Category Archives: Feelings

Feelings, Garden

More Doing

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Summer                                                      Hiroshima Moon

More doing.  A couple of weeks ago our dogs, imagining we were bored, I think, decided to dig under the orchard fence rather than vault over it where I had put the electric fence.  Thing is, they succeeded.

(a 2010 effort, getting ready for the Olympic digging)

The first route underneath resulted in a shallow cave under the second of two blueberry mounds that we have, leaving them in danger of collapse.  That was when it was too hot to move, so indolence carried the task through until today.  Got out the shovel and reversed the dog’s action carried out with their two front feet.  If it was Vega and Rigel, and I’m sure it was, then they probably took turns, as I have seen them do numerous times.  One gets tired, the other steps in to continue the task.  Two big dogs can move a lotta sand fast that way.

Digging underneath the fence requires a different strategy than electric fence since I don’t want to run a low wire-rope.  Too much trouble with plants, snagging, that sort of thing.  My method in this instance is to bury chicken wire after having wired it to the larger mesh we have between the wooden rails. This works.

The California fence that we had put in for the vegetable garden, five foot tall chain link in
black with red cedar posts, top rails and bottom boards, would have worked better here, too, but we didn’t choose it.

(California fence)

Also collected the onions whose tops had fallen over, the sign for harvesting, put up the old screen door on supports in the near garden shed and laid out this year’s yellow onion crop for drying.  After about a week they’ll go downstairs into our small root cellar simulacrum.  The yellows keep best.  Reds don’t keep at all; whites in between.

Finished weeding the mounds around our fruit trees and the blueberry patches, helped Kate start the mower and came in.  Kate came in a few minutes later to say she had disturbed the ornery bees.  Two stings.  We have one hyper-vigilant colony and one almost somnolent.  Odd.

 

Family, Feelings

La Revedere

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Summer                                       Hiroshima Moon

The Hiroshima moon rose in sickle form over the front range, its young light just above a bank of storm clouds.

Left Jon and Jen’s tonight around 9 pm.  Ruth came up and grabbed my legs, put her head against my waist.  She didn’t say anything.  I hugged her, told her I loved her and left.

Though children are never as innocent as we credit them, they are often transparent in their feelings, which appears as innocence.  Perhaps it is innocence, to be out there in the world as  you are, with no guard up.

We may mature as we age, but to the extent that we become opaque to the world, we will never again know innocence.

Innocence is the rising of the young moon, slender and beautiful, perhaps aging can be the waning of the same moon, a sickle slender and beautiful.

Grandchildren touch the heart in a way no other relationship can.  Ruth and Gabe occupy that part leaning toward the future; the part of the heart that will not die, but will live on in the lives of others.  In a profound sense we need our grandchildren far more than they need us.

Without them most lives hit a barrier as bleak as the dark of the moon, extinction.  With them the heart never stops beating, it transfers bodies, ready for another lifetime.

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

I’m So Glad

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Beltane                                     Garlic Moon

Be Glad You Exist, the Greek inscription I mentioned a few posts ago, got me thinking.  A persistent prod in American culture is the I’m not doing that well enough, or fast enough, or soon enough or with the right attitude.  Not studying enough, eating too much, not working enough, not working out enough, not relaxing, not being charitable enough or financially successful enough.

It’s an argument from lack that has as its premise that jockey metaphor I came up with a month or so ago.  In case you forgot, I did until just now, I suggested that many of us take on board, sometime in childhood, a jockey who rides us, rides us hard, always pushing us toward the next, the better, the hoped for, the not yet achieved.

This argument from lack is the jockey’s prod, his quirt that comes out when he senses flagging will or decreasing purpose.

But, what if Be Glad You Exist was the baseline?  Just that.

Then we might start not from a place of lack but from a place of adding, of completing, of maturing, of enriching.  Moving ourselves not with the lash, but with a model more like Maslow’s where the underpinning opens new possibilities, like the emergence of the butterfly, say, from the caterpillar.  A caterpillar is not a lesser butterfly, but its necessay precursor.

Orienting ourselves this way (I realize I’m writing about myself here, but maybe a bit about you, too.) does not require the scorched earth of bad diet, bad language skills, inadequacy of any kind; rather, it could have Be Glad You Exist as the ground of our being.  Sounds like a good thing to me.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Retirement, Third Phase

A Third Phase Entry: Learning How to Die

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Beltane                                              New Garlic Moon

Whew.  Over to Riverfalls (east into Wisconsin, about an hour) for Warren’s father’s funeral.  Then, in rush hour, out to St. Louis Park for the Woolly meeting this month at the Woodfire Grill. (west of the Cities)  So much driving.

Funerals.  The wedding equivalent of our age range.  We meet friends there, catch up, honor the family and the final journey.  Then we go home, secretly glad we were attending another funeral, not being featured.

Though.  We agreed tonight, Mark, Scott, Bill, Frank and myself, that what we learn from Moon’s recent death, Warren’s father and mother, Sheryl’s father and mother, Bill and Regina’s confrontation with cancer, is how to die.  It is the end of this phase of life as surely as a degree ended the first phase, career and family the second.

It is this that changed at our retreat two weeks ago.  We acknowledge and are ready to learn how to die.  And how to live until we do.  It is a joy and a true blessing to have men ready to walk down this ancientrail together.  And to be one of them.

Family, Feelings, Weather +Climate

Rainy Weather

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Beltane                                                                New Garlic Moon

Rain.  Thanks, weather gods.  Lightning and thunder and high winds, they scare Rigel and Gertie.  Rigel tries to bark the thunder away.  Which, needless to say, increases the noise level some.  All the veggies got a good soaking, the orchard and the flowers.  Nice.

Kate said tonight that her first job was a great fit, wrapping presents at a gift shop.  She also said she thought medicine fit her, too.  I surprised myself then by saying, “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever had a job that fit me.  Not one.  Except maybe the last 20 years.”  Writing, being a husband and a father, gardener.  Sometimes I get exasperated with the boss, but that’s true in every work situation, right?  (just to be clear.  le boss est moi)

Kate thought I might have made a good journalist.  Maybe.  Hard to say.  Strange to look back over my life and realize I never worked (by that I mean, employed specifically for) at anything I really enjoyed.  I did a lot of things I considered important, good, worthwhile, but that’s not the same, is it?

 

Dogs, Family, Feelings, Literature, Travel

A Thought, A Sigh

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Beltane                                                                            Beltane Moon

All day.  A thought comes.  A sigh, hoping to delve into, oh, say, renaissance humanism.  Dive in and just stay there until all there is to absorb crawls inside my skin and remains.  Or, maybe Romania.  Wondering just how the Slavic countries ended up north and south of Romania-Hungary-Austria.  Here’s another part of the world about which I know almost nothing.

Later, watching Kate, seeing her sinking back into a life without paid work, a sense of relaxation, of being at home.  At last.

Looking at the Google art.  A kris.  A southeast Asia blade with a wavy, not straight edge.  Indonesia.  Again, a country with a population comparable to the US and lots of islands, but, again, not much is in my head about it.  A little.  Bali.  Krakatoa.  Suharto.  My god, it has 17508 islands.

Lyndon Johnson.  In the first volume of Robert Caro’s four volume (so far) biography.  He dominates, pushes, acts out against his parents.  The hill country of texas.  A difficult place, a trap for the unwary.  Most of the people who lived there.

The dogs.  At the vet.  18 years to the same vet.  Many dogs, all panting, all nervous.  Rigel, Vega and Kona today.  Rigel and Vega, sweet dogs.  Kona more aloof.  A grand dame.

Irrigation overhead busted in the southern vegetable garden.  Pulled loose from the pcv that feeds it water.  Have to fix it.  Plant more collards and beets.  I’ve touched most of the plants here, memories.  Buying them at Green Barn.  Digging a spot for them.  Pouring water on them.  Over the years, 18, lots of plants, thousands.  One at a time.  In the soil.  Maybe pick it up and move it or divide it.  That sense of a deep, long connection.

Dream of the Red Chamber.  Chinese literature, the third classic of the four major ones.  Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  Monkeys Journey to the West. Sinking into the rhythms of another culture.  Reading it on the Kindle.  Odd juxtaposition of past and present.

original by Ivan Walsh)

Now, tired.  Smelling the lilacs Kate brought me.  Thinking of sleep.

 

 

Feelings, Garden

Not All Who Wander Are Lost

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Spring                                                Bee Hiving Moon

Feeling directionless.  Not down, just aside from forward motion.

Spent the weekend hands in the garden, planting beets, leeks, shallots, green onions, yellow onions, moving plant matter pruned or dug up by Kate.  That all feels good, the growing season again, seeds again, the sun again, the sky and the clouds again.  Pressing the beet seeds into the ground, placing the leek transplants tenderly against the trenches side, pushing the yellow onion sets into the sides of our side trap, like cloves in an orange.  All good.

Still.  The book.  Not done.  The Sierra Club.  Not finished.  Tours disappointing.  Reimagining faith on a furlow after the push to get the Groveland presentation done.  Work with photoshop and inDesign still potential.

Summer’s come and gone already.  Now it’s fall.  Hard freeze tonight.  Maybe spring will return next week and summer come the week after that but right now the weather seems directionless, too.

Thought I had another two weeks before the bees came, but now the word is that they’ll be here on Saturday.  That means work during the week that I’d planned to do on the weekend.  That sort of thing.

A sort of malaise.

Maybe it’s that damn jockey trying to reclaim his seat.

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Friends, Retirement, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

A Third Phase Entry: I Don’t Have Friends Who Knew Me When

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Spring                                           Bee Hiving Moon

Sometimes realizations float up in conversation, product of a gestalt not possible without others.  That happened to me tonight at the Woolly regular first Monday meal.

Gathered at the Woodfire Grill in St. Louis Park, we began to toss around the topic of change.  Woolly change.  Some of us express excitement about change; some want to explore change, but do not want to lose what’s still valuable to them

At some point in the conversation I said, “Well, it’s not true for any of you, but for me, I didn’t go to high school here.  I don’t have those friends here who knew me when.  When I face down those final days, you’re those friends for me.”

Without even realizing what I’d done, I had laid a vulnerable part of me on the table, not a fear exactly, but a concern.  I don’t want Kate to have all the responsibility.  Nor do I want to have all of it for her.  Most of it, sure.  But not all.

Here then, was naked need.  A need for reassurance that these relationships will last.  Until death do us part.  That’s the realization.  I need to know that these guys will be there for me, as I will be for them.  It’s not often that an unexplored need strikes me, and rarely in public, but it happened tonight.

Let me quickly say that I don’t doubt these relationships.  It’s just that I didn’t realize how important, crucial even, they are for me.

Aging, Feelings, Third Phase

Leave Taking

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Spring                                                           Woodpecker Moon

At the dentist this morning I told them Kate and I planned to use a dentist closer to our home here in Andover.  This was what got me thinking about leave taking.  We’ve been with Centennial Dental for over 22 years and making the change was not a trivial decision.

In part we switched because our new dental insurance doesn’t include them, reason enough for sure; but, this was more a decision about not wanting a trip to the dentist to take three hours or so.  Centennial Dental is in Edina near the Macy’s Homestore.  They are great dentists.  That’s why we stayed so long.

After that, a nap, and then off to Champlain High School and my third and last, for now, class on the Adobe Creative Suite.  This class is on Adobe InDesign. I’m cranking up to sell my books on Amazon, through the Kindle store.  InDesign will let me format my books myself and save them in a file congenial with the Kindle operating system, perhaps others, too.

Then there’s the verdammt melancholy.  After the dentist I drove right at a car coming from my left.  I missed her, but my attention was not there.  Vacillating now between acting as if I’m fine and seeing if that will lift my spirits or biting the bullet, calling my old analyst John Desteian and my gp Tom Davis, take arms against this sky of clouds and by opposing them grow more cheerful.

 

Feelings
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Imbolc                                                         Woodpecker Moon

Felt some clouds lifting yesterday, but they drifted back in this morning.  Getting old.  Gonna have to try something.