Category Archives: Memories

Faith and Spirituality, Memories, Weather +Climate

Home and Heart

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winter-solstice-08cbe2.jpg1  bar steep rise 30.42  WSW0   windchill 1  Winter

Waxing Crescent of the Wolf Moon

Oh, man.  To get the trash out I had to blow the snow.  Underneath the snow is ice.  The snowblower with its knobby tires spun out and the only reason I stayed on my feet was the firm grip I had on the snowblower.  Never before had taking out the trash had a hint of danger to it.  Tonight it did.  After the snowblower and I went slip sliding away, I still had to roll both the trash containers down the long slope of our driveway.  Risky business.  Made it ok.

In doing research for Homecomer I looked back over many of my sermons for Groveland and noticed that I’ve written several that deal with home as an idea.  Home has a certain poignancy for me, since my estrangement from my father and his subsequent marriage to a woman who made the problem worse.  The town and the house where I grew up seem faraway to me, as if the warm and comfortable feelings associated with home got eaten away by the acids of my family quarrel.

The rightness or wrongness of it all has long been moot, yet the hollowness with which I’m left when it comes to home and nuclear family must have lead me to consider this theme.  It is a rich concept, one with so many layers and metaphorical possibilities that I have not tired of it.

Perhaps out of this search of mine for home I’ll  find ideas useful to others.  The current environmental crisis both has its roots in and is made more intractable by our American sense of mobility, of looking over the next horizon for a new frontier.  This makes it hard to learn about the home that greets us each evening.  Well, more on that in Homecomer.

The cold has come again and that will make the sleeping even better.

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Memories, Myth and Story

At 50, What Next?

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3  bar steep drop 30.16  0mph  NE  windchill 3  Samhain

Waning Gibbous Moon of Long Nights

My brother Mark asked me my thoughts on turning 50.  This April 11th he has his 50th.  By then it will be, as it always is, twelve years since I had that birthday.

Twelve years ago is a long time and when I first started to answer Carl Jung came up.  He should have, but not in the positive way I had in mind.  I began that piece by reflecting on Jung’s notion of life’s  two halves:  an external, career and family half followed by an interior, reflective and calmer half.  Hmmm.  But that was the upbeat spin.

How Jung came into my turning 50 is less philosophical.  In 1996 I shifted my credentials from the Presybterian church to the Unitarian-Universalist.  In 1997, my 50th year, I had to take an internship to qualify for recognition.  I did.  Unity Church Unitarian (no relation to the Unity movement) in St. Paul and First Unitarian in Minneapolis both offered me internships.

It felt good to be wanted in a professional capacity again.  I had given myself 5 years to make it as a writer (with no real idea what making it meant) and I failed.  No sales.  Not even any bites.  Instead of the romantic I’ll stick with it no matter what I decided to go back to the trade I had learned.  I felt a need to earn money and to have recognition as a skilled and valuable person.

This whole episode was a mistake and a big one.  I crowned it with accepting a position as minister of development at Unity, essentially a fund-raising position.  I hate fund-raising and everything associated with it.  But I said yes because I was asked.  Pretty desparate.

That was how Jung came in.  Early on I could see I’d made a mistake but I needed to understand why.  What did it mean?  My long time analyst John Desteian, a Jungian, and I worked on it.  In the end we decided I had regressed, rather than moved forward.  I had regressed by returning to safe territory.  John said that most regressions occur because we have to go back and pick up something we needed.  In this case I needed to be reminded how much I’d wanted out of the ministry six years before and why full time ministry was a bad fit for me.

It felt wonderful to leave after the fund-raising goal had been met, an increase of 10% over the prior year.  I did it, but I did not want to do it again.

I came home and save for one brief relapse when we needed money I learned my lesson.

What was the lesson?  That the world of work and achievement had come and gone in my life.  Now I needed to pursue life itself.  That did include writing, whether I sold anything or not.  I have not.  It meant I needed to face life as myself, not as a role or job holder.

So, Mark, turning 50 for me meant a need to go back and relearn a lesson I had not grasped completely the first time around.  I don’t know what turning 50 will mean for you.  Perhaps reflecting on the expat life?  Perhaps following some abandoned or long cherised dream?  Maybe you’ll tell the story of South East Asia as only someone of your particular experience can.  Who knows?  I can tell you this.  Pay attention to what happens around this time because it has deep meaning for the rest of your life.

Friends, Memories

Seeing and Being Seen

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37  bar rises 29.59  0mph SSW  windchill 37  Samhain

Waxing Crescent Moon of the Long Nights   Day  8hr 57mn

Lunch with Lonnie.  We ate in Gallery 8, the first place in the city of Minneapolis I saw when I came to seminary in 1971.  I met Lonnie back during the Leadership Minneapolis days, probably 1983/1984, sometime in there.  She was a consultant to the program and did a good deal of work on creative leadership.

My fellow committee chair, Gary Stern, and I were so creative in our response to the question of defining leadership that the entire board got fired the next year.  Although I don’t recall the process, Gary and I facilitated that years class as it sought to understand leadership in its terms.  We all came up with love, justice and compassion as the key qualities of leadership.

Turns out the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce, sponsor of Leadership Minneapolis, did not think those terms fit their idea of leadership and cleared out the whole board the next year to start over.  They never did give us their definition, but they must have felt a little stupid when Neal Pierce, a national columnist who focused on urban issues, wrote up our effort and commended its results to a national audience.

The chair of Leadership Minneapolis that year was Sarah Strickland.  Not long after I finished my year as a participant with a year on the board (the one that got fired), Sarah’s husband, Paul, and Lonnie’s husband, Stefan invited me to join the Woolly Mammoths and the rest is hysterics.

Friends of diverse backgrounds and from different facets of life make life richer, like a soup with several ingredients.  There is the comfort of being known and knowing, of seeing and being seen.  Lunch today with Lonnie gave us both.

Today was mild.  Pleasant.

Memories

The Nature of Memory

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74  bar steady 29.96 0mph NNW dew-point 60  sunrise 6:05 sunset 8:32  Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

“Brothel owners in Bulgaria are blaming global warming for staff shortages.  They claim their best girls are working in ski resorts because a lack of snow has forced tourists to seek other pleasures.”  Metro, a British newspaper, March 2007

Now there’s a motivator for action!

In my list of very American I knew I put it out there as the world of a Midwestern white male raised in the 1950’s.  I just watched an Easy Rollins movie with Denzel Washington as Easy.  It reminded me that my view has a certain perspectival bias; that does not make it wrong, of course, just limited.   From the others point of view, a girl’s or a woman’s, Latino or Latina, Chinese or Japanese immigrant, member of a First Nation or gay turns the kaleidoscope, changes the color chips through which the nation comes into focus.  What might seem bucolic to me could be oppressive or dangerous to another.  A comfortable place depends on who seeks comfort.

I’m glad to have that reminder.

Memories

The Old Barber with the Pump Chair and Slick Black Combs in a Pink Bath

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79  bar steady 29.95  2mph N dew-p0int 60  sunrise 6:04 sunset 8:32  Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” – Thomas Paine

What does it mean to be an American?  This is the question I’ve set for the Woollies on August 18th, the gathering here.  Paine offers a perspective.  An American stands with his country in a time of trial, does not flinch from action when the stakes are high.

We’ve not had times like that often in the American experience, but enough.  The revolution.  The Civil War.  Reconstruction.  The Great Depression.  WWII.  The second Civil War, fought over Civil Rights and our presence in Vietnam.  There have been other, less heated moments, still difficult like the temperance fight and women’s suffrage, perhaps the feminist movement’s main time in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

Still, when I think of what it means to be an American I trend toward adjectives, vignettes, moments rather than political or cultural conflict.  Fireworks on the 4th of July.  Yellow school buses.  Flickering televisions.  Traffic jams.  Grocery stores with that over abundance.  Kids headed to church in ill-fitting fancy clothes. Norman Rockwell moments.  The old barber with the pump chair and the slick black combs in a pink bath surround by glass and topped by shiny metal.  Drugstores and soda fountains.  The Statue of Liberty.  The Lincoln Memorial.  The Washington monument.  American football on Friday and Saturday nights or Sunday afternoon.  Hot dogs.  Hamburgers with cheese and bacon and fries.  Baseball cards.  Comic books.  Movies.  A bright, sunshiny California dreamin.  Surfin USA.  The Grand Canyon.  The Rocky Mountains.  The Catskills.  Rip Van Winkle.  Hudson River School painters.  Walt Whitman.  Moby Dick.  The Scarlet Letter.  Those kind of things.  Muscular.  Proud.  Sacrificial. Sad.  Arrogant.  Salarymen in gray flannel suits.  Barely hanging on to the corporate ladder.  Milk in glass bottles.  The Alamo.  Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett.  Log cabins.  Maine flannel shirts and lobster.  Disney lands.  Slave ships.  The enslaved.  The Emancipation Proclamation.  The Monroe Doctrine.  The Louisiana Purchase.  The Northwest passage.  Ice cream and popsicles.

Faith and Spirituality, Memories, Weather +Climate, World History, Writing

Qin Shi Huang Di

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67  bar steady 29.97  0mph NNW dew-point 58  sunrise 6:04  sunset 8:34  Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

Last night I stood outside for a while and listened to the wind rustle the leaves of the poplars and oaks, an invisible hand caressing these giants.  Tonight stars dot the sky and the air is quiet, the temperature a cool 66 (dropped a temp since I added the info. bar above.)  These nights, summer nights, have stories that reach back in time, memories of cars pulling into neon lit drive-ins, dances in school gymnasiums and midnight rides through the countryside seeking bliss.  A special place, the summer night.

Heresy Moves West will have two parts, I see no other way unless I perform drastic surgery on the introductory material, now seven and a half pages.  My plan is to finish the second half, the stories and threads of thought that directly result in the building of liberal congregations in Minnesota.  This is, of course, the assignment I originally gave myself, but I did not know then the complex of political, theological, institutional and intellectual lines necessary to make the story comprehensible at anything more than a superficial, potted history level.  After I finish part II, then I’ll see what can be done with the whole.

The last piece of the whole considers the future, projecting a possible trajectory for the liberal faith tradition in a time of what I perceive as thinness and altogether too disparate a theological base.  Here I will begin to answer the problem I addressed in my late night post August 3rd.  Ideas have come to me of late and I have a way to go forward, at least one that makes sense to me.

In the build up to the Olympic Games the History Channel and National Geographic have run programs on Qin Shi Huang Di, the unifier and first emperor of China (Qina).  His story makes for conflicted reading or watching since he brought the dreadful warring states period to an end by subduing the seven larger states that had survived.  He also standardized weights and measures, the width of axels, coinage, language and law.  As Chinese history developed after him, both the unification and these measures of standardization contributed to China’s long continuity in culture.  In these ways he is the father of China.

He was, however, a cruel man who killed millions to achieve peace.  He killed at least a million more building the Great Wall and at least hundreds of thousands building his mausoleum. The legal system he instituted was draconian and ran against the grain of the Confucian thought world that preceded him.  His dynasty lasted only one generation beyond his and even that, from his perspective was a failure since he spent the last years of his life in a desperate search for an elixir of immortality.

Art and Culture, Friends, Literature, Memories, Politics

More Radical Than Thou

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80  bar falls 29.66  0mph E  dew-point 76!  sunrise 5:55  sunset 8:43  Summer

Waning Crescent of the Thunder Moon

Jerry Stearns sent word that he worked with rebels in Central America and served a stint as a bodyguard for Rigoberta Minchu, the Mayan activist.  This reminded me, though I don’t think it was his intent, of the old game, More Radical Than Thou.

This was a game of gotcha and it drove the Everything Matters part of the personal is political.  If I, say, was a draft resister and an anti-war marcher, you might say that you planned to go to Canada.  If I planned to go Canada, you might say you were going underground.  If I said I was going underground, you might say, me too, but I’m going to bomb federal buildings, too.  This macho ratcheting up of the stakes in a round of how far can you travel away from middle-class morality and conventional politics lasted for a long, long time.

It was an aspect of movement politics in which I always felt one step behind, never quite outré enough.  I was back then, as now, stuck with this dipolarity, radical and conservative, both alive and well, never reconciled, perhaps irreconcilable. Come to think of it this same dipolarity might have been the tense spring that kept me going back to the bar for one more round.

Nowadays I cherish this peculiarity.  I can engage radical environmental politics, continue in my radical analysis of American society while loving the MIA and my docent role there.  I can continue opposition to conservative politics while loving the classics, poetry and faith traditions.  These two poles now serve as a creative edge for me, a sort of tectonic junction where volcanoes are born and subduction feeds the volcano.  Back then I felt the need to exist on only one end of the pole, rather than embracing the tension that came from them.

More Radical Than Thou pushed me to one end of the pole.  I ended up denying, repressing the conservative part of me that wandered art museums, read Ovid and Homer and yearned for a connection with God.  Seminary and a stint as a Presbyterian minister only reversed the pressure.  While I could affirm my love of biblical study and prayer, I felt constant pressure to be more radical, to engage in more and more radical political activity.   This change from one end of the see-saw to the other was no resolution either.

Only now, in these days when the introvert has settled into a quiet writing existence have I begun to live from both ends of the dialectic.  I can work as a docent amongst the fascinating details of art history while I the Sierra Club work blossoms.  I can write novels while I search nature and the American literary tradition for a pagan faith relevant to today.  Though the Jungian analysis moved far along this ancient trail, only unconditional love can heal these splits and I have found such love in Kate. We are soulmates.

Memories

Vanished in the Smoke

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76  bar falls 29.70  0mph SSE dew-point 67  sunrise 5:55 sunset 8:44  Summer

Waning Crescent of the Thunder Moon

Echoes from the past.  Over time certain folks reconnect out of the blue.  Jerry Stearns is one.  We were part of the movement at Ball State.  Hard to believe, but we had a radical wing at this conservative midwestern teacher’s university.  We did some drugs, raised some hell.  He’s kept the faith working with Central American guerillas and medical groups like medicine sin fronteras.  He’s still at it doing hospice work now and using the money to help develop clinics with the Zapatistas and sub-commandante Marcos.  He brings word of folks I’d forgotten about long ago.

Those days.  They were so different than now.  So formative for a generation, at least a chunk of the generation.  As I’ve written elsewhere, we engaged in struggle in our own lives, with our friends and lovers, in our own communities.  The personal was political and the political personal.  It was, really, politics drugs sex and rock and roll.  We went on road trips, driving through Indiana small towns flashing the peace sign and shaking our long hair. (Yes, I realize how ridiculous this sounds now.) We smoked dope, dropped acid and listened to acid rock.  We demonstrated, wrote, loved and then disbursed.  Jerry stayed in touch with more folks as near as I can tell, but I never looked back.  After Dad and I split, I left home for Wisconsin, then Minnesota.

Intense. Those days dripped intensity.  Everything, every tiny thing mattered.  It was, for this cowboy, too much.  The more intense it got, the more I drank.  I gave up acid and marijuana early on, but I hung on to beer and whisky.  The sexual revolution kept going and going and going up until my second marriage, then it stopped until my divorce.  At which point it picked up again.  Then stopped again when I married Kate.  And happily so.

Back then I was an introvert trying to function as an extrovert.  It took a lot of chemicals and a rich dose of denial to stay at it.  When I finally woke up, I was on my second marriage, working for the Prebyterian church and wondering just what the hell I had done with my life.  Treatment brought me into contact with a new reality, my true self.  It was, though, as it often is, ten years before my maturation caught up with me after I stopped drinking.  18 off and on years of Jungian analysis.

All the drugs and sex, the politics of rage, make the true effects of those years difficult to sort out.  They were painful in so many ways, yet pain and growth are old partners.  The overall affective tone of those years has a negative valence emotionally, but a positive one in terms of commitment, struggle, victories.  So much of it vanished in smoke and the slosh of beer. I mean my memories are unreliable, in some cases extinguished, or at least very hidden.

Family, Memories, Travel

Scene of the Crash Bar-B-Q

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78  bar steady 29.79  1mph SE dew-point 65  Sunrise 5:53 Sunset 8:44pm  Summer

Waning Crescent of the Thunder Moon
This is a few of the 50+ Ellis clan who attended the 2008 reunion at rest on the back porch of the Baker’s Texas sized house and property.

ellis727500.jpg

The reunion entailed a good deal of eating and the usual amount of what have you been up to.  A few of the more memorable updates for me follow.

Jean Cate’s son Jeff and his Brazilian wife, Danielle, move to Brazil in two weeks for at least ten years.  They’ve lived in the states for some time, but after the birth of their beautiful son decided he needed immersion in Brazilian culture.  Jeff doesn’t speak Portugese, but said he’s gonna right to work on it.  The impact of the line of demarcation effects our family.

Many people had retired including Dan McGregor who, this September, will watch from the side lines as school starts without him in any of his many coaching assignments:  basketball, football, tennis, golf, and several others.  We were all a good bit grayer than the last time I attended the reunion in 2000.

Jane (Stephens) ran a family meeting in which Aunt Dorothy and her husband Harley Brown were remembered.  They both died over the year since the last reunion.  Aunt Dorothy had a phenomenal memory, all agreed, recalling family facts long after others had forgotten them.  She died at 100+ intellectually sharp up till the end.  “She proved you’re never to old to learn.  Yeah, And never to old to get married!”  She and Harley married when she was 90 or so.  Harley was a world recognized expert on riffle beetles.  Riffle beetles capture oxygen and work with it below water.  He was a fun and funny guy.

We agreed to have the meeting next year the third week in July, place undecided.

I became interested in Ellis history.  We all know a good bit about the Spitler side of the family, but not much about Elmo Ellis and his family.  Apparently Lloyd Ellis, son on Henry Ellis, Elmo’s brother, has come the last few reunions and has some considerable history.

A few stories reveal a good bit.  At one point Elmo and Jenny gathered their children on a train from somewhere in Oklahoma where Elmo had work as a farm hand.  Their destination was Mustang, Oklahoma, sort of the family seat of the Ellis and Spitler families.  In Ada, Oklahoma Grandpa Elmo got off the train and none of his children saw him again save for Uncle Charles.  He had a glass eye, losing one eye while fighting a grass fire.

Those who knew him a bit said he was charismatic, charming, but “never got down the working thing.”  He was a rich kid who ran through a sizable inheritance.  Family.

Mike Simpson, a former petroleum engineer and owner of an oil and gas services company he recently sold, gave me some tips on looking up information about our land in Pecos County.  He thought the fact the guy wanted to buy the land meant he knew something, too.  The oddity is that the best website is the Texas Rail Road Commission which handles all oil related permits for the state.  They apparently also control all matters related to trucking. Go figure.

Before I sign off today I wanted to mention a couple of other interesting sights along the way to Mineola.  There were 2 Beer Barns.  At the Beer Barn there are two truck sized drive through bays, somewhat like a coin operated car wash.  The trick here is that you can drive in, buy your beer by the case, or, as the sign said, Get Kegs To Go and they load it in your vehicle.  You don’t have to get out.

At a major intersection on Highway 80 there was a vendor wagon with a sign that read:  Scene of the Crash Bar-B-Q.

Family, Memories, Travel

“If it’s not at Brookshires or Walmart, we can get it in Tyler.”

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68  bar rises 29.75  0mpn ENE dew-point 63  Sunrise 5:53  Sunset 8:45pm  Summer

Last Quarter of the Thunder Moon

As you can tell by the lawn mower postings, I’m back from Texas.  No handy computer down there.

Confession:  We had no problems with the airline.  I loved the plane, a small Embraer with a single aisle and two rows, 2 seats to a row and plenty of legroom.  Left and landed on time.  Since we didn’t check anything, no extra fees.  Carrying no electronics and all the liquid stuff in the handy quart bag so security was as painless as possible.  The rental car was cheaper than advertised and we got a PT Cruiser which was at least an interesting compact.  This experience was enough, given my basically positive experience on the flights to Hawai’i, to make me rethink my “never fly unless absolutely necessary” pledge.

With two of us along things always go smoother because we can divide traveling chores, so that’s part of it, but, in the end, it was ok.  Not pleasant.  Barely worth the cash.  But OK.

We spent the weekend encased in East Texas heat and humidity.  97-99 during the day, cooling down to around 80 at night.  Since we were not hiking or picking peaches, it was ok, but both Kate and I find the heat enervating, unpleasant at best.  The Bakers, Carol and Charyn, have a huge home on considerable acreage outside Mineola, Texas.  A former executive for Bell Helicopter, Carol exudes a charming, Texas style hospitality.

Once, long ago, I took a train through east Texas on my way to visit Uncle Charles, Aunt Berta and their daughter, Charyn.  This was at least 50 years ago, but my memory of it is fresh because the pine trees and the hills surprised me then, just as they did this trip.  When you leave Dallas and head out toward Mineola, the road takes you through flat, reddish tan countryside.  Somewhere around Grand Saline (yes, a big salt deposit there.  I asked.  Morton has a big mine.) the flat begins to roll and the reddish tan countryside has forests of pine and oak.

The drive on Highway 80 runs through Forney, Terrell, Willis Point, Grand Saline, Elmo, Fruitvale and Mineola.  On beyond Mineola 80 hits Big Sandy.  I love the names of these towns.  There are fruit orchards along the way, peaches, apricots and others I could not identify.  Even with the salt and the fruit and truck farming, these towns all look worn and tired, as if the promise of the past had not quite come to life.

Mineola is different.   It has antique stores and quaint restaurants, Mineola Mercantile, for example, which is a restaurant and stuff store.  This is a small town like Long Lake, Stillwater, even Anoka surrounded in the countryside by large properties protected with iron gates protected by keyed locks.  Horses are everywhere which helps explain the iron gates.  This is the good life far enough from what they call the metroplex, Dallas/Ft. Worth, that the people who live here can feel rural with many of the comforts of upper class life.  This includes a Brookshire grocery which is equivalent to a Minnesota Bylery’s.

Carol and Charyn said, “Anything that’s not at Bylery’s or Walmart we can get in Tyler.”

I’ll report some more on the reunion tomorrow.