Category Archives: Politics

Aging, Family, Politics, Travel, World History, Writing

Path of Most Resistance

Leave a comment

Spring                                         Waning Bloodroot Moon

I have a new round of resistance work underway in addition to the Tai Chi.  This work I got from Brad at the Y.  It involves squatting on a balance board while doing curls, then shoulders followed by a second round, also squatting, focusing on the chest and triceps.  Every other day I do crunches, too.  That plus the aerobics and the Tai Chi, plus the Body Flow I attend with Kate should be quite enough for now.  My goal with the Tai Chi is to learn it well enough to practice it while on the cruise.

(in case you couldn’t tell, this is not me.)

As to the cruise, I’m buying books, reading, talking to friends who’ve been to various spots, trying to figure out the logistical possibilities for trips other than the usual shore excursions.  At Stefan’s suggestion I’m going to look into a day flight to one of the Galapagos Islands as well as the potential trip to Aerquipa.  Part of travel’s allure for me lies in this preparation, the ingestion of different places, cultures and histories, different natural and environmental histories, different literature and art.

Meanwhile we work at the legislature, the Sierra Club and the committee for which I am responsible, the folks keep coming to the MIA, the Woolly’s meet and talk, the Latin continues to flow and Kate and I learn more and more about retirement.  The novel?  Well…  Not so much right now.  You see, there’s the garden, too, and next will be the bees.

Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics, US History

Stay In It

Leave a comment

Spring                                                    Waning Bloodroot Moon

As winter loosens its grip on our state, the legislature begins to tighten theirs.  In the last half of the first session of the 2011-2012 legislature, budget bills dominate the news.  From my perspective as both a liberal and an environmentalist, the news is grim.  Environmental permitting, a public process designed to tease out and prevent negative impacts, has been weakened.  A bridge over the St. Croix, negotiated to a smaller, less intrusive version, has suddenly come back to life, bigger and more expensive than ever.  Up until the Japanese disaster, the nuclear moratorium in the state seemed headed for repeal.  Last night, in what must be one of the more peculiar–not to mention outrageous actions–an amendment passed attaching to an omnibus environmental budget bill a provision to fund state parks by cutting down black walnut trees in two of them, White River and Frontenac.   Let’s see, cutting down trees to save the state parks.  Like selling the children to support the family or auctioning off the planes to save the airlines.

Since the halcyon days of the 60’s, it’s been tough for those of us with liberal to radical political sympathies.  Victories have been few and defeats numerous.  It is possible to despair, to wonder if a sense of communal responsibility will ever again influence policy; but, it is in precisely these circumstances where those of us with a historical perspective and active engagement must not allow despair to over run our convictions.  To shuck off politics now is to insure that the field is left to those whose politics create the need for us.

No, as the conservative hand closes around the gavel in state after state and in Congress as well, those of us in the opposition must be more vigorous, more active, more vocal.

Aging, Great Work, Health, Politics, Weather +Climate, World History

Clean Teeth. Legislation. Western Civ.

Leave a comment

Spring                                                                       Waning Bloodroot Moon

Dangerous driving conditions tomorrow. Winter storm warning.  Who stole my spring?

Into the city twice today, once to get my teeth cleaned and a second time for a Sierra Club meeting on legislative basics.  The teeth cleaning, an every 6 months visit, has become routine by now.  Mary, the dental hygienist I saw today, complimented on my teeth-brushing.  That feels a bit to me like being told, good boy, you cleaned your plate.  Mary has a gentle way with her and worked hard to convince me to take extra good care of my teeth.  It’s important for overall health, especially as we age.

On both trips listened to another lecture series, this one on Western Civilization, part II.  It focuses on the 500+ years in which modernism arose.  This is ground I’ve been over from several perspectives over the years, but each time it gets a bit clearer and the puzzle pieces seem to fit together better.  Modernism and the Enlightenment are key to understanding our current political, cultural, social and economic conditions, so it’s hard to become over educated about them.  What I enjoy now is finding connections between, say, Chinese history and Western.

I’m on lecture 9 already.  Just finished the Reformation, ground I know pretty well, but it never hurts to hear it put in the larger socio-political context.

The economic and environmental situation we find ourselves in now can be traced back to this period, both the good and the bad.  More later.  I’m tired.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Politics, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Carpe diem

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                 Full Bloodroot Moon

Got my novel a boost by going out to Blue Cloud, got back and dove into the legcom, MIA, Latin sequence plus finishing my presentation,  Redefining the Sacred, and have gotten little novel work done.  The times.  Now the air has begun to warm up and the snow to melt.  That means more time outside, which I’m eager to get started, but that, of course, means less time inside and all of the winter work is desk bound or at the museum.

When I talked to Kate about my despair for human life on this planet (see yesterday’s post), I also commented on my zest for life.  It’s never been higher, I told her.  OK, yes, the sun shone, the sky was blue and it looked warmer, all boosts to the life zestometer, but it’s more than that.  Kate’s retired and that’s removed a lot of stress from my life as well as hers.  I know this for sure because I have a mild case of psoriasis and its gotten much, much better since her retirement in January.

I’ve also got two challenging volunteer roles, docent at the MIA and the legcom at the Sierra Club, each of them test different skill sets every week.  The Latin work has given renewed confidence in my learning capacity, plus it’s fun in ways I hadn’t anticipated.  We have two grandkids with birthdays coming up.  The dogs are healthy.  Our orchard should begin producing this year.  I know what seeds I’m going to start and what I’m going to plant outside, early.  There’s a novel underway.  I’ve made new friends at Bluecloud and through the MIA and Sierra Club work. This will be my third year as a beekeeper. The Woolly’s are in our 25th year.  Finally, Kate and I have started new physical routines.

Said another way I get to be around art, practice politics, create, grow, love, laugh, visit with friends and family.  Life is full of matters that can keep us excited and eager to get up in the morning.

No matter what the world may be like tomorrow today is a day filled with promise.  So, like my friend, Bill W., I’ll take my life one day at a time.

Aging, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Minnesota, Politics

They’re just being Republicans

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                                          Waxing Bloodroot Moon

Latin.  Subjunctives, indirect questions, tense sequences.  Done in a bit of a fog, almost like school.  The verb conjugations still have not taken full root in my mind, though at this point I have had exposure to all of them, for all four tenses.  I’ve had exposure likewise to five noun declensions, comparatives, superlatives, pronouns, interrogatives, adverbs, adjectives, ablative uses, dative uses, participles and participial clauses, and subordinate clauses of several types with more  to come.  I’m almost three-fourths through Wheelock and have now translated  75 verses of Ovid’s Metamorphosis.

As unintended outcome, I have found myself metamorphosed, changed.  Just how, right now, is not all clear, but it has something to do with facing a challenge, a language, and coming to grips with it, incorporating it into myself.  Just why I waited until I was 63, I don’t know; fear, yes, time, yes, but the largest barrier was lack of purpose.  When I began to want to know what was behind the translator’s veil, and, in particular, when I wanted to know what was behind the translations of Ovid’s master work, the purpose emerged and a teacher appeared.  There is no time when we stop growing, learning.

Later in the day I prepped for and ran the Legislative Committee for the Sierra Club’s weekly meeting.  This political season will not be kind to our lakes and rivers, our forests and wildlife, our prairies.  The burden will be laid at the foot of the Republicans, but really, they’re just being Republicans, giving political expression to the wills of those who support them.  No, the burden lies squarely at the feet of those of us who want to see our forests, rivers, moose, wolf, prairies and lakes healthy and whole now and into the future.  We have not fought with the same passion today as the Tea Party folk or the Christian Right or the Libertarians.

Over the retreat at Blue Cloud I read two novels focused on the political life of Cicero.  At the end of a brutal period for his political perspective he said, “All regimes come to an end.”

I agree.

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Politics, Writing

Dreamin’

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                                  Waxing Bloodroot Moon

Still adjusting to this early rising, write, then do the rest of the day which included, today, my 2 hour mentoring session with Leslie, more writing, the legcom call, then doing a quick study on the mourners for a brief tour of them tomorrow.

So, I didn’t have much time to get here today.

Here’s an idea I had before going to sleep last night.  What if our dream life is our real life and the process of this embodied life is the aberrant condition which death resolves?  Actually, the Mexica had a similar idea.  Crazy I know, but maybe worth a story or two.

Great Work, Politics

Pawlenty and His Upbeat Environmental Message. No, I’m Not Kidding.

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                                      Waxing Bloodroot Moon

This video, made by the House DFL caucus, casts an odd light on the current debates about gutting environmental review and pushing back standards for coal pollution, the nuclear moratorium, and softening the sulfate standards for Polymet.

Humanities, Politics

Union, Yes

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                                              Waning Bridgit Moon

This week had a lot of Latin time.  I made it through ten lines of Diana and Actaeon which Greg and I discussed at length during my tutoring session today.  I need to pay more attention to the verb and its object; when I get that, I get the translation; when I don’t, I make it fit anyhow, the Procrustean bed of my mind.  The work of translation, at least in Latin, lies within my competency level, I can see that now.  All it will require is ongoing attention.  All.  Well.  Good thing there’s a lot in Latin that interests me.

Madison, Wisconsin.  Politics, the way they work in our country, allow this mercurial swing from one perspective to another in the course of one election.  Republicans seem to need two things in the public arena:  enemies they can flog and to be the enemy themselves.  It’s a peculiar combination, like group sado/masochism with both aspects of S&M in action at the same time.  Enemies right now:  public sector unions, bloated budgets and those that love them, perverters of the constitution–at least they one they read, environmentalists, the environment.  Being the enemy right now:  ruling with a peculiar maliciousness–witness the Wisconsin Governor’s “conversation” with billionaire David Koch,  acting as if the nation were a one party system, theirs, with a pesky group of liberals who act like horseflies and insist on inhabiting seats in their government, choosing a mainstream way of interpreting the constitution, the living document school, and pushing it, in their minds, to the dustbin of history as if it had never existed.

We need parties that represent different communities and different interests, that’s what politics is for, the mediation of disputes, but our politics don’t work unless respect for the others existence stands as a given. Continue reading Union, Yes →

Humanities, Politics

The Holly King Still Reigns

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                                            Waning Bridgit Moon

The snow has well begun and the winds howl outside, evidence that the Holly King has not yet been defeated by the Hawthorn Giant.  Even so, the snows of this time of year do not last long, even when they come in depth.  The sun vaults higher and higher in the sky each day, already 11 degrees higher at 33 than it was on January 1st at 22.  This elevation concentrates the sun’s rays, warming the days faster and faster until finally the Holly King will retire to his growing season abode far away in the ice of the northern regions.  I don’t know what he does there, but when he returns after the crops have been harvested and the land left fallow, he will be rested and ready to reassert his dominion.  Today he shows that his reign has not yet ended for this year.

Translating Ovid has been slow, as it always is, looking up individual words in the Latin dictionary, investigating verb forms and the declensions of nouns and adjectives.  The trickiest part, for me anyhow, remains holding the various words and their possible conjugated and declined meanings in my mind, assembling and reassembling them until, like the keystone into the arch, the sentence or phrase hangs together.

I like being in my lower floor study, half below ground, windows opening at ground level show the wind and the snow.  In here I have created a library set up for my needs:  art history references, philosophical texts, books on the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Sierra Club and environmental politics, travel guides from Greece, Cambodia, Turkey, Rome, Great Britain, Cambodia and Thailand among others,  texts, little read, on neuro and cognitive science.  Files for objects at the MIA, old presentations, short stories, novels and research material on the Great Wheel, the ancient Celts.

This is a peaceful place where concentration comes easily and hours can pass without leaving.  I suppose it’s also a meditation room.  Now the snow and the work of the morning have me leaning toward a nap.  Kate’s at work this Sunday, so I’ll sleep alone.  Unusual these days.

Politics, World History

Struggle

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                                      Full Bridgit Moon

Uprisings for democracy in the Middle East.  I’m still a fan and await with some eagerness the next chapter in the story as these people’s movement try to make the difficult transition from protest to governance.  Apportioning power is never as easy as standing in the way of the powerful.  It requires a different lens, a different attitude, because it entails accountability for policy and follow-through.  Most reforms and revolutions fail at this point, the psychology of wielding power a radical turn away from undermining it.  This is the sense in which conservatives have it right.  Order is easy to upend and difficult at best to restore.

Disorder can damage lives and nations.  Order, even order held in place by authoritarian regimes, can provide stability for day-to-day lives.  Thus, the conservative says, better the dictator you know than the one you don’t.

Their argument has merit, too.  Trade and peace flourishes when a powerful government maintains order and enforces laws.  Genghis Khan, for example, opened up trade over vast parts of the East, including the vast grasslands from which he came.  The Pax Romana encouraged a network of trade, scholarship and immigration that enriched the Mediterranean and European regions.  The Pax Britannica created a global network of trade as its empire waxed across the earth.

There is no need to deny the positive elements of imperial power.  They exist and any one with a sense of history knows something about them.

At the same time, though, there is no possibility of avoiding the negative elements either.  A loss of personal and national autonomy defines the nature of imperial or autocratic rule, so there is a bargain made or enforced, our stability and trade for your freedom as individuals and as a nation.  This bargain may even convince people in regions torn by internecine conflict, ethnic rebellions or war lords.  A chaotic past exchanged for a less free but orderly community may appear fair.  At first.

Continue reading Struggle →