Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

In Tutelage to My Self

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41  bar steady  29.41 4mph dewpoint 39 Beltane

           Waning Crescent Moon of Growing

Wet.  Cold.  Dreary.  An inside day.  I was gonna plant beets and carrots outside, but not today.  Maybe Sunday.

Lunch with Tom Crane.  We discussed the meeting at his house where I serve as his assistant.  The topic is mastery.  The word poses some problems for me because it is difficult, if not impossible, to extricate it from its linkage to subordination.  The idea that lurks behind it, though, is strong.  Somewhere in the terms Zen master or Taoist sage or master gardener, even master craftsperson lies a life time of practice, the honing of a skill or a life way on the hard stone of experience. 

We had an interesting conversation about who we had come across in our lives we would consider masters.  I’ll get back to you, but no one leapt to mind.  We also discussed the possibility of naming for others where we see mastery in them.  This gets around the culture bound reticence we upper-middle class Midwesterners have to tooting our own horn.

I admitted that I had not allowed anyone to mentor me, nor had I been willing to be anyone’s disciple.  This is a weakness, I believe, borne of a need to figure things out for myself, to do things on my own.  Tom had the same experience, but for a different reason.  He was thrust into responsibility and expected to survive.  And he has.

This is, in part at least, a vulnerability question.  Can I make myself vulnerable enough to another person to become their student, their disciple.  The result of not doing that is, as Tom and I admitted, a sense that we have never quite arrived, not quite done enough.  A niggle of uncertainty that has no reference within us which we can use to dislodge it.

We also spoke a bit about being in tutelage to the Self.  I said I have been willing to trace my own journey by the vague outlines I feel in that part of me that participates in the greater universe, and which calls me forward to my own destiny.  As a Taoist, I would call that my attunement to the Movement of Heaven, the Tao.  A good lunch on a wet day.

Friends, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work

A Fed? LOL

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43  bar steady  29.47 11mph  NNE  dewpoint 42 Beltane

                Waning Crescent Moon of Growing

Well, ok then.  The reader who wondered about my hydroponics is not a Fed.  LOL they said. 

It is a weirdness about the Web that we can connect directly with people, yet know nothing about them.  The weirdness compounds when we realize the people with whom we come in contact in this way, we don’t know at all beyond a few words on a computer screen.  In the case of comments on a website or a blog like this one the stakes are, for the most part, low, but when you consider the apparent number of people who meet up in person after such interactions. 

All this reminds me of Alvin Toffler and his book, Future Shock.  I still remember many ideas from that book because he was a good phrase maker.  High tech, high touch is the one that comes to mind here, but in a slightly different vein than Toffler’s.  His version was that the more we connect through technology, the more we will want to see each other in person.  I believe that’s true, but I’m on another tack here.  High tech, high touch heightens the need, the desire for personal interaction, yes. It produces that desire–the original sense of eros in the Greek, the desire for human contact–in a situation we have not evolved to understand.

We are animals wired over hundreds of thousands of years to read the language in another person’s eyes, the way they hold their hands, the set of their neck, the wrinkles and twitches of the mouth.  Though we are often wrong even with those cues, at least in face-to-face encounters we have a chance to assess, to ponder.  Words on a page are not the same.  Not even close.  It may be that we have a sophisticated reader’s intution about how language reveals the author, but that’s a game often got wrong by critics, so how good can we be?

The point is this, words without flesh, disembodied words put us at a disadvantage.  We can’t judge the intent of a phrase, the reason behind a conjecture.  This has led to the all too familiar problem of flaming where some unhappy soul takes this anonymity and uses it to vent, often just to vent.

Toffler also described Over Choice, a situation where we face more decisions about more matters than we can handle with anything approaching wisdom.  This applies to people we meet through the electronic ether, too.  The reader interested in hydroponics might be a valuable interlocutor, one whose journey with indoor gardening might supplement and enhance my own.  And vice versa.  Or, they could be, as I speculated, a law enforcement officer hiding behind the web’s anonymity.   Because it is my nature to trust first and question later, I accept the response to my speculation at face value; but, I have no face.  Therein lies the dilemma.

We must evolve some method, some means of reading people we meet on the web.  I suppose that’s what Facebook, Youtube, Myspace propose to accomplish, but there it is often meeting people to be meeting people.  And those social networking sites get gamed, too.  An endless loop. 

Enough on this.  I have to get to work writing my piece for the Muse.  It’s taken an odd turn.  Wonder how it will finish?

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work

Hey, Buddy, Got Any Pictures?

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55  bar falls 29.59 8mph NE  dewpoint 36 Beltane

                 Waning Gibbous Moon of Growing

           grandmaanddescendants.jpg

This is Grandma and her descendants, Gabriel and Ruth.  Gabe still has to learn to suck and swallow.  He also needs to wean himself from the canula that deliver an oxygen stream.  Both of these are maturational tasks that would have completed on their own in the womb, so he just needs to grow and get older.  Right now everyone wishes he’d do both quicker, unmasking one of the many contradictions in human development.  As we age, no one wants to get older and grow bigger. 

Kate came home last night.  She was sad.  Ruthie now knows her and runs up with a smile and arms out, “Grandma!”  That’s tough to leave.  Gabe, too, is in a vulnerable place even though she’s confident he’ll be fine.  She also helped out Jon and Jen with domestic matters like cooking, grocery shopping and Ruth care when Ruth was not in daycare. 

Having a child in the hospital creates stress just because, but there is stress, too, because work goes on while the daily routine gets disrupted.  No one gets enough sleep.  A tough time for the Olson family, Denver branch.  It will receded into the past, someday, and become the stuff of family legend.  When you were a baby, Gabe, you were in the hospital so long and we were so worried.

A reader from the Webiverse asked to see some photographs of my hydroponic setup.  It occurred to me that it might be the feds trying to catch a not too intelligent dope grower.  Go, ahead, buddy, show me your pictures.  Heh, heh, heh.  I hope so, but because boy are they going to be disappointed.

                           hydro2300.jpg

From this and the next angle all you can see are lettuce and tomato plants, but there are also morning glories, cucumbers and three varieties of beets.  These last are not as far along in the growth process and will go outside as soon as the weather warms up.

                           hydro300.jpg

As I’ve begun to work with the hydroponics, this setup seems small.  The megafarm is the larger of the two; the smaller is sold as Emily’s farm.  

                          Here’s the whole deal, including the seed sprouting area. The halide bulb and shield are just out of sight near the top.

                          hydrosetup300.jpg

It’s amazing the charge I got out of working with seeds and young plants when snow and cold weather blew around the house.  I plan to branch out (ha,ha) a bit over the year to include flowers and, maybe, carnivorous plants.  No, I don’t know why.

                         

Art and Culture

One Psychiatrist Says to Another

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61 bar steep fall 29.73  6mph WSW dewpoint 33 Spring

                Last Quarter Moon of Growing

Some leaf curling and cupping on my lettuce and tomato.  Not sure if it’s a problem or not.  I can’t find any organisms.  No sign of mildew, virus, aphid, biting insects.  Still, it doesn’t look quite right to me.  Time will tell.

Fed the dogs at 11:00AM and took off for the Walker to talk to Stefan.  He asked me to edit and comment on his poems. 

I got there early and wandered through the Suburbs exhibit and the Richard Prince exhibit.  I’m not sure about Prince, as I know many others are not, but he has some funny jokes. 

Two psychiatrists are at a bar together.  One psychiatrist says to the other, “I had dinner with my mother last night and I had a Freudian slip.”  The other psychiatrist raised an eyebrow.  “I said, ‘You ruined my life you fucking bitch!”

Also, “You know what it means when you come home to a warm, loving embrace?  It means you’re in the wrong house.”

These are on monochrome backgrounds, sort of pop artish.  Most of the other re-purposed photographs show an interesting angle on American culture.  I can imagine a curatorial meeting where having Richard Prince and the Suburban show together would add irony, creative tension.  I’m not so sure. I found the suburban show more provocative than the Prince.  It has an original take on a widely experienced phenomenon.  Prince recycles material from our magazines, our popular culture, but his work seems more cool, distant.  The suburban exhibition is lively, engaged with the subject either ironically or in a non-judgmental way.

Stefan and I met in Gallery 8, the first place aside from United Theological Seminary I saw when I first came to the Twin Cities over 38 years ago.  Oddly, I had lunch with Lonnie, his wife, there many times when she and I used to keep up. 

We talked about his poetry.  I took a slash and burn approach to editing this batch.  “I’m trying to find the line here, Stefan.  Like skiing.  I cut out everything that didn’t get me down the hill fast.”  I told him that was an idiosyncratic method and that he could do whatever he wanted with the feedback.  He gave me a few more so I guess it wasn’t too bad for him.

Family, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work

Hazards in the Learning Process

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41  bar steady  29.96  0mph ESE dewpoint 24  Spring

                    Last Quarter Moon of Growing

Spent a good part of the afternoon on mechanical and electronic stuff.  It was time for the first changing out of the nutrient reservoirs in the hydroponics. 

I first tried the way the setup suggested, that is, drain the reservoirs onto the plastic shelf on which they both sit.  This is not as crazy as it may sound since the shelf has grooves pressed in to carry used nutrient mix and water toward a drain plug at the end of the shelf.  So, I hooked up some plastic tubing by cutting a small hole in the end of the cap and opened the taps.  This is slow.  The drain hose is not too big.  It’s also messy since the hole in end of the plug allowed a bit of the liquid to drain around the tubing and drip on the lights (electric!) and the floor. 

Hmmm.  Had to be a better way.  Then I thought of all those car thieves hard at work stealing gas.  Siphon!  By chance I had one hundred feet of plastic tubing and it fit inside the drain tubing quite neatly.  I pushed this tube through the hole in the drain cap, sucked on it a bit and voila!  Both of them drained all by themselves.  Still took a while, but it is a handsoff operation.

As I read somewhere, I took the used nutrient mix out and poured on the garlic, garlic is a heavy feeder and impervious to the cold weather we’ve had.  That’s important because you can’t encourage growth in most plants when the temperature can still go below freezing.  That possibility exists here until May 15th.  I also poured it on some daffodils about to bloom.

Then I made 9 gallons of fresh nutrient mix and poured it back into the reservoirs through the pots holding the lettuce, tomato plants, three kinds of beet and morning glories.  A tip I read in the hydroponic bible (according to the folks at Interior Gardens) suggested swapping out the nutrient every three rather than four.  So, I did.  This is fun.

The treadmill still has some hiccups.  I had to rewire it again this afternoon.  Landice apparently thinks they may have sent me a bad rheostat.  If so, that means I swapped a bad one for a bad one rather than a good one for a good one.  More work ahead there.

I also put away all the material from the Weber tours and the bronze tour I have a month or so ago.  The library is neat. (in a manner of speaking.  That is, my manner.)  I have a file to read for the three hour bronze session I have for Family Day on the 11th.  I also have a number of articles and objects to use as reference while I write something about Urania visiting the MIA.

Kate called today, too.  Ruthie ran out of the kitchen yesterday, into the dining room and tripped, falling on the corner of the coffee table.  Big cut.  Lots of angst.  But super grandma was there to be calm.  She and Jon took Ruthie to urgent care for stitches.  This is a busman’s holiday for urgent care doc, Kate Olson, but it gave her a feel for the other side of the examining table.  As she often does, she felt guilty.  Not her fault.  Ruth is a puppy, running and playing and trying out the world.  There are hazards in that learning process and none of us escape.

She comes home tomorrow and I’m glad.  The bris has been delayed because Gabriel still has not decided to eat enough and he’s still on some oxygen.  Until he can eat and breathe on his own, he’ll remain in the level 2 nursery.

And.  No snow!

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work

Newton, Darwin, Einstein–an Enlightenment Trinity.

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41  bar steady 30.16 1mph SSW dewpoint 26  Spring

              Last Quarter Moon of Growing

Charles Darwin was and is a remarkable man.  Newton, Darwin, Einstein–an enlightenment trinity.  An old paradigm physicist, a new paradigm physicist and the first student of complexity, a biological pioneer.  These three have direct influence on so much of our world: calculus, atomic energy, genetic sciences, conservation biology, space travel, orbital mechanics.  So much.  To know the work of just these three and still deny the reality and power of ideas.  Impossible.

Darwin has influenced my own thinking.  A constant question I bring to the biological world is, “How is that adaptative?”  “What adaptative advantage does that confer?”  These two questions alone encourage speculation about fever, pollen, phototropism, the color of plant  leaves, the place where birds nest, bipedal locomotion and so on ad infinitum.

I have multiple reading projects that will happen when I have time. One of them is to read through Darwin’s work, at least the important books.  Why?  To separate what Darwin was about from the muddled and often inaccurate picture offered by his acolytes.  Here’s an example.  An instructor at the arboretum’s symposium I attended on Saturday used the term survival of the fittest.  Not Darwin.  Herbert Spencer.  Spencer used Darwin’s ideas to speculate about the succession of civilizations.  He invented the now long ago discredited notion of social darwinism.  Oswald Spengler brought the idea into its zenith of disrepute during the Nazi era.

Darwin’s idea is natural selection.  It is not only the fittest, that is the strongest and most competitive, that survive.  Those also survive who have a protected niche (think islands and deep valleys), a winning reproductive strategy (seeds versus spore mats) and great defense (lion fish, poison ivy).  The long sweep of evolutionary time favors those whose characteristics favor survival, whether the organism is the fittest in their niche or in their species or not.  Thus, the many endemic birds of Hawai’i may well not survive in some other environment.

Here’s a brief paragraph from Wikipedia that says this better than I can: 

“An interpretation of the phrase to mean “only the fittest organisms will prevail” (a view common in social Darwinism) is not consistent with the actual theory of evolution. Any organism which is capable of reproducing itself on an ongoing basis will survive as a species, not just the “fittest” ones. A more accurate characterization of evolution would be “survival of the fit enough”, although this is sometimes regarded as a tautology.[3][4]”    

I have added a link to the Digitial Darwin Library on the right side here.  Allison Theil turned me on to the Darwin exhibition at the Brooklyn Botancial Garden.  They had the link to this library.   In 2009 we will celebrate the 150th year of the publication of Origin of the Species.  Much sturm und drang can be expected.  I stand with Darwin.

Cinema and Television

A Clever Take on the Horror Flick

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29!  bar steady  30.17 0mph NNW dewpoint 22  Spring?

                Last Quarter Moon of Growing

Just finished watching Cloverfield.  This was a clever take on the horror flick.  It used Blair Witch hand-held camera and concealment with high production values off in the distance.  The affect is a sense of immediacy and immersion in the experience.  In this case we don’t know much about the monster, in fact nothing outside its destructiveness at first.  If we didn’t know we were watching a horror movie, we might think that New York had experienced a multiplied terrorist attack on the scale of many 9/11’s.  

The monster convinces because it’s alien in form, though it most closely resembles a bat with a long tail and ferocious teeth.  It also convinces because we see it from a distance and are most aware of its presence as the army races believably into action against it.  Unlike most monster movies where the army seems called into shoot guns because that’s what we know how to do, in this instance it appears desparate, almost hopeless.  This makes it seem real.

Matt Reeves, the director, wanted to give America a monster as iconic as Godzilla is to the Japanese.  I don’t think he succeeded on that score.  Besides, we have King Kong.  Who is more iconic than that giant gorilla?

General

A Flurry of Activity

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32  bar steady 30.06  0mpn NNW dewpoint 25 Spring

            Last Quarter Moon of Growing

A three day flurry of activity has come to an end.  On Friday I gave two Weber tours.  On Saturday I attended a workshop on Natural Rhythms and Time.  Today I preached at Groveland.  Now I have three days in a row to catch up on this and that.  I need it.

Kate’s been gone since Wednesday.  Life is more empty without her here, but one of the beauties of our relationship is our mutual ability to function on our own.  That makes both of us freer for family and for other things that come up.  I talked to her twice over the last two days and both times she was with Ruthie at the playground.  She comes home this Wednesday.

Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Friends

Deeply Skeptical of Industrializaton and Technology

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42  bar falls 30.10 3mph WNW dewpoint 22 Spring

             Last quarter Moon of Growing

Into St. Paul today.  Preached (sort 0f) at Groveland.  I say sort of because the presentation consisted of me telling jokes about Unitarian-Universalists and the group discussing their meaning as it relates to UU identity.  This comes from a technique dredged up from those long ago years in anthropology.  Joking behavior, according to anthropologists, helps determine group boundaries.  And so it did.

The discussion that ensued was better than I could have hoped.  It was heartfelt, honest, sometimes bordering on painful.  The latter emerged during a discussion of UU discomfort with faith, with the act of vulnerability.  This leaves UU’s, as the discussion went, with a blank spot when confronted with grief, crisis. 

On the way home I stopped at Cheapo on Snelling and loaded up on mindless action films, the kind I prefer to watch when I’m working out. 

During lunch I finished Princess Mononoke again.  It is a wonderful, complex and beautiful work that gives pause.  It would be perfect to show at the same as Lord of the Rings because both Tolkein and Mizasashi are deeply skeptical of industrialization and technology, yet also unflinching in representing the contradictions and trade-offs as not black or white.  Tolkein seems more either/or than Mizasashi, so I prefer Mizasashi’s take on thing.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

The Wollemi Pine–Live From the Carboniferous

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33  bar steep rise 30.06 5mph N dewpoint 22 Spring

                Waning Gibbous Moon of Growing

The workshop I attended today had two co-sponsors, The Institute for Advanced Studies (UofM) and the Arboretum(UofM).  This was the culminating workshop in a two-year long effort by the Institute for Advanced Studies to explore time from many perspectives.  Today we examined time in three different, but related, botanical areas:  phenology, paleobotany and time from the perspective of trees. 

The phenological, by definition, is the chronological study of events in nature.  This strikes me as an odd definition since it seems to impose a human mental construct, linear sequencing, on what is cyclical.  The notion is a good one, though, since it involves paying close attention to changes in the natural world, day by day, and making a record of them.  Phenologists know when the ice goes out lakes, the first robin returns, the dates that various spring ephemerals like the bloodroot, snow trillium and scylla bloom. 

Over several years I’ve tried my hand at phenology.  It is something an amateur can do.  So far, I’ve not had the discipline to continue my observations day after day, year after year.  Perhaps as I get older and slow down a bit this will come to me.  I hope so.  The woman who was our teacher for phenology was a lively Cantonese woman named Shirley Mah Kooyman.  A Smith graduate in Botany she has a direct and engaging teaching style.  Shirley took us outside and showed us the spring ephemeral garden they have planted.  It gave me ideas.  Our field was cut short by blowing winds, snow and cold.  On April 26th.

Over  the long lunch break I wandered the bookstore and picked up books related to aspects of permaculture I want to pursue in more depth:  pond building, fruit and nut trees and landscape design.

In the afternoon Tim started us out with segments of trees so we could tree rings.  This lead into a discussion of the time and stories that a tree knows, sometimes revealed in its growth rings.  He showed an amazing graphic created by an arborist who actually dug up tree roots and followed them, painting them white as he went so he could measure accurately.  He discovered that almost all trees have relatively shallow, but very broad root systems.  I learned, as did Tim, that tree roots stop at the dripline and that what’s below the tree roughly parallels what’s above in size.  Nope.  We measure a double centurion outside the learning center.  You measure at breast height, compute the diameter with everybody’s favorite mathematical constant; in this case it was 52 inches, then multiplied by a factor for white oaks, 5.  This gives a rough estimate of 260 years for the trees age.  Cutting back a bit for optimal growing conditions, experts feel this oak is 225 years old.  That means it was an acorn in 1780!  Whoa.

The last session focused on the evolution of plants.  In some ways this was weakest session, yet in another it astonished me.  Randy Gage, the guy in charge of school groups for the arboretum, took a trip to Australia to investigate the Wollime Pine.  Here are some fast facts from the Wollemi Pine website:

Fast Facts
…………………………

Claim to fame One of the world’s oldest and rarest trees

This is a tree that, prior to its discovery in 1994 was known only in the fossil record.  It was a coelacanth or stromatolite like find.  Remarkable.  But I missed it.  Maybe you didn’t.

The time related stuff here was somewhat cliched with the 24 hour clock and an arm span as metaphors.  The Wollemi Pine story is the stuff of science fiction.

Taking this symposium at the same time I learned about a book, Reinventing the Sacred, which attempts to reinvent spirituality from within a scientific perspective, but one that discards scientistic thinking (reductionism, empiricism) has really set the wheels turning.  So many things clicking.  We’ll see where it all goes.