Winter First Moon of the New Year
I’m running through a dry spell here. Might relate to my new work schedule since it involves a lot of writing. Could be just a time when little of note (to me) is happening inside my head. Don’t know.
I did set aside two hours last night and edited, then organized photographs from Panama and Manta, Ecuador. I plan to do the same tonight. I want to get as many as possible up before we go to Denver.
Other than that. Need to hit the Ovid.
Winter First Moon of the New Year
Beginning to settle in more and more to my new routine. I’m focused on three primary projects: novel, translating Ovid and writing reimagining faith essays. I have a way of giving each one time during the week and, as my other obligations drop away, I find it easier to stay on track.
Kate and I visited our financial consultant today. An important visit, preliminary to Kate’s full retirement. No more part time. Some number crunching still to go, but we’re aiming at getting her out as soon as possible.
Winter First Moon of the New Year
Finished the Art of Fielding. A book about striving and letting go, about loving and letting go, about baseball and Moby Dick, about heterosexuality and homosexuality, about living and dying. All in the compass of northeastern Wisconsin, around Door County. A fine read.
In the movie Patton, George C. Scott as Patton, in reviewing a harsh slap to a soldier with shell-shock, what we would call post-traumatic stress syndrome, recalls the morale of the other soldiers in the Third Army, “It was,” he says, in an explanation and a confession, “on my mind.” Scott’s gravely delivery has lodged this sentence in my mind.
It reveals to me the awful and the beautiful truth about memory. We can stand condemned by our past, but in our remembrance of things past (proust), we can confess in that Catholic way, a heartfelt acknowledgment of our complicity and yet our need and our opportunity to live beyond it and, if necessary, in spite of it.
This thought occurs to me after Marian Wolfe’s funeral, after all funerals, all deaths. Whether there is a great judge who puts your soul on the scale against a feather or a sudden extinction, the moment after death is no different than the next moment in life.
This may seem a shocking thought, but consider. At any one moment in time we carry what miners call an overburden, the piled up soil and stones and boulders and tree roots and unessential rock of our life experience. At any one moment in time, too, we may cease to be. In fact, at some moment, soon or late, we will cease to be. And the moment after we die is no different than the one that comes next. Right now.
Think of it. When we die, that living slate gets wiped clean, a lifetime folds up and gets tucked away. This is the same opportunity we each have, every moment, if we can only open ourselves to our past, receive it in all its humanness, accept it and move on.
You may say we live in the memory of others. Well, the memory of you lives on in the lives and memories of others, also perhaps in land you’ve loved, books you’ve written, paintings you’ve created, houses you’ve built, quilts you’ve made, but these are not you. They are the memory, the imprint of you.
You are that whole universe lived within your Self, in the body and in the mind and in the spirit or the soul. That others can never know, can never see, can never experience. That universe experiences its apocalypse at the moment of your death.
This is very liberating. We need only accept the death of our private universe to realize how tiny each event that looms so large in our memory is. It will be swept away.
Hmm. getting tired here and don’t want to dig this further right now. But its important to me anyhow.
Winter First Moon of the New Year
Our long November continues. Patchy snow, mostly bare ground and leafless trees. Occasional sunshine, like today, otherwise gloomy and gray. I’m disappointed in the season since I believe we have to earn our springs here and I’m not sure we’re going to this year. Of course, last year may have counted for two.
Action method and Evernote have both made my work on the computer much more 
productive. I can switch seamlessly among projects now without having to do a lot of hunting for files and resources. Since my days have become more and more study oriented this means a lot to me.
(remember last winter?)
Kate’s out having lunch with a friend, Penny. I worked on Ovid, finished up my ten verses for this week. This afternoon I’ll check out my objects for my two China tours tomorrow and probably enter some more of the material I wrote last March at Blue Cloud.
I’m getting close to having that finished. Once I do, I’ll go back over my notes and start writing again. I expect I’ll have a rough draft finished in February if things go well. I’ll start on Book II after that.
Winter First Moon of the New Year
Spent yesterday shifting to my new work schedule. A couple of hours on Ovid, plus analyzing some of Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Edited three portions of the Tailte Mythos: Book I and began clipping postings from Ancientrails to consult for my first essay in the Reimagining project.
Also learned that I can’t go to sustaining status at the MIA until I’ve had 8 years as a docent. Sustaining would cut my tour requirements in half.
This means I’m going to have duck out of the Sierra Club sooner than I had planned.
No plant starts this year. I’m going to buy already started plants and of those only those we decide to grow for particular, planned uses. We’re going to shift our gardening now toward minimalism, toward those things we’ll preserve. Two colonies of bees. Emphasizing less maintenance everywhere, planting towards a time when the gardens will need even less, eventually very little care.
Life’s focus changes as our lives change and now I’ve become focused on those kind of things only I can do. Only I can write the Tailte books. Only I can set down my scattered thoughts about a sort 0f ur-faith, a common reverence all of us on the planet might share. Others might/will translate Ovid, but only I will work toward a beginner’s level commentary, one similar to Pharr’s commentary on Vergil.
Not sure why now for this shift except to say that I know my time is finite. Yes, it always has been, that’s true, but now it seems existential. No, I’m not covering something up here, I’m not ill, in fact, I just got a set of labs that Kate says are typical of a 40 year old.
Long ago, in my 20’s, I read an article about when certain professions reach their maturity. You know the material about mathematicians and scientists, early ripe, but certain other professions matured much later, writers and artists, for example, with the oldest age of maturation according to this reckoning being 50, for philosophers.
Factoring in my drinking and an early career emphasis on politics and the practical side of religion, I don’t find 65 to far out of range for me. I feel mature in my thinking and writing skills now and I need to deploy them or my unique contribution will be lost.
Winter First Moon of the New Year
At an inflection point with the Latin. Either I keep the pace I currently follow, maybe 6 hours a week; or, I ramp up, say to 10 or 12, maybe a couple of hours each day. Some analysis of other texts–maybe Caesar or Suetonius or Julian, I have all of these in Loeb Library volumes–plus more translating of the Metamorphoses. My inclination is to ramp up, do more, focus on Latin and the novel. That’s what my heart tells me.
That other project, too. The one I’ve got slotted for 5,000 word essays each month next year. Where I’m going to give voice to my whirling ideas about the earth, about ge-ology, about what would help us help our home planet. That one, too.
When you add these things together, they constitute real work and I feel good about that, not trapped or bummed. Now all I need is a way of allocating my time so I can work them all in and still manage the art, the garden, the bees and family.
That may be my new year’s work. Pruning activities and creating a new schedule.
Winter First Moon of the New Year
The Tumblr site is up, though it has very few postings right now. That will change over the next few weeks and the initial postings may change, too, as I use the new theme more. You can access the site through the link, Ancient of Trails, found at the top of the right hand column here.
Why another blog? Tumblr allows for much easier posting of photos and emphasizes them over print. We have a large number of photographs and I need the impetus to organize and fiddle with them. In late January I’m taking a two session class on Adobe Photoshop, then another later in February. In March and April I plan to learn two more Adobe programs. I bought an Adobe Creative Suite last fall before the cruise but the programs are too complicated to use without some training upfront.
All of this, too, ancientrails and ancient of trails, will leave cyber footprints for children and grand-children, a way to look back at Grandpa and Grandma, see what they were up to back when computers actually sat on desktops, folks still had landlines and watched broadcast tv. You know, the old days.
Starting in January I’m going to begin mining ancientrails for a 2012 writing project, one 5,000+ word essay a month, so there are additional uses for them, too. Thanks for reading, time to start doing some Latin.
Samain Moon of the Winter Solstice
Today, the novel. Rereading old work, this material is from the beginning of this year, has an odd flavor. Some of it I read and, boy, what was I thinking? The pencil scratches out words, lines, paragraphs. Sections get moved, some eliminated. Other parts. Hmmm. The bones of something is here, not all bad.
This world, Tailte and the mythos of the Great Goddess, has an expansiveness to it, a rich and textured feeling, as if I might write in it for a long time. That aspect of this work feels very good.
Rereading though goes slowly and until I’m done I won’t start writing new material. I have about 2/3’s of the novel written, maybe a little less. If all goes well, I might have a manuscript finished by May. Then, I’ll set it aside for another six months and return to either Superior Wolf or Jennie’s Dead, two novels I’ve had underway for several years.
The other feeling, maybe inescapable unless you write like Maughm, Kafka, Tolstoy, is the considerable insignificance of the work. It feels small, as if the world it is in might matter too little, be of too small a consequence.
No writer can make that judgment for their own work, no artist can, but the thought of laboring for years and cranking out filler, well, that can be deadly. At times this notion, the matter of mattering, has stopped me. Knocked me out cold. Sent me to reading or politics or volunteering at the art museum or growing a vegetable garden.
Not this time. In the end this is my work. For whatever value it has beyond me, it is my work and it is the best that I can do. That’s enough. It has to be.
Lughnasa Waning Harvest Moon
The museum (MIA) has us check out when we’re going to be gone over our tour days, so I’ve checked out from mid-October through early December. I’ve not had many tours in August and none in September, just one in October.
That, plus the relatively light schedule for the Sierra Club–the legislature doesn’t convene until February, so no weekly meetings–has given me plenty of time for the late garden work with time left over rearranging the downstairs and reconfiguring my study.
Yesterday I finished swapping out books from the bookcase nearest to my desk. The desk and the bookcase form the sides of a U, with the bottom of the U created by the computer workstation. On this bookcase I had collected various art and art history texts as the docent years had gone on, but they were works I did not reference frequently.
What I need near the desk are books I pull off for work. It’s a working bookcase, not a storage unit. Now I have near me all my Latin dictionaries, commentaries, grammars and readers; various style manuals like The Chicago, a thesaurus and english grammars plus books on writing. The works I use most after the latin texts are the oxford dictionary of art, the oxford dictionary of philosophy and the oxford english dictionary.
On the bottom most shelf I have notebooks from docent training and several comprehensive art history texts.
I do have a shelf devoted to a long term project which I’ve shorthanded Ge-ology. This project has its own page on this website, but I’ve let it dangle, as I have the ecological history of Lake Superior. Here’s the summary: This work will gather various strands from ecology, environmental movements, pagan and neo-pagan faiths, literature, art and philosophy. It will weave those strands into a faith indigenous to the Midwest (and most other places) and universal to Ge.
Having at least some key texts near to hand may spur down time work on Ge-ology. Oh, hell, why not go for it? It will produce work.
There are still a few book stacks on the floor and this and that to find new places for, but I’ll finish that today. Ready for winter.
Lughnasa Waning Harvest Moon
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” – Aristotle
While the empirical method, the theory of falsifiability and scientific rigor make it an article of faith that scientists will entertain thoughts with which they may not agree, it is even more important that in the world outside the realm of science: politics, art, sports, religion, literature, psychological therapies and commerce for example, that we insist on considering the opinions and beliefs of others without subordinating ourselves to them.
Why more important? Because these are the realms in which we live our lives. The realms of home, work, play, faith, leisure and citizenship. The crucial realms. Science is but a helpmate, a maidservant to these much more central human activities. Science gives us tools to use, like this computer on which I work and the communication network on which you read this, but the tool does not write the words, think the thoughts, feel the feelings.
Science gives us a clearer and clearer picture of our world, the fundamental physical and biological components of it, but science fails when it steps into such everyday, yet critical arenas like defining life, the meaning of life, the decision between a good use of nuclear power and a dangerous one, identifying the beautiful or the just, embracing love.
It is in these fuzzier areas, the areas marked by complexity and uncertainty, that the humanities come into focus. The humanities allow us, demand really, to search the experience of humans who have lived before us or who live now. We search their experiences and their thoughts and dreams through books, movies, paintings, sculpture, music, political structures, even through the medium of a blog such as this one.
We then face the always daunting task of exegesis, that is, making sense of the thought or experience in its original context, and after this challenge, we face the even more critical task of hermeneutics, applying the wisdom of the past or of others in other places, to our own situations.
Only when we can entertain the thoughts of others, often alien others, alien due to era or geography or culture, can we examine our own lives and situations in a broader context. In that broader context we can see new or different ways to handle the problems we face today.