Category Archives: Feelings

Still No Wind

May 5, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence

In spite of what I said yesterday I’m still in the doldrums. Still feeling out of touch with now, wishing for some magic transport portal that would accomplish this move in a flash. The resistance I have is not about the decision, that makes sense, feels good. Moving. And prior to moving, culling, sorting, packing, staging, selling, buying. I’ve done it, more times than I care to count, but it’s been 20 years and that’s a long, long time. Longer than I’ve lived anywhere. All that time to accumulate. Stuff.

And the resistance is, as I said the other day, premonitory. What can I do today? Gather all the garden tools, put them on a tarp and divide them into keep and donate. After that’s done, I can plant the onions and leeks. Then, we can go into the garage. Same discipline. Sort. Divide into keep and donate. That’s what I can do now. I can’t hunt for land or property. I know that. So we can do the incremental things that will make it possible for us to move forward.

Imagine those pioneers faced with a homestead full of things and a Conestoga wagon to put them in. That must have been a challenge. Or, all those nomadic peoples who pick up and move every season. Packing light’s a necessity. So, it can be done. I know it.

Art and Culture, Colorado, Feelings

Calming

May 4, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

The first wave of emotions has passed. I feel present now. Those onions and leeks which I did not plant yesterday will go in on Monday and Tuesday instead, along with some fertilizer for the daffodils. Big life decisions take a while to incorporate and this one is not done with me, I know. But for today, it is.

Kate and I are going into the Cowles Center to see the Inferno danced by the James Sewell Ballet. Several years ago, when the writing stalled, I spent a year reading the classics, among them Dante’s Divine Comedy. This is one of the masterworks of western civilization, especially its depiction of Dante and Virgil’s journey through the Inferno. I did read on, finishing the trilogy with the Purgatorio and the Paradiso. It’s ironic, and I’m hardly original in observing this, that the Inferno is what has held reader’s attentions the most over the years. Damnation interests us more than redemption.

Colorado, Family, Feelings, Third Phase

A Gentle Tsunami

May 3, 2014 Charles 1 Comment

Beltane Emergence

I’ve put myself into a shocked, off center state by our decision to move. Assimilating the idea and its consequences have left me lackadaisical about Latin, less interested in the garden, a schlump relative to writing except for this blog. This won’t last long. It’s a response to the gentle but powerful emotional tsunami washing up on my Minnesota shore, a flood that I realize will wash most of what has been my life here back out to sea. And, it’s premonitory, a reality in the distance, yet it has enough force to rock me.

I’m letting it, right now, take me out of the now and buffet me with imagined sequelae, some wonderful, some sad, some exhilarating, some anxiety producing.

Wonderful. Living near the grandkids, the Rockies, the West. More faces at holidays and birthdays. A new place to absorb, to see, to learn, to become part of.

Sad. Saying good-bye to the Woollies, this house and its gardens, the Walker, the MIA, the Guthrie, the memories of 40 years.

Exhilarating. Writing in a new natural environment, one that will give me years of stimulation as will the lived history of the region. Staghounds in our future, dogs of the West. A new home and land.

Anxiety producing. You know. Packing, unpacking. Money. Adapting to a new place. Finding medical care, insurance.

All this swirls around, causing emotional collisions that spark off each other, create radiants of feeling. It’s the early days of a love affair, one that will go the distance. God, how great, how frightening, is that?

Colorado, Family, Feelings, Friends, Third Phase, Travel, Woolly Mammoths

The Circus Is Leaving Town

May 2, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

A slow moving mountain. Or, a slow move to the mountains. Sitting here contemplating my study, its hundreds of books and file folders, computer equipment, desks, chairs. I feel overwhelmed at the thought of pruning, organizing, decluttering for selling the house and actually moving. That’s one reason we’re giving ourselves two years or so to move.

Two years might encompass the remaining lifespan of Vega and Rigel. We really don’t know since they’re hybrids, but we suspect 7-8 years and 2016 is 7 years plus. That’s a factor though not a determining one. Hell, who knows, it could encompass our lifespan, too, though I don’t imagine it will.

Talk about liminal space. Between now and then we are no longer fully here and definitely not fully there. I imagine a huge circus tent with many ropes and stakes and poles. Each stake must be pulled. Each rope removed. The poles must be taken down and the canvas rolled up. The canvas is our life in Minnesota and its attendant material possessions.

The stakes are friends, the MIA and the Walker, the Sierra Club Northstar Chapter, the background relationships developed over years of work in the church and in politics and in neighborhoods. The ropes are the emotional ties that bind us to places, to our years lived here, to our sense of ourselves as Minnesotans. The poles are those key relationships like the Woolly Mammoths, Anne, the docents, the folks Kate and I have worked with in multiple capacities: our vet, our doctors, our financial consultants.

All this must, in some way, be stored and the canvas packed. All these things will change once we reach our new destination. Our life will no longer be a Minnesota based life, but a Colorado based one. The friends will remain, of course, as will all the institutions and professionals, the places and their attached memories, but we will have stretched the ease and physical distance with many beyond the breaking point. It will not, of course, be possible to know which ones will suffer the most until time has passed. But all will suffer some, most will suffer a lot.

Feeling overwhelmed, of course, comes from imagining that the tent and its supports must be packed and moved for a train leaving tomorrow. That’s not the case. We have time and will use it well. It’s just that, well, right now, it’s a lot.

Family, Feelings, Travel, Weather +Climate

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

April 29, 2014 Charles 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.

Feelings, Writing

I Found, I Found An Altar

April 17, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring (so they say) Bee Hiving Moon

My lands! My great-aunt Nell used this phrase a lot. Seems to fit the weather today.

Entered my revised version of I Found an Altar into Scrivener. I’ll compile it and start a round of submissions for The Ifrit and Altar. These will go to magazines, both print and electronic. I’ll start with prozines because they pay the best and acceptance at them counts more than that at the lower paying and no compensation mags.

Really does feel like I’ve begun a different phase of my life now, one in which the writer is more professional, more functional than dysfunctional. In spite of my melancholy over the last week or so I feel better about life in general. A paradox, I know. Melancholy these days feels like a chemical matter, perhaps triggered by some event (the rejections?) or emotion (why did I wait so long to get to this place?), but out of proportion to them. So, I can have this underlying sad, heavy, bittersweet tonality or mood while feeling simultaneously strong.

Family, Feelings, Memories

24 Years and Still in Love

March 10, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Hare Moon

Sometimes, not often, but sometimes an event matches its purpose. Tonight’s anniversary dinner was such an event. We arrived at the Nicollet Island Inn at 6 pm, the same place where, 24 years ago, we spent the night before boarding a PanAm (yes, PanAm, can you imagine?) flight for Rome.

The host knew it was our anniversary, took us to our table after complimenting us on our glasses and our colorful garments and pointed to the bouquet on the table. “You are loved,” he said to Kate. “24 years and still in love?” Yes, we nodded. “Wonderful. Have a great evening.” We did.

We thanked our taste in classical music, our seats at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra for bringing us together. We looked at the things that could have gone badly like Kate earning a lot and me earning much less, then nothing. I said, “I think the thing we’ve done, all along, is nurture the best in each other. I don’t see how you can ask for more in a relationship.” Kate agreed. Somehow we have seen the highest and best in each other, staying out of each other’s way in some instances, stepping in with a helping hand at others.

(in Pizarro’s dining room, Lima, Peru)

Kate ordered the scallops; I went for the tenderloin. We both ate less than half, saving some for tomorrow. I set aside my low carb focus to have a chocolate tart for dessert. We finished smiling. Kate slid over and put her arm through mine.

Added to the bill were two Nicollet Island Inn mugs, memories of the evening of our 24th.

Next year in Hawai’i!

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Retirement, Third Phase, Travel

Coming Up in March

March 6, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Hare Moon

Looking down the month toward our 24th anniversary (Monday) and the date I’m wheels on the road for Tucson (the 18th). 24 years with Kate and our relationship improves like fine wine, gaining more nuance and depth, more body with each passing year. This year we return to the Nicollet Island Inn for dinner, the spot from which we launched our honeymoon. As spring rolled forward in March of 1990 those three weeks in Europe were as good a beginning as the marriage itself. Next year we’ll celebrate our 25th anniversary at Mama’s Fish House on Maui.

The Tucson trip grows closer. These rolling retreats, as I like to think of alone time behind the wheel, are really just road trips. Road trips are part of the American way, peregrinatio updated for the age of the internal combustion engine.

This one of course has its focus self discovery, focus, personal deepening so it will have a more spiritual note, but it will also include my usual visits to spots of natural and historic interest. Among the possibilities are Carlsbad Caverns, the Saguaro forests, a state park or two in Arizona, the Sonoran Desert Museum, Mt. Kitt, Chaco Canyon, Joshua Tree National Park (probably not, but it’s within reach) and a second visit to the Arbor Day lodge and farm in Nebraska City, Nebraska.

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Memories

Selfies

December 19, 2013 Charles Leave a comment

Samhain Winter Moon

Great warmup yesterday, eh? I think we saw 33 here for an hour. Take that nosnowbirds.

Off to downtown Minneapolis again today. Third time this week. I often go a month without getting there. My first physical with Cornelia Massie, M.D. No real concerns, just another benchmark on the road to the big check-up. That’s the one when check-ups are no longer necessary.

(who’s in there?)

Listening to a lecture by Alan Watts yesterday had me wondering about the self. As you may know, I’ve been an advocate of the Self, the unique bundle of experiences, gifts, body/mind and personal history that is you. In my way of thinking, Self=Soul.

But. I think I may have to balance that with the Eastern view of no-self. Watts described each of us as the universe being conscious of itself, a game the universe plays. We float along on the flesh bag that contains us, taking in sensation as it comes, changing, always, with it.

In addition to the high Western individualist Self I can see the Eastern argument, too. When I consider the young boy who ran up the concrete slope of a neighbor’s fence to walk higher than his mom for the length of their lot, I wonder how we can share memories. We do, I know that. But his reality, his experience of the world is so different from mine today that it makes him as alien to me as a stranger. Or, an intimate for that matter.

And, if the child, then what about the adolescent? Well, there, too. That guy with the runny nose, a wet handkerchief in his pocket, going from class to class, working hard to keep up his status as the brain. How about that 60’s radical with a placard in one hand, a joint in the other? Geez, who was that guy?

And so it would go in a chain up until, well, when? What about the man who sat with his brothers at the Nicollet Island Inn on Monday? His time has come and gone, replaced with the one who types now.

Yet, I’m also dragging this ever changing body to the doctor because I feel a duty to it, to make it last as long as possible. Why? Well, I’m interested in seeing what the Self becomes.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Woolly Mammoths

Fed

December 2, 2013 Charles Leave a comment

Samhain New (Winter) Moon

Drove into Minneapolis in driving snow as far as Coon Rapids, then rain. The Woolly’s met at Gorkha Palace, a Tibetan-Nepali-Indian restaurant near Surdyk’s Liquor store in Minneapolis. Tom, Bill, Scott, Mark, Frank, Warren and I had a pleasant meal together.

Each time I go to a meeting I come away nourished in body and soul. The body is fed. And so is the soul. What do I mean by soul? I mean much the same as I do when I use the word Self, that fluid yet somehow distinct sense that the I in this sentence is a peculiar, particular entity and one always with me, one with me. That last is tricky because to be one with me implies a separation between me and the I, a separation that does not, I believe, exist.

How does the soul get fed? By being seen, validated by others who recognize me as a peculiar, particular entity. It’s important to note though that the soul, the Self that I experience is not the same as the one recognized by others. Yet, it is fed by others who see me and respond to me as a continuing presence from one time to the next.

It helps the tricky move of the I seeing the Self. There is a difficulty here. What part of me sees the Self that is also me? I know there must be answers to this, but right now they’re escaping me. Ha.

What I’m trying to say here is that this soul is fed by the souls of others, especially others key to his ongoing story. The Woollys are such people for me as I am for them. We help each others Selves stay alive and well.