Category Archives: Writing

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, World History, Writing

Onion Drying, the Next Stage

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72  bar steady 29.81 1mph NE dew-point 65  sunrise 6:00  sunset 8:37  Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

A writing day so far.  I have started writing Heresy Moves West.  It will take a bit longer than I imagined, maybe quite a bit, because I have this propensity to place things in context, deep context.  In this case for example I have established the Protestant Reformation as the sine qua non of the development of Unitarianism and its westward expansion, at least I have established that to my content.   Not too much further along I intend to swing back to Abraham who listened to YHWH and left his Canaanite Gods for monotheism.  Since you can not just go back into the past and then jump into the present, the intervening time takes a paragraph or two (at least) to describe, and all this in service of the actual topic, the history of Unitarian and Universalist churches in Minnesota.

Why do I do this?  Sheer cussedness in part.  Simplistic explanations that ignore real historical paths irritate me.  I do not like to emulate them.  That means rooting my thesis about U-U expansion in Minnesota in the soils from which it sprang.  They have lots of topsoil, gathered from diverse times and places.  The process is sort of like archaeology.  In order to explain the top, most recent layer of artifacts requires continuing to dig down, down, down until the physical culture either stops or changes to something completely different.

Anyhow, all this means I’ll be writing for some time, maybe as long as 2 or 3 days.  That eats into posting time.  So, for the next few days it might be a little sparse here.  Might not.

In the past week AncienTrails had 2100 unique visits, about 300 a day.  You are not alone.

Kate and I carried the old sliding door screen into the front shed.  We had to take all the onions off it to get it inside, then move the onions back on it.  In addition I had to remove the remaining stalks so my hands smell like onions.  The onions must remain in the shed for two to three weeks, then they will go in tangerine crates.  Once in the crates the onions will await their turn in the kitchen on an old book shelf in the furnace room.  The garlic hangs not far from their future home.

When dead heading the last of the Lilium today, I found one that had bulbils.  These form at the junction between stalk and leaf.  They are another means of propagating lilies.  I will cut this plant down and use the bulbils inside to create stock for next spring.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Weather +Climate, Writing

Spaghetti Squash and a Scimitar Cucumber

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81  bar steady 29.93 1mph NE  dew-point 51  sunrise 5:59  sunset 8:38

New (Corn) Moon

Tao is the way without a way;
It is the path with no tracks.
You start walking the way of Tao when you erase anything – good or bad – you learned about Tao.

“If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.” – Wilson Mizner

This quote from Mizner amuses me since I’ve just read many authors to tease out the history of Unitarian and Universalist churches in Minnesota.  Research, not plagiarism.   I put down Freedom Moves West this morning after read it, mostly, from beginning to end.  It is rare when researching a topic as outside the mainstream as this one to find a whole book exactly on point by Freedom Moves West is such a book.  It offers up the history of the Western Unitarian Conference from 1852 to 1952, the period when Minnesota churches came into being and the context nationally and regionally that surrounded their creation.

Of course, such a lot of material on point requires a good deal of sifting and weighing, matching with other sources, like church histories written by individual congregation, still it provides an overall narrative that makes the whole task better.

After my nap, I plan to sit down and organize my notes and thoughts on Heresy Moves West (yes, I sort of borrowed the notion from the book).  If I can, I hope to get to writing.  If not, tomorrow.  That will feel good.

Last night I harvested a spaghetti squash and a long, scimitar shaped cucumber.  This morning I pulled golden beets and Nante carrots.  Later on I’ll pluck one of the drying onions off the screen and a head of garlic to use in cooking supper.  This will be a vegetarian meal, one made in  honor and celebration of Lughnasa.  Celtic holy days lasted a week or more, occasioned as they usually were by markets, dances, rituals and general collectivity.

A lovely, blue sky day with reasonable dew-point and temperature.  Good deal.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Writing

A Bell That Cannot Be Unrung

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61  bar rises 29.87  0mph N dew-point 53  sunrise 5:59  sunset 8:39  Lughnasa

New (Corn) Moon

Outside tonight the sky has no moon.  This illustrates the paradoxical nature of light.  We think of light as illumination enabling us to see, but it has another, not often recognized property; it can obscure as well as reveal.   The night sky during the dark moon shines with stars, many invisible when the moon is brightest.  A cool night with a clear sky, a panoply of stars, ancient messages from faraway places gives a northern summer its true character.  Able to burn with heat in the daytime, the northern summer can cool down, remind us of the coming fall, just as Lughnasa, the Celtic first fruits holy day does.  A convergence of a new moon, Lughnasa and cooling temperatures make this a night made for myth.

The research for Heresy Moves West will probably end tomorrow.  I hope I can get at writing, too, but I doubt it.  Sunday.  This is a big task, one I set for myself, but I’d like to get a first draft done, so I can set it aside for awhile.  I have Stefan’s poems to edit and the Africa tour, too.  Not to mention a firepit to dig, hemerocallis iris and lilium to move.

A piece of this project troubles me.  Maybe troubles is not the right word, provokes, that could be it.  When Channing and the others split from the Standing Order Calvinist orthodoxy in New England, they started a cascade of controversy that has not ended.  Not long after the Unitarians had left the congregationalists behind, Emerson began writing his essays and giving his lectures.  With the strong push Transcendentalism got from Theodore Parker, there was soon a split over natural religion versus theistic religion.  The Civil War obscured this problem for the first half of the 1860’s, but it re-emerged as the Western issue as the more radical, Parkerite ministers began to dominate the Western Unitarian Conference.  This led to constant conflict with Eastern conservatives (used to denote those who wanted to retain Jesus as Christ, keeping Unitarianism’s original perception of itself as liberal Christianity).  The Free Religious Association and The Ethical Culture movement kept the Western issue alive in the east.  This split healed with a broad understanding of liberal religion, only to be sundered again in the 1920’s with the rise of humanism.  Humanism set aside theism for good in the interest of a scientific and humanistic approach to the ethical life.

Here’s the problem.  Conservatives predicted the gradual erosion of religious sentiment if there was not at least the glue of Jesus to hold the center.  Their predictions came true as the shift away from theism took its incremental, but, looking backward, inevitable progress toward an essentially secular movement focused on ethical living.  This leaves the field free for radical inquiry into the nature of the human experience.  A great, not small thing.

But, it can lose the faith that burns in the heart, that seeks the reality next to or beyond this reality; it can lose it in the same kind of scientistic move that linguistic analysis made, that Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris make.  It is, though, a bell that cannot be unrung, so we must seek this faith that burns in the heart elsewhere than in tradition.  Good.  Emerson thought so, too.  The question is, where?

Investigating this question will occupy some time, perhaps the next few years.

When I went out to check the drying onions, I found one with a bit of a soft spot.  I brought it inside to cut up for a salad for lunch.  Cut open I put my fingers on the white flesh.  It was very warm, almost hot.  That drying would take place inside the onion had not occurred to me.

Great Work, Memories, Politics, Writing

The History of Ideas

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75  bar falls 29.90  0mph ESE dew-point 60 sunrise 5:49  sunset 8:49  Summer

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

The mayfly lives only one day.  And sometimes it rains.    George Carlin, RIP

Freud, Marx and Hegel expelled from school.  The article to which the first sentence here links refers to the strange disappearance from the college curriculum of these three seminal thinkers in psychology, economy and philosophy.

Here’s an e-mail I sent to its author:

Hello, Mr. Jacoby,

In 1965 I began the study of philosophy with the pre-Socratics, moved onto Plato and Aristotle, and then on toward the present.  The early study of philosophy excited me so much I chose it as my major.  The methodology, the history of ideas, has remained with me as the most important intellectual tool I have.  When I switched schools, I entered a school dominated by logical positivists.  The most important and interesting questions of philosophy, questions which mattered to individuals and to public discourse did not matter to this department.  I left philosophy behind, sad that it refused to engage matters of ontology, values and beauty. 

I write to you because I felt then what the gist of your Chronicle of Higher Education article suggests is a contemporary problem.  It is a problem with its roots, I believe, in the logical positivist and linguistic analysis movements which tried to align philosophy with the scientific method.  There would have been nothing wrong with this as an adjunct discipline, but the arrogant dismissal of metaphysics, for example, for reliance on what I would call a shallow epistemology gutted philosophy of its humanist core.

This same attempt to bring economics and psychology into the scientific realm, and sociology too for that matter, has identical problems.  The quantifiable in these disciplines is fine and produces important insights, but, again, the core of these disciplines, with the possible exception of economics, is humanistic, not scientific. 

Your article reminded me of those long ago days when I moved on to anthropology.  The dismissal of historical perspective leaves us with the need to reinvent all those old arguments and to approach their resolution without the aid of some of humankinds most creative thinkers.  Too bad.

As I grow older, history looms ever higher and higher in my intellectual pursuits.   As I said in the e-mail to Mr. Jacoby, the history of ideas, learned during classwork for my philosophy major, has informed everything  I do.  I gravitate naturally at this stage of my life toward the historical record.  Where did that word originate?  How has it been modified over time?  Where did this artistic movement come from and what questions did it try to answer?  What are the roots of the so-called New Age thinking?  Why are not its current proponents interested in its intellectual history?  What is the source of liberal and conservative political thought and how does their history help us modify them to fit present needs?  Why is the issue of climate change such a problematic one?  What in the history of humanities relationship to the natural order created such a situation?

These are the questions that get me up in the morning, that drive my decision making about what to do with my time and how to direct my own work.

 

 

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Literature, Politics, Writing

Steamed Dumplings Stuffed With Yak

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78  bar steady  30.03  0mph ENE dew-point 56  Summer, warm and sunny

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

A trifecta.  In to Minnehaha.  Back to Andover.  In to Kenwood.  Back to Andover.  In to Sierra Club and the MIA.  Back to Andover.  Geez.  As I said, I gotta check with my scheduler.

Katarina is an intern from east Germany, Jena.  We folded letters and surveys to candidates for Minnesota House races.  She’s a bright young lady whose lucky boyfriend lives here.  They both study political science and enjoy comparing US and German culture/society.  She gave the example of her parents:  “They have never worried.  They have no debt.  They live modestly.”  She said her mother was not allowed to finish high school in the old East German regime because her husband was a mathematics professor.  If you had an intellengentsia in the home, you also had to have a proletarian.  Odd logic, even for Marxists.

After doing the mailing, I called about half a list of candidates who received the survey by e-mail last Friday.  This was just a reminder call.  Margaret Levin cajoled me into making phone calls and I’m glad she did.  It wasn’t so bad.  Of course, these were all friendly folk, too.

Across the street from the Sierra Club is the Himalaya, a Nepalese restaurant.  It was noon, so I stopped in for steamed dumplings stuffed with yak and a tasty sauce.  The next course was a soup with potatoes, black-eyed peas and bamboo shoots.  Nan accompanied this dish.  Hmmm.  I enjoy finding these small ethnic places and sampling cuisine from countries I have not visited.  Food is one of the fastest ways into a culture, even faster, because more immediate, than language.

I discussed purchasing a Nepalese thangka with the owner.  When I said I would like a Yamatanka, he said, “Oh, you like Yama?” He stuck his tongue out and down, Yama’s typical presentation. “Yes,” I said.  “Scary.”  I’ll speak with him about it again when I go in to the Sierra Club political committee meeting next Wednesday.

Before I went to the Sierra Club, I stopped at the Northern Clay Center and picked up a small plate.  It is my intention, over the next few years, to replace our Portmerion with unmatched pieces from many potters.  This is the fifth or sixth acquistion so far.

Each quarter I define a retreat.  It can be brief, three days or so, and it can be long, like the stay in Hawai’i.  I find I need to punctuate my normal routine with these caesuras or I get stale.  This habit began when I was in the ministry and I’ve found it a good carry over, so I’ve continued it.  Here’s my retreat for the fall quarter:

7/22/08   No traveling for this retreat.  I will take two weeks and stop writing, stop using the internet (except for the blog and e-mail) and study books on novel craft.  In this retreat I will create a reading program and a writing program that will guide my work for the next ten years.

Art and Culture, Great Work, Writing

A Novel Realization

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68  bar rises 30.02  2mph NE dew-point 59   Summer, cool and pleasant

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

Again this morning off to the Cities to the Sierra Club for help with a mailing and to make some phone calls, drop by the MIA.  This is three trips in two days and feels like too much.  I scheduled all this myself, too.  Hmmm, gotta speak to the person who keeps my calendar.

After finishing 48 lectures on the history of English literature yesterday, I had an odd realization.  Over the 15 plus years I have been writing, I have spent time in serious, sustained study of astronomy, liberal religion, art history and the classics.   When I say serious, sustained study, I mean time frames of years.  In the case of liberal religion over a decade.  But.  I have not devoted any appreciable and no sustained time to the study of the novel, the very form I have chosen as my own.  Strange.

So, my dream for the next stage of my life entails concentrated study of the novel, its history and craft, as well as reading more novels.  I want to write a serious, literary novel, not my next one and perhaps not the one after that, but soon, one informed by the insights and craft of others.  I might even take a college course in literature.  When in college, I refused to take literature classes, saying I could read on my own.  I have, too.   Now, though, with a different intent, I might well find literature classes instructive.

Gotta sign off and get to the Sierra Club.

Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Writing

Even Though It’s Still July

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71  bar steady 29.87  0mph ENE dew-point 62  Summer, wonderful

Full Thunder Moon

The color:  deep red, pale yellow, pink, mauve, orange, red, virgin white, flame pink with a burnt orange throat,white with a pink throat.  Scents ethereal as they are ephemeral.  The true lilies and the day lilies are in bloom.  A chaos of color.

The true lilies have a bloom architecture clean, sweeping, grand.  They have colors with hues so intense they can make the heart dance.  These are the regnant plants of this garden and this is their time.

Here’s the problem with putting stuff in writing:

“We will also finish creation of a fire-pit, family gathering area begun last fall.  These will be finished by the August date of my meeting.”  from my Woolly project notes.

Kate dug this up yesterday and reminded me of this commitment.  Sigh.  The one aspect of gardening that seems always to drain from consciousness is the July slump.  Not much gardening gets done by me in this month.  It’s too hot, too many bugs and I’ve usually worked way more than I intended in May and June.

In July I begin to need indoor time, book time and writing time.  By August things have become marginally cooler, I’ve satisfied the reading itch though probably not the writing and the bugs become tolerable.  August and September, sometimes in to mid-October can be intense gardening, too.

All this means I sometimes (always) project more completion than I will realize.   Even so, I want to finish the fire-pit, family gathering area, too.  I have not told Kate that I intend to rent the stump grinder this Wednesday, but I do.  That will clear out the roots I found lacing the fire pit hole last fall as I dug.  After some weeding, moving some sand and rock and cutting up a few logs for seats around the fire, the fire pit will be done by August 18th.  That’s the date of my Woolly meeting and Kate’s 64th birthday.

Maybe I’ll go out there right now and start pulling weeds.  Even though it’s still July.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Writing

Writing Makes Its Own Space

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66  bar steady 29.79  3mph NNW dew-point 63  Summer night, rainy day

Full Thunder Moon

We had rain and storm, tornado warning and tornado watch.  A full thunder moon day.  The rain poured down, drenching the lily blooms, forming small rivers on the wide leaves of the acorn squash.  While I read the first chapter of the book on the Western Unitarian Conference, the rain drained from the sky and onto the azalea, the begonia, the several amarylis and a bed full of hosta.  Reading a good book while it rains or snows pleases me, makes me feel at home, in place.

Kate harvested beans tonight, a few onions, too.  I used the onions with some beets I bought at Festival, delicious.  We also had a few early sugar snap peas and wax beans.  Some fish.  Some pasta with pesto made from hydroponic basil.  An evening meal.

Kate works this weekend, as she does every other weekend.  Ten days in a row, a long stretch, but she likes the four days off it gives her.  We pretend she’s retired on those days.

The Minnesota UU history piece has begun to take shape, get bones.  When there is a subject matter to master before I write, it usually takes me a while before I get a gestalt, a feel for the whole.  Once I have that I know where I need more information, or that I do not.  At that point I can sit down and write, usually in one setting.  A few days later, after its cold, I go back, reread and edit, revise.  Then I’ll put it away until I need to present it.

This one has been a bit unusual in that history requires a certain precision and accuracy with details, chronological sequence, names and places.  This means the material that I use to illustrate and make my points must get reordered to fit my needs, yet remain accurate and true.   It’s part of what I love about this kind of work.

When I have this kind of work, it pushes out everything else.  The writing work makes its own space in my life, creates openings and time for itself.  Just like this blog.  It happens each day, two to three times a day and often I do not recall having written here.  The breadcrumbs, though, are there, laid down in words and postings.

Art and Culture, Memories, Politics, Writing

Psyche’s Politics

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70  bar steady  29.87  0mph NE  dew-point 62   Summer, cloudy

Full Thunder Moon

In Kavalier and Clay, the book by Michael Chabon I referenced a few days ago, the author often talked about art and artists.  At one point he referred to the “…necessary self-betrayal of the artist.”  This was one of those phrases that slipped right under my mental fingernail and caused some pain.  I knew what he meant.

Writing is of no value if the writer plays it safe, stays inside the lines, never transgresses boundaries.  Coloring in what other people have defined as the picture on the page adds nothing to the human experience.  When our frailties or our biases or our inner logic are on display the skin limits of self get pushed aside and others can get a peek.

I read an interesting definition of art as a person turned inside out.

A flurry of domestic activity yesterday.  Though all of the budget watching, bank going, grocery shopping activities undergird our daily lives, still, they leave me feeling as if little got done.  I’m suspicious of this as male acculturation, that is, the chores do not count as masculine work, but even this suspicion does not cross out the emotional response.  This quote from a few days ago sums it up:

“Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices — just recognize them.” – Edward R. Murrow

The recovering alcoholic never leaves my side.  The recovering racist struggles on a regular basis with instant opinions formed on the basis of skin color or accent.  The let down after a day of domestic work reveals the sexist role divisions imprinted deep in my own psyche.  Kate also points out that I always drive.  Too true.

Recovering may sound like a dodge or an excuse, but it is not.  The often derided politically correct comes from those of us willing to engage in the inner struggle with the cultural assumptions we have inherited.  What recovering admits is that acculturation is forever, just like addiction.  There will, in other words, always be parts of me that diminish cooking, cleaning, balancing the checkbook as unworthy of my time.  This in spite of the many times and the many ways in which I have learned this is not true.  There will always be parts of me that attach secondary characteristics to skin color or age or sex.  There will always be parts of me that trade on the unearned advantage I get from being white, male and American.

My responsibility as a conscious adult lies in owning up to who and what I am, then choosing a different response.  I may not be responsible for the sexist acculturation I received growing up, but I am responsible for the choices I make when it raises its head.

This willingness to throw one’s self into struggle, not for a day or a week, but a lifetime infects the people effected by the creative turmoil of the 60’s and 70’s.   Certainly others of other times, too, but the immersion in those days when the old ways were no longer viable, but the new ways had not yet arrived created a mass of people who came to question their basic assumptions about reality; question assumptions about realities so intimate as the nature of love, the immediate reaction to another, so often unquestioned.  This struggle brought politics to the bedroom as well as the boardroom, to the kitchen counter as well as the lunch counter, to the front room as well as the class room.

There is bravery here, foolishness, too; but, it is the foolishness of the wise fool, willing to risk self for the sake of the other.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Writing

Showing Up

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79  bar falls 29.88  0mph NE  dew-point 53   Summer evening

Full Thunder Moon

Next weekend is the Ellis cousin reunion in Mineola, Texas.  Kate and I fly down on Friday, back on Sunday.  A short visit to the really hot weather.  All the folks of my father’s generation on the Ellis side, that is his siblings and their mates, are dead.  This is cousins and their kids and grandkids.

Though I was born in Duncan, Oklahoma I know the Ellis side of the family less well than the Keaton (mom’s side).  We moved from Oklahoma when I was only year and a half or so to Indiana, mom’s home state.  I want to get to know them better.  They are family, after all, a main connection to the past and through it to the future.  Like much in this life family is about showing up.  Otherwise, no family.

Kate had a lot of charts to do today, so I did the errands.  We had lunch, a nap and a business meeting.  We have overshot our travel budget, by a good ways.  If she failed to earn the big bonuses, we would have had to pull in the belt a bit.  We discussed ways to stay on budget.  Important and not always easy for us.

Got in the mail today Freedom Moves West, a whole book on the Western Unitarian Conference. It may contain enough information that I won’t have to go to the Minnesota History Center.  More and more I look at Amazon and on-line shopping as a way to save trips and therefore fuel.  Budgeting trips into the city is something I’ve not done too much.  I just hop in the car and go.  Nowadays though I think.  Try to put two things together.

Next Tuesday I go in to help with a Sierra Club mailing.  That day I’ll visit the museum and head over to the Minnesota History Center if I need to find anything there.  Like that.