Category Archives: Friends

Art and Culture, Friends

Ordinary Catastrophes

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Spring            New Moon (Seed Moon)

My preparation for sheepshead foundered on two factors:  1.  I could not discipline myself to count points and keep track of trump.  I tended to lapse back into not counting.  2.  I had poor hands and bad luck in addition.  A tough combination to overcome.  Still, I can learn. I’m sure.

Two tours tomorrow then over the weekend I will have time to work on setting up my new Gateway.  Must be the way guys used to feel when they went out to the garage to work on the car.

Busy Busy Busy.  Not enough time to blog. Good tours today.  Interested kids and chaperons.  Ate lunch with three docent friends between tours.  One woman has a daughter on the east coast who just gave birth after a dangerous operation to remove a benign growth on her liver that could, the doctors felt, hemorrhage during the pregnancy.  Mother and baby are doing fine, but the birth, just this weekend was a long affair and left grandma tired.  This was in DC.  Meanwhile in LA a second daughter has begun another round of chemo to take down some metastases from the lung cancer she developed, at 31, last year.  She’s a non-smoker.

Grandma seems exhausted, strong but emotionally wasted.

Came home and took a two hour nap.  Now ready for the treadmill.

Friends, Garden, Great Work, permaculture

Let The Grass Green And The Plants Grow

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Spring          New Moon

Lunch with Paul today at Origami.  When I lunch with friends, I find we often go back to the same place we first went, even after years and years.  I had lunch with an old friend last month and we returned to Gallery 8 at the Walker even though it had been seven or eight years since our last meal together.

Today and tomorrow I have tours to prepare, and I’d best get to them.  Nuclear hearing tonight at 6:30.  Lots of stuff happening right now.  I’m feeling a bit distracted, maybe over stimulated, but it won’t last.

I missed the thunder storm in this blog and the couple of days of rain, but when I woke up to snow this morning I had to get on and say, enough.  I mean, really.  OK, I know it’s not unusual, that March is a snowy month, that winter lingers, yes, but even so, enough.  Let the grass green and the plants grow.  Let some color appear.

A friend has decided to head to the Smoky Mountains next week to hike and see some green. I get it.

This is not cabin fever, I don’t have a longing to be somewhere else, somewhere warm; but, I do have a hankering for growth.

There, that’s off my chest.  On another, similar note, my seedlings have gone from the sprouting stage to the small leafy stage.  This is onion, kale, chard, eggplant, huckleberry, leeks, broccoli and cauliflower.  On Monday I put them all in separate peat and coca pots, getting my hands in the potting soil.  That took care of some of my green desire.

Aging, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

A Locked Car Mystery

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Imbolc    Waning Wild Moon

The Woolly’s met tonight at the Jasmine across from the Black Forest.  Food is noveau Vietnamese, French accents.  I had spring rolls and mangoes on sticky rice.  Just right.

Got to give everyone a head’s up on labyrinthitis.  Tom has a friend who visited him yesterday and may be dead from multiple myeloma in two months.  Whoa.  Paul and Sarah have purged their home, shined up and have neared the day of the first open house.  Changes.

Stefan locked the keys in his car while x-skiing at Hyland Park.  He asked a cop if he could help.  The cop said sure and gave Stefan a ride down.  When he got out to work on Stefan’s car, he inadvertently locked his keys inside as well as Stefan who was in the back seat.  In a police car.  A locksmith had to be called for both cars.

The trip in is always worth it, a chance to connect and renew the connection.  Got several happy birthdays.  Guys just don’t remember birthdays well.

Friends, Sport, Weather +Climate, Writing

We Got Sizzle

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24  rises 29.89  NNW0 wchill 24   Winter

Waxing Crescent of the Wolf Moon

The Internet is a strange phenomenon.  It functions as a time machine, bringing the future just a bit before it arrives and churning the past as old acquaintances find you again through one of the search functions or social networking sites.

It’s a good thing for me, because I was not such a good communicator before the web arrived.  I wrote a few letters, but I’ve never liked the phone much and the only reunions I ever attend are those of my high school.  Now though with Facebook,  Myspace and e-mail those old acquaintances are not forgot and often brought to mind.

Wrote about three pages of a new Homecomer.  Much better.  I needed to make it a continuation of the first two pieces in the Heresy Moves West series.  I had conceived of them as a set from the beginning, but I hadn’t begun the other one as if it fit with them.

We have some kind of frozen precipitation coming down right now, but I don’t what to call it.  Snert.  Sleeze.  Maybe sneeze?  Frozen drizzle is so uninteresting.  Fizzle?  Hey, I got it.  Sizzle.

I bought two new snow shovels.  I have an unfortunate adventuresome spirit in the purchase of snow shovels.  This time I bought one of a kind I saw used on the U.P.  You figure they have 3 to 4 times the amount of snow we have, they must know something.  The other one has a blade made of a tough (I hope) plastic that won’t snag on the nails on our deck–at least that was my conclusion.  I may find out as soon as tomorrow morning.

Just finished a lower body work out and aerobics. Tomorrow AM all morning I’ll write, then watch the vikings.  May Johnny Unitas have mercy on my soul.

Art and Culture, Friends, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

A Cold One, Please

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-8  bar steep rise 30.33  0mph  S  windchill  -10   Samhain

Waning Gibbous Moon of Long Nights          Day  8hr  45mn

A cold one today.  This week will have the same kind of weather we usually get in late January.  Just fine with me.

A very busy day today with the Joan Herried Lecture at the MIA, then lunch at Butter and a tour of the Transcendental Icons exhibit at the Russian Museum.   This evening it’s the Woollys at chez Schmidt.

Realized I’ve been setting myself up to get tired today.  Thinking, oh, man.  Long day.  Geez, I may have to cancel something on Tuesday night. Well, I don’t have to think that way and I’m going to stop right now.

I’m going to wait just a bit to get at the snow on the driveway.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends

Cyber Apocalypse Averted

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Oh, boy.  Thought I had a cyber apocalypse here.  Opened up AncienTrails and there were no blog entries.  Yikes!

A quick e-mail to my cybermage, Bill Schmidt, apparently frightened the devil in the bytes to flee.  When he turned on AncientTrails, everything was there.  After his e-mail telling me the same, I looked again and there it was.  Whew.

Annual physical today, oh, boy.  Also, prepping for a Renaissance/Reformation European painting tour.

Friends, Memories

Seeing and Being Seen

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37  bar rises 29.59  0mph SSW  windchill 37  Samhain

Waxing Crescent Moon of the Long Nights   Day  8hr 57mn

Lunch with Lonnie.  We ate in Gallery 8, the first place in the city of Minneapolis I saw when I came to seminary in 1971.  I met Lonnie back during the Leadership Minneapolis days, probably 1983/1984, sometime in there.  She was a consultant to the program and did a good deal of work on creative leadership.

My fellow committee chair, Gary Stern, and I were so creative in our response to the question of defining leadership that the entire board got fired the next year.  Although I don’t recall the process, Gary and I facilitated that years class as it sought to understand leadership in its terms.  We all came up with love, justice and compassion as the key qualities of leadership.

Turns out the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce, sponsor of Leadership Minneapolis, did not think those terms fit their idea of leadership and cleared out the whole board the next year to start over.  They never did give us their definition, but they must have felt a little stupid when Neal Pierce, a national columnist who focused on urban issues, wrote up our effort and commended its results to a national audience.

The chair of Leadership Minneapolis that year was Sarah Strickland.  Not long after I finished my year as a participant with a year on the board (the one that got fired), Sarah’s husband, Paul, and Lonnie’s husband, Stefan invited me to join the Woolly Mammoths and the rest is hysterics.

Friends of diverse backgrounds and from different facets of life make life richer, like a soup with several ingredients.  There is the comfort of being known and knowing, of seeing and being seen.  Lunch today with Lonnie gave us both.

Today was mild.  Pleasant.

Friends, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

Love and Politics

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Another busy week.  Guess it’s a good thing we’re headed to Colorado on Saturday.  Time for a rest.

Yesterday I worked outside all morning, then took a nap, worked out and went to the Woollys at Paul’s house.  We talked about love.  Love was central to each of our lives and, we all agreed, to the Woolly’s.  Scott talked about the tough, tough time financial planners had in the last month and how it had been very difficult for him personally.  Stefan spoke of his children and the active love a houseful of teens requires.  Frank feels bringing novelty to people’s often boring lives is a way to show love.  Bill read poetry.  Love, marriage (31 years), fear and family dominated Paul’s presentation.  My stuff you read yesterday.

This morning I worked on material for the Sierra Club’s Ex-Com, it’s local (Minnesota) board of directors.  I have to present a report on the candidates whose races we chose for targeted effort.  That’s tonight at 7:30pm.

This afternoon the Africa checkout tour tomorrow morning at 9:30 requires my attention.  Then, phone-calling at the Sierra Club tomorrow night.  After that I can return to work outside until we leave on Saturday.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Holidays

The Ancient Trail of Gratitude

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quick note:  Boy, the pace of life accelerated with the coming of autumn.  This last week it felt like I’d gone back to full-time employment.  I’m glad the week-end is here.

Mine is a small life, no encyclopedia entries or feistschrifts, no monuments.  Ordinary.  I’ve been lucky so far.  The major stumbles I made got turned around by mid-life.  Kate came along and made the journey forward companionable.  There are few friends, but good ones.  The things I do, I love.  Dig.  Plant.  Harvest.  Write.  Preach.  Tour.  Spend time with the kids and their kids.  Read.

Thanksgiving is not a one-day holiday, but, rather, a life way, the ancient trail of gratitude.

Friends

The Judgment of the Universe

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There are times when the judgment of the universe becomes inscrutable.  At best.  The complex interplay among our nature, our nurture and the actual facts muddies the whys of life.  Always.  It is no wonder that humans seek answers, we are pattern seekers, probers, wonderers, wanderers.  Yet, there may be no answers.

I know a family, a small nuclear family.  A man, a woman, a daughter.  Since January the full weight of heaven has fallen on their home.  The man, in his fifties, a government employee, a sailor, an astronomer, a fixer.  The woman, also in her fifties, a quirky domestic with an honesty and unflinchingness that marks her as  unusual.  The daughter, bright, also quirky, a maker of angel wings.  A student of costume.  A lover of the
Renaissance.  Finished college early with a degree in history.

In January the man had a spell, a stroke they thought at first.  Some improvement.  Another spell.  An MRI.  Neurological.  Holes appeared.  Demylenation, a stripping away of the insulating layer of the nerve fibers.  At first, a guarded diagnosis.  After a second and third episode.  MS  Multiple Sclerosis.

Various treatments, but none working very well.  Then, again some improvement physically.  With the realization though that work had come to an end and life as he knew had vanished over night.  The man has become sad, angry, depressed.  He hits the dog with his cane.  The dog will go to a new home this week.  He wakes up at 4 in the morning and wants to argue.  Considers suicide.  Has gone from a detail guy, a traveler and friend to an invalid and a miserable invalid.

Then.  Continue reading The Judgment of the Universe →