Art and Culture, Great Work, Writing

A Novel Realization

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68  bar rises 30.02  2mph NE dew-point 59   Summer, cool and pleasant

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

Again this morning off to the Cities to the Sierra Club for help with a mailing and to make some phone calls, drop by the MIA.  This is three trips in two days and feels like too much.  I scheduled all this myself, too.  Hmmm, gotta speak to the person who keeps my calendar.

After finishing 48 lectures on the history of English literature yesterday, I had an odd realization.  Over the 15 plus years I have been writing, I have spent time in serious, sustained study of astronomy, liberal religion, art history and the classics.   When I say serious, sustained study, I mean time frames of years.  In the case of liberal religion over a decade.  But.  I have not devoted any appreciable and no sustained time to the study of the novel, the very form I have chosen as my own.  Strange.

So, my dream for the next stage of my life entails concentrated study of the novel, its history and craft, as well as reading more novels.  I want to write a serious, literary novel, not my next one and perhaps not the one after that, but soon, one informed by the insights and craft of others.  I might even take a college course in literature.  When in college, I refused to take literature classes, saying I could read on my own.  I have, too.   Now, though, with a different intent, I might well find literature classes instructive.

Gotta sign off and get to the Sierra Club.

Art and Culture, Memories, Woolly Mammoths

Robert Bly

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69  bar steady 29.91  2mph NE dew-point 63  Summer, cooler and cloudy

Full Thunder Moon

Today is a busy day for me.  Two trips in to the cities.  The first to my old workout haunt, Minnehaha Falls.  Every morning rain or shine, winter or summer I did a fast hike through the trails along the Mississippi ending with the stairs going up to the parking lot that abuts the falls themselves.  Today the docent book club planning session.  We’ll see how many folks turn out.

Later, the Woollies at Jim Lenfesty’s house.  Mark and Elizabeth housesit for Jim, at least they have these last two years.  Since it is right across the street from Roberty Bly’s, Mark invited him again.  Last time he came with a cream pie that had three slices out of it.  He’s a bit of a curmudgeon, but then so am I.

Shower.

Family, Our Land and Home, Travel

Vineland Place

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74  bar steady  29.89  4mph NNE dew-point 64   Summer, warmish and stickyish

Full Thunder Moon

Ah, the power of suggestion.  Especially from a spouse.  Spent an hour and a half clearing burdock, nettles, black locust, burrs, climbing wild cucumbers and virginia creeper from the site of the soon to be firepit cum family gathering spot.  An area in which everything has been removed invites the emergence of those plants whose seeds or rhizomes remain in the soil.

Over the last few rainy, hot weeks nettles have taken nourishment from the former compost heap to grow large, reaching for the sun and laden with formic acid to prevent uprooting.   The wild cucumber which climbs, then produces lacy transparent fruit liked the compost as did the virginia creeper.

While yanking on the long above ground runs of vine and pulling out their equally long runs of below the soil surface roots/rhizomes, I decided to change the name of our property from 7 Oaks, named for the 7 Oaks on the hill outside my writing room window, to Vineland Place.  I have no idea why, but our property is the ideal happy home for vines:  wild cucumbers, Virginia creeper and wild grape.  The wild grape in particular grows vines thicker than my upper arm (OK, so I’m not Ahnold, but still).  We have nurtured a wild  grape that has chosen the six foot fence we had put in the front after Celt began climbing the fence to go greet the neighbors on walks by our house.  At 200 pounds Celt, an Irish Wolfhound, was not a pleasant surprise, though in manner gentle and loving.

As the CO2 level rises with global warming, it favors vines.  I do not recall why.  I could not help but recall this piece of trivia as I drove through Alabama, Mississippi and Lousiana where kudzu has a presence akin to an alien invader.  It grows over lower shrubs and covers the entire highway easement up to the drainage ditches on divided highways.  In more than one case I saw old homes, uninhabited (I think), shrouded under the green of this conqueror vine.

Jon did many projects around Vineland Place when he lived here.  One of the early ones was to cut back the large grape vines that had begun to strangle the oak, ironwood, ash, elm, pin cherry and poplar that make up our woods.

Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Writing

Even Though It’s Still July

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71  bar steady 29.87  0mph ENE dew-point 62  Summer, wonderful

Full Thunder Moon

The color:  deep red, pale yellow, pink, mauve, orange, red, virgin white, flame pink with a burnt orange throat,white with a pink throat.  Scents ethereal as they are ephemeral.  The true lilies and the day lilies are in bloom.  A chaos of color.

The true lilies have a bloom architecture clean, sweeping, grand.  They have colors with hues so intense they can make the heart dance.  These are the regnant plants of this garden and this is their time.

Here’s the problem with putting stuff in writing:

“We will also finish creation of a fire-pit, family gathering area begun last fall.  These will be finished by the August date of my meeting.”  from my Woolly project notes.

Kate dug this up yesterday and reminded me of this commitment.  Sigh.  The one aspect of gardening that seems always to drain from consciousness is the July slump.  Not much gardening gets done by me in this month.  It’s too hot, too many bugs and I’ve usually worked way more than I intended in May and June.

In July I begin to need indoor time, book time and writing time.  By August things have become marginally cooler, I’ve satisfied the reading itch though probably not the writing and the bugs become tolerable.  August and September, sometimes in to mid-October can be intense gardening, too.

All this means I sometimes (always) project more completion than I will realize.   Even so, I want to finish the fire-pit, family gathering area, too.  I have not told Kate that I intend to rent the stump grinder this Wednesday, but I do.  That will clear out the roots I found lacing the fire pit hole last fall as I dug.  After some weeding, moving some sand and rock and cutting up a few logs for seats around the fire, the fire pit will be done by August 18th.  That’s the date of my Woolly meeting and Kate’s 64th birthday.

Maybe I’ll go out there right now and start pulling weeds.  Even though it’s still July.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Writing

Writing Makes Its Own Space

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66  bar steady 29.79  3mph NNW dew-point 63  Summer night, rainy day

Full Thunder Moon

We had rain and storm, tornado warning and tornado watch.  A full thunder moon day.  The rain poured down, drenching the lily blooms, forming small rivers on the wide leaves of the acorn squash.  While I read the first chapter of the book on the Western Unitarian Conference, the rain drained from the sky and onto the azalea, the begonia, the several amarylis and a bed full of hosta.  Reading a good book while it rains or snows pleases me, makes me feel at home, in place.

Kate harvested beans tonight, a few onions, too.  I used the onions with some beets I bought at Festival, delicious.  We also had a few early sugar snap peas and wax beans.  Some fish.  Some pasta with pesto made from hydroponic basil.  An evening meal.

Kate works this weekend, as she does every other weekend.  Ten days in a row, a long stretch, but she likes the four days off it gives her.  We pretend she’s retired on those days.

The Minnesota UU history piece has begun to take shape, get bones.  When there is a subject matter to master before I write, it usually takes me a while before I get a gestalt, a feel for the whole.  Once I have that I know where I need more information, or that I do not.  At that point I can sit down and write, usually in one setting.  A few days later, after its cold, I go back, reread and edit, revise.  Then I’ll put it away until I need to present it.

This one has been a bit unusual in that history requires a certain precision and accuracy with details, chronological sequence, names and places.  This means the material that I use to illustrate and make my points must get reordered to fit my needs, yet remain accurate and true.   It’s part of what I love about this kind of work.

When I have this kind of work, it pushes out everything else.  The writing work makes its own space in my life, creates openings and time for itself.  Just like this blog.  It happens each day, two to three times a day and often I do not recall having written here.  The breadcrumbs, though, are there, laid down in words and postings.

Art and Culture, Memories, Politics, Writing

Psyche’s Politics

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70  bar steady  29.87  0mph NE  dew-point 62   Summer, cloudy

Full Thunder Moon

In Kavalier and Clay, the book by Michael Chabon I referenced a few days ago, the author often talked about art and artists.  At one point he referred to the “…necessary self-betrayal of the artist.”  This was one of those phrases that slipped right under my mental fingernail and caused some pain.  I knew what he meant.

Writing is of no value if the writer plays it safe, stays inside the lines, never transgresses boundaries.  Coloring in what other people have defined as the picture on the page adds nothing to the human experience.  When our frailties or our biases or our inner logic are on display the skin limits of self get pushed aside and others can get a peek.

I read an interesting definition of art as a person turned inside out.

A flurry of domestic activity yesterday.  Though all of the budget watching, bank going, grocery shopping activities undergird our daily lives, still, they leave me feeling as if little got done.  I’m suspicious of this as male acculturation, that is, the chores do not count as masculine work, but even this suspicion does not cross out the emotional response.  This quote from a few days ago sums it up:

“Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices — just recognize them.” – Edward R. Murrow

The recovering alcoholic never leaves my side.  The recovering racist struggles on a regular basis with instant opinions formed on the basis of skin color or accent.  The let down after a day of domestic work reveals the sexist role divisions imprinted deep in my own psyche.  Kate also points out that I always drive.  Too true.

Recovering may sound like a dodge or an excuse, but it is not.  The often derided politically correct comes from those of us willing to engage in the inner struggle with the cultural assumptions we have inherited.  What recovering admits is that acculturation is forever, just like addiction.  There will, in other words, always be parts of me that diminish cooking, cleaning, balancing the checkbook as unworthy of my time.  This in spite of the many times and the many ways in which I have learned this is not true.  There will always be parts of me that attach secondary characteristics to skin color or age or sex.  There will always be parts of me that trade on the unearned advantage I get from being white, male and American.

My responsibility as a conscious adult lies in owning up to who and what I am, then choosing a different response.  I may not be responsible for the sexist acculturation I received growing up, but I am responsible for the choices I make when it raises its head.

This willingness to throw one’s self into struggle, not for a day or a week, but a lifetime infects the people effected by the creative turmoil of the 60’s and 70’s.   Certainly others of other times, too, but the immersion in those days when the old ways were no longer viable, but the new ways had not yet arrived created a mass of people who came to question their basic assumptions about reality; question assumptions about realities so intimate as the nature of love, the immediate reaction to another, so often unquestioned.  This struggle brought politics to the bedroom as well as the boardroom, to the kitchen counter as well as the lunch counter, to the front room as well as the class room.

There is bravery here, foolishness, too; but, it is the foolishness of the wise fool, willing to risk self for the sake of the other.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Our Land and Home

A Deere John Article

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66  bar rises 29.91 0mph N dew-point 56  Summer night, cooler

Full Thunder Moon

I went out tonight for a bit of moon viewing.  I’ve always thought a moon-watching deck would make a nice addition to the property.   We don’t have one so I stood in the driveway, watching the moon while Lady, the brittany next door, howled at me (instead of the moon).

This moon rides low in the sky, just below the tree tops, so I had to walk almost to the end of our driveway until I could see it free and clear of the treeline.  It is a polished coin of a moon, bright and sparkling in the sky, a moonstone on jeweler’s velvet.  A night out well rewarded.

From tonight’s Washington Post

Deere John: It’s Been Good Knowing You
Lawn Behemoths Are Going Out to Pasture “The riding lawn mower has long been a barometer of the American dream, been a symbol of having arrived in the suburban middle class. It says, “I have so much lawn to mow, I need to sit down.”

It says, I’ve made it, I’ve escaped that funky old rowhouse neighborhood with the asbestos siding and yards like dirt-scabs. My land, my spread, not enough to plow, but way too much to mow the old-fashioned way. It says, I’m Jefferson’s dream of the yeoman farmer. It says, I’m rich enough to not only raise a worthless crop, but to pay money for the privilege. It says, I’m a boy with a boy’s rightful toys; a real American man.

Or that’s what it said back when city dwellers would gather around the riding mowers at the old Hechinger north of Capitol Hill, and dream the dream.

Now it’s saying something else. It may be a measure of the forces lined up against us. The riding mower seems to be on the wrong end of every headline. If economic news — from gas prices to shrinking nest eggs — is like the magnifying glass focused by an 8-year-old to fry a bug with sunlight, riding mowers are the bug.

The news: The riding mower industry “is deeply troubled by the decline in housing starts,” says Kris Kiser, spokesman for the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute in Alexandria. “New home construction is a good barometer for us. But you add foreclosures, decline in housing starts and the decline in housing sales, and you have the trifecta.””

Dehn’s 4 Seasons, the lawn appliance store where we bought our chain saw, our riding mower, our snow blower and super charged weed whacker closed up shop and didn’t alert us at all.  I drove by there one day a few weeks ago and the place was empty.  Capitalism’s creative destruction is at it again.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Writing

Showing Up

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79  bar falls 29.88  0mph NE  dew-point 53   Summer evening

Full Thunder Moon

Next weekend is the Ellis cousin reunion in Mineola, Texas.  Kate and I fly down on Friday, back on Sunday.  A short visit to the really hot weather.  All the folks of my father’s generation on the Ellis side, that is his siblings and their mates, are dead.  This is cousins and their kids and grandkids.

Though I was born in Duncan, Oklahoma I know the Ellis side of the family less well than the Keaton (mom’s side).  We moved from Oklahoma when I was only year and a half or so to Indiana, mom’s home state.  I want to get to know them better.  They are family, after all, a main connection to the past and through it to the future.  Like much in this life family is about showing up.  Otherwise, no family.

Kate had a lot of charts to do today, so I did the errands.  We had lunch, a nap and a business meeting.  We have overshot our travel budget, by a good ways.  If she failed to earn the big bonuses, we would have had to pull in the belt a bit.  We discussed ways to stay on budget.  Important and not always easy for us.

Got in the mail today Freedom Moves West, a whole book on the Western Unitarian Conference. It may contain enough information that I won’t have to go to the Minnesota History Center.  More and more I look at Amazon and on-line shopping as a way to save trips and therefore fuel.  Budgeting trips into the city is something I’ve not done too much.  I just hop in the car and go.  Nowadays though I think.  Try to put two things together.

Next Tuesday I go in to help with a Sierra Club mailing.  That day I’ll visit the museum and head over to the Minnesota History Center if I need to find anything there.  Like that.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends

On What Ground Does Your Faith Stand?

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74  bar rises 29.92 1mph N dew-point 62    Summer, sunny and pleasant

Full Thunder Moon

“Think like a man of action and act like a man of thought.” – Henri Bergson

I’ve not seen this quote before, but I like it.  I do know Bergson, however, a creative philosopher.  He proposed the snapshot theory of time.  Time precedes in discrete chunks, rather than a continuous flow.

After sheepshead last night, Bill Schmidt and I talked outside Roy Wolfe’s house.  The air was warm and a bit stale, mosquitoes homed in on my bald head while we  talked about Chardin.  A new translation of Chardin’s phenomenon is out, Bill said, now called the Human Phenomenon.  Much better.  I said I’d look at it.

We share a spirituality, a sense of our location in the universe, that has its roots in Christian experience, yet has long ago slipped the moorings of that more traditional way.  Both of us now search for ways to articulate this sense of wonder and awe founded not in words, but in lived experience.  Bill spoke of a moment when the trees outside his apartment came to him and he to them, “A moment, maybe.  A tenth of a second.  But I was with them, no boundary.”

In my re-reading of Unitarian history in preparation for my UU history presentation it has become clear to me that the primary struggle in liberal religion, from the beginning down to the current day, is over what gives religion authority.  I could have seen it earlier, because I learned while a Presbyterian that all fights in the Christian community come to that, too.  In their case the issue was either biblical interpretation, the most common authority in the Protestant community, or the Catholic church’s claim that their magesterium grew from its apostolic authority in addition to scripture.

At first, in the Unitarian movement, the new come-outers fought with the orthodox Calvinists over reason applied to Scripture.  The Unitarians said there was no warrant for the trinity in scripture, therefore they did not believe it.  But.  They did believe the scriptures had supernatural authority.  Jesus was still the Christ and miracles like the resurrection were the warrant for reasonable Christians in their faith.

When Emerson, in his Harvard Divinity School Address, said that we should look to our own inspiration, our own revelation rather than that of the fathers what he put forward was, in fact, a new source of religious authority, personal experience.

The  outflow from what then became the Transcendentalist Controversy was the subtle, at first, erosion of belief in the supernatural character of the scriptures, and therefore of Jesus, that proceeded pell mell to questions of the existence of God.

Quelled in part by the accident of the Civil War just as it had begun to gather force, the whole controversy emerged again when, in the West, after the Civil War, the new Unitarian and Universalist communities began to veer away from Boston Unitarian orthodoxy and raise what would become the western controversy, that between theists and those who wanted more latitude.  The Free Religious Association, which carried the burden of those who did not want to be bound by any orthodoxy, gave a brief organizational expression to this movement.

The result of all these questions was the gradual opening of more and more space within liberal religion for a range of perspectives from conservative liberal Christian Unitarianism to those who sought the foundation for their faith in human experience.

This was roughly how things stood at the transition in to the 20th century.  At this point Minneapolis emerged, through the preaching of John Dietrich, as the center of a controversy, this time between the humanist message conveyed by Dietrich to audiences in the thousands and the theists of the liberal Christians.  This humanist-theist debate still resonates in 21st century UU congregations.  The content seems to be the issue, but it is not.

As it has been from the beginning with William Ellery Channing in the early part of the 19th century, the issue is now this:  what authenticates your faith experience?  Is it some external authority:  a creed, a bible, a prelate; or, is it a matter of lived experience?

Now we have come full circle back to Bill and me standing there on the street in St Paul, the mosquitoes buzzing and Roy coming out from his house to toss a can in the blue recycling bin.  We waved to Roy, concluded our talk and got in our cars to head home.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Great Wheel

Imagine Your Soul Traveling on a Lambent Beam

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69  bar rises 29.85  0mph NE dew-point 68  Summer night with a full moon, steamy beautiful

Full Thunder Moon

Five of us sit down every 4 to 5 weeks or so and play sheepshead.  This is a game, as I’ve said before, peculiar to eastern Wisconsin and there among the German community where it is also known as schotskopf.  Sheepshead is the thin glue that gives us an excuse to sit together, laugh and be amused at the spectacle of ourselves.

As I grow older, it is these close gatherings of friends that provide the social cohesion I need.  My needs may be less than most, but they are not non-existent.  These men, all save me variously Catholic, from not anymore to still engaged in the work, have wry, knowing attitudes toward life, attentive to the ridiculous and the tender.  I am more when I return than when I left.

And something to be said for the moon.  A perfect circle, silvered white and suspended in the sky with stars and planets gathered round.  On the nights of the full moon the dark opens its arms to secret pacts, whispered love and the breath of Diana, huntress and defender of the forest.

Take a moment and step outside, stand under the Full Thunder Moon and let it shine on you.  Imagine your soul traveling on a lambent beam to the moon and back, gazing down toward the spinning blue globe as you come home.  This dance of the planets and their satellites around the greater gravity of Sol creates and destroys.  Shiva Nataraja.

Amen.