Category Archives: Holidays

Family, Holidays, Politics

A Good Idea Failed

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Winter                                                             Seed Catalog Moon

Kate and I drove in to Minneapolis today, to the Smack Shack.  The Smack Shack is not, as you might justifiably think, a boutique heroin market, but a food truck doing a transformer move into a very large seafood restaurant.  The featured menu item is boiled lunch complete with your choice of a 1.5 or a 2.0 pound lobster.

This was a holiday lunch with Anne, Kate’s sister, who lives in Waconia.  A smattering of west suburban upper class types were there and the prices wouldn’t shock any of them, but if any of our neighbors showed up they’d grimace.  The food is o.k., but not worth quite the bite it takes out of the wallet.  Still, for the purpose, it was great.

Kate and I shared a boiled lunch and Anne had one to herself.  We both had plenty to take home.  The lobsters are red and look very much like their coastal nickname, bug.  On the plate were several grade b skin on red potatoes, two links of polish sausage, two fresh ears of corn, a half lemon wrapped in cloth, two small metal containers of cole slaw and a pot of melted butter.

Bibs in place we dug into the meal.  Both Kate and I remember the days when, at least in the midwest, surf and turf was about as fancy as food got.  Lobster was the pinnacle of haute cuisine, even one step higher.  Surf without the turf.  Now I find lobster ok, but usually tough and not as flavorful as I remember from days gone by.  Of course, that could be my taste buds.

The sisters compared arthritis in their hands, spoke of sewing and retirement.  Anne turns 62 this year and finally, as a result, rotates onto the day shift at a metro County Jail.  She commented on the increasing number of drunks, mentally ill and generally decompensating people that show up in our culture’s catch basin, the county hoosegow.

Just the other day five of the 11 women in her charge had serious mental health issues, one screaming and another lacerating her arm with her fingernails.  It made me recall those days in the late 60’s and early 70’s when deinstitutionalization had reached its moment.

They were exciting times.  People were to be freed from the Victorian confines of state hospitals for the retarded and the insane, places with institutionalized violence and clients aberrant adaptations to an aberrant, abnormal living situation.  The watchword was normalization.

Normalization meant re-introducing these populations to society, helping them in the process through community based services, residential for those who needed them, supportive services for those who didn’t.  Community Involvement Programs employed me for 8 years in its residential training program for developmentally disabled adults.

C.I.P. was an example of the best of the community based services.  We took folks straight out of Fairbault and Cambridge State Hospitals, put them in their own apartments in a 32 unit building we ran and trained them in budgeting, cleaning, cooking, shopping, making appointments and integrating into the community.  It was good and important work.

What happened though a confirmed cynic would have foreseen, but we didn’t see it back then.  As states cut funding to their large state hospital systems, the money was supposed to flow into the community based treatment programs.  And some of it did.  But not anywhere near enough.  This was the root cause of the first wave of homelessness, developmentally disabled and mentally ill citizens released from state hospitals to the streets our major cities.

This is one of the great tragedies of our time, but it has gone largely untalked about. The people who suffer are the marginalized among the marginalized, the folks whose disabilities render them vulnerable to shifts in income, housing, treatment.  The answer, of course, is not more state hospitals, but increased funding for community based treatment.

But in an era of Republican budget cutting, which has largely dominated the political scene since the early 80’s when Reagan came into the Whitehouse, this kind of state and federal funding has proved easy to slash.  The result was–to use an overused but apt metaphor–a perfect storm of liberal policy releasing thousands of our society’s least able to cope into cities where prevailing political realities made them largely unhelpable.

This is a big reason that our county jails have now become our community based treatment centers.  They resemble in many ways small outposts of the old state hospital system, run by authoritarian hierarchies that respond to the needs of bureaucracy first, not inmates.

And Anne, in her role, sees the results and has to deal with them.  Surely we can do better.

 

 

 

Cinema and Television, Family, Holidays

How Much Is Enough?

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Winter                                                   Winter Moon

Kate and I both read a zine called the Tablet.  It’s a hip Jew commentary on whatever.  It contained this today:  “The Hebrew year is 5774 and the Chinese year is 4710. That must mean, the joke goes, that against all odds the Jews went without Chinese food for 1,064 years.”  We follow, as I wrote before, Jewish tradition by going to movies and eating Chinese on Christmas.

Today we stayed close to home, eating lunch at the Mandarin Buffet, greeted by r challenged waiters and waitresses who greeted with holiday cheer anyhow.  After that we saw the Desolation of Smaug, the second of the Hobbit trilogy.  It’s a non-stop action flik with Evangeline Lilly as an action elfess, as beautiful here as she was all those seasons on Lost.  The time went fast as the dwarves escaped the Wood Elves in barrels, road coal and metal carriers to escape Smaug and Gandalf seemed to be defeated by Sauron.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s a lot of fun.

This was at the Andover Cinema and our second choice, Hunger Games II, had just ended its run and we didn’t know that.  So, we had to decide on a second movie on the spur of the moment.  We chose Wolf of Wall Street. This is a more difficult movie to parse.  First, it’s too long.  Could have stood 45 minutes worth of cutting.  It’s a Martin Scorsese movie so he apparently got the cut he wanted.  Second, I hope, as Kate imagines, it’s broadly drawn.  I’ll explain that in a bit.

Wolf’s great strength is its unflinching look at what happens to people who cannot answer the question, what is enough?  If you make money and power the focus of your life, they will become your center of value, what H. Richard Niebuhr called your God.   With them in the center of your ethical system your value choices will not be about people or beauty or justice or the natural world, but how about how you can get more.  More money.  More power.

You will not be able to answer the question, how much is enough, because the amount of money and power you need will always be just a bit more than you have.  This is ambition. This is greed.  This is eagerness to have positional authority.  This ultimate honey trap gets strokes by the culture.  We lionize billionaires and barely recognize the teachers, doctors, mechanics, nurses, clerks, postal workers who do the important work in our culture.

I’m not, this time, trying to make a political point, but a theological one.  What you place at your center, your center of value, shapes all the decisions that you make.  It’s a critical decision and it is just that, a decision.  You can choose to have other people, the natural world, beauty, health or justice as your center; you can also choose money and power.

In Wolf we see the terrible personal and social cost of choosing money and power.  Other people are tools.  Stocks are, as Matthew McConaughey’s character, Mark Hanna says, “Fairy dust…they exist for one reason.  To take money out of the clients pocket and put it our pocket.”  The only yardstick for success is money and the conspicuous consumption of luxury goods:  Armani suits, Ferrari’s, yachts, estates, drugs, whores, planes.

Kate saw it as drawn broadly.  That may be, but the motive force, the need for more and the sense that life has no moral limits characterize so many striving folks.  Not just Americans.  Chinese, too.  Singapore.  Mumbai.  This movie is, at bottom, about seduction and shows what few people ever realize.  We don’t need the devil.  We seduce ourselves.

 

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

At Home

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Winter Solstice                                                           Winter Moon

The long night continues.  Kate and I had our bonfire together.  All three dogs came out and sat with us for a bit before taking off for doggy business barking at something deeper in the woods.

(Lorraine_Williams_Rainbow_Serpent_Dreaming)

The silence has fallen and will stay with us until morning.  Then the sunlight will wake up the birds and the newspaper deliverers and those who work on Sunday mornings.  And the long trek into darkness begun last summer in June trades places with an equally long ancientrail of light.

These are not opposites, not poles of a dialectic, but two sides of the world, entered through dawn and twilight, and with us every single day of our lives.  I’m still intrigued with the notion that the darkness may be our brains normal state and all this waking activity is clever misdirection by the dreamtime.

This will bear more thought and reading.

I do know this.  The ancientrail of darkness is katabatic, like Persephone’s or Orpheus’s or Odysseus’s.  That is, it is the trail which leads to the underworld, the dark places within us and that it has always drawn me more than the journey toward the light.

Let me say exactly what I mean here.  This is a bodily sensation, a sense of familiarity and comfort, a feeling of spirituality and it correlates to the increasing darkness.  It becomes most intimate this night, a night that is different from all other nights. Yet, the same.

It’s not that I reject the light or feel oppressed by it.  The garden, the growth of plants and the chance to wander outside easily has its joys, certainly.  It’s just that for me the darkness is richer, takes me further.

Does this have any correlation to my depressive or melancholic or dysthymic states? Maybe.  Does that mean it’s bad in some way or counter productive?  I don’t think so.  It seems to me that this is descriptive, not prescriptive or proscriptive.

My guess is that our bodies and our early life experiences give us a tendency to lean more toward the dark or the light.  My guess further is that since waking activity has a natural though not necessary linkage with the day, in particular work and school, that we privilege those who tend more toward the light, perhaps even suppressing in ourselves a tendency to favor the dark.

At any rate I’m of the dark persuasion and this is the moment in the year when I feel, as Tom Crane suggested, at home.

 

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Myth and Story, Sierra Club, Weather +Climate

Repent Or Face Damnation

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Samhain                                                                      Winter Moon

Samhain ends tomorrow with the arrival of the Winter Solstice.  The long fallow season following Summer’s End fades into the coldest months of the year.  Here in Minnesota the coldest days of the year begin on December 1st, meteorological winter; the old calendar reflects a different climate situation in Ireland and Britain.  Still, that calendar and its larger cultural context is the one which continues to influence our holy day practices.  Christmas comes on the celebration of Sol Invictus, the all the conquering sun, a Roman holy time set by the coming of the Winter Solstice.

Paul Strickland heard a Christian talk radio show lamenting the re-emergence of Winter Solstice celebrations and complaining that everyone knows Christmas came long before such pagan holy days.  We all laughed.  Christmas is a late addition to the Winter Solstice celebration collection and not a very important holiday among Christians until the Victorian era.

When Samhain ends at the Winter Solstice, the old growing season shifts from the death and desiccation of fall into decay and enrichment, preparing the way as the light begins to increase.   When Persephone returns to the Underworld to rule with Hades, the active forces of the soil begin their work in earnest, breaking down the fallen, dead and rotting materials into rich nutrients that feed soil organisms and will feed plants when Persephone returns home to her mother Demeter in the spring.

James Hillman said we see the gods today in our pathologies and I suppose that’s true in his sense, but the gods of polytheism suffered their Nietzschean fate long ago and have come again in more than psychological ways.

As Paul Ricoeur suggests, Christian’s familiar with biblical scholarship might return to the texts with a second naivete and see them once again as holy; so, I would suggest that the gods and goddesses of polytheism have long since resurrected, once again ready to offer themselves to us. All we need is our second naivete to see them. They can help us follow the recurring cycles of nature and understand them as powerful and dynamic realities, ones to which we owe allegiance.

Our blasphemy toward the old gods has created environmental havoc. We wantonly pollute–in the religious as well as the chemical sense–Poseidon’s ocean, Persephone and Hades’ soil, Zeus’s sky and even Aurora’s dawn.  Perhaps only Apollo’s Sun has escaped our meddling.

We are heretics to the old religions and we have paid the price.  If we do not repent, it will lead, as the logic of religion suggests, to our damnation.

 

Friends, Holidays, Music

On the Eastern Shore

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Samhain                                                            Winter Moon

Down to the river again tonight.  This time not on Nicollet Island but on the eastern shore, connecting to Chicago, Pittsburgh and New York, the businesses of St. Anthony on Main, a place much visited 30 years ago, less so now.  We were at Vic’s, a restaurant with a great view of a lit up Minneapolis sky line, the river running cold and sluggish below.

Irv Williams (Photo: Kevin Brown)

KBEM, jazz radio, had its Christmas party tonight, another, the last, of the years restaurant fund-raising evenings.  This one featured a 95 year old saxophonist, Irv Williams, short with a polished bald head the color of stained cherry.  He was, my Kate told me, Mr. Smooth.  His music wrapped around us as we ate and talked, a quiet tributary of the same great river plyed by John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman.

Warren and Sheryl were there, venturing out after four years in care-giver isolation, still trying to wrap their heads around the freedom they have.  It was a large crowd, maybe 3 or 4 times larger than usual because all the KBEM staff were there.

There will be another jazz noir radio play in April and a restaurant night at the Dakota on January 22nd.

Friends, Holidays, Woolly Mammoths

Warm

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Samhain                                                             Winter Moon

Still warm from yesterday evening.  We need the small flames that friendship kindles to keep the soul from growing cold.

Tom’s other gift of holly and acorns, the Holly King and the Oak King, sits above my computer, recalling the struggle between the two over the last six months, a battle that will, starting on the Solstice bend toward the Oak King’s forces of light.

Mark’s gift of polished Woolly Mammoth tusk is up there, too, waiting inspiration.

As many of you know, I’m no longer a Christian, but I celebrate Christmas the holiday still, only now in the way we did last night, by seeing people I love.  No tree.  No gifts.  No cards. No church services. Just other humans walking this most ancientrail–life–together.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Holidays, Woolly Mammoths

up north with friends

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Samhain                                                                Winter Moon

Here is a northern moment.  Good friends gathered in a small room with wine and steaks and snow outside, the cold.  The Holiseason has charged the air with angels and dreidels and long nights.  Ice on the streets and roads creates the kind of gentle confusion, and sometimes not so gentle confusion, that makes driving in Holiseason different from the rest of the year.

We gathered slowly, two Woollys walked up to the bar before I got there.  Mark in his silk Chinese tie and fancy sport jacket with high points on the collar sat with Charlie H. leaning back, comfortable around alcohol, the two smiling and talking.

The Sun Room at the Nicollet Island Inn was back through a labyrinth of halls, past the bar, stuck away from the rest of the place, a private area for ten or twelve, just right for the eight of us:  Warren, Frank, Mark, Charlie H., Paul from Maine, myself, Tom and Bill.

Tom made the evening special with a gift, the meal, a gesture toward the season and toward brotherhood, appreciated by each of us.  It was that special holiday gathering, one of friends genuinely glad to see each other, to listen, to laugh.  May we have as many more ahead of us as we have behind us.

 

Art and Culture, Asia, Family, Holidays

Global

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Samhain                                                                 Winter Moon

-12.  81.  72.  34.  35. 14.  Andover.  Singapore.  Muhayil, Saudi Arabia.  Mihailesti, Romania. Montgomery, Alabama.  Denver, Colorado.

Mary and I talked today, she near her bedtime while I ate a quick breakfast.  7:30 am here while 9:30 pm there.  It’s a big planet.

(Thanksgiving 2013, Singapore)

Having close family members scattered around the world affords an occasional window on quirks in places far from the center of North America.  Mary reports that Thanksgiving has taken hold in Singapore, colleagues say to her, “Happy Thanksgiving!” and many Singaporeans celebrate with a big meal.  Thanksgiving has no religious roots and its secular coloring is very faint, the whole pilgrim/indian thing long ago and perhaps apocryphal anyhow. It’s emphasis on food, family and gratitude could travel well into any culture.

Halloween and Christmas are also big in Singapore with Mary reminding me of the lights by Hitachi that go up on Orchard Road, lights that I saw when I visited in early November, 2004.

There is one holiday transfer that puzzles me.  Mary says St. Patrick’s day is big, too.  And, people wear green and go to bars and drink green beer.  In this case Chinese and Indian people, maybe even a few Malays, too.  Maybe it’s seen as a spring holiday?

(St. Pat’s 2013 Singapore)

Mark is in his third week of classes in Muhayil, Saudi Arabia.  He reports that many of his students leave class early to go home and eat kabsa.  “Kabsa (Arabic: كبسة‎ kabsah) is a family of rice dishes that are served mostly in Saudi Arabia — where it is commonly regarded as a national dish. Kabsa, though, is believed to be indigenous to Yemen.”  Wiki.

 

Anoka County, Art and Culture, Great Wheel, Holidays, Weather +Climate

Switching Rails

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Samhain                                                               Winter Moon

In late January when this kind of cold usually comes a few days of it can bring on an intense desire to be outside, be anywhere other than inside.  This is the condition often called cabin fever.

Having this deep, long cold spell come up front in winter, though, has not produced the same kind of grousing and low murmurs as a January dip.  This is still bracing.  Or, well, what do you expect?  We live here, don’t we?  Ruth, our financial advisor, said a mutual friend, Larry Schmidt, the late investigative reporter for WCCO, told her winter cut gang activity out for a season which he said, “Gives us an edge over L.A. and Detroit.”

This kind of seasonal change switches rails in the roundhouse of the mind.  No doubting now that the growing season is far behind us and the earth’s orbit has swung us into different astronomical territory.  We can concentrate on activities like snowshoeing, bird feeding, igloo building, cross-country skiing, ice-fishing, dog-sledding.  There’s even the few, the hardy who have sails rigged on “boats” with ice-skate like runners.  Others will go winter camping, hiking in the boreal forest.  And, yes, there will be snowmobilers, too.

Some will concentrate on feasting, reading, indoor games.  This is the concert and theater and dance season, too.  And all those holidays with their bright lights and festive music and gift giving and family and friend get togethers.

And the cold says winter.  Time for all that winter offers.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays

Following the Great Wheel

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Samhain                                                       Thanksgiving Moon

The Thanksgiving Moon has become a crescent, my favorite shape of the moon.  When it matches up with Venus or Jupiter in the evening sky, what a wonder.  As the Thanksgiving Moon wanes, we are in the middle of Samhain, the cross-quarter holiday beginning on Summer’s End, October 31st, and running through the Winter Solstice.  Samhain covers the first 8 weeks of the fallow time.  Winter the next 8 weeks.  At least on my sacred calendar.

Following the Great Wheel as it rolls through the sky, a human, mythic rendering of the earth’s orbit, helps me stay in touch with the seasonal nuances.  Following the moon through its phases adds a wheel within the larger wheel, two eccentrics moving through the universe and around the sun together.  This would, in itself, be enough for me.

The other holidays though, Deepavali, Easter, Boxing Day, 4th of July, the Eve of St. Agnes, the Posada, Christmas, Hungry Ghost, the various new year’s dates add spice, are the flavors of others sacred sight added to the earth tones of my own observances.  And I love them, too.

We can experience this life as a series of holidays, one after the other.  Delightful and evocative.  Why not?  Perhaps one year, maybe my 70th, I will decide is a holiyear and try to celebrate as many festivals as I can over the course of a year.  Could be fun.