Category Archives: Weather +Climate

Weather +Climate

10 Feet High and Risin’

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                 Emergence Moon

“A large section of the mighty West Antarctica ice sheet has begun falling apart and its continued melting now appears to be unstoppable…If the findings hold up, they suggest that the melting could destabilize neighboring parts of the ice sheet and a rise in sea level of 10 feet or more may be unavoidable in coming centuries.” NYT

(see this website for a clickable version of the map to the right. It shows, in gray and orange here, states affected at that level of sea rise.)

“WASHINGTON — The accelerating rate of climate change poses a severe risk to national security and acts as a catalyst for global political conflict, a report published Tuesday by a leading government-funded military research organization concluded.”  NYT 

I see these things. I know the road ahead and it is difficult. Yet, there are Ruth and Gabe. And your grandchildren, too. Then, the children they too will have. And imagine the world in which they will have to live.

All this demands a piece of me for as long as I’m able. Some of us have to lean on the horn until folks start coming out of the building to see what’s going on.

Health, Weather +Climate

Spring Holds Out For a Better Contract

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                         Emergence Moon

Great line from Paul Huttner at MPR’s Updraft blog:  The season formerly known as spring… The plants in our vegetable garden really want to grow. I can tell. But the temperatures aren’t giving them much of a chance.

While at the Woolly retreat this weekend, the transplants from Seed Saver’s Exchange will probably come.  The timing is right; or, at least the timing should be right. But, we may have to shelter the plants awhile until the soil warms up a bit more.

Did my workout this evening, at least the high intensity aerobic part, and my back has calmed down. I’m glad this isn’t a week or week + long event.

Colorado, Friends, Weather +Climate

And the Winner Is…Bill Schmidt

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                      Emergence Moon

Fortuna rode in from the western suburbs with Bill Schmidt tonight. He got hand after hand and played them well. Congratulations, Bill.

We’ve had a soaking here tonight. As I drove home around 9:30 after the sheepshead card game in St. Paul, the rain began to achieve downpour proportions.  I turned on Highway 10 headed toward Round Lake Boulevard and had the windshield wipers on full phaser.

Driving through the rain, here in the humid east, a background scene rolled past of future drives at night in the arid west. Will these storms be those of memory once we move to Colorado?

Even though we’ve set ourselves two years to make this move, there is a sense of the last time I’ll… in many things I do, including this drive in the rain. To return to the circus image, the stakes have begun to loosen and the ropes have got some slack even though the tents a long way from coming down.

Travel, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Wet

Leave a comment

Spring                                                                       Emergent Moon

Pulled into the garage at 8 p.m. last night.  We were tired, but had had a good trip, our first together driving to Colorado in a very long time. It was rainy during much of the drive though our time in Denver was largely dry.

Minnesota is pushing toward our wettest April on record. Go team rain. Fall today. Many of our spring ephemerals are well out of the ground but only the crystata Iris are blooming so far. We need the warmth to open up leaves and flowers. Sun. We’re ready for the growing season.

My unusually heavy travel time will take on another chapter the third weekend in May with the 26th? annual retreat of the Woolly Mammoths.  This year we’re at Frontenac’s Villa Maria retreat center.

During this retreat, the theme, What is your walk, should bring up conversation about the next few years for each of us. We’ve supported each other for more than a quarter century. That’s really something.

Family, Feelings, Travel, Weather +Climate

Winter Storm Warning. 6-8 Inches of Snow. Oh, joy.

Leave a comment

Spring                                                                 Bee Hiving Moon

A cool morning in Wall, South Dakota. 37 and wet. Last day on the road for this trip. About 8 hours to Andover. Last posting for this trip. Just looked out the window. The Rav4 is covered in, of all things, snow! Winter just will not let go this year.

Traveling puts us in a liminal zone, neither at home or settled elsewhere. Liminality has long interested me. The liminal zone between ocean and land, lake and shore is often where the most abundant life thrives. The liminal zone between forest and meadow provides refuge for predator and prey alike. The ‘burbs are a liminal zone between rural and urban.

We’re most familiar of course with the liminal zones of dawn and twilight, but fall and spring are actually long liminal zones between the cold fallow time and the warmer growing season. Those strange interludes between sleeping and waking are, too, liminal.  The Celts believed the liminal times of day and night were the most potent for magical working.

Liminality puts us between familiar places, neither wet nor dry, city nor country, day nor night. In these spots we have the most opportunity to discern the new in the old, the possible in the routine. It’s not surprising then that Kate and I will approach the question of where we will live our third phase life from a different slant while on the road.

From this vantage, neither Minnesotaheim nor Mountainheim, we investigate the terrains of our heart, let the rational mind float, or stay tethered perhaps in Andover. The heart says family. It also says friends. It says have people close to us when vulnerable, which argues for both Minnesota and Colorado. It says memories; it says grandchildren. The heart pulls and pushes. We’ll mull our decision over the growing season, see how it flourishes or wanes, see what the heart says at home. Listen to friends and grandkids. And each other. Those dogs, too.

Weather +Climate

Mountains and Oceans

Leave a comment

Spring                                                                New (Emergent) Moon

Dark clouds over the Rockies this morning, rain and 57 after 78 yesterday. The horizon line shows bright just above the peaks, then another two degrees or so, the clouds point down toward the mountains, as if mirroring them. Virga falls in the distance.

(Rain Clouds Gathering-Scene Amongst the Allegheny Mountains  George Harvey 1840)

The weather changes quickly here, katabatic winds from the mountains meeting moist air from the gulf and cooler, drier air from the north. Depending on which one can be a weathermaker, Denver gets rain, heat or snow and cold.

The mountains have the same sort of presence as the ocean. They dominate the skyline to the west just as the ocean dominates the sight line to the curvature of the earth. Their difference from flat land is as dramatic as the ocean’s, too. Both remind us two leggeds that not all the earth was made for us. Or, better, that we were not made to enjoy all the earth.

That’s not to say we don’t venture onto and into the ocean, onto and up the mountains, we do; but, we make those treks with safety gear and attention for we are not on our element. Knowing their indifference to our welfare makes their presence nearby slightly unsettling, a reminder of the all to narrow slices of this planet on which our species can thrive.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Weather +Climate

Fencing Off Spring

Leave a comment

Spring (Ostara)                                                       Bee Hiving Moon

Friend Bill Schmidt found a helpful exposition on Ostara, an early fertility goddess, and her regular appearance in Christian households (among others) at this time of year. Here’s a link to this short, but well-researched piece.  After reading it, an odd thought occurred to me, perhaps because I also read this NYT piece this morning:  Saving Minds, Along With Souls.

The odd thought is this.  The church captured the renewal and invigorating power of spring as a metaphor for the resurrection, then demonized (quite literally) and punished pagan observances of the season, like those related in the linked piece Bill found.  The effect was to put a theological fence around the power of spring in Western culture, confining it within the garden of Christian orthodoxy.

By making church membership and belief a prerequisite for experience its power-through the Easter holiday-the natural celebration of a Great Wheel holiday, a real and joyous one, became dangerous, sanctioned as blasphemy.  The church accomplished this in fact through the burning of witches and the intentional extinguishing of earth focused traditions wherever it spread its missionary power. It accomplished it in theory through making spring only a metaphor for the resurrection.

Enough of that.  A temperate latitude Spring is a wonder, a life renewing, hopeful time when the earth shows that life comes again, and triumphs over the fallow time.  And more.  In doing so it assures life for the human race and all the animal kingdom that absolutely depends on its gentle, but unyielding power. It is an animal’s birthright to gambol when the grass greens and the trees leave out.  The joy is innate.

Business cycles come and go.  History rises and falls. Nations become great and then wither.  Religions prosper and die away. Note this, though. If even one spring failed to happen, it would cause a worldwide catastrophe more damaging than the failure of any of these. If two springs failed to happen in a row, there would be no need for business cycles or nations and history would record a near apocalypse.  Three springs? Well, just imagine.

(A Vision of Spring – Thomas Millie Dow)

So give me a bunny rabbit and some colored eggs. Let’s take off our shoes  and walk barefoot on the soil as it warms the seeds. I’ll dance with you as the shoots come up and starvation is banished once again.

 

 

Weather +Climate, Writing

Short Story Collection

Leave a comment

Spring (?)                                                               Bee Hiving Moon

Two more rejections have come in on this decidedly unspringlike day.  I can’t tell how much we have now, but when I went out at 7 pm to retrieve the trash container I walked in snow that came over the top of my Sorels.  In one day the advance of the sun has been pushed back, nullified by white, a covering more mid-winter than Easter.

Right now I’m going through a curious process of trying to collect all the short stories I’ve written in one spot though it has proved difficult.  I’ve had several computers over the years and transferring files from one to the next has not always been seamless.  All my novels and parts of novels are in one file, but until today the computer files I have of short stories were all over the place.  The computer files now have a home.

However.  In going through my paper files I’ve found many stories no longer extant as computer files.  That’s ok, because I can just reenter them, but it makes centralizing my cache of stories a bit more complicated.  I’m not sure I’ve located all the paper stories yet since I have three file cabinets plus bankers boxes, but over the next few weeks I’ll get all I can find in one physical location.

This is important to me because I’m editing and revising them in preparation for sending them out to magazines.  I want to have a reasonable idea of what my trunk looks like.

I edited one today, “I Found An Altar, Black With The Ash of Sacrifice,” that I like a lot, but it’s one of the paper only stories so I’m entering it now into Scrivener.  This process will take some time.

Art and Culture, Family, Garden, Weather +Climate

Saturday

Leave a comment

Spring                                                                Bee Hiving Moon

Business meeting.  Money continues to come in and go out.  Life in advanced stage capitalism.  Third life, that is.

The rain today waters in the nitrogen I put down yesterday and soaks the seeds, giving them that first shot of liquid and snugging them in their rows.  The chill, raw temps are why I did that yesterday afternoon.  This is the next week’s weather, roughly, according to the weather forecasts.

Kate and I see Mountaintop at 1 pm today at the Guthrie.  Bill Schmidt’s description of it made it interesting to me.  Also, in all these years of theater going, I’ve never seen a Penumbra presentation.  Looking forward to this one.

A kind thought to all those recovering or about to begin recovering from one medical intervention or another.  Especially Tom’s thumb and Frank’s back.

Dogs, Garden, Weather +Climate

The Wolf Came Out

Leave a comment

Spring                                                                 Bee Hiving Moon

The sun is as high in the sky now as it is at Labor Day.  That means warmth is coming. Today we’re supposed to hit 70.  Then, maybe get some snow on Sunday.  Back and forth. With the sun high, the snow from winter will be gone by then, except for those heroic dirty mountains that rose up in large parking lots.  I remember a few years back when they hung on until well into May.

The dogs heard something this morning around 2:30.  And set to howling and barking to get at it.  Kate finally got up and let them out.  She later heard a high pitched scream and a while after that the dogs retching.  Whatever it was, they caught it.  She also said the owl was in fact hooting last night.  It was, however, quiet when I wrote the post below this one.

Not often these days, but on occasion, we get reminded that these gentle loving creatures remain red in tooth and claw.  Underneath that indoor sweetness lie genes borne of wolves, most often not aroused, but last night.  The wolf came out.