Category Archives: Woolly Mammoths

Faith and Spirituality, Travel, Woolly Mammoths

A Houseless Life

Leave a comment

72  bar rises 29.73  0mph WNW dew-point 62    Summer, pleasant

Waxing Crescent of the Thunder Moon

“It is not how old you are, but how you are old.” – Jules Renard

Elizabeth Odegard has West Nile virus.  She’s lethargic, stays in bed.  Not much to do, but support your body and wait it out.  Mark thinks she may have gotten it in Thailand when they stayed on a houseboat.  Mark has the most unusual current lifestyle among the Woollies.  He and Elizabeth, then real estate agents, sold his house in Marine of St. Croix, pooled their retirement funds and began living a houseless life.

He often refers to himself as homeless, but what he actually is houseless.   His home is the Twin Cities and he’s rooted here.  He and Elizabeth went to Hawai’i three years ago and got the Cambridge certification in teaching English as a second language.  With that credential and a cash flow generated from investments (managed by Scott Simpson) they have moved from spot to spot:  Buenos Aires, Peru, Shanghai, Bangkok sprinkled with returns home.  Here they housesit for folks they know.

They leave for France later on this summer, where they will spend time with Mark’s brother and his family before heading off Morocco or Turkey or Chile.  Sometimes they work, sometimes one does and the other doesn’t.  It’s been all ESL.  Mark worked on a healthy sexuality exhibit in Thailand, for example.  They ponder a commitment in Japan, where the English language jobs require a year contract.  Most of their stints have been four months or less.

We talk about travel often at the Woollies.  We are a well-traveled group.  Paul and Sarah made a round the world trip early in their marriage.  Paul jets off to Africa, Syria and Cuba now and then.  Frank is in Ireland right now for the eight or ninth time.  Bill spent over a year in Japan building a nuclear power plant.  Tom travels the US every week.  Charlie Haislet and Barbara cruise in Europe, go to Africa now and again.  Stefan has been many places.

Last night Stefan talked about a childhood trip to Egypt.  “It made me want to be an architect.  Karnak.  With those great pillars shaved back and sloping upward.  And the details on the gate.”

We are atypical as a group in so many ways:  level of education, diversity of employment, life paths dominated by values, intimacy among men that has lasted over two decades.  Our level of income is high.  We lead lives of privilege in the most powerful country the world has ever seen.

Art and Culture, Literature, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

Wading in Your Media Stream

Leave a comment

61  bar steep rise 29.96 2mph NNW dew-point 45   Summer night, nice

                              New Moon (Thunder Moon)

I’d forgotten the all consuming nature of writing a novel.  It goes to bed with you, advances into your dreams and wakes up with in the morning.  Plot ideas, twists, character developments, inconsistencies, new characters.  All aswirl.  The novel bumps up against daily life, takes something from it, gives something back, a loop, a mobius strip.  Feedback.  A neuro-net firing and firing and firing.  It’s fun, a wild ride while its cookin’. 

There are plateaus.  Superior Wolf landed on a plateau about 6 years ago, struggled to get off it a couple of times, then settled back down to rest.  Jennie’s Dead has been on a bit more of an up and down ride. She’s in storage now, but I can sense her wanting to break out now that her brother has begun to get legs, take strides.

Somehow, as happens in my life, momentum has increased.  Both the velocity and the mass have kicked up at the same time, calling back into action skills set aside long ago.  The Sierra Club work will require a good deal of time.  The novel needs constant nourishment.  So does the garden.  These three alone would be a good deal, but I also have a sermon to write for September that will take at least a week of research, if not more.  I’ve also agreed to take on managing the Docent Book Club and my term for that starts this month.  Then there’s that pesky Africa check out tour.

Right now this all feels good.  Blood flowing, mind working.  And I’m sure it will feel that way for a good while, probably on into December, then I’ll feel a need for a let down again.  Right now, though, I’m jazzed.

My Woolly meeting is in August this  year.   I sent out the following e-mail so guys could prep for it.

Hi! Your Media Stream:  This is the water from which you take much of your intellectual nourishment.  What is it?  The radio stations to which you listen, TV programs you watch, movies you see, books you read, magazines and newspapers you take or consult.  I-Pod fare, music at home.  Any media, in short, that you use for either entertainment or education. How will we organize the meeting?  Like this—please bring a book you are reading right now.  Please bring a book you consider important and formative for you, perhaps one read long ago.  Bring a copy of your favorite magazine.  Be prepared to let us know your favorite radio program, TV program (if any), movie (again:  current and from the past) and newspapers.  We’ll set music aside for this evening, but it might be fun to pick up again at some point as both Scott and Frank have led us to do at retreats. The physical objects themselves are important, so please bring whatever you can.  2 books and 1 magazine at least.  If you can jot down your favorite radio program, TV program and movies (past and present) and newspapers, I will collect your lists and send them to Bill to publish on our website. What’s the point?  To dip into each other’s media stream for a bit, to hear why we like the books, movies, programs, newspapers and magazines that we choose.  I imagine five-ten minutes each of sharing, then a round of conversation about what we’ve heard.  This is for fun and to expand our grasp of who we are.

Garden, GeekWorld, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

Will I Build A Computer?

Leave a comment

76  bar rises 29.76 6mph NW dew-point 51  Summer, pleasant and warm

New Moon (Thunder Moon)

A new head has been found for the red car.  Hopefully it will get placed on its automotive neck tomorrow and we will go back to two vehicles.  This is important with the rise of gas prices since our Tundra has a V-8 (may be an antique walking) whereas the Celica averaged 30-31 mph on the Alabama trip.  Co-ordination is not such a big deal for us, though that can matter.

The computer has shut down on its own, without warning, twice already today. I bought the tools to crack the case, get inside and clean out the cooling fan, but I’ve hesitated due to a hyperactive June.  Now available time and increased urgency have moved closer to taking the step.  In the back of my mind, the fantasy part, I see myself building a computer from parts.  The tools I bought would serve that purpose as well.

Ate lunch with Stefan at the Modern Cafe.  I had a lamburger and Stefan had a smorbord, pickled herring and beets.  Both were tasty.  We discussed his poetry and he feels I’m helping, so I’ll keep at it.

He wants to start a support group for children of successful parents.   My hunch is it would be big hit.

On the way home from the Modern (it’s in NE Minneapolis) I drove north of Anoka (really, west) to Anoka Feed and Seed where I picked up four bales of bedding straw.  I’ll use it to mulch the garden over the next few days.

Now, a nap.

Faith and Spirituality, Woolly Mammoths

Gotta Take That Wild Last Ride

Leave a comment

61  bar steep rise 29.76  4mph W dew-point 53  Beltane, sunny and cool

                First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Decided to cancel the Gettysburg leg of my trip.  Need to be at home.  Another time.  Gettysburg is not going anywhere.

A bit more about radical individualism.  Last night I proposed, as I wrote here yesterday, that civilization, especially through work and love, constrain the unfettered, natural–wild part of us.  There was good criticism of that position, i.e. part of the natural state of humanity is life in family, in relationship.  Another position asserted that deconstructing (I’m not sure about this use of the term, but it is what was used.) ourselves so that wildness could break out denies the process of integration of the mature person. (individuation, perhaps?)  Wildness, in this view, must somehow come together with all of psyche’s zoo or, better, pantheon (my terms) to define a full person.

It is true that the very nature of what it means to be human gains its definition in a social context.  In that sense, yes, to be human is to be in a family, a clan, a community.  It is also true that the integration model of maturity requires a delicate balancing and harmonizing of disparate impulses, desires and drives into a well-functioning individual. 

Even so.  A first reaction over against both of these arguments is this:  we all die alone.  This is the existentialist’s key and, to my eye, keen observation.  It can be pushed back through life itself.  We are all born alone, that is we are the only one to emerge from the womb as that distinct individual.  Even triplets are born into different bodies, at a slightly different time, and have unique life experiences.  In life we inhabit our body and no other.  We may, more or less, empathetically walk in another person’s shoes, but we can never get in there while their foot is in the shoe.  You are unique and, whether you wish it to be the case or not, can have it no other way.

Second, the Jungian model of individuation, which I embrace, calls us to live into our Self, to become, that is, whom we already are.  This may involve harmonization and balancing, but it may also include embracing aspects of our Self heretofore submerged or repressed.  The journey is not to maturity in this view, rather it is toward the clearest and most distinct realization of our uniqueness.

As a note I read moments ago by James Hillman said, the individuation process prepares us to die.  Last night I did not mention my final thought on wildness.  The last wild act of our life is death.  It is that moment most natural, most terrifying, most awesome, least understood and never tamed.  Death is, for each of us, our wildest moment.  Individuation ensures that we come to that last natural divide, that last wild place, as who we are, shorn of cultural convention and psychological repression.  That we come dressed only in the clothes which our psyche had for us to wear from the very beginning.  That we come to the most wild moment in our life, in other words, as the natural, wild Self into which we were born.

This journey, this ancient trail, is the ancient trail.  It is one we walk alone from birth until death.  It is this realization that makes me a radical individualist, proud and happy to live in community, yes, but as a person free and unfettered.

Family, Woolly Mammoths

A Radical Individualist

Leave a comment

58  bar rises 29.69  0mph S  dew-point 51  Beltane, night and cool

                   First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Woolly’s on Wildness.  Some of us thought wildness was wilderness, or being in wilderness.  Others of us thought wildness lay in the the natural, the natural state, unconstrained by civilization.  Yet others believed wildness was one aspect of our psyche that needed integration into the larger, mature person we become over time.

I realized in the middle of the conversation that I am a radical individualist, along with Emerson and the Existentialists.  More on this at another time.

How to make another see the inherent worth they have, the beauty and the glory of their person?  The depth of their soul and the bounty they represent in the world?  I don’t know right now and I wish I did.

Travel, Woolly Mammoths

The Wild Man

Leave a comment

71  bar steady  29.66  1pmh ENE dew-point 49  Beltane, sunny and warm

                 First Quarter of the Flower Moon

We have had only 3 days above 80 this year.  The weather stays cool, which is fine, but the plants don’t like it.  They grow slowly.

Tonight is the Wild Man meeting of the Woolly Mammoths at Charlie Haislet’s pent-house condo overlooking downtown Minneapolis.  Not exactly the abode of a wild man.  Still, most of us would have trouble with it, too.  

This week feels compressed since I leave on Saturday for Maxwell AFB and Gettysburg.  It means I’m on the kind of work attitude I get into before a trip.  This time it will last a week.

Thankfully this time I head out on Hwy 94 not 35.  I will skirt Chicago by heading down the middle of Illinois, then on south, into the heat.  I can only hope that the hot weather will subside, at least a bit, before I get into Tennessee.

Woolly Mammoths

A Happy Story about the Big C

Leave a comment

78  bar falls 29.59  1mph W  dew-point 55  Beltane, cloudy and warm

               Waxing Crescent of the Flower Moon

Grocery shopping.  Lunch and feed the dogs, then off to Minneapolis to Abbott-Northwestern Hospital.  When I got into the Piper Building, the information desk had no one there.  Up to the second floor.  They directed me to the east elevators and floor 3.  Lonnie was in 3556.

A closed door.  I asked the nurse to go check. Stefan was in there.  Lonnie had had a rough night and was still anxious from the meds she had on board.  But.  If the path from frozen sections on Wednesday confirm the initial findings during surgery, she will not need chemo or radiation.  That means a clean excision.  No penetration of the uterine wall.  Therefore no cancer floating in the body at large.

Stefan and I talked for awhile.  About waiting.  Waiting for an appointment with an oncologist.  Waiting for surgery and the prep for surgery.  Waiting for the results of the surgery.  Now, a much easier form of waiting.  Waiting until Lonnie improves enough to go home.

A happy story about the big C.  Not the one’s I recall from the paper.  Diagnosed last week, dead this week.  One to remember.

Taylor came by while Stefan and I talked.  He had made jello for Lonnie, but it took longer than he thought to jell.  He was on his way to a recording studio.  He’s laid down 50 hip-hop songs, “kept 30 of them.”  He has serious folks interested in his work. His ambition is impressive and his willingness to lay it out there suggests to me that he will succeed. 

He had on a big billed hat with gold and logos, a hooded sweat shirt done in an almost 50’s preppy sock diagonal plaid.  His pants, the low hanging denim variety have purple stitching on the rolled up cuffs and gold threaded designs on extra large back pockets.   Trippy.

Back home for  a snack and now a workout before Kate comes home from work.

Friends, Garden, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

The Most Ancient Trail of All

Leave a comment

54  bar falls 30.06  1mph NE  dew-point 51  Beltane, cloudy and drizzly

                   Last Quarter of the Hare Moon

A change has begun to creep over the Woolly Mammoths.  It is at least late fall for us.  One of us had an episode of Bell’s Palsy over the weekend.  He first thought, as I would have, stroke.  The effects lingered into this week. 

Late last night came news of a Woolly spouse.  Cancer of the utereus.  Adenocarcinoma.  A hopeful prognosis if tests next week find it in an early stage.  Even so.   

Frank’s heart attack before he came to the Woolly’s and his bypass surgery after have kept medical issues in front of us, yes, but these are new.  Fresh.  Signals that we have begun to age.  The fact is that such matters are no longer unusual in our period of life.  While still not common, they will begin to pop with increasing incidence until, one by one, this herd of Woolly Mammoths and their spouses follow those of the Ice Age on that most ancient trail of all.

On a cloudy, cool day with a light rain falling this news could be depressing, but I find it just so.  These matters are as key to our developmental age as were graduations in our 20’s and weddings in our late 20’s and early 30’s.  Like those earlier rites of passage, the action is not in the event itself, but in our reaction to it over time. (to paraphrase Saul Alinsky)

I spent an hour and half outside today, planting and transplanting.  Cloudy, cool, drizzly.  Perfect for that work.  Blue fescue, Maiden Grass, cucumbers, watermelon, squash and morning glories will each enjoy the rain on their first day in their new locations.  The daylily transplant project was part of this and continues, in dribs and drabs, as it will until we finish it, probably some time in July. 

We go out to see RJ Devick, our financial planner/money manager, today.  These situations become more and more pertinent as Kate nears retirment age and I  enter that time when eligibility for both pension and social security are upon me.  Considering these matters thoughtfully are also part of our development period.  We are at the cusp of a major change in our lives.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Garden, Our Land and Home, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Seeking Mastery Within

Leave a comment

54  bar steady 29.78  1mph NW  dew-point 44  Beltane, sunny and cool

                                       Full Hare Moon

The weather remains cool.  This is not a long spring; it’s a long late March or early April.  The gardening upside has been longer lasting blooms on the tulips and the daffodils and the scylla.  This weather has also proved excellent for transplanting, reducing transplant shock to a minimum and resulting in little wilting after a move.  The downside has been slow germination (no germination?) for some vegetable seeds planted and slow growth for the ones that have sprouted.  From the humans who live here in Andover perspective it’s been a great season.  Cool weather to work outside and to further many landscaping projects.

Last night’s conversation about mastery at Tom’s lingers today.  At one point we asked each person to claim what mastery they found in themselves, then we offered evidence of mastery we found in them, too, from an outsider’s perspective.  Various Woolly’s were masters of soulfullness, love, living, listening, communicating, design, the big picture, and drawing others out to see the best in themselves. 

Tom and I were wrong in our assumption that individual Woollys would find it difficult to claim a sense of mastery.  And delighted to be wrong, too.  We affirmed what each Woolly saw as their area of mastery and added ones they hadn’t seen or chose to ignore, e.g. mastery of forensic engineering, computer skills and sheepshead, making the complex accessible, letting go, the body in motion.

In my case, for example, I admitted I couldn’t find anything to claim since I’ve lead such a curiousity driven life, often running full speed down divergent paths at the same time.  Then, I said, “Well, I guess I could claim being a master student.”  That got modified in the eyes of the group to seeker after essential, radical truth.  OK, I can see that.  “You’re a master teacher, too.”  Hadn’t occurred to me, but that’s become a theme in various areas of my life of late, so it must be there in spite of my opacity to it.     

Tom initiated a get together for designing the evening and having me as a co-facilitator, rather than a servant lackey.  He made the food simple, sandwiches and soup followed by a big, really big, cookie.  Others seemed to appreciate the act of co-operation in design of the evening.  Tom and I wanted to introduce better time managment, and we did; but, that was not appreciate by everyone.  “Felt forced.”  Well, yes.  But every time together has its limits and therefore its limits on contribution.

As we closed, Tom observed that the Woolly’s as a group are a master that each of us can turn to for guidance in life.  I nuanced that a bit by suggesting that as a group, over 20+ years together, we have mastered groupness.  We are a living community, best evidenced, as someone said, by the fact that we show up.

I have signed out for the summer at the Art Institute.  I need the break.  I’ll use the time for writing, family and our land.

Art and Culture, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

Anne Looked Grand

Leave a comment

43  bar steep rise 29.74  1mph NW  dew-point 41  Beltane

                                 Full Hare Moon

Whoa.   More socializing today than I get in a normal month.  AM Eric Kjerlling, curator of Oceanic art at the Met, gave an information packed lecture on this vast geographic region and its varied art forms.  He was funny, knowledgeable and deep.  An excellent introduction that I will want to revisit if I get the Asmat special exhibition year.  It was my number 2 choice after William Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelites.  The Pre-Raphaelites are among my favorites in Western art and I hope I get that exhibition.

Saw several folks at the coffee on break during the lecture, but then retired to St. Paul, 1394 Lincoln, for a wonderful couple of hours seeing others from our docent class.  Careen Heggard’s house is appointed by an architect, Careen, and wonderfully casual  and elegant at the same time.  She has a small cottage on the grounds, a former gardner’s residence, which she uses a cabin to which she does not have to drive, tea-house, escape.  Looks an ohana dwelling like we see in Hawai’i.

Morry, Joy and I stood out in the rain by the fire discussing literature.  Joy had a great line, one I hadn’t heard before, “Oh, that.  It’s just my stigmata acting up.”

Anne Grand was there and looked great.  She also seemed sharp.  Quite a relief.  I had worried about her.  Bill Bomash showed up, too, on crutches and looking wan.  I had to leave just as he came so I didn’t get a chance to chat.

Home for a nap at 2:30.  The morning and the lunch tired me out, as socializing tends to do.  I got up from my nap, went out in the rain, dug siberian iris, bearded iris and hemerocallis for Yin.  Scott brought three big bags of  hosta.  I felt like a piker.  I assured him there were more plants.

Woolly meeting at Tom’s.  On mastery.  Ode was home and it was great to see  him.  His report on the exhibit he did for UNESCO, sex ed for Thai teens, inspired me.  The meeting was a good one, deep and funny.  More later.  Paul and Charlie H. couldn’t make it.  More on the content tomorrow.