Christmas Eve note
-7 on the weather station and no wind. Santa will have a frigid time here before heading on to the southern states.
Watched the movie Hancock tonight with Kate. Pretty good. Not great. Interesting take on superheroes.
Tomorrow Kate and I will go the movies, joining Jews from all over the nation for this ethnic holiday observance.
6 bar rises 29.89 3mph W windchill 6 Winter
Waning Crescent of the Moon of Long Nights
Last night before bed I finished reading the Story of Edgar Sawtelle. This is a big book and well-written. The arc of the story brings Greek tragedy to mind. A few people wend their way through a period of some 16 years or so, making choices and living out their consequences. This book features notable passages of an American magic realism with ghosts playing significant roles. There is, too, a village crone, Ida Paine, who dispenses sour wisdom as she runs a small grocery store.
Edgar, a mute boy, and the title character has a life of wonder and pain. He interacts with a cast of well-drawn and closely observed dogs, his mother and father, an Uncle, a veternarian and his sheriff son. The isolation of their circumstance in northern Wisconsin near Lake Superior and Chequamegon National Forest provides an at turns bleak and rich natural world for this story.
If you like a good story, well-told, this is a book for you, but beware. It will break your heart.
-7 bar rises 30.10 0mph SW windchill -9 Winter Solstice
Last Quarter Moon of Long Nights Day 8hr 44mn
17 bar steady 30.19 0mph NE windchill 17 Samhain
Last Quarter Moon of Long Nights
The best way to predict the future is to create it. Peter Drucker
Quick note. No, I’ve not gone away. Just had a busy day. Picked up the red car and drove it without incident into the Sierra Club and back. Yeah. Meetings at Sierra Club with Margaret and Michelle on anti-racism training and communications work during the upcoming legislative session. I will have a lot to do: research, weekly updates, action alerts, perhaps co-ordinating some op-ed and letter to the editor material.
Home. Nap.
Just spent an hour compiling research into usable slots. Handy with Google. Technology in the service of political change.
An invitation to do some modest work in the Permaculture arena, too. Helping Reed Aubin put together some material for a talk on Permaculture and ethics. Should be fun.
Gotta hit the treadmill.
11 bar falls 30.22 2mph NE windchill 7 Samhain
Last Quarter Moon of Long Nights
Here is a new term (new to me) that has become important in my thinking: emergence. It comes from a discipline that fascinates me, but about which I know very little: complexity theory. Emergence describes those characteristics of life forms, human history and human economics that arise from the fact of life itself. Emergent realities like value, meaning and history, according to this line of thought, do not break the laws of physics, but cannot be predicted by application of those same laws.
Inability to predict the next action of a man or woman, the working of the markets or the next events in human history creates a peculiar circumstance. It means that though they break no natural laws these emergent realities do not conform to either. Again, according to this line of thought, this lack of predictability has two sources: agency and creativity.
Agency is the ability to act. Combined with consciousness in human beings this leads to creativity. Creativity and agency make for the rich, diverse reality that is human life.
I’m not going to go too far with this right now because I’m just beginning to absorb it. I want to understand how it relates to my work on a Ge-ology and read a critique or two before I get overly excited, but it seems like an important idea to me.
12 bar steady 30.27 0mph ENE windchill 12 Samhain
Last Quarter of the Moon of Long Nights
As you can tell by the temperature, we have a heat wave in progress. 12 degrees! Break out the shorts and t-shirts and sandals. This is a good old-fashioned Minnesota winter so far and I’m liking it.
I spent this afternoon reading material for part III of Heresy Moves West. This one will explore what I sense is an emerging new faith, one rooted in the soil of the Midwest and given space by our skies. It is not unique to us, nor is our embrace of it unique. What is unique is our location, a place from which this new faith can take wings and begin to test the air of this 3rd millennia after the West focused on Jerusalem. With 2,000 years of Christianity and 500 or so of reason, we need a new way to view our situation in the universe.
Those of us who live among the wheat fields, corn fields and dairy farms of the Midwest have grown up with this faith attached to our Selves. The very factors which make the bi-coastal crowd smirk as they fly over over our green land are the ones which give us a birthright understanding of ourSelves as part of, rather than apart from, the natural world.
As we fall deeper into darkness, heading toward the Winter Solstice now only three nights away, our time underground, Persephone-like, reaches it deepest point. This is a time for meditation and contemplation.
|
Forwarded to me by a fellow Woolly Mammoth, Tom Crane. Jeff Foxworthy on Minnesota If you consider it a sport to gather your food by drilling through 18 inches of ice and sitting there all day hoping that the food will swim by, |
8 bar steady 30.27 0mph NW windchill 6 Samhain
Last Quarter Moon of Long Nights
A busy morning here at the homestead. I played around with various formats and methods of research for the Sierra Club legislative committee. One setup uses Google News Alerts and Google Docs to create a real time log of news articles, web entries and video feeds on the five issues the LegCom will target during this years legislature. This much I can do at home.
My new datalogger for my weather station has not yet succumbed to my troubleshooting, but I imagine I’ll wrestle it to the ground sometime soon. Something about ports seems to be hanging it up right now. Requires detailed attention and I have to set aside time for that.
Kate and I had our business meeting. In spite of the negative financial weather swirling around we’re fine; not as wealthy as we were in, say, August, but fine nonetheless.
Good news on the car front. It was only a blown tire as far as they can see. Everything else looks fine. Under $400 bucks and I’d imagined multiple thousands. Quite a relief. We decided we’ll keep this one running until the plug-ins make sense.
-4 bar steady 30.28 0mph SW windchill -4 Samhain
Waning Gibbous Moon of Long Nights
I have a run of almost 3 weeks with no outside obligations. This is a time of the year, even when I worked for the Presbytery, that I would stay home, take up a research project or a book I’d wanted to really absorb. This habit probably started during the Presbytery time because no congregational folk wanted to talk to judicatory people during the Christmas holidays and immediately afterward. Which was fine with me.
Right now it’s quiet. It has been dark since about 4:30 PM. The long nights have begun to swell and take over the rhythm of the day. This means more silence, more time to enjoy the darkness of mid-winter. This is a time of year and a natural cycle that draws us all inward. This inward pull pushes some of us to string up lights, go to multiple parties, perhaps drink to excess, spend money beyond our means. We’ll wake up sometime in the new year, ought 9 in this case, with a hangover wondering how the season got so out of hand.
The season can be filled with holy nights, silent nights. Starred filled and wonder saturated nights. It matters how we come to the season.
Instead of driving in to the Sierra Club meeting tonight I chose to participate by phone, as did all but two of the other legislative committee members. By the time I got done with my workout and shower, a lassitude crept over me, borne of the tensions and aches of the last couple of days. If I had driven in, as it turned out, my trip would have taken twice the time of the meeting. Not very efficient.
My original reason for driving in, to match peoples faces with names, would have been thwarted, too.
As it was, I was on the phone for 45 minutes, took notes, then hung up and went upstairs to read the Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Without the long drive it felt like I’d cheated.
6 bar steady 30.24 0mph SW windchill 6 Samhain
Waning Gibbous Moon of Long Nights
I made a beef broth today. Took four hours to cook. Now it’s ready but I have not tasted it yet. I’ll probably use it as a base for soups.
Blew the snow from last night around 1pm after the city plows had gone by.
Did some research on the issues central to the Sierra Clubs work at the legislature this year. Home work assigned by me since I still don’t know the terrain very well.
Got back to working out today after two days of feeling crummy after two hours on my feet at the Russian Museum and a couple of hours sitting beside the freeway. Felt good.
Tomorrow I can begin research, writing and meditation. About time. I hope I can keep it up right along.