Category Archives: Friends

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

March 19, 2011 Charles 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.

Bees, Friends

Precious

February 24, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Waning Bridgit Moon

Sheepshead tonight. I took in honey for Ed, Dick, Roy and Bill plus honeycake that Kate made from our honey. Artemis Hives honors the ancient Greek Goddess of the hunt who also had honeybees within her domain. Worshippers took to her altar honeycake as an offering. My original idea was to call Artemis honey, “The honeycake honey” and include honeycake recipe and a bit about Artemis with each sale. Might still happen, some year.

The card gods were good to me tonight, again. They gave me three good hands when I dealt, a good position when playing sheepshead. Ed and Bill both spoke about their wives with Bill reporting the good news that Regina’s cancer score has already begun to trend down after only a brief time on the hormone therapy. That’s the kind of news it’s good to hear.

Ed’s wife has challenges surrounding a knee replacement gone bad compounded by her other health related issues. She’s in a transitional living facility right now while they try to calm her body down.

As life goes on, I appreciate more and more the precious nature of the relationships I have at this sheepshead table, at the Museum, among the Sierra Club folks and the Woolly Mammoths. Each place enriches me and gives me a place to just be, be who I am. What a gift.

So, good night to you and to Artemis Hives matron Goddess.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Health, Retirement

Gospel

January 22, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Waning Moon of the Cold Month 3 degrees

In all the hoopla and aftermath of the party I forgot to mention the gospel. The good news. The friend’s wife I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, the one diagnosed with cancer? She came to the party. Not only that she said her energy was better than it had been for a while. She looked good, too. Both she and her husband looked still vulnerable, the residue of concern, fear lingering. She has a hormone treatment, recommended by her oncologist, that may keep the cancer at bay. Not cure it, but keep it from getting a firm grasp on her.

As Leni said, another party goer that same night, about his throat cancer, “Well, you know, the goal now is to make cancer a chronic disease. Something you can manage.” He’s living proof, having survived in apparent good health for several years now. He and the friend’s wife were not alone, either. Hank, another party goer, has leukemia, a disease kept in check now for many years, so much so that it almost recedes into the background.

These are the three I know about. There were probably others. Cancer no longer has the skull and cross-bones attached to its every appearance. Think of it. Cancer is not a new disease. It killed people relentlessly in all centuries before the last one. Now, it begins to look, at least in many cases, like the caged tiger, pacing back and forth within its chemical compound, its lethality imprisoned, though not rendered harmless.

Kate has retired from the practice of medicine as others graduate each year to take up the responsibility, this tricky act we call healing. It has more parts than chemistry and technology and knives, we know this, yet those parts themselves, the fruits of engineering and science, have a great deal to offer. Perhaps this next century is the one where the enlightenment driven side of medicine will meet the ageless truths of the human spirit, joining together in a medicine, a healing for the whole person. It may be that the last years of the baby boom generation, now upon us, will provide the impetus for this fusion.

Friends, Politics, Retirement, US History

Never Ending Terror

January 7, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

The big day has arrived. Kate’s last shift. She’s off right now getting her nails done–her constant scrubbing in and out of rooms made fancy nails silly–and her toes, since she wears sandals almost all year round. This way she’s dolled up for tonight and for the next week in Colorado.

Back a bit I bought a print by a Minnesota artist, Mike Elko. It hangs to the right of this computer and looking at it right now triggered a major aha. The print is the faux cover of a magazine, Practical Paranoia. It features a cartoon woman with sixties hairdo and clothing, a tear trickling down her face and this copy next to her: He keeps saying, “If you question me, then the terrorists have won!” Is all of this really necessary or is he just trying to make me crazy? I live in…

NEVER ENDING TERROR!

A Bush era piece, I bought it in part as a lest we forget, a cautionary tale about government gone loony. As I looked at it right now, I realized a huge difference, a huge positive difference between the Bush and the Obama eras. We don’t feel this way anymore. There is no longer the Cheney–Rumsfeld–Bolton–Wolfowitz–Kristol nexus, a sort of demented nerve ganglia that twitched and pulsed cries of alarm at every shadow. Obama has calmed us as a nation while continuing to actively pursue terrorists, and a sober analysis of the Bush methods.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Health

Pain

January 4, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

When a friend is in pain, the pain travels. In its journey from one friend to another, the pain may not lessen, but its burden may grow lighter. Such a journey is underway now with a friend whose wife has received distressing news, the kind of news we know about yet still hope will never be heard among the people we know and love. Cancer. It has such a brutal, dangerous, threatening aura. Black. Shot through with jagged points. Hearing the word in the mouth of a friend sets the inner self back. Creates a sense of fear and loss, loss even before any loss, a type of loss that may be the final stage of innocence, the end game of our immortality.

Then there is turning to face the truth, to talk to the doctors, to sort out the words, the feelings, the possibilities, the dangers. And choosing, choosing about matters of life and death. Decisions no amount of prayer or meditation or forethought prepare us for, decisions about our own life, its length, its end. Or, worse, the life of a loved one. Hope? Of course, hope always has a role, a horse in the race. But there are other horses, too.

My heart has been heavy ever since I learned this news, an existential dread, the kind always there, under the surface, the knowing, the knowing about predatory nature. Yes, she is our mother; yes, in all ways, yes; but, like Coatlicue of whom I wrote a few days ago, she not only gives life, but she takes it back.

Cancer is not evil. It has no intention. It is. It is a force majeur, an act of blind fate. And yet. We can, sometimes, turn it back. Cancer’s aura has gotten a bit dimmer of late, a degree of lethal certainty has leaked away as drugs and drug regimens, research and surgery have chipped away at its powers.

So, I invite you to do the kind of thing in which you believe for my friend’s wife. A kind and generous universe will know how to direct your message. We all need love, love from places we know and places we don’t.

Aging, Family, Friends, Retirement

Grab It, Now!

December 28, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Just back from the former Kinko’s, printing the invitation for Kate’s retirement party, Coming of Age: the Art of Retirement. We have entered the good-bye phase of life. Good-bye to work. Good-bye to cousins, aunts, uncles. Good-bye to homes and states. Good-bye to life. Viewed from the vantage point of youth this must seem a dreadfully depressing, black life stage, in fact the opposite is true. As death comes closer, most of us finally get the message: live in the now. Live today, not in regrets about yesterday or anxiety about the future.

A calmness comes with this perspective, a realization that this life, this moment has the only juice you’ll ever get. So, we try to ring as much as possible out of the day: Ike’s funeral, Kate’s retirement, the days we have when we’re able to garden and tend the bees, the opportunities we have to work on environmental advocacy, to roam the museum and spend hours talking about art, to eat and talk with friends like the Woolly Mammoths. These are life.

Corny as it sounds, I always liked the very existential Schlitz ad: You only go round once in life, grab all the gusto you can. Laissez bon temps rouler!

Aging, Art and Culture, Family, Friends, Retirement

You, Yes You, Are Invited

December 27, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

If you read ancientrails, you’ll likely get an invitation either by e-mail or snail mail or by hand. But, if you don’t, and you see it here and can come, please come. The idea is the more the merrier. Kate’s retiring and we want to mark the occasion with friends of both of us.

We’ve scheduled the party during the Third Thursday event at the MIA because the museum puts on a different face and has lot of extra activities. We’ll have appetizers and beverages in the Wells Fargo Room.

The art work here is a piece I commissioned from Chicago artist, Deb Yankowski, in honor of this transition. More details to come.

You’re Invited To An Event

Coming of Age: The Art of Retirement

6702010-12-27_0548

She opens her mouth with wisdom

And the teaching of kindness is on her tongue

Give her credit for the fruit of her labors

And let her achievements praise her at the gates.

(English translation)

January 20^th, 5-9 P.M. Minneapolis Museum of Art

Aging, Friends, Great Work, Politics, Weather +Climate

Restored Wonder

December 4, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Samhain Waning Thanksgiving Moon

“The one common experience of all humanity is the challenge of problems.” – R. Buckminster Fuller

Once again, awake. I know why this time. Over stimulation. The interview process at the Sierra Club has my head cranking over time, weighing this aspect and that, noodling out the implications, going over what ifs. I’m familiar with this kind of insomnia, it happened a lot when I worked for the Presbytery, particularly when I had several projects in the air all at the same time, which was the norm rather than the exception. Leaves my jaw a bit achy, not so good with my still healing wisdom teeth extraction.

This is my (now mild) neurosis at work, continuing to work over nuances, much like the front tires on the Celica last night, trying, trying, trying, but gaining no traction, spinning in place, unable to move forward and accomplishing nothing moving backward.

Added to the interviews, of course, was the commute home last night and my sling-shot derby trying to use momentum to move my car up the slope of our driveway. Last night after I closed out my blog for the evening, our neighbor, Pam Perlick, called and offered a berth in her garage so our plow guy could work unobstructed. A kind and thoughtful offer which I accepted. That meant putting back on jeans, boots, parka, hat and gloves, taking my Berea College whisk broom out and sweeping two new inches off the car before moving it to safe haven.

The night was dark and cold, the snow swept up and swirled as it fell. Once outside, as is often true, I found the storm exhilarating, especially since Pam’s gesture meant the Celica would not interfere with the snow removal. I could embrace the cold and the falling snow for what it was, rather than for the problems it brought into my life.

Based on NOAA weather spotter’s it appears we got another 5 inches of snow. Which would square with my guess. Snow shapes itself to the objects on which it lands, often in unusual, even bizarre shapes. I’ll put out some photographs today, once it becomes light.

These kind of storms and the deep cold of January define the north for me. They’re why I’m here and why I love this state so much, so I’m happy my neighbor restored my wonder. Thanks, Pam.