Category Archives: Travel

Cinema and Television, Family, Garden, Travel

Really Creepy Vampires

Leave a comment

42 bar rises 29.73 0mph W  dewpoint 28 Spring

         Waning Crescent Moon of Winds

OK.  I’m taking off my hair shirt and hanging up my cilici.

Today is Ruth’s second birthday.  Ruth is our first granddaughter.  The thought of another life, connected to your own, just starting out, makes the world seem a more congenial and more precious place.  Her blue eyes, mischievous quality and alertness augur an interesting and bright future.  She feeds the dogs, carrying their bowls with that peculiar toddler rolling gate.  She also crawls in the dog crate and closes the door to go night/night. (She’s just pretending.)  Jon and Jen are good parents, another fact that makes the world more congenial and more precious.

A quiet evening after the workout.  Started watching 30 Days of Night.  Vampires attack Point Barrow, Alaska just after it heads into 30 days with no sun.  One of the vampires says, “We should have come here a long time ago.”  A bit of Draculian humor.  A good movie so far.  Great production values, interesting actors and really creepy vampires.

Kate leaves tomorrow morning at 6:15 AM (with me as taxi driver) for Denver to celebrate Ruth’s birthday, then onto San Francisco for a family practice CME.  I plan to do some garden work tomorrow, like put down weed preventer and remove some mulch, maybe rake a bit.  It’s still too early to do much, but I’ll be able to get started.

Family, Garden, Politics, Travel

Airlines Not Required to Provide Food, Water, Clean Toilets or Fresh Air

Leave a comment

42 bar steep rise 29.71 1mph WNW dewpoint 28  Spring

           Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

We soaked the rock wool seed pellets in 5.0 ph water.  This will neutralize the natural high alkalinity of the rock wool. Tomorrow I’ll sow seeds from a lettuce mixture we got at Seed Saver’s Exchange.  Tomorrow, too, the tomato seeds will got in the peat pots.  Action on the indoor garden and some (the tomato seeds) on the outdoor garden proceeds apace.

The library provided a couple of books on DVD for Kate and her drive to Nevada, Iowa over the weekend.  She’s doing a sort of homecoming/reunion thing.  Meanwhile I’ll celebrate Chinese New Year’s in Lauderdale.

The beat goes on.

In the ongoing journal of outrage at the way things are, this from today’s newswire: 

A federal appeals court has rejected a law requiring airlines to provide food, water, clean toilets and fresh air to passengers trapped in a plane delayed on the ground.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that New York’s new state law interferes with federal law governing the price, route or service of an air carrier. It was the first law in the nation of its kind.

The appeals court said the new law was laudable but only the federal government has the authority to enact such a regulation.

The law was challenged before the appeals court by the Air Transport Association of America, the industry trade group representing leading U.S. airlines.

Garden, Great Work, Politics, Travel

The Sons of the Soil

Leave a comment

 37  bar steady 29.78 0mph windchill 36

   Waxing Crescent Moon of Winds

 

Below is a reply to my brother Mark about this e-mail he sent to me:

Charles, This is pretty amazing. It really needed to happen. Mark ** Penang abandons pro-Malay policy **The Malaysian state of Penang says it will no longer follow a government policy favouring ethnic Malays.< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7289509.stm >In re:  the sons of the soil.  When I was in Hawai’i, I learned the natives call themselves kama’aina, literally children of the land.  Businesses offer a kama’aina discount and there has been some effort to get civil service preference to kama’aina.  In Hawai’i, where the indigenous population has experienced considerable oppression (plantation slavery for sugar and pineapples) and marginalization (numbers cut by 90% thanks to disease), it seems just.

It made me think a lot about this notion of belonging to a land, or a place.  The problem with identifying one ethnicity or one particular population as sons of the soil is its ahistorical nature.  That is, at some point in time, virtually every population on earth, outside of a miniscule group in Africa, emigrated. In other words, kama’aina is not a permanent characteristic, rather it reflects an acquired relationship, one that reflects a love for this place.  Others, too, can become kama’aina.  That is the essential injustice in the Malaysian situation.It is, too, an injustice in Hawai’i, if Filipino, Japanese, Chinese and white inhabitants cannot, at some point, also be kama’aina.

 

As I thought more about it, I realized I am kama’aina of the American Midwest, the heartland of the North American continent, yet I am also a son of immigrants.  Am I less wedded to this land than the Annishinabe or the Lakota?  I don’t think so.  My life depends on it. When I return, I see home in its lakes and forests.

In fact, the whole notion of an ecological consciousness comes down to seeing ourselves, each of us, as kama’aina of the planet earth.

Anyhow, thanks.  I agree, amazing and hopeful. 

Memories, Travel

An Indiana Farm on Kauai

Leave a comment

                             9  bar rises 30.24  1mph NNW windchill 5

                                                    New Moon

                                   roosteranddoves300.jpg

When I was a boy, say 12 and under, each summer I would visit my Uncle Riley and Aunt Virginia for a couple of weeks or so.  They lived on the farm my grandfather had put together.  It was a couple hundred acres of corn, a few cows, a pig or two, harness-racing horses and chickens, Bantams with the Banty roosters and their mile-high attitude and morning curdling cock-a-doodle-doo.  These memories have a particular smell, a mixture of gravel dust, hay and cow manure.  They also have an increasingly antique feel as they recede further and further from the present day.

Imagine my surprise when these memories came alive all day, every day while we were on Kauai and all because of Hurrican I’niki.  In 1992, just before we first visited Kauai, it was struck by a rare and devastating hurricane.  This hurricane eliminated many resorts, including the famous Coco Palms where Elvis shot his movie, Blue Hawai’i.  Many homes blew away, trees and plants got pushed over and beaches changed their shapes. 

I’niki also opened up all of the many chicken coops on the island.  Once free, the chickens never again came home to roost, but instead have now made the entire island their home.  They are, like the feral pig, wild animals, freed to roam wherever they like in a paradise of bugs and small worms.

The result is that often throughout the day the sound of a Banty rooster crowing reverberates whether you’re on the beach, in the forests, up a mountain or near a river.  The chickens come around pic-nic tables and wait patiently for food.  Local children pick up the roosters and carry them like puppies down to the beach.  As a result, Uncle Riley and his farm came to mind day after day on the most isolated islands in the world, in the midst of the Pacific Ocean. 

Now that was unexpected.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Travel

The Days Look Potent

Leave a comment

26  bar rises 29.93  5mph  NNW windchill23

       Waning Crescent of the Snow Moon

The angle of the sun has changed; the days look potent, ready to burst open and let plant life smash through winter.  Even the snow today has a futile, last gasp appearance.  It is not the snow fury of midwinter when the drifts pile up and driving snow blinds motorists, making the home a cozy refuge.  Yes, temperatures will plunge the next couple of days, but we know this is just the Hawthorne Giant reluctant to let go his grip on the land.  The Oak King has already seized the season, opening the eyelid of nature wider and wider until one day soon the snow will melt and the ground begin to thaw.  Then, all hail breaks loose.

This drama, the back and forth of seasonal change, is not felt in the tropics.  I remember the struggle my brother Mark had explaining snow to his classes of Thai students learning English.  How to grasp cold and frozen water falling from the sky when all you know is wet seasons and dry?  As a child of this land between the Rockies and the Appalachians, the vast Midwest, and as an adopted son of the northern reaches of it, the seasons long ago seeped into my bones.  The sun’s countenance changes and I know it; I know it in the animal part of my brain that tells me when it’s time to migrate toward the growing season or to put up stores for a coming winter.  The subtle variations between late season snow and the early spitting of snows in November have deep meaning for me.  We are, all of us, practitioners of meteoromancy, attempting to tell our futures through cloud cover, length of day and temperature.

I would have it no other way.  Visiting the tropics is  wonderful, a chance to see another life way, another adaptation to the planet’s many faces, but to live there, to wipe out lifelong learning about spring and its puddles or summer and its heat, does not appeal to me.  This has been and will be my home.  As I said the other day, I am kama’aina of the heartland, a child of the Upper Midwest on the North American continent and this is where I belong.

Great Work, Our Land and Home, Politics, Travel

Kama’aina of the Heartland

Leave a comment

15  bar rises 30.17  2mph WNW windchill9

    Waning Crescent of the Snow Moon

“People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this, that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.” – John Jay Chapman

I would add to Chapman, it often means a taking a bone from a vicious dog and a strong one.  That’s why it’s fun.  And dangerous.

Just made an attempt to sign up for the Sierra Club’s political committee for this election year.  I want to put my hand back in, but with Taoism as my mentor this time, rather than liberation theology or neo-marxism.  We’ll see what that means if I get selected.

Slept late today.  Still getting used to the center of the continent. 

One realization I had while in Hawai’i is that I am kama’aina of the heartland, the center of a large landmass, the actual geographic opposite of island life.  As a child of this land, I relish significant even sudden changes in weather.  The cycle of planting, growth, maturity, harvest and a fallow time is as essential to my Self as it is to the rhythm of life here.  I am, in every sense of the word, an American.  A Midwesterner.   A Northerner.  Each of those geographic identifiers impacts key aspects of my person, my approach to life and my deep values.

Travel

Deadlines, Bah!

Leave a comment

Gray, dirty snow, chill with humidity.  A dull, gray day as my Aunt Roberta used to say.

This morning I looked at my calendar, the stuff that March requires of me.  It looks ok, doable.  That’s thanks to writing a sermon, my workshop for the Woolly retreat and a presentation on the strange place of religion in contemporary art for the docent book club before leaving for vacation.  A good move.

Deadlines do not stimulate me, unless they are a long way off.  I can finish tasks well before they’re needed, but as time gets closer, I get frustrated and willing to put up with whatever to get stuff done.  Not a recipe for my best work and I like to do my best work.

The blog presents an interesting quandry in that regard.  By its nature the blog is better fresh and without edits.  It’s more like speech than writing.  Still, over half the time I run spell check and go back over the entry after it’s written, just to check.  Even if errors sneak through, I’m ok wid dat.  It’s a blog, not War and Peace.

Seem rested, but still undermotivated.  A trip into the MIA should help tomorrow.  There’s a continuuing event and I can check Matt Welch’s lecture on the Weber exhibit.  After going on a few tours next week I want to start touring that exhibit the second week in March.  I’ve also picked up a China tour later in March that should be fun.

By tomorrow or the next day, I’ll be back in the Aeron and ready to write. I still have mail to go through, but that’s about it as far as vacation-related catch up I have to do.

Memories, Our Land and Home, Travel

Back on Central Standard Time

Leave a comment

23  bar falls 29.90 2mph  NNE windchill21

     Last Quarter of the Snow Moon

Gonna get the weather changed back to Andover tomorrow.  Still a little fuzzy.  I stayed up all day to reset my biological clock and it feels like its worked.   I’ll be ready for bed around my usual time.

This was 6:30PM on Hawai’ian Standard Time.  Time to hunt for dinner and begin to wind down from a day of hiking or visiting gardens or beach combing.  It’s always strange, at least to me, that when we return from a place like Hawai’i that it continues, in the same rhythms, after we leave. 

Most of the year I don’t hold the distinct memories of two places in my mind as I do right after I return from vacation, but for now and the next few weeks Hawai’i will be as clear as if it were a short drive away.  This is partly a function of jet travel.  We walk down a jet way on Kauai, wander around a few mostly similar airports, walk down a couple more jetways, then we’re home again.  No landscape passes by as we travel.  There are only vague indications of cultural change.  OK, the banks of slot machines in the Las Vegas airport were not subtle, but you know what I mean.  No changes in cuisine, no different towns, license plates, grocery stores, just the world air travel culture and its modest inflections as we pass from one gate to another.

Getting to bed time here on good ol’ CST.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics, Travel

The True Radicals of Today Are Conservatives

Leave a comment

7:45AM.  Bright sun.  Blue water.  Breeze off the ocean.  Mourning doves coo.

The mourning doves have had it goin’ on the last week.  Males walk up to a female, bow, stomp their feet, then spread their tail feathers.  Oh, yeah.  I saw that move before.

Last post from Da Fish Shack.  My bags are packed and I’m ready to go.  Just 12 hours until my jet plane.  Da Fish Shack check-out is 10AM and my flight doesn’t leave until 8:15 PM so I have time to do some more sightseeing, shop, visit the museum in Lihue, have lunch and dinner.

One point of comparison I forgot between Da Fish Shack and the Hyatt was showers.  At the Hyatt the shower was an ordinary shower in a tub, found in most hotels.  Here at Da Fish Shack showers are al fresco although with appropriate screening.  Kate suggested I use flip-flops when I used the shower.  Although I would not want to take showers outside at home, here in Hawai’i’s wonderful climate, it provides a note of adventure to a routine task.  You can hear the surf and feel the wind all over.

On driving back last Sunday night to Da Fish Shack after supper in Wailua, I turned on NPR.  Guess who was on?  Garrison Keillor and Prairie Home Companion.  Right here on route 56 headed north toward Princeville and Hanalei.  This morning I read the NYT while I ate breakfast.  Lead story in travel?  Skiing on the Gunflint Trail.  

Something I’ve started rolling around.  It appears to me that the true radicals of today are conservatives.  No, not the George Buckley, Russell Kirkland variety or the neo-con versions that got us into this damned war, but conservatives who focus their conservative tendencies on species and eco-systems, on cultures and life ways.  These eco-conservatives are in fact conservative over against enlightenment liberals,  free-market economists and raging bull capitalists of multi-national corporate organizations.

In tandem with this thought, which still percolates, is another.   Rather than the nexus of evil, the world’s faith traditions are vast resources that represent the human heart and mind at its most integrated, its most daring and its most compassionate.  Yes, the religious institutions that accrete around these faith traditions often become like the coral reef, rigid and sharp, but the faith traditions themselves preserve the world’s oldest stories and humankind’s most radical dreams. 

When anti-religion dogmatists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens rail against these institutions, all they are doing is raising the enlightenment flag of REASON.  Well, here’s the big news guys, REASON is not all there is.  In fact, reason works its magic by dividing and parsing, by reducing the world to manageable portions, to forumlas and laws.  Not a bad thing as far it goes, but turn the process on its head and move out toward the whole, toward life and the solar system, the galaxy, the cosmos. 

These things are.  And, they were before science and reasons and they will be after science and reason has passed away.  They do not need to consult either Newton or Einstein to go the speed of light or engage gravity.  It is this whole, the buzzing, blooming whole that is most precious and it will not be dissected because there are too many variables, too many data points moving in too many disparate directions.

And so forth.

Travel

Kauai is Old. Old and Moody.

Leave a comment

8:53PM 73.  Night.  Clouds.  Surf back.  Strong, cool breeze off ocean.  Humid.

Kauai is old.  Old and moody.  It goes from sunshine to dark clouds in a moment, from dry to cloudburst.  It’s peaks sharp and jagged, there are notches between mountains.  Valleys run away from the ocean in deep v’s ending in waterfalls. 

A quarter of the island has no roads and no human habitation.  Only 58,000 people live on Kauai as residents, though many others come through from a few days to a few months.  Like me.

High up on Mount Wai’aleale hundreds of inches rain fall each year.  The Polihale Beach and the area around it on the south west is arid, practically desert.  Great sea slides lie in the Pacific around Kauai, evidence of land that used to be above sea level.

The longer I’m here, the more the land and the ocean speak.  The bays, the beaches, small lakes of freshwater.  The debris thrown up on the beach speaking of  what lies beneath the water.  The way vegetation and temperature change as elevation changes.  The breezes.  The fresh catch in the restaurants:  opah, ahi, marlin, ono.

Somewhere under all this is a process so old, so mysterious that it leaves no trace, yet nothing here happened without it.  Or happens.  Maybe it’s not under, perhaps within or around and within is better. 

Here’s the twist for me.  The more Kauai draws me in and makes me love her, the more I want to return to Minnesota, to our lakes, our rivers and streams.  The trees and shrubs and flowers on the land we care for in Andover.  I want to make another circle tour of Lake Superior, a slow one with time to listen to the lake.   Minnesota is old, too, and the process works there, too.  The same process.

As Lao-Tze said, “Whenever I sit in a room, the universe is there.”