AncienTrails

Beltane Has Begun

Beltane                Waxing Flower Moon

As is the case with all Celtic holidays Beltane began at sundown.  Over the years that I have kept the Celtic calendar, now 14 years at least, Beltane signals a real shift from the getting going of spring to the active growth of summer.  Some years that’s more obvious than others and this year the change has been slower than the recent past, yet the emergence of the daffodils, tulips, garlic and the blooming of our magnolia all point toward summer.

Kate’s back from work with new rules for influenza A(H1N1) novel.  They had a sick hallway at the Coon Rapids clinic tonight and they were, again, swamped by persons concerned about the flu.  She said a case has been reported at HCMC.  Tomorrow, however, her attention moves from pandemic to garage sale, the sort of odd shifts we all make between our work and domestic lives.

Baby Plants, Nuclear Energy, and Influenza A(H1N1)

Spring                  Waxing Flower Moon

All my baby plants have moved from the nursery into big plant pots.  Now we have to wait until May 15, the average last frost date here, and all these babies can go outside into the garden.

The Minnesota House refused to repeal the moratorium on the construction of new nuclear plants citing waste storage and transportation as primary issues.

Kate’s off to the frontlines of the Swine flu (or, as it will be called from now on:   influenza A(H1N1) pandemic.  This has put some new energy into her practice as she approaches retirement, a real crisis which requires her medical skills.

If the pandemic moves to level 6, there will be a division between sick clinics and well clinics.  Doctors in the sick clinics will have to wear hazmat like protective gear when treating patients who have risk factors for the disease.

Indian Princes and Japanese Peasants

Spring               Waxing Flower Moon

Another computer problem averted by cyber wizard William Schmidt.  If you had tried to access the files from February 2005 to October 2007 in ancientrails, you would have been met with a not found error message.  An e-mail to Bill and he not only had the problem managed, but helped me relocate the files on my own computer.  I knew they were here somewhere.  Thanks again, techno-mage.

Morning workout, a bit of legislative blogging for the Sierra Club and lunch.   My movie of the moment for my workouts is the continuing saga, the Maharbarata.  I’m on disc 7 of a lot more.  Each disc has six episodes.  This is one long story.  It interweaves gods and humans, demi-gods and demons with the history of India, providing along the way morals and folkways.  Just today, for example, Dhorydan, a contested crown prince, got this wisdom from Bhisma, “No.  Just because you are elder does not mean you will become king.  In India merit is most important.”

Yesterday I finished an early Kurosawa film, The Hidden Fortress.  It featured a running gag with two peasants who act almost as clowns.  It was crisp, the copy, a Criterion Collection dvd, pops.  The story involves a period when Japan consisted of warring kingdoms.  A princess of a defeated people escapes with a loyal general.  Their adventures as they try to leave their home territory for shelter elsewhere constitute the movie.

Kate’s Ready

Spring            Waxing Flower Moon

Rain.  We had a red alert, a fire danger warning over the weekend, but now we’re soggy.  Soggy is better.

Kate came home with information from the Minnesota Department of Health on how to handle potential swine flu patients.  We’ve had no cases here yet, but the protocols for patients with high indices of suspicion are very clear.  It’s impressive.  The level of detail has been planned some time ago and gets implemented in a reasoned way in response to evidence, not panic.

Kate has a sense of eagerness about it all.  She likes the edgier aspects of medicine:  arrests, lacerations, dealing with a possible pandemic.  I’m glad it’s her doing it and not me.  I’d be edgy myself rather than professional.

Alert Level 5: W.H.O.

Spring            Waxing Flower Moon

Kate has seen many patients coming to urgent care seeking reassurance.  Urgent care and emergency care docs are on the frontline because they see people who become symptomatic rapidly or are nervous.  I have some concern about her because she’s in that situation, on the other hand, this is the kind of circumstance where a physician’s calm and straightforwardness are important.

I want to have this in here for historical purposes.  (pic.  Zocalo in Mexico City.)

“The WHO raised the alert level to “phase 5,” its second-highest level, which means that human-to-human spread of the virus has been found in at least two countries in one WHO region. While most countries will not be affected at this stage, according to WHO, the declaration of phase 5 represents “a strong signal that a pandemic is imminent and that the time to finalize the organization, communication and implementation of the planned mitigation measures is short.”

In making the announcement, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan urged countries to activate their pandemic flu response plans.

“This change to a higher phase of alert is a signal to governments, to ministries of health and other ministries, to the pharmaceutical industry and the business community that certain actions now should be undertaken with increased urgency and at an accelerated pace,” she told a news conference in Geneva…

U.S. officials said they are already treating the swine flu outbreak as a “phase 6″ event — the highest alert level — in terms of preparations and informing the U.S. public.”  Washington Post

Visiting Our Money

Spring                       Waxing Flower Moon

Oh, boy.  Kate and I had a chance to visit rush hour traffic this morning in our journey to see RJ Devick.  RJ manages our IRA and he does a stand-up job.  We are down less than the market and we have rebounded along with and somewhat ahead of it.

When we go visit RJ, he takes us into his office, decorated with cows and financial type artwork.  He does not have the favorite, sort of the dogs playing poker of the brokerage and finance community, which features bulls and bears in a realistic setting.  Instead he had a nice antique world map, a 2-d globe surrounded with bank notes from various countries, a little formulaic, but attractive.

His conference table is round, which is very Asian, and seats four.  There is always an agenda.  We update him on our financial situation:  savings, pensions, 401K’s, other matters.  He shows us pictures, his daughters: one Asian, one Ethiopian and a Caucasian.  We talk about Gabe and Ruth, these conversations no longer about Joseph and Jon.

While RJ talks, I can see out the sixth floor window beyond a parking lot top level.  There are apartment buildings with a faux Elizabethan front.  Kate and I answer questions.  Yes, Kate plans to retire next year.  Yes, we have savings.  Yes, we refinanced.  No, we have no short term financial demands.

His client relations manager, Na Haman, brought us water, significantly in tumblers, not encased in plastic.  Na is a pleasant young woman.

Everybody shook hands with us.  The swine flu has not yet altered that behavior.  But it will if it keeps up.

After the conference, which we leave feeling reassured, Kate and I headed over to IHOP for a rare breakfast out bfore heading over to COSTCO to buy dogfood.  We buy dogfood and treats there because it is so much cheaper than the speciality brands, by as much as $20 a bag, and has worked fine for us over the years.

As always with Costco, there is the gauntlet of attractive but unnecessary items to pass by:  IPOD’s, a new umbrella for the patio furniture, a small bistro set for our upstairs deck.  We make it out with dogfood, treats, a bag of rice puffs and $100 each on gas cards that allow us to buy gas at the Costco pumps, usually five cents cheaper than competitors.

We had a long nap because we got up at 6:30 a.m.  Early for us.  Now Kate is off to work and I’m getting to ready to do an afternoon workout since I spent the am at RJ’s and Costco.

Troping Through the Tulips

Spring               Waxing Flower Moon

At times themes or tropes seem to skip through my consciousness, appearing and disappearing, until a whole begins to emerge.  I wrote about this process a while ago about the energy/climate change crisis.  There I was waiting for a gestalt that seemed just around the corner.  It has not arrived yet.  A big corner, I guess.

Right now another one has taken up occupation.  This one has more mythic overtones and is, therefore, more in my usual realm.

Robin Hood as the Green Man, the Green Man as the lover of the Queen of May, the goddess in her Maiden form. One chunk.  Gawain and the Green Knight and all the work I did with that a couple of years ago.  Beltane and the fire festival, the celebrations of fertility and health.  The Green Man.  This time of year bursts with life, life overcoming the bleak months of winter.  The Green Man defeating the Hawthorne Giant.  There may be other pieces not yet emerged from my unconscious, it feels as if there are.

This did not begin now, it began before the Woolly Retreat in 2007, after I read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a winter holiday gift.  Something will come from it, but like the energy/climate crisis gestalt, I don’t know when.

Spring Has Almost Run Its Course

Spring                  Waxing Flower Moon

Spring has only two more days to run, then we head into the time of Beltane.  Beltane, a Celtic fire festival, featured bonfires that a  woman would jump over to increase her fertility and two bonfires between which cattle passed to prevent disease.  It also featured sex in the grass at night and weddings for a year and a day.  A holiday that makes more sense to me than most.  Beltane ushers in the growing season, the half of the  year that lasts until Samhain, or Summer’s End on October 31st, the celebration of the final harvest.

Shifting my workout to the morning got me back in the swing of a full workout, including resistance work.  I’d begun to neglect that in the busy days of the legislative session.  Now that the session is in a low level of postive action phase, at least as far as environmental policy goes, I can recapture some of that time.  Felt good to work my muscles, to do flexibility work.

No one showed up for my Asmat tour this morning, a public tour which I took as a substitute.  That was fine.  I got back home and into my nap earlier than I had anticipated.  Now I move stuff for the great garage sale.  After that, work with the hydroponics.

Morning Workout

Spring                  Waxing Flower Moon

Shifting my workout to the AM.  The whole routine has gotten stale and needs shaking up.  Maybe when it gets a bit warmer I’ll take the aerobics outside.  I used to workokout outside all the time, even in the coldest part of winter, then on snowshoes.  Now I’m on the treadmill.

An Asmat tour today, filling in for Lila Aamodt.  Helping Kate with the garage sale, potting veggie transplants and planting legumes.  That’s the week this week.  Gardening stuff will occupy a lot of time between now and the vacation.

Have We Traded Paradise For Hell?

Spring                  Waxing Flower Moon

The newspapers have begun to read like the Book of Job.  A dire economic catastrophe.  Climate change.  Now, a possible pandemic?  If there had been headlines in the 14th century, they would have looked like ours.

While listening to a series of lectures on the Late Middles Ages, I encountered a very interesting piece of information.  Due to depopulation occasioned by the Black Death, the natural world began to recover all over  Europe.  This is a topic I want to pursue further.

Human hubris, understandable given our triumphant march across the globe and over the seas for the last ten thousand years or so, has blinkered our vision, allowed us to imagine that the grand, sweeping changes that, say, destroyed the dinosaurs could not happen to us.  We could not experience the kind of cultural and demographic deceleration that medieval Europe suffered.  Why?  Because we are too advanced, we know too much.

We have had the cautionary tales of Faust, Dante, even Milton’s Paradise Lost but they seem important in historical perspective only.  OK, we may have had a taste of Mephistopheles in the time of the Manhattan Project, but we’ve worked to stuff that genie back in the bottle.  We have not been successful, that jinn is still among us and he won’t grant us three wishes anymore.

Disease organisms have as relentless a drive to survive as we do.  They have the advantage of numbers and speed on us.  One celled organisms reproduce sometimes in matters of hours, each division allowing for a possible mutation that would give them a cilia up on our much slower production of medicine and evolutionary change.  We are  the tortoise in the adaptive race.

Our unintentional experiment with the atmosphere has the potential to ratchet up the rate of change in our climate, in many cases, like sea level rise and changing temperatures, well beyond our control.

You might think of humanity as Milton’s rebel angel, willing to trade paradise for hell, if for no other reason, than our capacity to reign in the hell of our own making, rather than curb our appetites to remain in paradise.