"Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought." - Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau and Emerson, especially, are traveling companions on my ancient trail.  What I like best is their American posture toward received wisdom, perhaps a bit adolescent in its over againstness, but necessary in their time when European hegemony was near absolute over American letters.  Thoreau gives the flavor of this attitude, ironically, in this most European of metaphors.

Dreams last night.  An ornery, combative side of me came out in my dreams last night.  Seemed like everybody was trying to manipulate me, move me around.  I fought back with sarcasm and direct verbal assault.  The dream left me feeling guilty, ashamed of myself.  Felt good to put behind me as I awoke.

Wonder if the weekend work on the book proposal stirred all that up?  Writing has turned into such a complicated and sometimes tortuous aspect of my life.  What do I do?  I  write.  Have you been published?  No.  Made any money?  No.  Have you tried very hard to sell your work?  No.  Are you embarrassed at having made such a dramatic shift in your life and having achieved so little?  At times, yes.  Have you managed to work yourself into a corner where  you fear professional appraisal?  Yes.

On the other hand I continue to write and as I look back over my work as a critic I find I like much of it.  Even find it good.  I do not, in spite of what the above paragraph might suggest, feel like a failure.  I have produced five novels, a large manuscript on pilgrimage and the Woolly Mammoths.  I have three novels in various stages of beginning. I have done a lot of research and travel for some kind of work on Lake Superior.  The work on Ge-ology will, I hope, sum up my thought on faith and help Americans develop a reverence for the natural world they inhabit, a reverence I hope I can convince many is not in conflict with other religious perspectives, rather additive, or baseline, or normal (only neglected, shoved aside by the forces of modern life). I continue to preach occasionally, do this blog, send out the Great Wheel e-mails.  My education continues with art history at the MIA and the course on Tillich right now at UTS.  

I have neither given up, nor even remotely feel like it.  The excitement of writing, of learning, of living continues as fierce and strong now as ever.

post:projects

     Last Quarter of the Storm Moon   The Christian liturgical season of  Epiphany

I have completed a first draft of the book proposal.  It seems not too bad.  I have to pick two chapters, or sections, to add to it, then draft a query letter and start e-mailing agents to see if they would like to see the proposal.

In re-reading the mss. today as I worked on the proposal I find myself surprisingly pleased with the work.  It has had two revisions and needs a third, maybe even on after that, but it's a piece of work I feel proud to call mine.

The work took me all yesterday and most of today, but having the two days with no distractions gave me a good clean shot at it.  A lesson in there, probably one I could have learned a while ago.

Next up, a highlights tour for 4th graders for Thursday:  Jade Mountain, Doryphorus, Lady Teshat, Transformation Mask, Japanese Battle Screen, Peace Concluded, The Olive Field, the Tantra.  Need to copy some files on Jade Mountain, the Olive Field, the Tantra, and the Japanese Battle Screen.

post:projects

     Last Quarter of the Storm Moon   The Christian liturgical season of  Epiphany

Made a little progress on the Pilgrim proposal.  I have all day tomorrow to work on it, too. Maybe I just need to push on through to the other side as some 60's rock song says.

post:projects

          Last Quarter of the Storm Moon   The Christian liturgical season of  Epiphany

The death of Anna Nicole Smith and the death of Barbaro.  Celebrity and our time.  Both died from injuries suffered on the fast track.  Lives run at a speed and in an atmosphere most of us will never see.  Rarified.  Dangerous.  Wonder what kind of warning sticker OSHA would put on it.  Perhaps hands raised high overhead with a lightning bolt headed down?  

Another commonality.  Commodities of the rich.  Not less loved for this, certainly in Barbaro's case, and, from what I've seen of Anna Nicole's mother and read about her late husband, not her either.  Yet, both perhaps drawn into a pace and style of life so attractive that it might have been the Sirens for them.  Who could have lashed them to the mast like brave Odysseus?

Less nobly here at home the book proposal for Pilgrim languishes.  Work on it this morning found me dull.  Not with it.  This is, I know, in part fear.  I'm afraid that what I've done is not worthy.  Not good enough.  That I will embarrass myself.  This is one of my character flaws and it holds me back.  So does my unwillingness to suffer fools.  Perhaps I'm not willing, in this instance, to suffer myself.

post:projects

Last night the Full Oak Moon shone its cold light through the seven oaks outside my workroom's window.  They cast their shadows on the new fallen snow, and, though it was not the luster of mid-day below, it was bright and the shadows distinct.  The weather was cold, near zero.  This is the month of long dark and it had on its true winter garb.

Today the temperature has risen a bit, but clouds obscure the sun, as if even it is loathe to break out in full.  

My cold has gone.  The Thanksgiving trip has entered the small volume of our family history.  I'm up to date on the docent work.  

This leaves me a bit at loose ends.  The book proposal for Pilgrim beckons, but I resist.  I have no other book-length project in a writing stage.  The garden is frozen and will require mulch in another week or so, but the truck is full of photographs so I can't get straw.  This feeling comes in part from our lack of decoration, occasioned by the imminence of the remodeling project, in part from not having determined which way to go right now.  It also comes in part from the stasis the culture goes into for holimonth, a gentle passivity, a waiting for Santa, or Godot, or divinity.  

11/2/06

When my plans have too much fine grain, I either forget them, or ignore them. I think this results in less accomplishment than I want. So,

For the new year that began on October 31st, 2006 I choose these tasks:

1. Finish book proposal for Pilgrims. Finish second edit. Market Pilgrim.

2. Work on Lake Superior

3. For fun: fiction of some kind

Continue garden as priority during growing season, add hydroponics.

Continue Great Wheel (but evaluate for freshness)

Continue Blog (upgrade to new software that offers discussion)

Continue at least one day a week devoted to art research, perhaps the same day as the touring day. Go in early, work and do tours.

Read Ovid in the fall, perhaps Dante when finished

The book proposal has faded from my attention with the remodeling, time spent at the MIA,  and preparing the house for fall.  Gotta get back to it over the weekend.

I've spent the morning hours this week working on a book proposal for Pilgrim.  It will take a good while to produce, but, having done one, I'll know how.  I do want to have someone review it before I send it out.  Mary Logue or Ellen Sue?  

September 7, 2006 This list, and its order, still seem right. The Great Wheel work continues though it has seemed somewhat repititious this year. The Blogs, though not as beautiful as I would like them, receive regular attention. Docent education, and my own supplementary reading, has a fair amount of steam. One year gone by and another one underway. In addition I have finished a history of China, and am now listening to a history of modern Europe. As a back to school gift I purchased a one volume history of Japan. I may purchase a teaching company course on the history of Africa.

The Pilgrim manuscript has gone through one complete edit! Kate has it now. After she's read it, I'll edit another time, then get it out to Bill Schmidt and Tom Crane. Maybe Jean Marie. Then, edit again. Third round to Paul and Stefan, perhaps BJ and Schecky. Then, edit again. In meantime I'm working on a book proposal.

Lake Superior will come up next. I need to decide whether to start revising novels or start Superior Wolf. Revision makes the most sense.

------------

The July 23rd entry below helped me rewrite the priority of my work:     I will not go to sleep until this work is finished.

Reordered and numbered: June 24, 2006

1. The Great Wheel Work                                                  8 days a year @ 1 day per holiday X several years simultaneous with others

2. The Blogs                                                                         78 days a year @ 2 hrs a day x several years simultaneous with others

3. Docent Education: especially here, art and nature     80 days a year @ 1 day classes + 1 day research and reading X 2.5 years

4. Pilgrim Diary                                                                     78 days a year @ 2 hrs a day x 1 year

5 Lake Superior: A Natural History

6. Revise novel manuscripts

7. Jennie's Dead & Superior Wolf

8. A Liberal Way - Research

9. Course of Empire - Research, ongoing

Anoka: A Northern County Later

Then the Mississippi and the Boreal Woods Later

June 24th, 2006 Midsummer

The top four on this list have received ongoing attention: regular Great Wheel, regular blog entries, Docent Education going well and supplementary study this summer on Chinese and Japanese history is underway. I have also read through Pilgrim a second time, and am into the 6th week on producing a second draft.

As for the rest, after Pilgrim.

December 2, 2005

The Great Wheel work continues; the Blogs grow each day; and, I'm developing a keener eye and a broader historical context for art. I've written two sermons and have one underway. Reorganizing Kate's new space and mine has taken most of my energy in the last three months, not to mention getting back up to speed on the student life. Still, I have moved all my Lake Superior books behind the computer and I'm restructuring my library in service of each of these projects. I hope the New Year will find me settled into the new study and back to the practice of regular (daily) writing.

From Anoka: Diary of a Northern County Blog of July 23rd (Cody, Wyoming)

Circumstances over the recent past have changed my orientation toward nature, making it deeper and more imbued with the sacred.

Over the last few years the Great Wheel has become a key part of my religious life.   

Last night I read Berry for the first time, stimulated in part by Brian Swimme’s mention of him and his Great Work in the lecture series many of my friends in the Woolly Mammoths recommended.

The Great Work idea comes from Berry’s perspective on culture. The Greeks, he said, had a Great Work in their philosophical and scientific thought, the foundation of Western culture. Israel had a Great Work in altering human-divine interactions. The Chinese had a Great Work in creating the world’s most elegant and human civilization. Rome had a Great Work in bringing order and stability to much of the known world. India’s Great Work made a spiritual practice out of the experience of time and eternity.

The Native Peoples of North America occupied this land and developed an intimate relationship with the powers that created it; this, too, was a Great Work.

Now, Berry says, is the time for a Great Work, perhaps the Greatest Work of all, and it falls to us, citizens of North America to realize it. The Great Work is "…to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner."

I understand now, after reading this, my reaction to the map of Moose distribution. I have a small role to play in the Great Work. My role is to write about the part of this Continent that I know and love: Lake Superior, Anoka County, the Boreal Woods, and the Mississippi. It is, I see now, this that all my fifteen years of practice writing has led me toward. I may still write fiction because I enjoy it, but my primary working energy will focus, as Kate and I discussed, on Lake Superior first, then the others. Just what shape my work will take I am not sure; I am going to continue my research and see what emerges, but I will not go to sleep until this work is finished.

From July 8, 2005 Blog

Kate and I talked about this on the trip. She reminded me of our earlier conversation. It had this conclusion: 1. Garden has priority in the growing season. 2. She will take the next five years to ease back on her hours, then out of Allina. 3. I will focus on art history for the next two to two and a half years. I will finish revising and marketing Pilgrim Diary. 5. I will continue my work on Lake Superior: A History. Continuuing work will include Meditations on the Changing Seasons, 4 sermons for Groveland, and the blogs I have underway on

Kate and I have talked, most frequently on the Paducah/Springfield trip.  I may do any thing I want with my life.  Of course, in one sense, that is always true.  That is, you have the choices in  your life always, though the consequences of them may vary.  More than  most, thanks to this good woman and her fortunate gifts, intellectual and financial and emotional [she got a perfect MMPI], I have choices most don't have.

We discussed my work in light of her movement toward retirement from medicine, at least Allina type medicine.  I will focus over the next two plus years on art history.  My writing effort will return to the Lake Superior work I began a while ago, plus the websites, sermons, and meditations.  Also, in the growing season my first priority will be the garden.  This much is clear.

June 30 Blog (Paducah, Kentucky)

In many places on the earth rivers have godlike powers, as do oceans and volcanoes. When viewed over a period of years, this perspective begins to make a lot of sense. The river creates bottom land, then in big flood years, takes it away. The river moves not only water but pebbles, sand, and silt. The earth herself moves along with the flow of water, topsoil from field in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana heading downriver to Mississippi and Louisiana.

A dredge, operated by Ingram, sets in one place and lifts pebbles and sand off the river floor, clearing a channel and mining construction material loaded onto, what else? Barges.

The south in the heat has a languid air and seems redolent of banjo music, the blues, a sweet sadness reeking of owners of people, slaveholders, Jim Crow, colored only fountains. In this sense it has, as it has always for me, a gothic touch, a layer of horror just underneath the veneer of gentility and architectural whimsy.

I know this is a northern sensibility. I know the north has segregated, steered, fired, and lynched, too. None of our hands are clean; this stain has Lady Macbethian qualities, and all of our washing will not remove it.

At the same time this very darkness draws me, as I’ve said elsewhere, the south is the nation’s shadow, and, in that sense, must also contain the power and creative energy to move us on into the future, if only we can embrace it, own it, celebrate it. Then, only then, will the stain yield to ritual ablution.

Next:   Book proposal for pilgrim diaries.   Then, Lake Superior and Superior Wolf.  Superior Wolf idea:  bring the monster to the Twin Cities, an area I know well.  Use knowledge of Ely as tourist, church, college.

In general I agree.  He proved his willingness to do this when he proclaimed, "There will probably be a need for 5 computers."  Ever.

"A man's life is interesting primarily when he has failed - I well know. For it's a sign that he tried to surpass himself." - Georges Clemenceau

So far, the writing has made my life interesting.

"If you practice an art, be proud of it and make it proud of you. It may break your heart, but it will fill your heart before it breaks it; it will make you a person in your own right." - Maxwell Anderson

Wanted to note here:  places to ground new stories, novels:  Singapore, Bangkok, Siem Reap, Angkor.  Also, Hawai'i. Wales.  Inverness.  Phoenix.  Breckenridge.  Denver.  

In writing the short story, The Kafir and the Jinn, I've discovered a home truth about writing:  write what you know.  I now know, after 13 years, what this means.  It means, write what  you know as a base for the work.  What you know...deep inside, have known...not intellectual content, but lived experience leavened with intellectual content.  Don't know why this took so long to sink in, but, like many lessons, life seems to hit me over the head now and then...and I sometimes listen.  This time I'm paying attention.

Listening today to a lecture about Zhu Xi, creator of the Daoxue, the way of learning, emphasized gewu, close investigation of things as a means of self-cultivation.  Further, he emphasized li, the patterns found in nature and chi, the thatness and energetic force of matter.  Gewu would uncover li and chi, the clear grasp of which contained within it, all the information necessary for the good man.

He also emphasized, like Renaissance thinkers, a reappropriation of the classics.  I liked his inflection on side-stepping the commentarial tradition in favor of direct contact with the classic literature.

This lead me to speculate about a similar approach to the Great Work where we could emphasize on the one hand, personal observation of nature--like keeping of a nature notebook or journal, while also returning to classical texts for guidance in how to appropriate our gewu to create a moral society.

Specifically, I wondered if I might go back to the great stories of the Bible, since I'm trained in depth there, and exegete them on my own, bringing them into a cultural context as allies in social change.  In effect, a  hermeneutical method ignoring the development of Christian orthodoxy of any kind, and re-conceiving the utility of these stories for the culture they formed.  Also, reaching into the mythological tradition of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as classical literature--Ovid, Hesiod, Lucretius, Plato--but with the same hermeneutical method.  Then, coming up through the centuries, utilizing folk stories, and fairy tales, poetry, and movies.  Again, looking for a core group of "texts" to include a canon that future generations can use as cultural assets for bringing humankind and earth into harmonious relationship.

This is a task I can do.  Might be fun.

"The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up." - Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)

Hmmm.  Well, I'm intoxicated.  The rest will be known only later.

Nearing the end of a second read through of the Pilgrim Diaries.  Gonna create a second draft soon.  Still feels rough, but the outline seems to appear as I work on it.

"Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day." - D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930

"We each have only enough strength to complete those assignments that we are fully convinced are important." - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832)

This is clearer to me now than prior to the application I made to the congregation.  I have strength/energy for art history, aesthetics, and tours; enough for writing and editing and revising and enough for the garden.  

With the collapse, again, of my return to the ministry, I've had a wabi moment, i.e. a time when frustration and failure has concealed within a great beauty.  In this case an inner release and recommitment to writing and to art as my primary vocation now.  

I've agreed to begin serious work on the second draft of the Pilgrim piece.  And to attend, this time, to marketing.

Also, I've set up a summer reading plan for art:  aesthetics, develop my highlights tour for ancient to 1600, finish Mason, and read a history each for Japan and China, perhaps India, too.

Due to missing the Jungian lectures on the Self today (Kate's illness, see Blog) I found myself with extra time.  I need to organize my reading in some fashion, though when I do I tend to rebel against my own organization.  

Read from Mary Oliver tonight. "Journey", a particular favorite.  Then, a few more nights from 1001 Nights, I'm now in Volume III, at the first, stories of Abu Sir and Abu Kir, barber and dyer.  The barber is a paradigm of hospitality, industriousness, and faith while the dyer is the reverse.  To end the evening one more chapter in Rembrandt by Roger Houseden. I'm reading it to present to the docent book club.

Still, after I finished Jarhead by Anthony Swoffer, the free time set me a bit adrift.  So much to read, so little time.  So much write, so little time.  So much to do in the garden, so little time.  

Thinking about the Lake Superior work and the Bill McKibben notion of a mythos for the ecological bind in which we find ourselves.  Turned over a story focused on the Mississippi, a picaresque novel beginning in Lake Itasca and heading downstream toward New Orleans and the Gulf.

From there to thoughts about directions as regions in the US:  the East we know, where the nation was born; the South we know, where slavery was and life has a hot, humid Gothic quality; and, the West we know,  pioneers, the Pacific, and Hollywood.  But, the North, we don't know.  The North, as a direction and region has not defined itself in the public mind.  Yes, there was the North during the Civil War, but that amounted to the East with a bit of the Midwest.  The states of the Upper Midwest:  Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota are not well known, neither are North Dakota, or Montana.

Kate wants to retire.  I've not helped much with the money over the years.  A bit, but not much.  The one thing I can do now is complete my pilgrimage book, then work on editing and marketing the rest of the stuff I have.  She's worked hard, now I'll pick up my pace, see if I can add a little anyway.

"Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. [La inspiración existe, pero tiene que encontrarte trabajando.]" - Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

A note of context for all this work:  I'm feeling a need to take a stand, a stand as distinct as the one I shared with so many others in the 60's, yet perhaps one now shared by few.  The competing pressures of contemporary life have left me confused; we have personal freedom combined with individual power that has no parallel in  human history, yet we also often feel vulnerable, naked--powerless before the large market, military, and governmental forces malling our globe.  Or, is it mauling?

My need, and my direction, have geographical context, living on the exurban edge, far from my political allies and friends, yet snugged into a natural world of subtle, yet great beauty.  

The monastic wants to come out and work, and pray.  To focus on the aesthetic and the spiritual and the garden and family.  The scholar needs even more time for the student life which has dominated and defined great chunks of my life, a focus which quiets, expands, and which demands expression so it does not become an unseemly hoarding, but rather a source for reflection and constructive thought.  The poet must get to work, too.  Writing, working on art, reading great literature, seeing fine movies and listening to the music he loves.    

The stand is this:  the time between now and death has already been counted, its days are a known quantity, though concealed.  The space between home and the cities requires care in the use of travel, travel I choose to devote mainly to art, friends, and presentation of religious essays/sermons.  Therefore, I will, even more than I have in the past, frame my work projects as matters for the scholar and devote time to them in the measured and consistent way I know well.  At some point I will turn that work over to the poet for creation of manuscripts:  essays, poems, books.  The monk's role will be to keep my spirit steady and refreshed, in contact always with the geist as it interacts with my Self. 

In the overall I place family first and the scholar's labor second, the monks rhythm will define my days, and the poets sensibility my creations.

"It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old down all the unchanging days, and die one day like any other day, only shorter." - Samuel Beckett

To write one sentence like this.  A world between first word and last.  Wonderful.

"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster." - Isaac Asimov

Yes. 

A funny thing keeps happening as I think about life after my sermon on Sunday.  I feel I passed a barrier, became mature as a thinker. (To be honest, if I went back through all my writings I imagine I would find this very phrase somewhere else.)  In any case I want now to speak, to write, to act based on what I have learned, not to interpret or analyze or embellish other folks work.  

"The man who is born with a talent which he was meant to use finds his greatest happiness in using it." - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832)  

Need another project like the proverbial hole in the head, yet one seems to press itself forward.  Contamination of the realms of healing, faith, and art with the paradigm of 20th century corporate management and budgeting, i.e. the reduction of these realms to quantifiable "results."   This places an important realm, but a subsidiary one--economics--at the heart of the church, medicine, museums, and other artistic institutions.  The cause is not difficult to identify:  boards of these institutions have a predominance of corporate managers or upper class investors on them.  

This is not to deny the often uneasy, but real balance that has attained between realms oriented not toward economic gain, or even economic self-sufficiency and the monied.  The problem is this:  religion institutions are faith nurturing bodies so their rationale, their raison d'etre lies in the inner world and the other world;  medicine and medical institutions are health focused, their core purpose, health, lies in the body and in the doctor-patient relationship;  and, the arts, whose ends are beauty and truth, like the other two, can only be compromised by replacing beauty and truth with spreadsheets and attendance numbers.

Well, if I'm going to pursue this I'll need crisper and more detailed arguments, but you can see the drift.  This presses forward because Kate comes home from work and despairs about the intrusion of insurance and managed care guidelines into her world of care for children's health.  I watched, and even promoted, planning/budgeting/evaluation technologies while an administrator for the Presbyterian church.  Now, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts has chosen to brand itself, to rely on marketing strategies to know whether or not the museum has succeeded in its "mission."  All this of makes this humanities guy uneasy at best, foaming at the mouth mad at worst.

"A man's style is his mind's voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices." - Ralph Waldo Emerson 

A helpful way of thinking about voice.

"Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself." - James Stephens (1882-1950) Irish Poet, Writer  

A good thing to know and remember.  Voice is the whole deal.

Somewhere I heard, oh, I know, Zora Thurston on NPR, Garrison Keillor, Writer's Almanac, I heard she went back down south and wrote a book of sketches of people and places from her home.  I've had some ideas.  May pursue this since Alexandria, Morristown, Indianapolis, Muncie are where the magic, the days of childhood lie for me.  I've found the whole place so distasteful as an adult that I've tended to steer away from it.  Maybe, at almost 59, I can grow up enough to revisit it.  A sample.  

"Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art." - Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

"If a man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts." - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832) German Poet

"Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you." - Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961)  

This motivates me to get back to work on my fiction.  I need the discipline of regular writing, but I haven't gotten very far with it of late.  Don't know why either.

December 2, 2005

The Great Wheel work continues; the Blogs grow each day; and, I'm developing a keener eye and a broader historical context for art. I've written two sermons and have one underway. Reorganizing Kate's new space and mine has taken most of my energy in the last three months, not to mention getting back up to speed on the student life. Still, I have moved all my Lake Superior books behind the computer and I'm restructuring my library in service of each of these projects. I hope the New Year will find me settled into the new study and back to the practice of regular (daily) writing.

The Great Wheel Work 8 days a year @ 1 day per holiday X several years simultaneous with others

The Blogs 78 days a year @ 2 hrs a day x several years simultaneous with others

Docent Education: especially here, art and nature 80 days a year @ 1 day classes + 1 day research and reading X 2.5 years

               Aesthetics

Pilgrim Diary 78 days a year @ 2 hrs a day x 1 year

Lake Superior: A Natural History 200 days a year @ 4 hrs a day plus at least 2 week long research trips a year X 3 or 4 years

Jennie's Dead & Superior Wolf 78 days X 2 @ 2 hrs a day x 2 years

Anoka: A Northern County 200 days a year @ 4 hrs a day plus at least 30 days of field trips X 2 years

Then the Mississippi and the Boreal Woods Later

A Liberal Way - Research 78 days a year @ 2 hrs a day X 6-8 years

Course of Empire - Research, ongoing 78 days a year @ 2 hrs a day X 6-8 years

Spent the Thanksgiving holiday twenty feet from Lake Superior.  Simply being in its presence lifted me up, calmed me down.  Immersion in its vitality, its influence on its watershed, and its place in the world's imagination sang to me with every wave.  I'm shifting the Lake Superior books to the bookshelf right behind me.  After Pilgrimage, Lake Superior and The Liberal Way will take over my writing time.  The docent program has my full attention when I'm in it, these are my work.  We'll see where they go.

From an NYT article on Morgan Freeman's adopted hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi:

Most famously, at the crossroads of highways 61 and 49, the early-20th-century bluesman Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the Devil for the gift of a guitar. (A guitar-shaped monument marks the spot, though the "original" location is at the intersection of East Tallahatchie Street and Martin Luther King Drive.)

A Biercian short story here?

It is my habit each year at the beginning of the New Year to evaluate my current work and the year just past, then, to project my work into the year ahead.  I had several years when this process worked well, that is, when I had active novels underway.  

At the millennium I had decided to chuck fiction writing as a lost cause.  No sales.  No faith in myself anymore.  A bad business all round save for the joy I got from writing and the need to get out of the ministry.  My decision around that time was this:  head into a period of studious retirement, an idea I got from John Milton and Isaac Newton.  I would read the classics, take notes, see what happened.  

I decided, too, that I still needed a writing project but I was through with fiction for good.  Lake Superior became a fascination, then a project.  The project I chose was an ecological history of Lake Superior.  I'd tumbled onto the idea of ecological history at some point and the combination of Lake Superior, history, and ecology suited my passions well.  I did the circle tour twice, stopped at various historical societies along the way.  Then, I begin buying books on Lake Superior.  I have three shelves full.  I did a lot of research, filled a full horizontal file drawer with carefully organized files and file folders, divided by ecological region.  I got started.

That worked for a while then 9/11 hit and I began my work on Islam.

About three years ago or so the fiction bug hit me again.  I finished Wilderness Queen, at least the first draft, and returned to Superior Wolf, set that aside again and, after a bit, started another, Jennie's Dead.  Set that aside.  I wrote a good ways into both, several thousand words, but a fit of melancholy settled over me, one severe enough and long lasting enough that I went back to see John Desteian and asked Charlie Peterson for Zoloft.  

The Zoloft leveled me out.  But, and I haven't written about this elsewhere, it also damped down my meditative/contemplative vigor.  I'm not sure why but I think it has something to do with processing images while in silence.

When this process began to ease up a bit, I settled into writing the Pilgrim Diaries. They occupied me for a year, a year when I also finished Kate's purple garden and went to Southeast Asia.  I finished them in January of this year (rough draft) and began editing/revising until late April (a big chunk taken out after my surgery for the ruptured achilles) when two things converged: one, I lost all of my edits to that point and got melancholy again, then, the gardening season began.  

This is where I was when I went on the Indiana/Paducah trip with Kate and the trips to Colorado for this year:  taking the Shopsmith out to Jon, then, helping Joseph move to Breckenridge.  The material below comes from those trips:

The July 23rd entry below helped me rewrite the priority of my work: I will not go to sleep until this work is finished.

Kate and I talked about this on the trip. She reminded me of our earlier conversation. It had this conclusion: 1. Garden has priority in the growing season. 2. She will take the next five years to ease back on her hours, then out of Allina. 3. I will focus on art history for the next two to two and a half years. I will finish revising and marketing Pilgrim Diary. 5. I will continue my work on Lake Superior: A History. Continuuing work will include Meditations on the Changing Seasons, 4 sermons for Groveland, and the blogs I have underway.

Kate and I have talked, most frequently on the Paducah/Springfield trip.  I may do any thing I want with my life.  Of course, in one sense, that is always true.  That is, you have the choices in  your life always, though the consequences of them may vary.  More than  most, thanks to this good woman and her fortunate gifts, intellectual and financial and emotional [she got a perfect MMPI], I have choices most don't have.

We discussed my work in light of her movement toward retirement from medicine, at least Allina type medicine.  I will focus over the next two plus years on art history.  My writing effort will return to the Lake Superior work I began a while ago, plus the websites, sermons, and meditations.  Also, in the growing season my first priority will be the garden.  This much is clear.

June 30 Blog (Paducah, Kentucky)

11/1/05  Status on this work:

I continue to write the Great Wheel, having now begun Vol. VI with yesterday's Samhain meditation.

The Website continues to grow in content though I've not done much to promote it, nor have I added the discussion/feedback features I wanted.

Docent education proves very stimulating and does occupy a good deal of time right now, but hardly more than the time I allotted, if that.

All else:  I'm in a slough. I need, want, to climb out, and I know it requires regular writing habits, but I've allowed my life to dictate my days, rather than putting on a harness (write 4 hours a day in the morning, for example.  Or, 2,500 words.  Or, anything  regular other than the Great Wheel and these various blogs.  

So, the question is:  when and how will this happen?  I'm hoping two things will converge to help me, as two things converged to stop me earlier this year.  1st:  Finishing the revamping of the study.  2.  The coming of winter.  First priority is to finish the draft/revision of Pilgrim Diary and do some research in the books I have on Pilgrimage.  Second priority is to get restarted on Lake Superior, perhaps with a circle tour.  Perhaps along the way I can also restart Jennie's Dead or Superior Wolf or another fiction project entirely, perhaps an amalgam of the two? Perhaps a short story?  

Recheck this on December 1st since both 1 and 2 should be finished by then. 

Almost three months since I've made a note here.  Writing, outside of this website and the Great Wheel material and sermons, has slowed to stop.  Yet, I've gotten a lot of garden work done and am well underway in the Docent program.  The renovations in the study and in the computer room/studio will make my work space more fun.  I do intend to get back to the book length projects I've talked about in previous entries here.

Recent purchases of Van Lewton and Hammer films make me want to at least try my hand, again, at a horror novel...Jennie's Dead is the closest I have to work underway.  

Mostly what I want to record here tonight is my eagerness to get back to a regular writing schedule.  My unwillingness has had many roots but no excuses.  I just need to set down, cordon off the time, and write.  No other way, really.  

"A man should ever be ready booted to take his journey." - Michel Eyquem De Montaigne (1553-1592) French Philosopher, Essayist

A great tag line for the Pilgrim's Diary.  Though I suffer travel fatigue from time to time, and more so as the aches and pains grow greater, I have my boots set by the door, a rucksack packed, passport handy.  Of course, we don't have to take Montaigne literally; we should also be booted for the spiritual and emotional journeys daily life and family life offer us.  It is easy to say I'm not ready to try a retreat, to have a new child, to go visit family members, to put on my miner's light and descend into the cave of my own heart.  Yet the rewards for doing these things when the time presents itself can be great, even life altering.  

The readiness to journey, like luck, favors the prepared.  If we embrace the chance for a visit  to South Dakota, Cuba, Cambodia, England, or to engage Jungian psychotherapy or a retreat focused on the inner life, then we make ourselves ready to receive the journey's gifts:  new perspective on our Self and our journey, new insights and wisdom, new friends, the enrichment of intimacy with loved ones.

Aren't these gains enough to keep a pair of comfortable hiking shoes close by the door?  They are for me.

The perversity of the imagination.  Just as this resolution (see below) comes clear, I get renewed energy for Superior Wolf/Children of the Blood.  I guess I  have these projects, or, rather, they have me.  And my inability to focus?  I don't know.  

Kate and I talked about this on the trip. She reminded me of our earlier conversation. It had this conclusion: 1. Garden has priority in the growing season. 2. She will take the next five years to ease back on her hours, then out of Allina. 3. I will focus on art history for the next two to two and a half years. www.educationofadocent.com 4. I will finish revising and marketing Pilgrim Diary. 5. I will continue my work on Lake Superior: A History. Continuuing work will include Meditations on the Changing Seasons, 4 sermons for Groveland, and the blogs I have underway on www.ancientrails.com

OK, I thought.  I get it.  This is part of the interview process and part of why I wanted to do the interviews in art museums.  So, after Paul's I went to the MIA and wandered around, but could find nothing.  Later, at home, an image from the Walker, the wrecked car, presented itself to me.  Perfect.  

This time, today, I again wandered the galleries at the MIA hunting for a piece whose visual language spoke as Bill did.  I found his in the Japanese contemporary ceramics collection at the MIA.  Here's the thing:  my awareness of art, and my training such as it is, has focused on art's long history.  I both consider myself more knowledgeable about, say, medieval European painting, or the temples of Angkor, and, by nature, more drawn to them.  During my trip to Southeast Asia I summarized this with the phrase:  A Soul in Ruins.

Yet, each piece that has come forward out of the mix objects I know well--those in the MIA collection and the Walker collection--has its roots squarely in this century, or in the last half of the 20th.  This seems significant.  I suppose in one sense it must reflect my own sensibility, but I suspect it has another source, too.  These works are of and from the zeitgeist of our age and the Woolly pilgrimages are of men of our time, our soul journeys happen in the same world as the world of these artists; so, it's not surprising that the essence of our journey finds voice in the work of contemporary art.

As always lunch with Paul had intellectual stimulation and  reflection as the main course.  His life has had major events that have changed his direction, the most recent impact with an 18-wheeler outside Detroit a couple of years ago.  Now he's discovering the cutthroat world of ecclesial politics and the difficulty of reaching consensus among persons whose metaphysics and history differ wildly:  the project on which he works has tibetan buddhists, roman catholics, reform jews, muslims, baptists, prebyterians, methodists, and episcopalians. That's a VERY broad tent.

He mentioned one possibility that really rocked me: a joint Master of Divinity degree between the Episcopal House of Prayer on the St. John's campus and the St. John's Benedectine seminary.  If this  happens---   I also learned some folks refer to Pope Benedict as the German Shepherd, though I find the irreverent Italian presses Papa Ratzi (get it?) more fun. 

The Jerusalem looks like it doesn't get the traffic it deserves, it has the ambience of a one room Caravan Serai (my favorite restaurant name), and middle-eastern food to rival any place I've eaten in the Twin Cities.  It's prices are right, too.  Our chef's plate with shawirma, kofta, chicken, and jerusalem salad, the special, was 6.95.

By happenstance this timing conforms roughly to the two-year + docent training program at the MIA.  I will create a website over the summer, Education of a Docent. I'll do weekly, sometimes daily entries about my learning curve, art history, the docent class, art objects themselves, movement toward understanding modernism and post-modernism, museum links, gallery links...in general the process of learning art history at the age of 58.  As I've done with the Pilgrim Diary, I will then edit this work into a text, though this will be a longer project and may require a couple of book length mss.

I've written many sermons, 200,000+ words on pilgrimage, 4+ years of Great Wheel Meditations, now the work contained in Ancient Trails.  Is there some way to link these last four years or so, to the next two-five years?  Some coherent project that would require a concentrated effort, drawing on this recent work, yet pushing me into places I've not  yet gone?

Kate seems to think something with a Northern focus:  Lake Superior, Northwoods, Boreal forest.  That could suggest picking up Superior Wolf and merging it with, say, Jennie's Dead and the Northern Waters work.  I've done so much collecting of resources on magic and Course of Empire...I suppose if I went in the Northwest Territory direction I could link in New Harmony and Owens.  And, of course, the material I read as the classics was the same material educated folk of that time knew well.  I have thought about a frontier preacher with a waning faith, and a confrontation with the devil.  The politics of that Northwest Territory era could prove interesting, too.  But, the dialect and historical detail...

I'm gonna let it stew a while longer.

I've asked Kate to give it some thought.  To help me think it through.

So much of this has nature writing roots that I'm wondering if my next work should be the Holy Year book, along with research on Course of Empire.  My lead strength is years of faith and religious reading, thinking, acting.  We'll see.  Gotta finish this guy first.

I've found a real satisfaction in the editing process.   First, because I have so much material to review.  I worked hard last year on this project.  Second, I'm finding the quality pretty good, some over intellectualized pieces, but I expected that.  Third, editing and working in the garden help each other, complement each other.  Too much head work, outside to the garden.  Tired of bending over, lifting, raking.  Come back in and edit a few pages.   

This is a series of weekly entries, written in rough draft form, and available at the link above for the Woolly Mammoths, a men's group.   Staff member Charles Buckman-Ellis has been a Woolly for 18 years.  These diary entries follow the life of the Woolly Mammoths over a year in which their annual theme was pilgrimage.

He plans to edit this rough draft  by Beltane and produce a second draft copy available for reading and critique by Midsummer before proceeding to a third edit by Mabon.  If you feel you would like to be a reader, please e-mail The Sacred.

The first read through has reached the 32nd week.  So far 14 separate threads, or themes, have come to light.

Finished the read through and I've done some work with Inspiration, an interesting software tool, somewhat like Mindmap if you know that one.  Starting today I'm going to take a shot at revising, mostly shortening and creating new transitions.  I have planned all along to work in chunks of writing whose dates correspond to a Great Wheel period.  I started in Imbolc, so I'm going to start in those six weeks, then, I'm going to skip to the Winter Solstice, the last period, so I'll have a feel for the span of the work.

Many decisions yet to be made.  My primary work for this first revision, shortening it all by about a third, will take some thought, still, I hope to finish close to my self-imposed deadline of May 1st, if not then, certainly this first cut by June 1st. 

So much on the web, on bookshelves about Democrats, liberals, and progressives can overcome this sinkhole.  Nothing real compelling that I've read yet, though I one article about freedom as the core American value rang true to me.  Not  yet reading in a systematic way, but that will come after the 1st revision of Pilgrim Diary.

We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves." - Buddha

Finished the novelization (yecch) of Constantine.  Not bad.  In following up with the graphic novel, I began to see a pattern I hadn't noticed before:  Lucifer, HellBlazer, The Preacher, Hellboy, even Sandman all have explicitly religious premises, the first four based squarely on Judaeo-Christian beliefs/myths.  All have a magical premise, too, at some level or another.

This gives me hope for a historical trilogy about magic in America, especially if I can use my knowledge of Christianity to make it flow.