Category Archives: Aging

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities

The Value of Increasing Darkness

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Samhain                                         Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

The daylight is gone, twilight has fallen and night is on its way.  Now that we have entered the season of Samhain, the leaves have vanished from the trees and the clouds, like tonight, often hang gray in the sky.  Samhain means the end of summer and in the old Celtic calendar was the half of the year when the fields went fallow while the temperature turned cool, then cold, hope returning around the first of February, Imbolc, when the ewes would freshen and milk would once again be part of the diet as new life promised spring.

In between Imbolc and Samhain lies the Winter Solstice.  The early darkness presages the long twilight; it lasts from now until late December as we move into the increasing night until daylight becomes only a third of the day.  This has been, for many years, my favorite time of year.  I like the brave festivals when lights show up on homes and music whirs up, making us all hope we can dance away our fear.

The Yamatanka mandala at the Minnesota Institute of Art gives a meditator in the Tantric disciplines of Tibetan Buddhism a cosmic map, brightly displaying the way to Yamatanka’s palace grounds.  In the middle of the palace grounds, represented here by a blue field with a vajra (sacred thunderbolt) Yamantaka awaits our presence.

In the Great Wheel as I have come to know it, we visit Yamantaka on the night of the Winter Solstice, that extended darkness that gives us a foretaste of death.  Our death.  On that night we can sit with ourselves, calm and quiet, imagining our body laid out on a bed, eyes closed, mouth quiet, a peaceful expression on our lifeless face.

We can do that, not in suicidal fantasy, but in recognition of our mortality, our finite time upon the wheel of life, awaiting our turn as the wheel turns under the heavens carrying us away from this veil of samsara.  If we can do that, we can then open ourselves to the thin sliver of light that becomes more and more, as the solstice marks the turning back of the darkness and brings us once again to life.

When we can visit Yamantaka’s palace, sup with him in this throne room and see death as he, the conqueror of death sees it, we are finally free.

Aging, Family, Retirement

Getting Closer

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Samhain                                          Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Kate spent 3+ hours at a sewing workshop, creating place mats.  They’re beautiful.  She’s done a lot recently to kick her sewing up another notch, learning how to use the embroidery module on her Bernina, assembling her machine quilter, making more difficult quilts, turning out purses of her own design, going to classes, joining a quilting guild and signing up for road trips to various quilt shops.  She sews a lot, disappearing into her sewing room and working for hours at a stretch, often oblivious to time.  She gets in flow.

She’s a bare month and half + a few days from retirement and she’s ready.  Her casual time will be only 4 work units or so a month with plenty of flexibility.

Our day-to-day lives will probably change little, except Kate won’t be leaving for work at any point during the day.  Once she’s retired, I plan to drive the truck in the winter and let the red car ride out the icy season in the garage.  It’s not the best on snow and ice.  That sort of thing, otherwise we’ll cook, tend the garden, do our creative work, travel some, volunteer here and there.

Living, not retiring.

Aging, Family, Humanities, Literature, Our Land and Home, Weather +Climate

Heavy, Man, Heavy

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Samhain                                           Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

File under the things we do for love.  Kate asked me, as a big favor, if I would clear the sidewalk and a path to the mailbox.  I agreed albeit reluctantly. Never again.  This type of snow, laden with water, dense and prone to packing tight when moved, is just too hard for me to clear.  It clogs up the snowblower, so the snowblower’s out.  Lifting it is beyond my frame’s capacity.  I knew it, but I did it anyhow.  Ouch.

The snow took off the top of the cedar tree’s other trunk, too, so the whole thing will need to come down.  That means the chain saw, sometime soon.  That, I can do.

After pushing some snow around, I harvested the last of the leeks, fine looking vegetables.  The greens, kale and chard in particular, will continue growing until the ground freezes, so I’ll probably have one more harvest from them, too.

Most of the morning I tried to pack in some material not too different from the heavy snow:  Latin participles.  As participles, they share in the attributes of both the adjective–meaning declensions–and verbs–meaning tense and voice.  In addition the participles tense does not follow the verbs because the participle can cue action either concurrent, before or after the action of the verb.  In addition, just to confuse things, the present tense and the passive future tense use the verbs present tense stem to form the participle while the future tense and the passive perfect tense use the participle stem.  Yikes.

I know, I know.  I’m doing this on purpose.  I’m just venting.

Aging, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Work, Humanities, Myth and Story, Politics

In The Right Spot After All

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Samhain                                      Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

“To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult.” – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Goethe captures the crux of a dis-ease I felt at the dam conference, a dis-ease that probably explains more of why I didn’t end up in academia than other explanations I often give myself.  In short there was more talking than acting and even the references to acting were talking and more it was talking about talking to partners and allies in their language.

Thinking of the caliber in this dam conference is, however, not easy; in fact, it is hard and many of the people who spoke were clever, insightful, giving a new spin to old ideas, my favorite example the delta subsidence problem. People who can take a long held belief and shake it inside out until it reveals it’s underpinnings have my utmost respect.  I hope sometimes I can reach that level in my own thinking; it’s the way change can get started, the reframing of the old in terms of something new.

Who would think, for instance, that sea level rise inundation of coastal delta areas might be alleviated by removing dams upstream?  So, first you have to have the new idea, the problem and its source carefully linked before action can target a plausible solution.

Still, I find myself impatient with just this kind of thinking, that is, root and branch thinking that stops without corollary action.  In the end I’m more of an action guy, much as I love the abstract, the analytical, the historical, the exegetical and the hermeneutical.  I want to change the way dams impact rivers and streams, whether it be by better design or by removal or by prevention.  I want to leverage the way dams have become visible issues into victories for the planet, victories that turn us toward a benign human presence on the face of the earth.

In the end I would have been unhappy as an academic, I see that now.  I would have strained against the confines of the classroom and publish or perish.  As it happens, I’ve been able to continue my learning on my own while engaging pretty consistently as a change agent.  Probably led the life I was meant to lead after all.  Good to know.

Aging, Friends, Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Politics, Weather +Climate

Losing a Friend, More on Dams

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Samhain                                   Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

“In the view of conservationists, there is something special about dams, something…metaphysically sinister….the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam.”

John McPhee Encounters with the Archdruid (1971)

We lost half a cedar tree in our backyard to heavy snow and wind.  We nurtured this tree from a small cedar bush into a two trunk tree that shaded our small patch of grass just beyond the deck.  These early heavy snows can be hard on evergreens since they retain needles throughout the winter, making them vulnerable to the wet and often large snow falls of late fall.  We’ll have a chance to do something new out there come spring.  Kate wants a lilac tree.

Here’s another thing about dams.  They generate, in addition to hydroelectric power, strong feelings.  People love’em or hate’m.  After they are built, they often become so much a part of the local ecology that people defend them from destruction with much the same fervor that folks oppose their construction in the first place.

There are a multitude of problems created by dams:  river flow is often altered and in turn alters the ecology both upstream and downstream, sediment pools at the base of dams robbing downstream deltas of needed material, archaeological sites can be destroyed or rendered extremely difficult to discover, populations are often displaced and, often, are denied access to the power produced by the dams which relocated them.

Equity questions abound as in the case of waters diverted to Los Angeles and Las Vegas from the arid Western states of Colorado, Utah, Nevada and Arizona and as in the case of a dam on the Zambezi river, built by Mozambique but because it needs military protection from rebel forces, forced to sell its electricity to South Africa at 1/7th of the world price.  Dams concentrate capital and political power in often unhealthy ways, especially in third world countries and especially when used as elements of a geopolitical strategy by such bureaucracies as the US Bureau of Reclamation.

More as the week goes on.

Aging, Art and Culture, Politics, US History

Canadian Immigration circa 1968

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Samhain                                                   Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

If you haven’t read the satirical piece about Canadian immigration posted below, it’s worth a look.  I want to tell you here about a true story concerning Canadian immigration, but it comes from an earlier time.

One cold day in 1968 David McCain and I set out from Muncie, Indiana Toronto bound.  Being the 1960’s we were in a drafty Volkswagen Beetle, cranky in the cold and not much help on snow covered road.  Our destination was the Toronto Anti-Draft League which distributed pamphlets outlining how to achieve landed immigrancy status in Canada.  When sent through the mail, these pamphlets were routinely seized, so David and I decided to go after them ourselves.

We drove the distance from Muncie to Detroit in one go and headed for the Bluewater Bridge, the entry point at Sarnia, Ontario.  We both had long hair and, in our orange Beetle, no doubt looked like exactly what we were.  The Canadians turned us away.  Regroup.  We went into a shopping mall, bought white shirts and winter caps, put them on, stuffing our hair up under the caps and tried again in a different lane.  Success!

After some hours we made Toronto, found the Anti-Draft League and picked up the pamphlets.  While there we noticed a store selling Asian presents, so we bought some Hell Notes and some other cheap touristy kind of things.

We had a night in Toronto and somehow found our way to the a performance called Succession*, or Three Games of Chess.  This unusual event featured Marchel Duchamp and John Cage playing three games of chess on stage, the chess board wired for sound.  In addition one of those ducks that dips its beak in a water glass, then comes up, goes down and dips again, stood on a card table nearby similarly wired.  The other performer was a man sitting on a metal folding chair reading the the classified ads from that days New York Time.  Out loud.  Into a microphone.  The audience was free to come up on stage and watch these two giants of early twentieth century avante garde art.

We were among a small audience and we stayed well into the early morning, leaving before the three games ended.  It was only much later in life that I learned this was a signal moment in Cage’s career, an event for the ages.  I was just there accidentally.

Both Dave and I had developed colds on the way up and stopped in a Canadian pharmacy for cold medicine before we began our drive back to the States.

At the border we were stopped, marched into the station and given a strip search.  Free.  No charge.  When we put our clothes back on, we found items from the car on the counter in front of the customs office.  We had these items:  125 pamphlets on landed immigrancy in Canada, several items made in Red China (the gifts) and 2-2-2’s, the Canadian cold medicine which we did not know was 40% codeine.  No wonder we felt so confident crossing the border.  This all added up to a damning conclusion.

The Customs folks confiscated everything.

Fortunately, we had no drugs in the car.  The hood and engine compartments were open, with stuff strewn on the ground and the hubcaps were off.    The reasons for our trip were gone, never to come back.  Except our memories.

*Actually, Cage hadn’t lost every single match with Duchamp. There was one that he definitely won, after a fashion. It happened in Toronto, in 1968. Cage had invited Duchamp and Teeny to be with him on the stage. All they had to do was play chess as usual, but the chessboard was wired and each move activated or cut off the sound coming live from several musicians (David Tudor was one of them). They played until the room emptied. Without a word said, Cage had managed to turn the chess game (Duchamp’s ostensive refusal to work) into a working performance. And the performance was a musical piece. In pataphysical terms, Cage had provided an imaginary solution to a nonexistent problem: whether life was superior to art. Playing chess that night extended life into art – or vice versa. All it took was plugging in their brains to a set of instruments, converting nerve signals into sounds. Eyes became ears, moves music. Reunion was the name of the piece. It happened to be their endgame.

Aging, Family, Retirement

Adult Activity

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Samhain                                                Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Another meeting with Ruth Hayden, our cash flow and strategy money person.  She’s so sharp.

Kate has done so well with earning money and putting money away that we’re going to have an ok retirement.  We’re still calculating, but things look good.

The transition from Kate working full time to casual time, then to full retirement is something I anticipate with pleasure.  I have wanted to grow old with her and now we can get started.

Being adult, though, for a whole morning makes me want to run screaming into the streets, doing something crazy.  Gonna have to settle for handling the comcast installer.  That’s crazy, in it’s own demented way.

Aging, Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, GeekWorld, Humanities, Politics, Retirement

Gadget Obsessed? Moi?

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Samhain                                                          New (Thanksgiving) Moon

To call me gadget obsessed might take reality a tad too far, but not much.  I saved up some money and bought a TIVO.  It took me this afternoon to get it set up and working, putting the cables in the right places, getting the codes right, creating a few channels on Pandora, wondering at the limited Netflix options when the full menu is available on my new Play Station 3, (OK, maybe it’s not quite far enough.) and deciding whether or not to ditch the cable tv subscription from Comcast, my least favorite company of the week.

In spite of myself it looks like keeping the cable subscription is still the best way to get the most out of the TV.  I’m gonna keep checking though since new ways to watch movies and broadcast shows keep popping up.  Most of what’s on tv is low culture, but often compelling anyhow and even the stuff I like that’s not compelling entertains me. With streaming movies the content available at home on demand has increased a hundred fold.

As a general rule, I don’t watch tv to get educated and I’m rarely disappointed.

Even with the increased quality and options though, nothing on the tube–that phrase dates me like saying icebox–compares to the live music, open studios and visiting with friends at Art Attack last night.  Remember Alvin Toffler?  The futurist from a long time ago.  He talked about high tech, high touch and I’ve found him right on that score.  I use the internet, the facility of cable tv combined with the internet and software like WordPress and Microsoft Word to make me much more productive in the work I choose to do, but going in to the MIA and seeing my docent friends or over to Paul’s house for a Woolly meeting, a Sierra Club meeting on Franklin Avenue are equally important to me.  Without them I would be a hermit.

A lot in the hermit’s solitude appeals to me, so I’m happy Kate and I have created a place here where we can be alone and creative, just the two of us, but I need face to face time with others, too.

Aging, Art and Culture, Great Work, Politics

Good Pharma

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Samhain                                             New (Thanksgiving) Moon

When I walked into the Northrup King building last night, I had to pause a moment to let another time in my life, also spent there, sink in, too.

The period was not unlike the current one with high unemployment and plant closings dominating the news.  This was the mid 1970’s, the era when the contraction of the American automobile industry began in earnest and my hometown went from Smalltown, USA to Shutteredtown, USA.  No longer at home, I had lived in Minnesota for five years at the time, involved in anti-war work and organizing for labor unions and local neighborhoods.

In 1975 ripples went out through the activist community in Minneapolis that Sandoz, the pharmaceutical giant, had plans to purchase the Northrup-King seed plant and close it down.  Many of us rallied to the workers there and began a campaign to stop the plant closing and save the jobs.  As our research proceeded, we learned an important and, to me at least, sobering truth: pharmaceutical companies were buying up seed companies; Northrup-King was far from the only one.  Why?  Because the pharmaceutical companies had the perspective and vision to see the imminent emergence of biotechnology.

They realized that future profit streams could require as many patents as possible on genetic material; germplasm would be the new precious metals, the oil fields of tomorrow.  And they wanted to control as much of it as they could.  Seed companies like Northrup-King already had patents on many of the cultivars of wheat, corn and soybeans, foodstuffs necessary to humanity’s most basic survival needs, add to them patents on specific chemical combinations and plant-based medicines already held by Big Pharma and the potential for mischief, if not downright evil seemed self-evident.  This was before the big push to patent parts of the human genome, now well underway.

We fought hard, working regulatory, legislative and union channels, organizing street protests and trying to raise the visibility of these issues, but we lost.  As did most plant closing campaigns.

After this sifted through my memory banks and into present experience, I walked up the iron steps onto a former loading dock, walking into a studio filled with brightly painted flowers and novel re-uses of older technology.  Art Attack! was a good anti-dote, good pharma.

Aging, Commentary on the news, Politics, US History

It’s Here! It’s Here! It’s Finally Here!

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Samhain                                    Waning Harvest Moon

Election day.  Or, as I prefer to think of it, extinguish those politicoporn commercials day.

The constant negative drone, the contention that the other person has committed some perfidy totally unexpected of a human being, let alone a politician, gets on my nerves, so, for the most part, I shut it out.  But that’s not what I mean.

What I mean is the amount of hard cash required for designing, shooting and airing political commercials.   Along with other technological expenses in the modern campaign the dollar amounts required make it inevitable that each politician, each one, Republican and Democrat, spend their incubency focusing not on policy or the politics of the day, but on fund raising.  Fund raising in amounts so large that often times they go back to the same well not just twice, but thrice.  This places every politician in Congress squarely in the sites of those who have wealth or who have become adept at bundling wealth from others for political purposes.  This is not only bad form; it is also a bad way to create a government.

Add the constant fund raising to the incessant drum beat of lobbyists and it’s no wonder our democracy–for which we want to make the whole world safe–has twitches and contortions that make professional gymnasts look clumsy and out of practice.  We are a people proud of our democracy, often hubristically so, and yet it has become a clogged artery, a broken limb, a part of our body politic that needs strong medicine and tough therapy to heal.

Our system of checks and balances has devolved into a system of halts and stops where partisan wrangling and/or ideological purity turns each place where a check might happen into a full body check against the boards and puts a thumb on the scales wherever balance must come into play.

While I’m at it, let me point out, too, a problem in our Senate.  No, not the rules, though those do need attention.  No, not Jesse Helms.  He left office.  I’m talking about representation.  Here’s what the point in a brief paragraph from Wikipedia:

“The Constitution stipulates that no constitutional amendment may be created to deprive a state of its equal suffrage in the Senate without that state’s consent. The District of Columbia and all other territories (including territories, protectorates, etc.) are not entitled to representation in either House of the Congress.[12] The United States has had 50 states since 1959, thus the Senate has had 100 senators since 1959.

The disparity between the most and least populous states has grown since the Great Compromise, which granted each state equal representation in the Senate and a minimum of three presidential Electors, regardless of population. In 1787, Virginia had roughly 10 times the population of Rhode Island, whereas today California has roughly 70 times the population of Wyoming, based on the 1790 and 2000 censuses. This means some citizens are effectively an order of magnitude better represented in the senate than than those in other states. Seats in the House of Representatives are approximately proportionate to the population of each state, reducing the disparity of representation.”

And this from a book blurb on Amazon for:  Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation–

“We take it for granted that every state has two representatives in the United States Senate. Apply the “one person, one vote” standard, however, and the Senate is the most malapportioned legislature in the democratic world.

But does it matter that California’s 32 million people have the same number of Senate votes as Wyoming’s 480,000? Frances Lee and Bruce Oppenheimer systematically show that the Senate’s unique apportionment scheme profoundly shapes legislation and representation. The size of a state’s population affects the senator-constituent relationship, fund-raising and elections, strategic behavior within the Senate, and, ultimately, policy decisions. They also show that less populous states consistently receive more federal funding than states with more people. In sum, Lee and Oppenheimer reveal that Senate apportionment leaves no aspect of the institution untouched.

This groundbreaking book raises new questions about one of the key institutions of American government and will interest anyone concerned with issues of representation.”

I mention this intriguing and disturbing analysis to underscore the problems with the amount of money it takes to win a Senate race which is, by definition, a whole state affair.  This means that money sunk into races in smaller population states can have the affect of negating changes in the House of Representatives while increasing the amounts for which the elected Senator is beholden.  This is not a recipe or a chance for corruption; it is a guarantee, a built in consequence of modern elections and an increasingly unequal Senate.

What to do?  We’ll look at that tomorrow, apres deluge.