Winter Seed Catalog Moon
African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Groups like families and the Woollies offer us the opportunity for both. To live long and well, we travel with each other on the ancientrail of life. To hone a particular skill or project we can go alone, but with others supporting us.
Winter Seed Catalog Moon
Warmer today. We reached 2. Not so cold tonight, only -5 right now.
More Latin. Jupiter is drowning the world.
More Loki’s Children. I’ve finished the first scene. A big revelation is set up.
A solid workout. Time with Kate. Another good day.
Winter Seed Catalog Moon
Kate and I drove in to Minneapolis today, to the Smack Shack. The Smack Shack is not, as you might justifiably think, a boutique heroin market, but a food truck doing a transformer move into a very large seafood restaurant. The featured menu item is boiled lunch complete with your choice of a 1.5 or a 2.0 pound lobster.
This was a holiday lunch with Anne, Kate’s sister, who lives in Waconia. A smattering of west suburban upper class types were there and the prices wouldn’t shock any of them, but if any of our neighbors showed up they’d grimace. The food is o.k., but not worth quite the bite it takes out of the wallet. Still, for the purpose, it was great.
Kate and I shared a boiled lunch and Anne had one to herself. We both had plenty to take home. The lobsters are red and look very much like their coastal nickname, bug. On the plate were several grade b skin on red potatoes, two links of polish sausage, two fresh ears of corn, a half lemon wrapped in cloth, two small metal containers of cole slaw and a pot of melted butter.
Bibs in place we dug into the meal. Both Kate and I remember the days when, at least in the midwest, surf and turf was about as fancy as food got. Lobster was the pinnacle of haute cuisine, even one step higher. Surf without the turf. Now I find lobster ok, but usually tough and not as flavorful as I remember from days gone by. Of course, that could be my taste buds.
The sisters compared arthritis in their hands, spoke of sewing and retirement. Anne turns 62 this year and finally, as a result, rotates onto the day shift at a metro County Jail. She commented on the increasing number of drunks, mentally ill and generally decompensating people that show up in our culture’s catch basin, the county hoosegow.
Just the other day five of the 11 women in her charge had serious mental health issues, one screaming and another lacerating her arm with her fingernails. It made me recall those days in the late 60’s and early 70’s when deinstitutionalization had reached its moment.
They were exciting times. People were to be freed from the Victorian confines of state hospitals for the retarded and the insane, places with institutionalized violence and clients aberrant adaptations to an aberrant, abnormal living situation. The watchword was normalization.
Normalization meant re-introducing these populations to society, helping them in the process through community based services, residential for those who needed them, supportive services for those who didn’t. Community Involvement Programs employed me for 8 years in its residential training program for developmentally disabled adults.
C.I.P. was an example of the best of the community based services. We took folks straight out of Fairbault and Cambridge State Hospitals, put them in their own apartments in a 32 unit building we ran and trained them in budgeting, cleaning, cooking, shopping, making appointments and integrating into the community. It was good and important work.
What happened though a confirmed cynic would have foreseen, but we didn’t see it back then. As states cut funding to their large state hospital systems, the money was supposed to flow into the community based treatment programs. And some of it did. But not anywhere near enough. This was the root cause of the first wave of homelessness, developmentally disabled and mentally ill citizens released from state hospitals to the streets our major cities.
This is one of the great tragedies of our time, but it has gone largely untalked about. The people who suffer are the marginalized among the marginalized, the folks whose disabilities render them vulnerable to shifts in income, housing, treatment. The answer, of course, is not more state hospitals, but increased funding for community based treatment.
But in an era of Republican budget cutting, which has largely dominated the political scene since the early 80’s when Reagan came into the Whitehouse, this kind of state and federal funding has proved easy to slash. The result was–to use an overused but apt metaphor–a perfect storm of liberal policy releasing thousands of our society’s least able to cope into cities where prevailing political realities made them largely unhelpable.
This is a big reason that our county jails have now become our community based treatment centers. They resemble in many ways small outposts of the old state hospital system, run by authoritarian hierarchies that respond to the needs of bureaucracy first, not inmates.
And Anne, in her role, sees the results and has to deal with them. Surely we can do better.
Winter Winter Moon
The first day of the second quarter, April 1st, is Stefan’s birthday and was a gathering of the Woolly’s at the Red Stag. I made this note: “Here we are seen by each other. Our deep existence comes with us, no need for the chit-chat and polite conversation of less intimate gatherings. The who that I am within my own container and the who that I am in the outer world come the closest to congruence at Woolly meetings, a blessed way of being exceeded only in my relationship with Kate.”
The “doing work only I can do” thought kept returning, getting refined: “With writing, Latin and art I have activities that call meaning forward, bringing it into my life on a daily basis, and not only brought forward, but spun into new colors and patterns.” april 2 On the 13th this followed: “Why is doing work only I can do important to me? Mortality. Coming at me now faster than ever. Within this phase of my whole life for sure. Individuation. It’s taken a long time to get clear about who and what I’m for, what I’m good at and not good at. Now’s the time to concentrate that learning, deepen it.”
The best bee year we’ve had started on April 16th with discovering the death of the colony I thought would survive. While moving and cleaning the hive boxes, I wrenched back and the pain stayed with me. That same day the Boston Marathon bombing happened. In addition to other complicated feelings this simple one popped up: “The most intense part of my initial reaction came when I realized what those feelings meant, the emptiness and the sadness and the vacuum. They meant I am an American. That this event was about us, was done to us.”
Another theme of this quarter would be my shoulder, perhaps a rotator cuff tear, perhaps nerve impingement caused by arthritis in my cervical vertebrae. Maybe some post-polio misalignment. But over the course of the quarter with a good physical therapist it healed nicely.
Kate went on a long trip to Denver, driving, at this time, for Gabe and Ruth’s birthdays. While she was out there teaching Ruth to sew, Ruth asked her, “Why did you become a doctor instead of a professional sewer?” When Kate is gone, the medical intelligence of our house declines precipitously. That means doggy events can be more serious.
Kona developed a very high fever and I had to take her to the emergency vet. She had a nodule on her right shoulder which we identified as cancerous. This meant she had to have it removed. At this point I was moving her (a light dog at maybe 40 pounds) in and out of the Rav4 with some difficulty because of my back.
This was the low point of the year as Kona’s troubles and my back combined to create a 
dark inner world. The day I picked Kona up from the Vet after her surgery was cold and icy, but my bees had come in and I had to go out to Stillwater to get them, then see my analyst, John Desteian. That day was the nadir. I was in pain and had to go through a lot of necessary tasks in sloppy slippery weather. That week Mark Odegard sent me this photograph from a while ago Woolly Retreat.
By the end of the month though Kate was back and April 27th: “Yes! Planted under the planting moon…”
For a long time I had wanted to apply my training in exegesis and hermeneutics to art and in this time period I decided to do it. In the course of researching this idea I found I was about 50 years late since the Frankfurt School philosophers, among them, Gadamer and Adorno, had done just that. Still, I patted myself on the back for having thought along similar lines.
Over the last year Bill Schmidt, a Woolly, and I have had dinner before we play sheepshead in St. Paul. His wife, Regina, died a year ago September. “Bill continues to walk straight in his life after Regina’s death, acknowledging her absence and the profound effect it has had on his life, yet he reports gratitude as his constant companion.”
By April 29th the back had begun to fade as an issue: “Let me describe, before it gets away from me, submerged in the always been, how exciting and uplifting it was to realize I was walking across the floor at Carlson Toyota. Just walking.”
Kate and I had fun at Jazz Noir, an original radio play performed live over KBEM.
In my Beltane post on May 1st I followed up my two sessions with John Desteian: “John Desteian has challenged me to probe the essence of the numinous. That is on my mind. Here is part of that essence. The seed in the ground, Beltane’s fiery embrace of the seed, the seed emerging, flourishing, producing its fruit, harvest. Then, the true transubstantiation, the transformation of the bodies of these plants into the body and blood ourselves.”
Then on May 6th, 5 months into my sabbatical from the MIA: “The third phase requires pruning. Leaving a job or a career is an act of pruning. A move to a smaller home is an act of pruning. Deciding which volunteer activities promote life and which encumber can proceed an act of pruning. Last year I set aside my political work with the Sierra Club. Today I have set aside my work at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.” That ended 12 years of volunteer work.
“When you recover or discover something that nourishes your soul and brings joy, care enough about yourself to make room for it in your life.”
| — | Jean Shinoda Bolen |
It was also in May of this year that Minnesota finally passed the Gay marriage bill. Gave me hope.
May 13 “Sort of like attending my own funeral. All day today notes have come in from docent classmates responding to my resignation from the program.” During this legislative session, I again became proud to be a Minnesotan.
As the growing season continued: “If you want a moment of intense spirituality, go out in the morning, after a big rain, heat just beginning to soak into the soil, smell the odor of sanctity…”
On May 22nd the Woolly’s gathered to celebrate, with our brother Tom, the 35th year of his company, Crane Engineering. The celebration had something to do with a crystal pyramid. At least Stefan said so.
A cultural highlight for the year was the Guthrie’s Iliad, a one person bravura performance by veteran actor, Stephen Yoakam.
Friend and Woolly Bill Schmidt introduced me to High Brix gardens. I decided to follow their program to create sustainable soils and did so over the course of the growing season. I got good results.
Our new acquaintance Javier Celis, who did a lot of gardening work for us over the year, also finished up our firepit and we had our first fire in it on June 7th. It was not the last.
On June 12th Rigel came in with a small pink abrasion on her nose. She had found and barked, barked, barked, barked at a snapping turtle. Kate removed the turtle from our property. The turtle came back, hunting I believe, for a small lake not far from us in which to lay her eggs. The next time Rigel and Vega still barked, from a safe distance.
And on Father’s Day: “Is there anything that fills a parent’s heart faster than hearing a child light-hearted, laughing, excited? Especially when that child is 31.”
During her visit her in late June grand-daughter Ruth went with me on a hive inspection: “She hung in there, saying a couple of times, “Now it’s making me really afraid.” but not moving away.”
My favorite technology story came on June 27th when NASA announced that one of the Voyager spacecrafts would soon leave the heliosphere, the furthest point in space where the gases of the sun influence matter. This meant it would then be in interstellar space.
And, as Voyager entered the Oort cloud Tom and Roxann made their way Svalbard and the arctic circle. Thus endeth the second quarter.
Winter Winter Moon
Kate and I both read a zine called the Tablet. It’s a hip Jew commentary on whatever. It contained this today: “The Hebrew year is 5774 and the Chinese year is 4710. That must mean, the joke goes, that against all odds the Jews went without Chinese food for 1,064 years.” We follow, as I wrote before, Jewish tradition by going to movies and eating Chinese on Christmas.
Today we stayed close to home, eating lunch at the Mandarin Buffet, greeted by r challenged waiters and waitresses who greeted with holiday cheer anyhow. After that we saw the Desolation of Smaug, the second of the Hobbit trilogy. It’s a non-stop action flik with Evangeline Lilly as an action elfess, as beautiful here as she was all those seasons on Lost. The time went fast as the dwarves escaped the Wood Elves in barrels, road coal and metal carriers to escape Smaug and Gandalf seemed to be defeated by Sauron. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a lot of fun.
This was at the Andover Cinema and our second choice, Hunger Games II, had just ended its run and we didn’t know that. So, we had to decide on a second movie on the spur of the moment. We chose Wolf of Wall Street. This is a more difficult movie to parse. First, it’s too long. Could have stood 45 minutes worth of cutting. It’s a Martin Scorsese movie so he apparently got the cut he wanted. Second, I hope, as Kate imagines, it’s broadly drawn. I’ll explain that in a bit.
Wolf’s great strength is its unflinching look at what happens to people who cannot answer the question, what is enough? If you make money and power the focus of your life, they will become your center of value, what H. Richard Niebuhr called your God. With them in the center of your ethical system your value choices will not be about people or beauty or justice or the natural world, but how about how you can get more. More money. More power.
You will not be able to answer the question, how much is enough, because the amount of money and power you need will always be just a bit more than you have. This is ambition. This is greed. This is eagerness to have positional authority. This ultimate honey trap gets strokes by the culture. We lionize billionaires and barely recognize the teachers, doctors, mechanics, nurses, clerks, postal workers who do the important work in our culture.
I’m not, this time, trying to make a political point, but a theological one. What you place at your center, your center of value, shapes all the decisions that you make. It’s a critical decision and it is just that, a decision. You can choose to have other people, the natural world, beauty, health or justice as your center; you can also choose money and power.
In Wolf we see the terrible personal and social cost of choosing money and power. Other people are tools. Stocks are, as Matthew McConaughey’s character, Mark Hanna says, “Fairy dust…they exist for one reason. To take money out of the clients pocket and put it our pocket.” The only yardstick for success is money and the conspicuous consumption of luxury goods: Armani suits, Ferrari’s, yachts, estates, drugs, whores, planes.
Kate saw it as drawn broadly. That may be, but the motive force, the need for more and the sense that life has no moral limits characterize so many striving folks. Not just Americans. Chinese, too. Singapore. Mumbai. This movie is, at bottom, about seduction and shows what few people ever realize. We don’t need the devil. We seduce ourselves.
Samhain Winter Moon
Another shooting in Colorado. In a school. In the Littleton School District, site of the 
Columbine shooting. I was in Denver with Jon and Jen, both teachers in the Aurora School District, when the gunman shot up Batman theatergoers in Aurora.
(granddaughter Ruth at the Stock Show)
The culture of the West and the culture of the East collide with some visible force in Colorado and Denver is the epicenter. Each January the Great Western Stock Show gathers cowboys and ranchers, rodeo queens and fancy riders, bulls and horses and cows and sheep into one place for a celebration of Denver’s central locale in the Old West. This is a culture of hardy individualists, folks used to taking care of things on their own and not interested in citified ideas towards guns.
At the same time Denver is the business capitol of the region with shiny glass skyscrapers 
and people in business suits hustling for a buck. It’s also a major educational and health services center. In addition thousands throng through the tented Denver Airport on their way to the ski slopes of the Rockies: Aspen, Vail, Steamboat Springs, Breckenridge. This is a culture more interested in public safety, clean streets and good medical care.
(Looking out from the Denver Museum of Art toward the State Capitol building)
It’s an uneasy conjunction, a mixing occurs, yes, but neither group comes away much changed from the interaction.
Samhain Winter Moon
-12. 81. 72. 34. 35. 14. Andover. Singapore. Muhayil, Saudi Arabia. Mihailesti, Romania. Montgomery, Alabama. Denver, Colorado.
Mary and I talked today, she near her bedtime while I ate a quick breakfast. 7:30 am here while 9:30 pm there. It’s a big planet.
(Thanksgiving 2013, Singapore)
Having close family members scattered around the world affords an occasional window on quirks in places far from the center of North America. Mary reports that Thanksgiving has taken hold in Singapore, colleagues say to her, “Happy Thanksgiving!” and many Singaporeans celebrate with a big meal. Thanksgiving has no religious roots and its secular coloring is very faint, the whole pilgrim/indian thing long ago and perhaps apocryphal anyhow. It’s emphasis on food, family and gratitude could travel well into any culture.
Halloween and Christmas are also big in Singapore with Mary reminding me of the lights by Hitachi that go up on Orchard Road, lights that I saw when I visited in early November, 2004.
There is one holiday transfer that puzzles me. Mary says St. Patrick’s day is big, too. And, people wear green and go to bars and drink green beer. In this case Chinese and Indian people, maybe even a few Malays, too. Maybe it’s seen as a spring holiday?
(St. Pat’s 2013 Singapore)
Mark is in his third week of classes in Muhayil, Saudi Arabia. He reports that many of his students leave class early to go home and eat kabsa. “Kabsa (Arabic: كبسة kabsah) is a family of rice dishes that are served mostly in Saudi Arabia — where it is commonly regarded as a national dish. Kabsa, though, is believed to be indigenous to Yemen.” Wiki.
Samhain Winter Moon
It’s so cold ice doesn’t work on our highways and streets. It has to be 10 above at least and we’re not predicted to reach that mark until Saturday.
Finished designing a new workout schedule. You have to mix it up once in a while otherwise a rut. Going back to a lighter workout on Tuesday and Thursday, some cardio and core and sticking with the high intensity cardio on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. That’s when I do the regular resistance work, in between high intensity bursts lasting around 2 minutes in the anaerobic range.
Kate and I are going into St. Paul to see a financial advisor. We see her 2 to 3 times a year. She helps us keep our cash flow working. Ruth dug us out of a big hole about 10 years ago and we’ve flourished since then. She’s a great reality check.
Samhain Winter Moon
Brother Mark taught in Hail two years ago and had technical school students. These kids might have been in his classroom.
“Saudi youths demonstrate a stunt known as “sidewall skiing” (driving on two wheels) in the northern city of Hail, in Saudi Arabia March 30, 2013. Performing stunts such as sidewall skiing and drifts is a popular hobby among Saudi youths.”
Samhain New (Winter) Moon
4 females, one human and 3 canines, one male. All present and accounted for. The house 
is full again.
On the cold and snow coming. Yes. Yes. Three times yes. We live here in the north and for many of us our northerness gets defined in these three months when the snow and the cold come. What it will be like here when the boreal forest has fled further north and the winters have become like currently more southern climes I don’t know, but I know I don’t want to be here then.