bad.  But they don’t care.

Groceries this morning.  Filled up the cart with fruit and vegetables and turkey burgers, soy milk and slim milk, Sharps and Diet Cherry Coke, a bit of feta cheese, some sliced turkey for the dogs, a few cheese curds, some peanut butter, oops, just realized I forgot the cereal, chicken breasts.  You know.  The stuff of daily eating.  It was church time while I shopped so I suppose we were all heathens in there, except for those righteous Catholics who went to Saturday night mass.  Grocery shopping has a soothing quality.  It combines shopping with a genuine need so the selection of items reflects not so much consumer driven behavior–though that does rear its head–as it does animal needs.

(The Mexicans do mercado better.)

Hilo has, as Kate says, the dwindles.  She’s becoming very thin and tentative.  We believe she’s lost the better part of her sight.  Last week she seemed frightened, wide-eyed and jittery; this week feels different.  Perhaps a resignation of sorts.  It’s sad to watch her fade away, but she still lives her life.  Napping with us this afternoon, going outside to wander around the yard.  Eating a bit now and then.  Live until you die.  That’s what I want for me and for her.

The sewing machine is on its movable platform, the wind-up reels for the cloth are in place, we attached a high-tech stitch regulator and a laser pointer to the apparatus that allows Kate to guide the needle.  Now it’s RTFM, a couple of extension cords and she’ll be ready to practice.  No more taking pieced work out for quilting, now it happens here, right in our lower level.

Happy Birthday. Giggle, giggle.

Lughnasa                                Waxing Artemis Moon

A red letter day here at chez Olson/Ellis.  Kate’s 66th.  She’s upstairs right now signing up for social security.

We went out for breakfast this morning to Pappy’s, a place that already has a place in my heart.  It reminds me so much of Indiana, a part of it that I didn’t know I missed.  As a gift, I gave her a photo album of her ascent to grandmahood starting with a pregnant Jen and running up to the present.   She liked it.

Being married to Kate these 20 years we’ve shared many birthdays and each one finds me more in love with her than the last.

We had a waitress at Pappy’s that had a Fargo accent and ended each encounter with a girlish giggle. More coffee?  No?  Giggle, giggle.  Here’s the check, pay me when you’re ready.  Giggle, giggle.  Creeped me out.  Like having too much sugar in your coffee.  Hee, hee, hee.

Lapsed Unitarian

Lughnasa                     Waxing Artemis Moon

Oh, boy.  Just got myself into another situation.  Promising things I’m not sure I know how to accomplish.  I hope this goes with do one thing you fear every day, month, year–whatever time frame you can stand.  Cannot reveal details right now, but this could be a lot of fun for a lot of people or a complete bust.  Feels like the old days when I used to do this kind of stuff all the time.  Dream up something, contact a few folks, make it happen.

Still fatigued.  Kate says it’s my body still healing itself.  I hope so, because it feels like I’m still sick.

A friend the other day referred to herself as a lapsed Unitarian.  Lapsed Unitarian.  That made me wonder.  What are the spiritual and metaphysical consequences of falling away from the only faith named for two doctrines, Unitarianism and Universalism, in which none of its members believe?

I have come to see UU as a way station of sorts, a caravan serai for the pilgrim lost in the desert or high on a mountain and in need of refreshment, companionship.  Maybe a spiritual decompression chamber where individuals are brought safely back to their spiritual sea level.  It’s clear to me that my decompression is complete, has been complete for several years now.

Now, this is probably idiosyncratic, but I’m pretty sure it’s not unusual.  When we step away from a long time, culturally supported faith tradition like Christianity or Judaism, the lag time for decompression can be lengthy.  Not only do we have to unlearn one faith identity, we have to find or create another.  The UU movement is perfect for that time, for the initial time of confusion and disorientation and for the development, the constructing of a new faith.  Once that work is done however it most often results in a person anchored no longer in institutional faith, but in a place more like the world, the world of the human and the animals and the rock and the lake, a place where the spiritual moment is every moment and where the faith commitment may have an introspective, interpersonal, natural, and/or political expression, but not an institutional one.

So.  Perhaps lapsed Unitarian is the destiny of most of us no longer inside the Christian hermeneutical circle.  It still helps to have a place to rest along the way.