Category Archives: Family

A Jinn Out of the Bottle

Spring                                                                Waning Bloodroot Moon

Round Lake still has ice, April 1st.  Ice out is way late this year.

Put Kate on the Northstar this morning, headed for MSP, terminal 2, for her Southwest flight to Denver and granddaughter Ruth’s 5th birthday.  Kate gets a real kick out of visiting the grandkids, a sort of grandma thing.  It’s great to see.  Being retired makes all this much easier for her.

Fukushima nuclear disaster appears to grow worse though sorting out the news reports is difficult.  The utility company appears less than forthcoming with data and the Japanese government has been unusually slow, too.  As Bill Schmidt said at Sheepshead, the tsunami and the earthquake have created much greater human tragedy so far.  Over 10,000 dead found and probably and equal number sucked out to sea never to be found.

Those folks need our attention and our care, as do humans experiencing disasters natural or manmade anywhere.

And yet, the media focuses on the nuclear story.   This is a genie that we know, one loosed from its billions of years old bottle, a source of energy confined to the bright heart of stars until the last century.   We say we control it, but like fire, if it gets away from us, its elemental nature can overwhelm our defenses, poison our world.  The record is mostly good, consider all those reactors functioning all these years without an accident, but three, three acknowledged accidents, roils the psyche.  What have we done?  Could such an unusual confluence of events happen here or over there, or over there?

This is a story whose end is not yet written, one whose significance will become clear later, perhaps years, maybe even centuries from now.

There and Back Again

Spring                                         Waning Bloodroot Moon

My usual method of travel is mosey.  I like slow travel, paying attention to the countryside and stopping when an interesting site shows up.  I’ve never understood the folks who drive straight through, as if travel was only about making it to a destination, for me travel is the destination.  Except for yesterday and today.  I drove to Lincoln, Nebraska yesterday and came back today.  It was  doable.  I only stopped to put gas in the truck and once to grab a hamburger, otherwise I ate food packed by Kate, a wonderful road food preparer.

(Above:  Nebraska Capitol.  R. Iowa Capitol Building.  I saw it from I-235.)

My destination was a Motel 6 just off I-80 north of Lincoln.  Apparently Motel 6 and pets are friendly.  I don’t know because we don’t travel with our dogs. I met Jon there.  He drove east through slushy snow while I drove west on clear roads with sun yesterday and back with cloudy but clement weather today.  Sollie and Gertie are now in their crate in our upstairs entry way after an evening of sniffing and being sniffed, a couple of tussles over doorways and such.  To be expected.

I got three-quarters through a long audio book and have arrived back home as if I never left.  Didn’t feel like travel to me.  Felt more like long-haul trucking.  Which it was, I guess.

This is family stuff, the sort of things families do for each other, even if separated by many hundreds of miles.

Path of Most Resistance

Spring                                         Waning Bloodroot Moon

I have a new round of resistance work underway in addition to the Tai Chi.  This work I got from Brad at the Y.  It involves squatting on a balance board while doing curls, then shoulders followed by a second round, also squatting, focusing on the chest and triceps.  Every other day I do crunches, too.  That plus the aerobics and the Tai Chi, plus the Body Flow I attend with Kate should be quite enough for now.  My goal with the Tai Chi is to learn it well enough to practice it while on the cruise.

(in case you couldn’t tell, this is not me.)

As to the cruise, I’m buying books, reading, talking to friends who’ve been to various spots, trying to figure out the logistical possibilities for trips other than the usual shore excursions.  At Stefan’s suggestion I’m going to look into a day flight to one of the Galapagos Islands as well as the potential trip to Aerquipa.  Part of travel’s allure for me lies in this preparation, the ingestion of different places, cultures and histories, different natural and environmental histories, different literature and art.

Meanwhile we work at the legislature, the Sierra Club and the committee for which I am responsible, the folks keep coming to the MIA, the Woolly’s meet and talk, the Latin continues to flow and Kate and I learn more and more about retirement.  The novel?  Well…  Not so much right now.  You see, there’s the garden, too, and next will be the bees.

Mind/Body

Spring                                                                Waning Bloodroot Moon

The yard!  The yard!  If Tattoo had been here this winter, he’d have gotten pretty excited about this dreary muddy mess now more visible than not.  The mountain of snow over which I could not see as I degaraged my Celica has melted to foothill levels, allowing me sights not seen for two + months.  Yippee.

Business meeting this morning and we acknowledged both the new tax burden and our wisdom in saving adequately to deal with it.  This transition year into the retired life has had surprises, mostly pleasant ones, but this one caught us up short, at least at first.  We have enough money to pay the taxes and still go on with our cruise.  I’m glad because I’ve already got that Panama hat picked out.

I’ve entered a new phase of physical activity, one with not only aerobic and resistance work, but also with body movement exercise like the Tai Chi and the Body Flow class at the Y.  It feels different, maybe better.  The better aspect comes with the more body friendly Tai Chi, yoga and pilates.  Aerobic and resistance are necessary to retain muscle mass and heart/circulatory system health, but the others work the body in a way designed to calm, loosen, stretch.  The Tai Chi, too, has a strong element, as does yoga, of the Eastern mystical.  Yoga as taught here has lost much of that, but the Tai Chi world remains rooted in the ancient Taoist traditions of China.

Welcome Home, Tai Chi

Spring                                                   Waning Bloodroot Moon

Once in a while something comes into my life and it feels like a part of me already, as if a missing piece had come back home.  Meeting Kate was like that for me.  My split-off.  When the Wednesday classes for the two-year docent program began, art history came home.  When I found a Jungian analyst over 25 years ago, my Self began to return.  Last night I attended my first Tai Chi class.  Another wandering aspect of myself has joined the others at the hearthside.

When my hands floated up last night into the second position, I felt an energy pushing away from my body, just I felt it collecting as I pulled my elbows in and those same hands back toward my body.  A sense of inner peace, momentary, but real, emerged.  My first class, but not my last.

It may be true as an article in the Star-Tribune this morning claimed, that memory takes longer to cement as we grow older, may be, but for me, I hold out for variability, that some things to take longer to seat, yes; but others, because they’re compelling or because they’re split-offs that have found their back to the homestead, just rejoin as if they’d never left.

I’m going to confess something here.  There’s a part of me, a looky-loo part, that hopes disasters will go all the way like the earthquake and the tsunami in Japan or the financial crisis or the riots sweeping the Middle East.  A part of me wants to see what a nuclear meltdown would entail.  What if that chief villain of high tech actually happened?  What would the consequences be?  Really?  This is not at all a desire to see more disasters or worse catastrophes, rather it is a sort of morbid curiosity, a curiosity about extremes.  What if a volcano like Mt. Rainier or Mt. Fuji erupt at full force?  What if the sea levels do rise by 2 feet or more?  This is the immoderate part of me, that aspect that wants thing to extend to their logical conclusion.

I wouldn’t feel embarrassed about this at all if there wasn’t the possibility, the great likelihood, of serious injury and death to people and eco-systems.  So, I feel embarrassed, but still interested.

Carpe diem

Imbolc                                 Full Bloodroot Moon

Got my novel a boost by going out to Blue Cloud, got back and dove into the legcom, MIA, Latin sequence plus finishing my presentation,  Redefining the Sacred, and have gotten little novel work done.  The times.  Now the air has begun to warm up and the snow to melt.  That means more time outside, which I’m eager to get started, but that, of course, means less time inside and all of the winter work is desk bound or at the museum.

When I talked to Kate about my despair for human life on this planet (see yesterday’s post), I also commented on my zest for life.  It’s never been higher, I told her.  OK, yes, the sun shone, the sky was blue and it looked warmer, all boosts to the life zestometer, but it’s more than that.  Kate’s retired and that’s removed a lot of stress from my life as well as hers.  I know this for sure because I have a mild case of psoriasis and its gotten much, much better since her retirement in January.

I’ve also got two challenging volunteer roles, docent at the MIA and the legcom at the Sierra Club, each of them test different skill sets every week.  The Latin work has given renewed confidence in my learning capacity, plus it’s fun in ways I hadn’t anticipated.  We have two grandkids with birthdays coming up.  The dogs are healthy.  Our orchard should begin producing this year.  I know what seeds I’m going to start and what I’m going to plant outside, early.  There’s a novel underway.  I’ve made new friends at Bluecloud and through the MIA and Sierra Club work. This will be my third year as a beekeeper. The Woolly’s are in our 25th year.  Finally, Kate and I have started new physical routines.

Said another way I get to be around art, practice politics, create, grow, love, laugh, visit with friends and family.  Life is full of matters that can keep us excited and eager to get up in the morning.

No matter what the world may be like tomorrow today is a day filled with promise.  So, like my friend, Bill W., I’ll take my life one day at a time.

A Third Thing

Imbolc                                         Waxing Bloodroot Moon

We went to the St. Paul Grill tonight for our anniversary dinner.  Our first date was coffee there after a St. Paul Chamber Orchestra Concert.  I learned Kate was a physician and she learned I was not a lawyer, but a clergyman.  Both surprised.

Tonight the place was hopping, full of an odd mixture of opera buffs and hockey fans.  The state high school hockey tournament is in town at the Excel Arena and the Opera is at the Ordway Theatre, both next to each other only a block away from the St. Paul Hotel, location of the Grill.

In addition, just across the block on the diagonal is the Landmark Center, where, in 1990, on this day, Kate and I tied the knot and stomped on a glass in a silken napkin.

Over the meal tonight (lamb chops, medium rare for both of us with a creme brulee for dessert) we talked about the South America cruise to which we committed yesterday.  37 days, an Inca discovery theme, with ports of call all along western South America and up the east coast as far as and including Rio.  This is a retirement present for Kate, a thank you for all her years of hard work as a doc.  I’m just going along for the ride. (Ha.)

Marriage has a palpability, is a third thing in and of itself.  When two come to anniversary, the thing they celebrate is not themselves, but this third thing they have made together.  It is, in every way, as precious and significant as a child, as difficult and rewarding, too.

Home Is Where the Garlic Is

Imbolc                                       Waxing Bloodroot Moon

This journey has begun to bend toward home.  I”m more eager know to go home than I was to come here when I left.  That seems good to me.  Home is the place you know you’re away from when you’re gone.  No place else on earth has that lodestone attraction for me.

Home is where the heart is, yes, and my heart is with Kate, with Vega, Rigel and Kona, with the raised bed and the garlic, the asparagus, the strawberries, with the bees and the grandkids play house, with the flower beds and the woods, with our house which, in exactly the same way a church is sanctified, has become sacred.  The life and the love,, our history there, has made it a sacred realm, a realm of the heart and a sanctuary for our life.

I have two yellow pads, one full, the other on its way, scribbled with this story of another world and these people I’ve come to know over the course of writing it.  Brag, Constance, John, Aeric, Gullen, Arton, Isaac, Cern.  Well, maybe a couple of these are speaking animals and one is a god, but they’ve come alive for me over the months I’ve spent on Missing.  Their journey, I see now, has only just begun, will only finish its first phase as this novel draws to a close in another 30,000 words or so.

This writing is and has been such a strange act for me, virtually solitary save for Kate, who has stuck with me in my up and down moments, my more confident moments and, most important, in my melancholy.  Otherwise, I’ve written these novels, these short stories and they go in a  file or in a box and sit, George Plimpton once called an unpublished work of his, A Monster In A Box.  This will be my sixth or seventh monster.

Not complaining just observing that’s been strange.

Family Celebrations

Imbolc                                                                Waxing Bridgit Moon

No aurora so far.  A big solar flare yesterday, but nothing much going on right now.

I had a truly senior birthday dinner experience.  At 4:10 I went into see my physician, Tom Davis, to get my blood drawn for a thyroid level check.  Then, Kate and I walked down Nicollet to the Dakota and had a very private meal in a room separated from the main floor where the Dakota crew was getting set for a show, War.  After all these years, there is still no one I’d rather share an intimate meal with than Kate.  She’s my valentine.

Next month we celebrate our 22nd wedding anniversary.  22 years.  A long time.  But not long enough.  A lot of celebrating since April holds birthdays for Ruth and Gabe.  A nice string.

A Good Birthday

Imbolc                                                     Waxing Bridgit Moon

Relearning old lessons.  Today I went to the capitol to do some lobbying.  While there, Justin (Sierra Club lobbyist) and I met with a member of the legislature whose outline was a bit murky relative to our issues.  We found an ally, someone we can work with who has the ear of folks we can’t reach directly.  It was a fun and helpful meeting.birthday-stupa-james-johnson

A lot of people sent wishes for a good day on my birthday.  Nothing is a better present for me than finding an ally in unexpected places.

Kate made me two wonderful shirts, both short sleeved, Hawaiian like shirts.  When it gets warmer, you’ll see them.  Having a wife that sews and quilts is a great gift.  Oh, and she’s good at diagnosis, too.

Thanks to everyone who sent birthday wishes.  Brother James Johnson, aka Dusty, sent me a birthday stupa: