Category Archives: Writing

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Friends, Great Work, Health, Humanities, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

When Do Many Avocations Become a Vocation?

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Beltane                                       Waning Flower Moon

Beekeeping, it seems to me, must always fall under the avocational** rather than hobby* definition, because it engages one’s time in a manner similar to an occupation, only perhaps not in as time intensive a way.  Under the latter definition I have an avocational interest in gardening, writing, art, religion, politics and now Latin.
Add them all together, as I do in my life, and the result is a vocation composed of many parts integrated through my particular participation in them.

I like the idea of a hobby as an Old World falcon, that is, engaging the world with grace and speed, stooping now and then to pluck a prize from the earth below then returning to some nest high and remote to enjoy it.

Whoa.  Worked out last night at the new, amped up level, after advice given to me by an exercise physiologist.  My polar tech watch which monitors my heart rate began to fade so I didn’t have a reliable way of checking my heart rate.   Guess I overworked myself because when I finished dizziness hit me and nausea soon followed.  Kate was home last night so she took care of me, eventually giving me a tab of my anti-nausea med.  That calmed things down, but didn’t put me right.  So I went to bed early.  Even this morning my stomach was sore, like someone had removed it and wrung it out like a dish rag.  Kate says I may have too little fluid during the day yesterday combined with salty foods.  Combined with the more vigorous workout it upset my body’s homeostasis.  It put me temporarily in the same place as the benign positional vertigo.  No fun.  No fun at all.

Lunch today with Paul Strickland.  He still doesn’t know for sure why his hemoglobin levels dropped so far.  He had a five-hour iron infusion last week and his color is better as are other symptoms.  We talked about his and Sarah’s place in Maine which has the possibility of a large LNG port being created nearby.  This is Eastport, Maine, roughly, and borders Canada, so the Canadian government has a voice as well as environmental groups.  Sounds horrific, an example of big corporate power taking on a relatively weak local government.  Bastards.

More sleep after.  I have returned to near normal but I’m going to skip the workout tonight just to be sure.

I have never sought nor do I plan to seek retirement though most folks would call me retired and I so call myself at times in order to give folks a handle easily understood.

At 6:00 pm I’m going to my first meeting of the Minnesota Hobby Beekeeper’s Association. It raises an interesting question for me about the difference between a hobby and an avocation.

The first two definitions here are of the word hobby:

*1. Etymology: Middle English hoby, from Anglo-French hobel, hobé
Date: 15th century

: a small Old World falcon (Falco subbuteo) that is dark blue above and white below with dark streaking on the breast

2. Etymology: short for hobbyhorse
Date: 1816
This one comes from an entry on avocation:

: a pursuit outside one’s regular occupation engaged in especially for relaxation

** Etymology: Latin avocation-, avocatio, from avocare to call away, from ab- + vocare to call, from voc-, vox voice — more at voice
Date: circa 1617   : a subordinate occupation pursued in addition to one’s vocation especially for enjoyment
Aging, Humanities, Memories, Writing

Scribo, ergo sum.

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Spring                                           Awakening Moon

An outside day today.  Planting onions, garden planning and repair.  I’m itchy to get back to learning more Latin and translating the Metamorphoses, but the rhythm of nature waits for no one.

Writing is always an exercise in self-disclosure, no matter what kind of writing you do.  The subjects you pick, the ones you don’t, the style you use, the one you avoid, the words you choose, the ones you don’t know all reveal inner workings most folks prefer to keep to themselves.  Even with my modest public writing–this blog, sermons, the Sierra Club Blog last year for example, I’ve gotten the occasional emotional jolt that comes when the inside becomes the outside.

If you click on the comments about John Lampl, you’ll see an example of what I mean.  This comment came right out of left field, a comment about a post I’d written a year and a half ago about events in my life that happened, let’s see now, 36 years ago.  36 years.  What’s amazing about that is the rocket ride back to feelings of the past, that particular past, I went on when I read the post.

To gauge the difficulties of those years is like comparing a Caterpillar 73f to a Tonka Truck.  Today is a Tonka Truck life in terms of angst.  Those days I bled angst from every pore.  I married a wonderful young woman, Judy Merritt, at the height of the sixties, 1969.  We got married on an Indian mound in Anderson, Indiana, received two pounds of marijuana as a wedding present and recessed to I’m So Glad by the Cream.  Butterflies landed on my shoulder.  Really.  Five years later my alcoholism had grown worse–ironically during my time in seminary–and I pushed Judy away.  No wonder Johnnie was there to catch her.

There is, too, an inescapable amount of self-absorption in writing.  I’ve kept journals for years, I have three bookshelves lined with them.  The last five years I’ve kept much of my journal-type writing on line in this blog and its Frontpage predecessor.

This post made me wonder why I do this.  Not from an, oh my god why did I ever do this perspective, but from a Why do I do this point of view.   The easiest and probably the truest explanation is that it is just what I do.  I write.  I write about politics, about fantasy worlds I create, about my life, about thinking through the liberal faith tradition, about art.  My dad wrote.  I write.

Scribo, ergo sum.

Art and Culture, Writing

A Grand Tour

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Imbolc                             Waning Wild Moon

I took folks on a Grand Tour at the MIA this afternoon, seeing objects from the historical period 1600-1850.  I expanded the Grand Tour idea and took it beyond the confines of Italy and France to include North America, Africa and Asia.  The folks on the tour, five, Allison and four women together, and I traveled the world in a little over an hour.

One of the women, an ICU nurse at Southdale, said of Lucretia, she looks she’s trying to stabilize herself.  This from a person who sees people in extremis every day at work.  I’m inclined to believe now that Lucretia is stabilizing herself.  This same woman, a practical woman of science and data, she described herself this way, has a son who has begun to study the Middle Ages.  She seemed a bit puzzled by his choice and wondered about just what the Middle Ages were.  Allison gave the group a pitch about bringing in friends for tours and she wondered about organizing a tour of medieval art, to learn more about what her son had chosen to study.

The tour at 1 o’clock breaks up the day though and I got a late nap and didn’t get on the treadmill until 6 pm.  The writing this  morning was fine, but the time was too short.  When I  write I like to have a clear morning and time for a nap in the afternoon.  Not so today.  I’m now over 50,000 words into the new novel, which should be about midway.  Revision and changes along the way could change that of course.

Letters, Writing

An Author New To Me

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Imbolc                               Full Wild Moon

An unusual day for me.  Up early, I got downstairs and had my 1,500 words in before 11:30.  I fed the dogs and began reading a short story, Duel, by Heinrich von Kleist, a German writer.  I read a remark about his work, that it was among the best in the German language, probably the best in the 19th century.  The writer of the article compared Kleist to Borges and said though that the author closest to him was Franz Kafka.  OK.  Borges and Kafka are two of my literary gods.  Kleist never wrote anything longer than a novella, didn’t leave much at all, a few short works, some plays and some anecdotes.  Someone collected them in one book.

This guy amazed me, as he would anyone, by the density and length of his sentences; yet also he impresses with their clarity and the fact that each phrase pushes the story further, not only further, but in a direction not predictable from what has gone before.  This story is maybe 12 pages long, but I didn’t get far in it, so mesmerized was I by his language.

Kate brought home lunch.  We ate.  I took a nap that knocked me out of the nuclear moratorium hearing today at the capitol.  I find myself increasingly unwilling to go into town for single events in the afternoon.  I wish it weren’t so, but there it is.

Then I worked on my 1600-1850 tour and this and thatted around until I missed my exercise.  I almost never miss exercise and never when I have the time.  Yet I did tonight.  It felt very transgressive.  Anyhow, I’m done with the night and we’ll start over tomorrow.  One good thing about exercise and me is that I have been at it long enough that missed nights, even missed weeks don’t throw me off.  I get right back up and start again.

Humanities, Letters, Writing

Books

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Imbolc                                Waxing Wild Moon

Bill Schmidt made me aware of this video:  Muslim Demographics.  He included the link to it within the Snopes website: http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/demographics.asp.

If you’re not familiar with Snopes, it tracks down information on claims made in videos, e-mails, the news and attempts to determine the truth or error in them.  In the case of this video, apparently by an evangelical Christian group, Muslims take over the world due to superior birth rates.  If you know anything about demographics, you would distrust the claims in the video on face value, but Snopes makes clear why the claims are alarmist rather than accurate.

Not to steal a march on them, but the biggest error is the assumption that high birthrates in the Muslim community, where they exist, will remain the same.  Increased income and the education of women depress birth rates, for example.

Books.  Gotta love’em.  Can’t live without’em, even with the Kindle.  I had some money saved and our mutual budget kicked in a third and I bought the entire Grove Dictionary of Art on sale.  It came yesterday in five boxes, each of which weighed 36 pounds.  Heavy, man.  They now have pride of place on the top shelf of a three tier bookshelf to the left of my desk.  I feel smarter already, just having them close by.

As I moved books around to accommodate them, I took note of those areas in which I have long term interest:  the enlightenment and its affects on contemporary life, especially politics and religion; our relationship with the planet and our particular places in it; poetry, China, Japan, India, mythology, fairy tales, art history, philosophy, transcendentalism and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the history of religion, water, war, American history, especially the Northwest territory, Asian art, magic, gardening, the Renaissance, spirituality, travel, Jungian psychology, the intelligence agencies, science, especially the history of science and ways we celebrate the apparent flow of time.

OK.  It’s broad, I admit.  But it’s not everything in the world.  I do have specific interests.  Just a number of them.

Some day I’ll explore those areas in depth, greater depth than I’ve achieved so far, anyhow.


Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Writing

Gonna Take That Wild Last Ride

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Imbolc                                         Waxing Wild Moon

Back at the novel today, 1,800 words.  There’s an uphill struggle to get back in the groove when I let a week or so slip by with no work on it.  Like navigating the turns in the fast luge track at Whistler, I get stuck at the start, but once the momentum picks up, I can dive into a chicane with confidence.  Back at it now headed down the track.

Self confidence is so fragile, at least for me, and I expect for many of us.  If I could graph mine’s rise and fall even in the course of a day, it would mimic a wild stock ride, selling up at one moment, then a run and a price in sudden decline.  And then the reverse.  Again.  Even now.

Example.  I came downstairs feeling pretty good about getting back to the novel.  Granted I skipped exercise tonight to keep on writing, but overall that felt good.  Then I went on Amazon’s website to check out an author Mark Odegard recommended, Dan Simmons.  Sure enough, he’s doing stuff enough like what I’m trying to do to make me nervous.  He’s already sold a lot.  I haven’t.

Now there’s a steadier core that chugs alone just underneath all this oscillation–the ego worried about its reception in the world–and that core is the one that, walking the garbage and recycling out tonight under a gorgeous waxing wild moon, reflected that no matter how gifted and accomplished, we all die, then sink away into oblivion.  Yes, a few don’t–Homer, Socrates, Qin Shi Huangdi, Confucius, Emily Dickinson, Boadicea, Teresea of Avila, Pancho Villa, Montezuma, Geronimo, Einstein, Chopin, Bach, Da Vinci for example–but the bulk of us, the 99.999999% of all who have ever lived, live in the best way we can, then slowly fade, first in body, then in memory, then we’re gone.

This one knows that the best life is the one we live on our own terms, not on borrowed hopes and dreams and not judged by externalities.  At 63 the core has become stronger and stronger, often balancing the ego’s surges and falls before they happen, but it is not yet dominant, at least not all of the time.  The devil of expectations still sticks a pitchfork into my ego every once and a while.  Predictably, my ego squeals.

If you have a chance tomorrow night, go outside and look at the moon around 9:00 pm if the night is clear.  The moon sat up there in the sky tonight, Orion off to its southeast, other stars around it like diamonds around a fat, lustrous pearl.  A work of art that needs no hand, but satisfies the eye.

Dogs, Family, Humanities, Letters, Writing

The Week So Far

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Imbolc                                       Waxing Wild Moon

Another day in the world of ancient Rome.  Translation continues to be fairly easy for me, though there are certain cases that give some trouble.  So far my learning has kept pace with the chapters.  I hope that continues.

Kate got pretty weary at work on Monday.  She saw too many patients.  She’s rebounded today, though and I think that’s a good sign for the future.

Kona, our largest whippet, has a fancy yellow bandage on her right rear leg after having what we believe is a benign growth removed yesterday.   She also has a water resistant sleeve over it, the Medi-Paw, that allows her to go outside.  A good thing.  Like most dogs I’ve known she simply ignores whatever discomfort she’s experiencing and does most of what she did before.  I was laid up for two months plus after my achilles surgery.

Now a bit on the novel.  Decided I had to start writing again, even though I’m revising, too.  I feel too disconnected from its flow.  Revising is important, but it doesn’t feel like an organic part of the process for me, at least not yet.

Family, Health, Weather +Climate, Writing

Frosty Saturday

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Imbolc                              New Moon (Wild)

Outside temp is 11.6 degrees and the dewpoint is around 9.  With them so close together, we have two phenomenon at once: more hoarfrost as the water precipitates out on shrubs, tree limbs, fences, porch rails, then freezes and fog.  Visibility is low here and the same conditions which create hoarfrost makes roads slick.  An odd combination.  We also have what looks like snow, but I think is actually flakes forming near the ground as cool air freezes water vapor.  Fog is a cloud on or near the earth so we could be witnessing outside what usually happens in the skies above us.

After printing out 40,000 words of new novel (redundant), which represents all I’ve written so far, I decided this was a good time to revise, go back, get familiar with its arc again after a week off.  That’s underway now.

It’s also Saturday, grocery day.  I can go any day of the week I want, but my patterning about grocery shopping on Saturday is very strong.  I know it, but don’t change it.

Kate has finished her second week of work.  She has come through them in much better shape than pre-surgery, yet she is not without pain.  Her neck bothered her last night and her hip has grown progressively worse.  She thinks digging the Celica out of the snowbank last week did some damage, so she’s not taking any of this as too bad a sign just yet.  She is visibly better than before, her face less tight at the end of the work day and her movements less stiff.  Still, as she says, she’s rather retire.  Soon.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Writing

Not Known To Self

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Imbolc                             Waning Cold Moon

“It is clear Charles, you know where you are going, and knowledge is the fuel.”   a fellow Woolly

Have you ever heard of the Johari window?  Here’s a graphic that illustrates it.  The white or open box represents common information shared between yourself and others who know you. The reddish brown box contains the stuff of which you are aware, but have shared with no one.  The third box is the one I’m interested in here, the green box.  It contains material not known to you, but known to others.  This is information to which you are blind for one reason or another, yet is apparent to at least one other.

This comment from a Woolly falls in the blind box for me.  Or maybe not.  A bit hard to tell.

It did make me reflect.  If someone else thinks where I’m going is clear, why would they think that?  Do I really know where I’m going?  Why is knowledge the fuel?

Here’s what came to me, after rolling the idea around for a week or so.

Long ago, perhaps in adolescence, the notion of a liberal arts education became central to my personal project.  How did it get there? It may have been my parents, could have been teachers, might even have been a minister, perhaps all of these plus things I read. The notion of a broad and deep education in the humanities, an education that began at least by the time of college.  There exposure to the great ideas, to the breadth of the human experience, to literature, art, music, theatre would open up a way of perception.  Perception that would inform life, even create a life.

There’s a lot more to this, but I’m tired.  Later.

Aging, Humanities, Letters, Writing

Back To School

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Imbolc                                  Waning Cold Moon

The snow has stopped.  Our neighbors, the Perlich’s, had relatives visiting today with snowmobiles which they happily drove on the Perlich’s lot.  I hope it was to make Greg feel better.   By city ordinance snowmobiles cannot come below a street about a mile north of us, but in this situation I won’t complain.

Chapters 2 and 3 in Wheelock completed.  That means I’ve copied declensions for 1st and second declension nouns, taken a shot at learning them, but count on repetition over time to cement the case endings.  I’ve also read about grammar, syntax and word order.   Then Wheelock has sentences from Latin writers like Horace, Catullus, Phaedres.  My job is to translate them.  At the end of the Latin sentences are sentences in English to be translated into Latin.  After this, once for each chapter, there is a paragraph, again from a Latin man of letters.  Today it was Horace.  I don’t recall yesterday’s.

This work demands nose to the grind stone type studying.  Create flash cards.  Review flash cards.  Copy declensions.  Use declensions.  Learn grammar.  Use grammar.  Translate from and into.  It feels like real studying, which it is, I guess.

So far, I like it.  A lot, actually.  In fact I’m a little surprised at how much I like it.

The novel  keeps on spooling out, nearing mid-way or somewhere close.  I plan to write on it during the retreat using my handy net book and my take along keyboard.  I suppose I’ll study some Latin there, too.  Very appropriate at a Benedictine monastery where Latin is still a living language.  Sort of.