Category Archives: Minnesota

Art and Culture, Friends, Minnesota, Music, Third Phase

Jazz. Yeah.

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Winter                                                                Seed Catalog Moon

To the Dakota tonight with my sweetie.  Warren and Sheryl attended this KBEM event, too.  The featured performers Charmin and Shapira are an improbable match.  He, Shapira, looks like a televangelist who maybe slipped along the line, and plays the guitar at times like Jimmy Hendrix.  At other times like a piano.  He’s subtle and smooth.

Charmin could be a smaller Billy Holliday with a great range and soulful tone that comes out easily.  She sang standards, a nice piece by Thelonius Monk and another I imagine was part of Gershwin’s songbook.

They were backed up a trio with a tenor sax, bass and drums.  All of the musicians were excellent.  I have a special fondness for the dreamy riffs that come from the saxophone and this guy was good.

The Dakota is a local treasure, a Minnesota Treasure, like the Japanese National Treasure’s.  They put out quality food and music.

The wind, must have been 10 mph or so, blasted us as we left and the below or right at zero reading made for punishment.  Glad to get to the car.

 

Minnesota

I’m a Minnesotan and I’m OK

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Winter                                                   New (Seed Catalog) Moon

Not only is it New Year’s day, but it is also a new moon, a propitious beginning to 2014.  A cold beginning too, well below zero before today and well below zero for the first few days of the New Year. Appropriate for our state, bordering as we do with Canada, sharing the great inland sea, the Boundary Waters, Lake of the Woods and the Minnesota Angle.

Minnesota as a place nourishes me, the Boreal woods, Lake Superior, having wolves and moose and bear as part of our state fauna.  There is, too, the vast stretch of glaciated, watered divots in the earth that give us our 10,000 lakes. The Anishinabe and the Lakota both have ancestral lands here, now much reduced in size by reservation, yet still here and still affecting the culture of us boat people.

The Scandinavian first influence dominates this mostly German state, giving us more of a Norwegian and Swedish and Finnish caste than perhaps we might have had otherwise.  We have a large co-op movement, pockets of truly radical politics and an engaged citizenry.

The Twin Cities have a remarkable abundance of cultural offerings:  museums, theaters, dance companies, many well-known writers and support systems for novices, a gathering of significant musical institutions like the SPCO and ?the minnesota orchestra?  We have as well recording studios for hip hop and rap, Prince’s Paisley Palace and Bob Dylan’s hometown.

The containers for all this, St. Paul and Minneapolis, have great park systems and multiple lakes within the city limits, 22 in Minneapolis alone. In recent years the Twin Cities have become one of the most bike friendly cities in the country with bike lanes, the Grand Round full city bicycle tour and several bridges specifically for bicycles.

Cuisine may not be our shining star, but it’s pretty good.  Our downtowns are not in ruin, far from it, in fact both cities have clocked in-migration in the last few years.

Health care in Minnesota stands next to that of Hawai’i as first in the nation and stands up well in international comparisons, too.  That’s important to us third-phasers.  Educationally we have the University of Minnesota, Carleton, St. Olaf, Gustavus Adolphus, Macalester, St. Thomas and a fine system of technical schools.  We also have a dramatic and unfortunate and unnecessary achievement gap between white students and students of color.

Plus we have winter.  And it keeps the riff raff out.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Garden, Great Wheel, Minnesota, Our Land and Home, Retirement, Science, Third Phase, Travel

2013: Second Quarter

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Winter                                                            Winter Moon

The first day of the second quarter, April 1st, is Stefan’s birthday and was a gathering of the Woolly’s at the Red Stag.  I made this note: “Here we are seen by each other.  Our deep existence comes with us, no need for the chit-chat and polite conversation of less intimate gatherings.  The who that I am within my own container and the who that I am in the outer world come the closest to congruence at Woolly meetings, a blessed way of being exceeded only in my relationship with Kate.”

The “doing work only I can do” thought kept returning, getting refined: “With writing, Latin and art I have activities that call meaning forward, bringing it into my life on a daily basis, and not only brought forward, but spun into new colors and patterns.” april 2 On the 13th this followed:  “Why is doing work only I can do important to me?  Mortality.  Coming at me now faster than ever.  Within this phase of my whole life for sure.  Individuation.  It’s taken a long time to get clear about who and what I’m for, what I’m good at and not good at.  Now’s the time to concentrate that learning, deepen it.”

The best bee year we’ve had started on April 16th with discovering the death of the colony I thought would survive.  While moving and cleaning the hive boxes, I wrenched back and the pain stayed with me.  That same day the Boston Marathon bombing happened.  In addition to other complicated feelings this simple one popped up:  “The most intense part of my initial reaction came when I realized what those feelings meant, the emptiness and the sadness and the vacuum.  They meant I am an American.  That this event was about us, was done to us.”

Another theme of this quarter would be my shoulder, perhaps a rotator cuff tear, perhaps nerve impingement caused by arthritis in my cervical vertebrae.  Maybe some post-polio misalignment.  But over the course of the quarter with a good physical therapist it healed nicely.

Kate went on a long trip to Denver, driving, at this time, for Gabe and Ruth’s birthdays. While she was out there teaching Ruth to sew, Ruth asked her, “Why did you become a doctor instead of a professional sewer?”  When Kate is gone, the medical intelligence of our house declines precipitously.  That means doggy events can be more serious.

Kona developed a very high fever and I had to take her to the emergency vet.  She had a nodule on her right shoulder which we identified as cancerous.  This meant she had to have it removed.  At this point I was moving her (a light dog at maybe 40 pounds) in and out of the Rav4 with some difficulty because of my back.

This was the low point of the year as Kona’s troubles and my back combined to create a CBE (1)dark inner world.  The day I picked Kona up from the Vet after her surgery was cold and icy, but my bees had come in and I had to go out to Stillwater to get them, then see my analyst, John Desteian.  That day was the nadir.  I was in pain and had to go through a lot of necessary tasks in sloppy slippery weather.  That week Mark Odegard sent me this photograph from a while ago Woolly Retreat.

By the end of the month though Kate was back and April 27th:  “Yes!  Planted under the planting moon…”

For a long time I had wanted to apply my training in exegesis and hermeneutics to art and in this time period I decided to do it.  In the course of researching this idea I found I was about 50 years late since the Frankfurt School philosophers, among them, Gadamer and Adorno, had done just that.  Still, I patted myself on the back for having thought along similar lines.

Over the last year Bill Schmidt, a Woolly, and I have had dinner before we play sheepshead in St. Paul.  His wife, Regina, died a year ago September.  “Bill continues to walk straight in his life after Regina’s death, acknowledging her absence and the profound effect it has had on his life, yet he reports gratitude as his constant companion.”

By April 29th the back had begun to fade as an issue: “Let me describe, before it gets away from me, submerged in the always been, how exciting and uplifting it was to realize I was walking across the floor at Carlson Toyota.  Just walking.”

Kate and I had fun at Jazz Noir, an original radio play performed live over KBEM.

In my Beltane post on May 1st I followed up my two sessions with John Desteian:  “John Desteian has challenged me to probe the essence of the numinous.  That is on my mind.  Here is part of that essence.  The seed in the ground, Beltane’s fiery embrace of the seed, the seed emerging, flourishing, producing its fruit, harvest.  Then, the true transubstantiation, the transformation of the bodies of these plants into the body and blood ourselves.”

Then on May 6th, 5 months into my sabbatical from the MIA:  “The third phase requires pruning.  Leaving a job or a career is an act of pruning.  A move to a smaller home is an act of pruning.  Deciding which volunteer activities promote life and which encumber can proceed an act of pruning.  Last year I set aside my political work with the Sierra Club.  Today I have set aside my work at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.”  That ended 12 years of volunteer work.

“When you recover or discover something that nourishes your soul and brings joy, care enough about yourself to make room for it in your life.”

— Jean Shinoda Bolen 

It was also in May of this year that Minnesota finally passed the Gay marriage bill.  Gave me hope.

May 13 “Sort of like attending my own funeral.   All day today notes have come in from docent classmates responding to my resignation from the program.”  During this legislative session, I again became proud to be a Minnesotan.

As the growing season continued:  “If you want a moment of intense spirituality, go out in the morning, after a big rain, heat just beginning to soak into the soil, smell the odor of sanctity…”

On May 22nd the Woolly’s gathered to celebrate, with our brother Tom, the 35th year of his company, Crane Engineering.  The celebration had something to do with a crystal pyramid.  At least Stefan said so.

A cultural highlight for the year was the Guthrie’s Iliad, a one person bravura performance by veteran actor, Stephen Yoakam.

Friend and Woolly Bill Schmidt introduced me to High Brix gardens.  I decided to follow their program to create sustainable soils and did so over the course of the growing season. I got good results.

Our new acquaintance Javier Celis, who did a lot of gardening work for us over the year, also finished up our firepit and we had our first fire in it on June 7th.  It was not the last.

On June 12th Rigel came in with a small pink abrasion on her nose.  She had found and barked, barked, barked, barked at a snapping turtle.  Kate removed the turtle from our property.  The turtle came back, hunting I believe, for a small lake not far from us in which to lay her eggs.  The next time Rigel and Vega still barked, from a safe distance.

And on Father’s Day: “Is there anything that fills a parent’s heart faster than hearing a child light-hearted, laughing, excited?  Especially when that child is 31.”

During her visit her in late June grand-daughter Ruth went with me on a hive inspection: “She hung in there, saying a couple of times, “Now it’s making me really afraid.” but not moving away.”

My favorite technology story came on June 27th when NASA announced that one of the Voyager spacecrafts would soon leave the heliosphere, the furthest point in space where the gases of the sun influence matter.  This meant it would then be in interstellar space.

And, as Voyager entered the Oort cloud Tom and Roxann made their way Svalbard and the arctic circle.  Thus endeth the second quarter.

 

 

Great Work, Minnesota, Politics, Sierra Club

Please Help Stop This Mine

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Samhain                                                           Winter Moon

Today’s Star-Tribune has an excellent article by Lee Schafer, business columnist:  PolyMet mine report has a giant hole in it.

An excerpt:

“Late last week, the voluminous environmental impact report for the first project in what could be a major expansion of mining in Minnesota, PolyMet Mining’s proposed copper-nickel mining operation near Hoyt Lakes, was released, but without much that was meaningful about financial assurance.

(William Ervin)

It’s baffling that over a decade into the project’s evolution, the public still knows next to nothing about the financial assurance provision. It’s hardly trivial, given that the proposed mining and processing operation could require the treatment of water for more than 500 years.

The idea behind requiring financial assurance to make sure there’s money to contain and clean up polluted sites is really pretty simple. A mine is operated by a corporation that could go bankrupt, or fold up like a circus and leave town once the money has all been made and the mine is played out…

It takes up a little over three pages in a report so big that just the glossary alone is nearly five times bigger. It has a one-line table, showing estimates of cost if the mine were to close at the end of year one, at the end of year 11, or at the end of year 20. The high end of the cost-estimate range is $200 million….

If operating a water treatment facility costs $1 million a year, the financial assurance for PolyMet should be easily manageable, he said. “But if that operating cost got up to $10 million a year, that is pushing $1 billion to pay for that. That’s why at PolyMet it becomes an issue.””

Financial assurance connects directly to the question of tailings runoff.  PolyMet will claim that its estimates are correct because their new, never-before-proven technology will create safer tailings and tailing’s ponds.  No sulfide mine ever, anywhere has created a safe tailing’s situation.

The basic problem is simple.  The overburden and the rock not containing copper, nickel and other valuable metals contains sulfur. When rain and snow and sleet fall, melting water runs through the massive hills of tailings.  The water which runs off the tailings creates a sulfuric acid load.  But, it’s water, too.  So it flows into the watershed around the Hoyt Lake’s plant.

“That sulfates can kill manoomin is evidenced by the Wild Rice Dead Zone – a stretch that begins where the Bine-ziibi (Partridge River) enters into Gichigamiwi-ziibi (St. Louis River) and extends 140 miles to the Anishinaabeg-Gichigami Maamawijiwan (Lake Superior Basin). The Wild Rice Dead Zone is the result of extremely high concentrations of sulfate released by U.S. Steel’s Keetac and Minntac taconite mines. Sulfide mining will add yet more sulfates into rivers and lakes thereby affecting the food that grows on water.”   (IC Magazine, Supporting Indigenous People)

A bonus feature of this area is that a confluence of continental divides makes some water head down the Mississippi to the dead zones of the Gulf, some water heads into Lake Superior on ies way to the Atlantic, while other water drains out of the tailings ponds into streams headed for Hudson Bay.  That way one mine can pollute three different large bodies of water and streams and rivers along the way.

Thus, to prevent acid drainage over the potentially 500 year long exposure to toxic runoff either requires a lot of money or excellent unproven technology.  Or, ideally, both.

As Schafer points out in a video discussion, Shakespeare was writing 500 years ago.  500 years is a long time.  The iron range gets 20 years of jobs against centuries of ruinous pollution.  Public policy must weigh the balancing benefits.

 

 

Minnesota, Weather +Climate

Our Time

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Samhain                                                                    Winter Moon

A sickle moon, 7 inches of snow, still fresh, -11 on the weather system’s display.  Yes. There is a purity in a northern winter, a clarity and a straight-forwardness that I sought out when I moved 44 years ago to Appleton, Wisconsin.  Indiana winters could never decide on cold or chill, snow or slush, rain or ice.  Walking in January with wet feet through a crunchy mush of water.  Well, that was the nadir.

That first winter, 1969, we had several feet of snow and the temperature got down to -20 and stayed there.  That was what I wanted, a season not afraid to declare its intentions, to arrive and stay present until time to give way to spring.  Since then I’ve lived through many notable winters and I’ve enjoyed all of them.

The motor vehicle has been my only source of displeasure.  Streets too narrow, snow and ice too built up, wheels spinning, starters whining and clicking.  Speeds well beyond what physics says makes sense.  Snowshoes.  Yes.  Sorels.  Yes.  Cross-country skis.  Yes.  Engines and tires and heavy metal.  No.

Other than that.  What can beat a several day snowstorm with flakes drifting, then coming in on the slant, drifting again.  Building up, caressing the landscape until it changes into something altogether new.  A newness with curves and sweeps and slopes and fewer barriers and boundaries.  And blizzards with the snow coming across the desert expanses like the fabled sand storms of the Sahara.

Even the danger of it.  It’s possible to lose your way here in a serious storm, wander off into a field, say, while only 50 feet from home.  It happens, not every winter, but often. People leave their cars, try to make it to safety.  The cold can kill.  -11, which it is right now, is far below survivability for the human body.  Trips have a somber side to them, a reasonable caution is necessary.

This is the human animal outside its geographic bounds.  We’re not polar bears or even bunnies like I photographed the other afternoon.  We’re creatures of the warmer regions where our hairless bodies can thrive with no clothing.  None at all.  Imagine being a bushman faced with a Minnesota winter night.  Or a native American or a pioneer for that matter.

Winter is why we don’t have to keep Minnesota for Minnesotans.  In Colorado there are license plates that read Colorado native.  I’m sure they’re not, really, but I understand. They don’t want to share.  Hawai’i doesn’t encourage immigration either and Portland has a don’t move here campaign.

Our quality of life meets and exceeds all three places but we have this northern temperate climate winter and if you don’t want to live here, it weeds you out.  Sends you packing for sunnier places.  And that’s ok.  Makes sure if you’re here, for the most part, you’re here because you want to be.

Minnesota, Weather +Climate
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Samhain                                                          New (Winter) Moon

This snowstorm has the slows.  The Updraft blog says it’s on its way, but will show around midnight now, rather than 6 pm.  There are some impressive numbers reported already for the northern part of the state:  “Up north, some epic snowfall totals approaching 2 feet are already down near Two Harbors, and totals will likely exceed 30 inches to 3 feet along the North Shore ridges by Thursday.”

(High waves at the Duluth Lake Superior harbor)

 

 

Anoka County, Art and Culture, Minnesota, Our Land and Home, Politics, Sierra Club

Why I Live Here

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Samhain                                                             Thanksgiving Moon

I have decided, over and over again, to remain here in Minnesota.  Leaving occurs to me from time to time, more often now the direction considered is north, beyond our borders where the politics, health care and weather all seem more sane.  Even with those attractions, and they are considerable, Minnesota and in particular the Twin Cities Metro always trumps any competition.

The arts here are a wonder.  Having the MIA and the Walker in a small market city like Minneapolis doesn’t amaze us, because, after all, they are here.  But it would if you considered them in a national, even international light.  The Guthrie is only the most visible island of a large theatrical archipelago, boasting more seats than any other metro area in the nation outside of New York City.

The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra is a gem.  Again, nationally.  The Minnesota Symphony used to be an internationally renowned organization, as recently as two years ago, before dimbulbs began a series of self-inflicted wounds.  Dance, local rock music, glass and clay arts, printmakers and galleries all thrive here.  Jazz, supported by KBEM of internet renown, flourishes.

There are substantially more dining options now than when I moved here in 1970.  More than Kate and I can visit before they disappear.

Writers in Minnesota consistently publish and make the national book news.  The Minnesota Center for Book Arts and the Loft provide outside academia support for the literary community.

Healthcare is as good as it gets. Anywhere.  Hawaii and Minnesota are tops in the US and good US healthcare is as good as there is anywhere.

When policy makers divided the land in the Upper Midwest and created Minnesota they included the intersection of three US biomes:  prairie, deciduous forest (Big Woods) and the boreal forest.  The Wisconsin glaciation scoured out numerous lakes and the Great Lakes.  Though flat our terrain is remarkable for its diversity and its  pristine nature in the north where the moose and the wolf still live.  At least for now.

Where else do you get all these things?  Nowhere else.  That’s a large part of why I stay. Another, equally large part, is friends.  The Woolly Mammoths, the MIA docent class of 2005, the Sierra Club and various past political activity has peopled my life with friends. They’re here and I am, too.

In the past, too, I valued the Minnesota political culture which showed compassion to the poor, effectiveness in government and sound stewardship of the state’s natural resources. A long desert of mean policy makers, eyes and hearts captured by the great god money, have devastated much of that culture though I continue to believe it exists.

The common good, defined broadly, is just that.  Our future depends on an educated work force, receiving a decent wage, a hand-up when life turns sour and a healthy environment in which to work and live.  These have seemed and still seem to me the necessary elements of a civil society.

Great Work, Minnesota, Our Land and Home

Among the Buckthorn

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Summer                                            Solstice Moon

Cleared buckthorn, again, from the area around the grandkid’s playhouse and the fire pit, leaving in serviceberry and small ash trees. Rejuvenating the understory is difficult to impossible with buckthorn present since it chokes out most things shrub size and below.  In certain areas of our woods it’s a remediable problem, those areas not on the boundaries with the neighbors.

Sitting outside now in the evening, watching the fire, has me more tuned up to work in the woods, since up to this point the woods have been an amenity, but not a place where we spent much time or energy.  This kind of work is hard labor, perfect as an alternative to the computer, the mind, the writing.

A local guy, biologist Mark Davis of Macalester College, has a different take on invasive species like buckthorn:

“Davis…believes it’s time to raise the white flag against non-native species. Most non-native species, he said, are harmless—or even helpful.

In a letter published in the journal Nature this past June, Davis and 18 other ecologists argued that these destructive invasive species—or those non-native species that cause ecological or economic harm—are only a tiny subset of non-native species, and that this tiny fraction has basically given all new arrivals a bad name.”

As may be.  As may be.  But I still don’t like the way buckthorn crowds out the serviceberry, ninebark, dogwood, columbine, trillium and jack-in-the-pulpit.  Somehow it doesn’t seem to deter the poison ivy.  If it did, well…

Art and Culture, Memories, Minnesota, Music

Destination Twin Cities

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Beltane                                                                               Solstice Moon

 

Butch Thompson is an elegant guy who can really get down.  “Two Minnesota artists — celebrated choreographer Sarah LaRose-Holland and jazz pianist Butch Thompson — have collaborated to present “Destination Twin Cities,” an impressionistic, time-traveling exploration of neighborhoods, landmarks, people and places that define urban life in Minnesota. Who were we, and who are we today?”

Butch played piano and one very soulful clarinet piece and Sarah LaRose-Holland’s dance troupe, Kinetic Evolutions, gave movement to a nostalgic look back at many Twin Cities’ notable places from the Lexington Restaurant to the Hennepin Avenue Strip.  The latter roughly located where Block E is now.  It was a place full of dives that provided steady work for many Minnesota jazz musicians.

Slides of Twin Cities past:  the Wabasha Caves, street cars, winter scenes in neighborhoods, the Stone Arch Bridge, the West Bank accompanied the music and dance projected on the brick wall of the former Guthrie Lab space, 700 N. 1st Street.

Butch’s music was sad, cheery, bouncy, wistful and cool.  The choreography had some fine moments, especially two two person sets, one ironic and intentionally so I imagine, paired a fine African-American dancer, Kasono Mawanza, with a superb Chinese dancer, Jenny Sung, moving through an evening at the haunt of the white power elite, the Lexington while the second featured a mother and daughter walking on Selby Avenue.  The daughter was 5 years old, maybe 6 and kept right up with the adult who could have been her real mother.  The Lexington piece was elegant and smooth, all careful sinuousity while the Selby Avenue work had improvisation and the kind of charm only a young performer can bring to the stage.

 

 

Dogs, Minnesota

Another Species

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Beltane                                                                            Solstice Moon

Rigel has a small pink abrasion on her right nostril.  Kate showed it to me this morning.  We both concluded it probably got there via snapping turtle.  Here’s the story.

(chelydra_serpentina)

Rigel’s job is to patrol the fence line and warn off any invaders, be they dog, human, cat or, in yesterday’s case, snapping turtle.  Usually we let her do her job without intervention, but while I took a shower, Rigel set up an alarm bark that agitated all the other dogs.  And, in the occasional assertion of her coyote hound genes, she wouldn’t stop.  Usually, she barks at something, then, after a bit, calms down.  Not this  time.

Kate got up from her nap to go investigate.  Rigel had found a snapping turtle just on the other side of our chain link fence and had already expended considerable energy telling it to stay there.  Do not come in here.  This is my yard.  Stay out.  Go away.

Rigel and Kate returned to the house.  After my shower, and unaware of all this excitement, I let the dogs out again.  And.  They found the turtle, this time inside our property and, Kate, again going to see what was up, discovered Rigel  on her belly, legs out in front, barking at the turtle, but this time from a distance.  Vega patrolled the rear, going back and forth around it.  The turtle had gotten about halfway through our woods from our fence line paralleling 153rd to the rear fence line, traveling on a diagonal to a spot that was well over two football fields away.

Kate, who has taken the turtle as her totem animal, recovered the turtle, holding its shell at the rear.  Even then, she said, the turtle’s long neck kept snaking around toward her hands.  She removed the turtle to a position outside our fence line and we’ve not heard any new alarms.

Based on reading the material* below I imagine this was a female hunting for a place to lay her eggs. (see the video)

*Group:

reptile

Class:

Chelonia

Order:

Cryptodeira

Family:

Chelydridae

Habitats:

Breeding takes place any time that the turtles are active, but occurs most frequently in the spring and fall. During June, females travel to open areas that are suitable for nesting, and may travel 1 km (0.62 mi.) or more from water. Suitable nesting areas must be open and sunny and contain moist but well-drained sand or soil. Nesting areas are commonly sandy banks and fields, but also include gravel roads and lawns. The female uses her hind feet to dig out a cavity, and then lays 10-100 (usually 25-50) eggs, using her hind feet to guide them into the nest. The eggs are 2.2-3.2 cm (.87-1.25 in.) in diameter, white, and have a leathery shell. Once the eggs are laid, the female covers the nest with sand or soil and returns to water. Depending on the weather, the eggs will hatch in 50-125 days. Incubation temperature affects the sex of the hatchling turtles, with more females hatching during warmer temperatures, and more males hatching during cooler temperatures. Hatchling turtles use their egg tooth and claws to break out of their shell, and then must dig their way out of the nest and find water. When they emerge, hatchlings are 2.5-3.2 cm (1-1.25 in.) in length. Young turtles are vulnerable to predation and desiccation. From any given clutch of eggs, 60%-100% of the young may be lost to predators. Primary nest predators include raccoons (Procyon lotor), skunks, foxes, and mink (Mustela vison). In addition to these animals, hatchlings are also preyed on by large fish, large frogs, northern water snakes (Nerodia sipedon), and some bird species. Common snapping turtles are slow to mature, reaching sexual maturity in 5-7 years.