Category Archives: Asia

Asia, Bees, Great Work, Weather +Climate

I Roll Over On My Belly

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Spring                                              Full Bee Hiving Moon

OK.  Enough.  Uncle.  I give.  I yield.  I roll over on my belly.  Please let us have spring.  Snow?  More snow?  Just when the Himalayan inspired mounds of soot black snow have begun their glacial retreat?  This is not insult to injury, but insult to insult.  Well, all right.  If it’s coming anyhow, but could this be the last one for this season?  Please.  I have plants that need to get back to growing.

T’ai C’hi.  Coming along.  I am within one move of learning how to grasp the sparrow’s tail, then one more, the long whip, of having the basic moves in some sort of order and execution.  My teacher says, insists, promises it will all get easier.  But, it took her, she also says, 30 years to get her form to its current level.  Wait.  I’m not sure I have 30 years of T’ai C’hi practice in me.  On the other hand, maybe with T’ai C’hi…

T’ai C’hi feels like Latin for the body.  It’s taking all of my concentration to stay with it when I practice and the learning is slow.

Then there’s that radiation problem in Japan.  Good news on it.  The power company says it can have things cleaned up in 6-9 months.  6-9 months?  We’ll see.

This is the time to move the bees.  Bee colonies do not like to have their homes moved once they’ve learned where they are.  Even a move of 2 feet can be too much for them.  If you want to move existing colonies, you have to do it in slow, incremental steps.  Right now, since I have no bees, I can put the hive boxes wherever I want.  Still mulling.  I want to put them in the orchard, but that will entail switching out the gear from the front garden shed to the back shed where I currently have all the bee equipment.

Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on the news, Humanities, Politics

Ai Weiwei In Jail

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Spring                                                                  Waxing Bee Hiving Moon

In all the tsunami/earthquake, nuclear crisis, air strikes in Libya, brother coming, dog biting haze I missed this story about Ai Weiwei, a Chinese dissident artist whose marble chair is in our Wu Family Reception Hall.  I’ve attached a summary from the Financial Times and a video interview with Dan Rather (see above).  Especially in the Rather interview I can see the problem he poses for an autocratic regime.  He gets the notion of freedom, of individuality, of free expression.  That’s frightening stuff to autocrats.

As a man who admires Chinese civilization, its arts, its literature, its inventiveness, its long, long history, I know China and Chinese civilization has room for Ai Weiwei and his kind.  Wandering Taoist sages, eccentrics all, the mountain poets, literati painters are just the ones who come to mind right now.

The more I read Chinese literature and history I do know that they inflect the dialectic rebel/government in a way not easily understood by Americans.  That is, the rebel is bad and the government good.  Or mostly, anyhow.  This has to do in part with the notion of the mandate of heaven.  As long as the government achieves order, the people are fed and happy, then the government reflects the will of heaven.  But, if the people are starving, crime and violence becomes rampant–see the Warring States period and the end of the Han Dynasty as examples–the government has lost the mandate of heaven and must be replaced.

I have also added a TED video (above) about China, one that defines it as a civilization-state rather than nation-state and speculates on the impact of China’s rise.  I think the idea is germane to this topic.

Enough.  I’m thinking about how to impact this man’s detention in a positive way.  If you have any ideas, let me know.

Fears grow for Ai Weiwei’s safety

By Jamil Anderlini in Beijing

Published: April 5 2011 15:22 | Last updated: April 5 2011 15:22

Fears for the safety of China’s most famous artist are growing amid international condemnation of his extralegal disappearance at the hands of the country’s increasingly repressive state security apparatus.

Family members of Ai Weiwei, whose “Sunflower Seeds” installation is currently on display in London’s Tate Modern gallery, said on Tuesday evening they still had no idea of his whereabouts after he was detained at Beijing airport on Sunday and led away by airport security.

Friends, family and associates have been warned not to speak to journalists and Mr Ai’s wife and eight employees were temporarily detained on Sunday after police raided his Beijing home and studio. Beijing police have refused to provide any information concerning his whereabouts.

A member of Mr Ai’s family said at least one of his associates remained in custody after being detained on Sunday but the others had been released.

Human rights groups and associates of Mr Ai say he is in grave danger of being tortured and is probably being deprived of medicines he needs to take regularly.

Asia, Family, Friends, Our Land and Home, Weather +Climate

In Spring A Man’s Heart Turns to…Yard Work

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Spring                                                             Waxing Bee Hive Moon

The weather has turned gray, inclement, wet.  The snow continues to melt, but not wholly disappear, as if it has gotten used to the yard and wants to stay as long as possible.  Where the snow has melted, there is mud.  Mud that tracks it on little dog’s feet.  And big one’s, too.  The spring cleaning season has begun.

This morning I look outside and see only work:  the trees to repair, various objects that need to get picked up and burned or trashed, the bee hives I need to move, old plastic that has to come so we can plant underneath it.  This last is a method for killing weeds without herbicides.  Leave the plastic in place for a couple of years and seeds germinate but die for lack of sun.  Works pretty well.

Of course, there’s the garden that will need planting, too.  Perennials left in for winter interest must come out now to make for their 2011 versions.

Tomorrow I plan to have a meal of greens from the hydroponics and next Monday I’ll use the basil grown there for a caprese salad for an afternoon meal with my docent friends.

Mark, my brother, e-mailed me and says his flight comes in on Saturday at 1 pm.  I’ll be there.

Have to practice my Tai Chi.

Aging, Asia, Dogs, Health

Feeling the Burn

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Spring                                                        New Bee Hiving Moon

As the day draws to a close, many of the matters seem to have come to some resolution.  My brother will be coming here to live with us for awhile.  We’ll see what he needs when he gets here.

I’ve figured out a way to calm the doggy waters with crating two dogs, letting the others in or out, then crating the others.  Sort of a shell game, but it does the trick and has prevented any more teeth baring episodes.  We’ll see how it works tomorrow.

After the episode where I got bit, my adrenalin was so high I had to sit for a while to calm my body back down.  I haven’t been that far into fight or flight for a long time.

Tai Chi has begun to burn.  My thighs.  The lesson tonight, Guard Left, involves co-ordinating several parts of the body and some of my body parts resisted the lesson.  I’ll get it eventually.  I’ve needed, for some time, a physical discipline, one beyond the resistance and aerobic work I do just to stay healthy.  Tai Chi will teach me, I can see now, better balance, flexibility, body awareness and grace.

The old Burch pharmacy at Hennepin and Franklin in Minneapolis is empty now with Art Smart art work by kids and adults hanging in the windows that used to advertise drugs and cosmetics.  Over the pharmacy is a warren of rooms, offices for the Nancy Hauser Dance Studio, another for another dance company, an odd shaped room with various couches and chairs, some comfy, some designy, a threadbare carpet, windows with no blinds and a small digital sign overlooking Hennepin.

There is a dance floor, made of a composite material screwed to the floor in 4 X 8 panels.  It has a pinkish pastel pearl cast and serves the two dance groups, a Karate club and the The Great River Tai Chi school.  Tonight as we practiced a dance rehearsal was underway across the hall, so music with a big beat kept intervening with my Taoist serenity.

This is the city at its finest.  A decrepit building put to good use, providing creative space and space for strangers to meet and try out new activities.  I’m reading a book about cities now and it wants, so far, to celebrate cities for just this, people jostling up against one another, offering their passions to others, ideas sparking and new institutions being born as old ones die.

When I walked out past the Lowry Hill Liquor store and saw the lights of downtown and felt the Walker just blocks away, I agreed.

Aging, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Retirement

Mind/Body

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Spring                                                                Waning Bloodroot Moon

The yard!  The yard!  If Tattoo had been here this winter, he’d have gotten pretty excited about this dreary muddy mess now more visible than not.  The mountain of snow over which I could not see as I degaraged my Celica has melted to foothill levels, allowing me sights not seen for two + months.  Yippee.

Business meeting this morning and we acknowledged both the new tax burden and our wisdom in saving adequately to deal with it.  This transition year into the retired life has had surprises, mostly pleasant ones, but this one caught us up short, at least at first.  We have enough money to pay the taxes and still go on with our cruise.  I’m glad because I’ve already got that Panama hat picked out.

I’ve entered a new phase of physical activity, one with not only aerobic and resistance work, but also with body movement exercise like the Tai Chi and the Body Flow class at the Y.  It feels different, maybe better.  The better aspect comes with the more body friendly Tai Chi, yoga and pilates.  Aerobic and resistance are necessary to retain muscle mass and heart/circulatory system health, but the others work the body in a way designed to calm, loosen, stretch.  The Tai Chi, too, has a strong element, as does yoga, of the Eastern mystical.  Yoga as taught here has lost much of that, but the Tai Chi world remains rooted in the ancient Taoist traditions of China.

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Humanities, World History

Welcome Home, Tai Chi

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Spring                                                   Waning Bloodroot Moon

Once in a while something comes into my life and it feels like a part of me already, as if a missing piece had come back home.  Meeting Kate was like that for me.  My split-off.  When the Wednesday classes for the two-year docent program began, art history came home.  When I found a Jungian analyst over 25 years ago, my Self began to return.  Last night I attended my first Tai Chi class.  Another wandering aspect of myself has joined the others at the hearthside.

When my hands floated up last night into the second position, I felt an energy pushing away from my body, just I felt it collecting as I pulled my elbows in and those same hands back toward my body.  A sense of inner peace, momentary, but real, emerged.  My first class, but not my last.

It may be true as an article in the Star-Tribune this morning claimed, that memory takes longer to cement as we grow older, may be, but for me, I hold out for variability, that some things to take longer to seat, yes; but others, because they’re compelling or because they’re split-offs that have found their back to the homestead, just rejoin as if they’d never left.

I’m going to confess something here.  There’s a part of me, a looky-loo part, that hopes disasters will go all the way like the earthquake and the tsunami in Japan or the financial crisis or the riots sweeping the Middle East.  A part of me wants to see what a nuclear meltdown would entail.  What if that chief villain of high tech actually happened?  What would the consequences be?  Really?  This is not at all a desire to see more disasters or worse catastrophes, rather it is a sort of morbid curiosity, a curiosity about extremes.  What if a volcano like Mt. Rainier or Mt. Fuji erupt at full force?  What if the sea levels do rise by 2 feet or more?  This is the immoderate part of me, that aspect that wants thing to extend to their logical conclusion.

I wouldn’t feel embarrassed about this at all if there wasn’t the possibility, the great likelihood, of serious injury and death to people and eco-systems.  So, I feel embarrassed, but still interested.

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on the news, Great Work, Weather +Climate

Body Flow

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Imbolc                                                        Waxing Bloodroot Moon

Some of our front yard is visible!  This is the first time in over 125 days, maybe more.  A friendly patch of brown lawn and the base of a spruce, an amur maple and a pine tree.  The bloodroot cannot be far behind.

Two tours today.  A Japan tour that reminded me why I love the Asian art so much.  Great kids.  I prejudged them as potentially inattentive, non-talkers.  Boy was I wrong.  We barely got past the teahouse.  A second, Titian tour, had about 30 folks.  Again an engaged and interested group.  The Titian exhibit has been a pleasure to tour, too.  I love the Renaissance anyhow and these are great images.  Love that Bassano and the Lotto, too.

Kate and I will hit our first Body Flow class tonight.  I don’t know what to expect.  It’s a combination of T’ai Ch’i, yoga and pilates.  To music.  When I found out it was set to music, I almost decided not to go.  I’ve never done group exercise and doing it to current dance songs doesn’t seem to add much.  But, we’ll see.

Japan.  Hard to know what to say.  As the big history guy I’ve been listening to off and on over the last couple of months keeps saying, our developed civilizations are so complex that they are very fragile.  Japan is teaching that lesson in a too vivid, too painful way.

Aging, Asia, Cinema and Television, Commentary on the news, Great Work, Memories, US History, World History

Elemental

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Imbolc                                                                     Waxing Bloodroot Moon

August 6th. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Rendering the friendly atom a deadly enemy.  Since that time, mutations became a favorite meme of  scary movie in the 50’s and early 60’s.  Since that time movies like On the Beach, Fail Safe, Doctor Strange Love, the China Syndrome have dealt with one scenario or another based on the catastrophe inherent in nuclear fission and nuclear fusion, even in peacetime uses.  Since that time Chernobyl and Three Mile Island became synonyms for danger, making even the nuclear generation of electricity scary.  The cold war and the DEW line and the Strategic Air Command, missiles in silos and on submarines heightened our awareness by putting a continuing military face on the nuclear threat.

The grim possibility highlighted by the doomsday clock since 1947, the minutes to midnight decided by the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago.  (Ironic like the photograph below because the first splitting of the atom occurred below Alonzo Stagg Stadium on the University of Chicago campus.  Some jinn just won’t go back.)

Those of us born after the end of WWII have lived ever since with the threat of nuclear annihilation.  That threat continues to this day. The most chilling photograph out of 8.9 earthquake and tsunami ravaged Japan was not the dramatic footage of the flood waters carrying burning buildings inland or the ships carried ashore or the fearful Japanese racing away from destruction, no, it was this one.  Thick with irony, unintentional in its resonance with over 65 years of military, cinematic and domestic horror, this scene, a scientific response to a scientific disaster–not the natural one–chilled me the first time I saw it.  It still does.

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Travel

Mindfulness

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Imbolc                                                      Waxing Bloodroot Moon

We’ve begun the slippery, muddy slide into the growing season, though I understand some of the parking lot snow piles, many well over 8 feet high and some much higher than that, will take a long time to melt.  Maybe months, into the summer.  The snow always pleases me as it falls and as it covers our world, now over 120 days straight with snow cover, but there is a time when it becomes a nuisance.  The snow went beyond nuisance this year and became a definite hazard as it has become impossible around the piled snow at many city intersections.  When driving the Celica out of the garage here, I’ve not been able to see traffic on 153rd since late December.  In that regard I will be not sorry to see the snow melt away.  On balance, though, I get far more pleasure from the snow than I do hassle, so when it’s time again, I’ll be ready.

Leslie’s mindfulness presentation this morning was wonderful.  We drew mandalas, did a guided meditation and ate a strawberry, a grape, a piece of cheese and a hunk of bread with intention and attention.  We washed it down with water and tea.  Each bite was an adventure.  Made me aware of how unmindful I am when I eat.  Also brought me into the present.  It was a Be. Here. Now. time.  Gotta get back to the meditation, discovered I missed it.

South America.  A lot to learn in the next six months plus.  In addition to scoping out the ports, already somewhat begun, I’ll read at least one comprehensive history of the continent, an ecological history and a natural history.  I want to find a reasonably priced geography, too.  The ones I have found so far are damned expensive.  One of the values of traveling is its ability to make the distant, close and the abstract, real.  There’s a definite gestalt to lengthy travel in a part of the world unknown.  At some point, a point uncertain, an understanding snaps into place, a combination of prior experience, preparation and that small market in Manta, Ecuador, the smells of Santa Marta, Colombia, the sight of glaciers around Punta Arenas.  Then, like the Velveteen Rabbit, South America will become real for me.

Often, I take along some literature, too, perhaps some Allenda, Losa, maybe I’ll just take take a Hundred Years of Solitude and read it again.  The phrase book, too.

Grocery store now.

Aging, Asia, Politics, US History, World History

The Times They Are A Changin’ (Still)

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Winter                                                             Waning Moon of the Cold Month

Temps have come up.  Near freezing on Thursday.  Break out the beer cooler, the barbecue and the hot dogs.  Time for a picnic Minnesota style.

Every once in a while I find myself driving in a part of the Cities I don’t know well.  Tonight was one of those times.  I needed to get the Urban League building at 2100 Plymouth.  Looked straightforward on the map, but, as usual, I wanted to try something, so I got off at the Olson Highway exit.  Hmm.  A bridge too far.  I had to wend my back north through side streets.  Finally found it and made it to the meeting.

Senate District 58, Linda Higgins.  The Sierra Club’s first in-district meeting with members and legislators.  A good turnout and a lot of good dialogue, back and forth on environmental issues, peace and justice and taxes.  Back in the car, back home.

How about that news that GM sold more cars in China last year than in the US?  Whoa.  Things change.  Our time at the top of the heap alone has come to an end.  I’m not with the dystopians who see us limping toward the next century, a much larger and sadder equivalent of Britain after the fall of empire.  Neither am I nervous about China.  Nothing in their 5,000 year history suggests to me that they will do anything more than shore up their borders and try to make as much money as possible while living interesting lives.

My own feeling?  The world will be better served with two different, but equal powers.  Will we stay there with China for the long haul?  I don’t know.  I don’t care.  How we live our lives here has become interwoven with China as an economic power, yes; but, will the superbowl or the world series cease?  No.  High school proms and McDonalds?  No.  Car trips and love of our national parks?  No.  Our wobbly, creeky democracy?  No.

Will the US change over the next 50 to 100 years.  Of course.  More Latinos.  Greater ethnic diversity.  More people in cities.  Sure. Will this makes us less American?  Nope. Will it change what it means to be an American?  Maybe.  But are we the same Americans as those in the first 13 states?  I don’t think so.  Different than Civil War America?  In substantive ways, yes.  So, it stands to reason that American will have a different flavor in 2111.  Not only am I ok with that, I celebrate it and hope my grandchildren and their grandchildren help make it special.