Category Archives: Woolly Mammoths

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

The Self

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Samhain                                                   Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Woollies at Stefan’s house tonight.  Bill, Frank, Warren, Stefan, Scott, Tom, Mark, me.  Paul was there for a bit before he left to have dinner with his daughter Clare.

Topic tonight was what role a higher power plays in your life, if any.  We wandered here and there, but came back to a few themes:  some found matters of this sort best expressed through loss of the ego, others found the idea of a higher power important for their journey.  A few of us focused on the self, the authentic self or the integrated self or the deep self, a self that is sufficient to itself for worth, but eager to belong:  to belong to the earth, to each other, to a past, to a family, but in that belonging still the self remains what it is, validated and grounded in an accidental combination of genes that is unique and separate, yet also a part while remaining apart.  The key element to this perspective then becomes personal responsibility, willingness to make choices and accept their consequences.

We touched on the notion of the sacred as a created sense of belonging, of a self located in a context, a place, a family, a cemetery, a house.

Some found this perspective a product of aging, of graceful self-acceptance, of knowing who we are, warts and all, and loving that self, not an ideal self that others or external systems would have us mold ourselves toward.

We have different toe holds on our reality, on what we need to feel whole and authentic, but we agreed long ago to take this journey together, and we’ve accepted responsibility for the ride.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

Friends

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Samhain                                        Waning Harvest Moon

Talking with the woollies at the Black Forest.  Scott, Frank, Warren, Stefan.  Eating here at this lasting monument to Gemütlichkeit we lived it.  Sharing with each other in our cozy, intimate way, a way borne of decades now together.  My claustrophobia, anothers workshop on codependence, Frank’s tooth, Scott’s restructuring of his hours at work, Warren’s cold.  All of these and the usual commentary on the upcoming election, the Vikings and the waiver of Randy Moss.  Friends eating together, putting another layer of mortar on the linkages among us.

Yet another trip through the night from downtown Minneapolis to the exurbs, from bright lights and people jaywalking, biking, loitering to the dark drive north of Coon Creek Road, past the eutrophying Round Lake and the vast peat bog across the road from it, the basis for Field’s large truck farm.

Now home, letting the dogs out, a note here, then upstairs to read, watch TV, relax.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Woolly Mammoths

The Beloved Community

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Samhain                                                   Waning Harvest Moon

Spent lunch with Leslie.  She’s progressing in her work at Groveland.  We had a very interesting conversation about a UU ecclesiology, not an easy topic since the notion loses something in importing it from Christianity.  UU’s insist on calling their congregations churches, but that is accurate only historically for almost all Midwest UU’s who are overwhelmingly humanist.  No one cares outside the UU community of course, and even most of those inside it don’t care either, except the clergy, for whom the nature of the communities they serve is all important.

Leslie began feeling her way toward an ecclesiology based on love.  It got me going, too.  There may be a way to define a humanist ecclesiology focused on something like the beloved community.  In this case congregants might gather to participate in a community where intimacy might happen, happen outside the familial or marital or partner bond.  No one has too much love in their lives and a community committed to vulnerability, safety, depth and confidentiality might increase the possibilities.  There is no need here to posit a ground for love transcendent to the community, that is, a God.  We seek and find love here in this immanent plane, mundane and profane creatures we might be, so seeking it in community is in our capacity.

I think this has real promise, might be groundbreaking.  I hope she follows through with it.

Going into the Black Forest to dine with my Woolly brothers.  Listening to a new book.

Here’s a thought about the beloved community:

“The Beloved Community has three dimensions: self-love, neighbor-love, and universal love, according to Rev. Owen-Towle. “You can’t send forth what you haven’t claimed,” he said of the importance of self-love. “What you don’t own in your own heart you can’t give away.”

Rev. Owen-Towle pointed out, however, that self-love is not sufficient. “Unitarian Universalism at its most authentic is never only about self-fulfillment – either everybody is saved or nobody is,” he said. “As UU’s we know that there lies an indisputable oneness at bottom.” We must demonstrate an alternative way of being religious, he added, in order to furnish a large, spacious household rather than a snug, comfortable collective.

Rev. Owen-Towle urged his audience to seek the challenge of the Beloved Community. “Beloved Community transcends our own convictions, ever widening its embrace to include outsiders,” he said. “It’s always bigger than the imaginable.””

Woolly Mammoths

Change of Venue

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Fall                        Waning Back To School Moon

Sorry, all, but wordpress or somebody ate my Nick Caspers file. I’m putting this here until I get this sorted out.

JENNY MICHAEL Bismarck Tribune | Posted: Wednesday, September 29, 2010 11:57 am | (3) Comments

A man accused of murder in McIntosh County will stand trial in Bismarck in late November.

The trial for Nicholas Caspers is slated to begin Nov. 30 in Bismarck. It is scheduled as a four-day trial.

Caspers, 27, faces a Class AA felony murder charge in the death of Paul Varner, 30, who died in the early morning hours of Feb. 28 after an altercation at his home in Wishek. Caspers, who is free on bond, was arrested after Varner was taken to the hospital by ambulance.

Defense attorneys for Caspers had moved for a change of venue, arguing it would be impossible to get a fair jury in the sparsely-populated community due to the notoriety of the case.

McIntosh County State’s Attorney Terry Elhard initially opposed the motion but dropped his opposition after preliminary juror surveys came back. He said the surveys indicated it would have been difficult to get a jury.

South Central District Judge Bruce Haskell will preside over the trial.

(Reach reporter Jenny Michael at 250-8225 or jenny.michael@bismarcktribune.com.)

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Woolly Mammoths

The Great Wheel

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Lughnasa                                                       Waxing Back to School Moon

Tomorrow we move into the fall equinox position on our yearly orbit.  In this sense time recurs again and again and again, each spot on the orbit revisited as Earth passes along on its ancientrail.  Of course, the orbit changes slightly each year and the solar system moves further and further away from the center of our galaxy, so in a strict sense the spots are not quite the same, but from a terrestrial perspective over the span of a human life, the differences are not noticeable.  Birthdays point as much to a specific point on Earth’s track around the sun as they do to a “time.”  Our age, which we consider linear, really counts the number of times the Earth has revolved around the sun since our birth, not linear at all, but elliptical.

Tom Crane said last night that he and Roxann climb a hill at the Arboretum and each time they see a tree.  At one point the tree has bare branches, at another leaves, at another flowers and fruit, colors change at yet another point.  It feels linear, but, wait…the colors change, the tree has bare branches, then leaves, then flowers and fruit and again the leaves change color.

As he spoke, I thought of our circle, made sacred now by 20 years of showing up, how our hair has gone gray, our flesh taken on wrinkles and on some of us, a few pounds.  Again, it feels linear, this aging process.  Then, the conversation turned to grandchildren who will crawl, walk on two legs, then three, just as the Sphinx had riddled.  Within our species the childhood, maturity, aging repeats over and over again as the fleshly vessel sloughs off, but its genetic information goes on.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Retirement, Woolly Mammoths

Delighted

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Lughnasa                                                      Waxing Back to School Moon

In the company of old men.  A surprising event occurred tonight among the Woolly Mammoths.  We had an evening of delight.  Warren raised this interesting topic and as it went round the room in our usual whoever wants to talk jump in and do so style, a congruence began to emerge.  Each of us reported more awareness of delights or miracles (see below) in our lives.  They ranged from grandchildren, whose every action delights us, to fly fishing and feeling the water around the legs, working on the Mississippi for twelve hours a day, dogs thumping and jumping when we come home, poetry, not having to perform anymore, just playing the music, sex, bees and honey and the Landscape Arboretum.  As we each offered up those things that delight us, it became apparent that most of us (all of us?) have entered a phase of life where external success has become a muted to extinguished need and instead we find ourselves driven by the inner life, by receptivity and acceptance.

Though it was, in one sense, comforting and even encouraging to hear this more relaxed, old folks with their feet up on the cracker barrel sort of ambiance, it seemed a bit too happy, a bit distanced from pain.  Just as this thought crossed my mind the conversation shifted to cremation, to place, in part spurred by one of us who talked about visits to West Virginia, to the hill top church where his grandfather had served his first and his last pastorate, a place where he’s buried and other members of the family, too.  This physical location, this place on a hill top in West Virginia, felt rooted, felt his, helped him feel grounded.

The cremation conversation moved along wondering about rootedness, about sense of place, about visits, though occasional, to parents burial plots.  Where will those who want to remember us go?  I mentioned green cemeteries and natural burial.  We will probably revisit this discussion.  It has an interesting relationship to something that intrigues me, something University of Wisconsin Madison geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan, called Topophilia.  All of this dovetails into a taoist perspective, or at least a taoist perspective as I understand it.

Bees, Dogs, Woolly Mammoths

Sigh.

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Lughnasa                                        Waxing Back to School Moon

Rigel escaped.  Again.  This after I don’t know what iteration of foils and barriers.  The neighbor thinks she scaled the fence.  It’s possible.  I have not electrified that part 05-15-10_bee-diary_0002670because it’s six feet tall.  Maybe I’ll have to do that.  Geez.

Measuring out the fumagilin-b for the nosema treatment. (bees)  Talk about fine measurements.  5 grams to a treatment, roughly one gallon.  5 grams is .176 of an oz.  Not much.  Kate and I got out the parchment paper and played pharmacist, dividing the powder into 5 equal parts.  That’s good enough since the powder comes in quantities of 24 grams per smallest bottle, which is what I have.  This goes into half a gallon of water heated to 120 degrees or so, our water heater puts out water that hot.  8 pounds of sugar gets stirred into to make a super-saturated liquid with a quantity of roughly a gallon.  The liquid goes in the feeder I have that sits over the whole hive box.  I may buy another one.  I like them better than the plastic pails.

Out to Wayzata to the Retreat, the old grounds of the Cenacle, now turned into a treatment center for alcoholism.  Dick Rice, one of my sheepshead buddies, works there.

Tonight each of the Woollies gets a pint of Artemis Honey and Mark Odegard, the label maker, gets a quart.  It feels good to have something to share that comes from our property.

Art and Culture, Bees, Cinema and Television, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

Lunch

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Lughnasa                                      Waxing Artemis Moon

Slept well past 6:30 this morning, then a very long nap.  The body still marshalling its resources.  I’m ready to be done with this, but it does not seem ready to be done with me.

In between I went into the MIA to have lunch with Mark Odegard.  Mark’s a Woolly, a friend, an artist and a damned fine jazz piano player.  He has very interesting friends.  One friend of his is on a two-month journey in Peru working on developing a complete catalog of all, underline all, the plants in the Amazon.  Sounds like a crazy task, but he’s found somebody who’s already done a lot of the work.

This was a thank you lunch, in part, for the bang-up design work he’s done for Artemis Honey.  As we have before, we wandered through the museum, looking at various things, talking about them.  The Ricci map.  The Minnesota Artists Gallery works by two young Asian women.  Ceramics and glass and wood bowls by women artists.

In talking about my work I told him something I realized last week.  The museum work grabs my heart; I think about things there, mull them over, look forward to going in, get excited about new collections, new artists, encounter objects that pierce my soul.  Even the Sierra Club, which is important and I do it because it’s important, doesn’t grab my heart the way the art does.  I wish it did, but it doesn’t.

Spent most of the day without internet service.  I tried to alter the way my router plugs into the internet and it worked for a while, then the router just went all kablooey.  An hour and a half of reading the manual, trying this, then that and I got the connection back but I lost the alterations I’d made.  I’ll try’em again tomorrow.

Oh.  The Wolfman.  I spoke too soon.  As I watched the end, I found it gained texture and strength.  The cinematography was wonderful and the pathos of the altered conclusion–altered from the Chaney original–made the story more emotionally gripping.