Category Archives: Dreams

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

Corn in the Mist

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81  bar steady  29.84  0mph NE  dew-point 66   Summer, hot and muggy

Full Thunder Moon

“Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.” – Thomas Alva Edison

I like Edison here.  He illustrates a fundamental flaw in the planning paradigm.  When we plan, we have a criteria for success.  Most planners see that as the summum bonum of the plan.  I know I did when I worked as an organizational consultant in churches and other organizations.  Time-limited, quantifiable and concrete.  That way you know one when you see one.

The problem here?  Just what Edison says.  The serendipitous.  Think of Roentgen who saw his hand on a photographic sensitive paper while working with radioactive material.  Not the point.  But.  Roentgen saw X-rays.  The North St. Paul 3-M’er who worked on glues and found one that didn’t work so well.  He used it for a while to stick notes in his hmynbooks.  Then.  Oh, Post-It notes.

The problem is deeper yet.  Plans and goals put us into a pass/fail world where our progress or lack of it runs up and down a scale, with our self-image and our sense of self-worth often traveling along for the ride.  In fact, life offers so much to us, whether we write that bestseller or become an academic superstar or get straight A’s or climb the mountain or ski the double black diamond or not, that too often the important parts of life get overlooked in the scramble to meet the plan.

A child’s smile.  A flower opened, beautiful, transient.  A partner’s caress.  A dog’s eager greeting.  The smell of fresh cut hay.  A tomato fresh from the garden.  A shooting star.  A full moon.  None of these come according to plan.  They come only with attentiveness, when we live in the now and notice not the graph headed up the chart, but the beating of our own heart and the breath of our own soul.

Plans.  As Scrooge might say, Bah, Humbug.  Buy that Christmas goose and pass out alms for the poor.  All better than getting the account books done on a holiday.

Here’s a shot I took this morning.  When I take my camera outside on these muggy days, the lens fogs up.  I often clean it, but this time I decided to shoot anyway.  This is corn in the mist.

cornmist500.jpg

Cinema and Television, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Family

Where We Are Is Where We Will Become Who We Are

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63  bar rises 29.78  0mph W  dew-point 54  Summer night, cool

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

Travelers and Magicians is a Bhutanese movie, the first one I’ve seen.  It’s theme spoke to the question, “What is your dream for this stage of your life?”  A Bhutanese official, newly appointed to work in a small mountain village, has an opportunity to go to America.  He considers himself modern, hip and wants very much to go.  On the road he meets many travelers, one a monk who tells him a tale of a young man who studied to be a magician.  There is a Canterburyesque flavor to the movie, a pilgrimage story of a sort.

It reminded me most of Emerson, who spoke of the futility of going to Italy to see beautiful things, when beauty is a notion within each of us.  The young official also meets a beautiful girl on the road, one he learns plans to return to her village to help her aging father.  By the end of the movie it is clear that he will return to the village.

A strong and persistent strain of my thinking in the last few years has focused on just this notion.  Where we are is where we will become who we are.  This is  true, for me, I believe.  Here in Andover, removed from the urban thrum, the constant action of political and religious life diminished by distance, is where I will become an old man, an elder.

My dream for this stage of my life is not yet as focused as the other three dreams I mentioned:  revolution, children and writing.  Even so, its outlines seem clear.   As I have until now, I will continue to support and nourish the dreams I have for political change, a healthy nuclear and extended family and writing.  The nesting or embedded nature of these dreams will remain, not get left behind.

Here are the emerging elements of my dream for this stage.  Kate and I will, together, create a paradigm for optimal living on suburban and exurban lots of 1+ acres.  We will focus our home and energy on supporting creative activity.  Somewhere in the mix, I believe, is Kate’s commitment to medical services for the poor.

Or not.  I don’t know.  This next phase hasn’t gelled in my thinking.  It may be that I don’t need a dream for this stage, that I’m already living it.

Aging, Cinema and Television, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Literature

An Instant Classic

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63  bar steep rise 29.64 6mph N dew-point 58  Summer night

Last Quarter of the Flower Moon

As always, the movies come later up here above 694, inside the pick-up section of the Minneapolis metro.  Tonight it was “No Country For Old Men.”  This movie is an instant classic according to many reviews.

Talk about an oxymoron.  An instant classic.  That’s where the frisson is, yes, but I have a suspicion that just beyond the irony of such a juxtaposition lies a realm in which critics believe in their capacity to know a classic when they see one, even if it has only six months of theatre runs under its belt.  I don’t believe in such a capacity; but, I do believe it is of the nature of criticism to imagine its existence.

This is a fine movie.  It has a story line that takes you by misdirection.  As the movie unwinds into its fullness, the obvious assumption is that it is a mystery, a how will they catch him yarn.  Anton Chigurh and his compressed air weapon, used in stock-yards for killing live stock, cuts a wide lane of violence down the center of the screen.  The opening scene shows the remains of a drug deal that has killed at least eight people.

The plot seems to follow the results of this shoot out when it really follows Sheriff Bell, Sheriff of Terrel County in west Texas.  His story is a meditation on aging and on the violent criminal action that follows in the wake of the international drug trade.   He is an intelligent, compassionate man bewildered by crime he no longer understands.  In the final scene, which took me by surprise, he recount two dreams about his father.

A classic?  Hell, I don’t know.  I’m not even sure the movies that film historians claim are classics are classics.  I feel more confident in defining literary classics.  There I feel I know one when I see one.  With movies?  Difficult.  Casablanca?  Yes.  Singing in the Rain?  No.  Wizard of Oz?  Maybe.  Birds?  No.  Why?  Too sleepy to explain.  This movie a classic?  Probably not.  But it is a damned fine movie anyhow.

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Literature

A Vivid Imagination

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59  bar steady  30.02  1mph WSW dewpoint 42  Beltane, sunny

                Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon 

“The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.” – Sir R. F. Burton

Burton is an interesting guy. He traveled the world and did a translation of the Arabian Nights.  He is, however, not much of a theologian.  His genes must have cascaded down to Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins.  They, too, seem to believe that if you betray your ignorance loudly, then others will agree.   All faith traditions are far more subtle, more nuanced that mere projection.  Do they each have their problematics? Absolutely.  Do the problems justify the kind of reductionist argument deployed by religions cultured despisers (to borrow the phrase from Frederick Schleiermacher)? Not at all.

The simplest argument against them is this.  Have you ever seen a love?  Have you ever smelled justice?  Yes, you have seen or smelled their physical manifestations, but have you seen the complex of emotions and judgment that produce them?  No.  Why not?  Because they are constructs of the mental world.  What constitutes the mental world?  Is it just the firing and stimulation of neurons?  Oh, how do you know?  Because the fMRI tells you so?  How does the fMRI tell you its information?  That’s right, through sight. 

I’m with Kant here.  The ding an siche, the thing in itself, is unknown and unknowable due to the mediation of the senses.   Therefore how Dawkins and Harris can claim to reach beyond their sensorium and know a negative is beyond me.  Does the trashing of their fundamental argument make them wrong?  Unfortunately, no.

By the by, if you’ve never read the Arabian Nights, The Thousand and One Nights, then you’ve missed something.  Find a complete edition because the Muslims who wrote it had a vivid imagination.  I mean, really vivid.

     

Dreams, Politics

Have You Ever Had Culloden?

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60  bar steady  29.68  1mph S dewpoint 45 Beltane  overcast

              First Quarter of the Hare Moon

After I read several articles about Obama’s running mate choice, I came away convinced that Bill Richardson won’t be his choice.  The most interesting article I read suggested Wes Clark or Bill Bradley.  The prevailing opinion seems to be that he needs gravitas on foreign affairs in a Vice President.  This disturbs me since the most recent example of a naif at foreign affairs coupled with a strong VP is George Bush and Dick Cheney.  Do we really want a shadow presidency when it comes to conduct of foreign policy? 

The argument for a strong woman makes sense to me, but the candidates didn’t.  I don’t know.  If I had to choose among the folks bandied about so far, I’d go with Bradley, then back to Richardson.

Another planting day here on the homestead.  And a good one, it appears.  Good planting, transplanting days are overcast, low wind and cool.  They put minimum stress on plants being transplanted and conserve moisture.

In a dream last night I traveled to Wales.  It was an island in this version, with an interior river that followed the coast line.  You could rent boats and just let them float along.  I went through several small towns and villages.  They were mixtures of theme park and historical village, like Williamsburg.  At one point I stopped in a village and spent the night in a hotel. It cost $80 and had all natural wood done in a folk culture style.  A young guy took me to my room and said he would be back later with culloden.  What’s that, you wonder?  So do I?  He said it was boiling water with holes in it.  He never brought it so I don’t know what it was.  There were snacks, but you had to pay for them.

In the morning I woke up and went down for breakfast.  A waiter pointed out the menu to me.  It was a traditional meal, but I didn’t recognize any of the dishes.

At several points I said, “Yes, my family’s from here.”  It felt good to be home. 

The only dark spot was that I had forgotten to pack my tooth brush and tooth paste.  Kate had them, back on the mainland at a conference.  I figured I could buy some, but I hadn’t seen a drugstore.  Didn’t solve that problem before I woke up.