Category Archives: Family

A Pruning Dervish

Beltane                            New Moon (Hungry Ghost)

Kate became a pruning dervish this morning, clearing a pathway to our front door, giving the draping yew apruned-old-salvia hair-cut and generally wrecking havoc with weeds and overgrown shrubs.  Yeah.  Now I’m moving the detritus to a resting place where the grape vines, columbine and raspberries will grow over it and make it a productive part of our property instead of a house-hider.

I have gotten through the perfect passive system for all verbs, interrogative pronouns, interrogative adjectives and a new  vocabulary.  Later on we’re going to skype with the kids and the grandkids.  How Sunday’s going around here.

The Sublime Gift

Beltane                                       Waning Planting Moon

” Life can’t bring you the sublime gift it has for you until you interrupt your pursuit of a mediocre gift.”

Woolly brother Tom Crane sent this to me.  It took me back to my recent post about Siah Armajani and his personal commitment to staying within his skill set.  When I worked for the church in the now long ago past, I had a boss, Bob Lucas, a good man, who had several sayings he used a lot.  One of them was also similar in spirit, “Don’t major in the minors.”

Stop focusing on the small things you might be able to do well to the exclusion of being challenged by the prajaparmita400serious, important matters.  Stop your pursuit of a mediocre gift.   The tendency to judge our worth by the accumulation of things–a he who dies with the best toys wins mentality–presses us to pursue money or status, power, with all of our gifts.  You may be lucky enough, as Kate is, to use your gifts in a pursuit that also makes decent money; on the other hand if  your work life and your heart life don’t match up, you risk spending your valuable work time and energy in pursuit of a mediocre gift, hiding the sublime one from view.

This is not an affair without risk.  Twenty years ago I shifted from the ministry which had grown cramped and hypocritical for me to what I thought was my sublime gift, writing.  At least from the perspective of public recognition I have to say it has not manifested itself as my sublime gift.  Instead, it allowed me to push away from the confinement of Christian thought and faith.  A gift in itself for me.  The move away from the ministry also opened a space for what I hunch may be my sublime gift, an intense engagement with the world of plants and animals.

This is the world of the yellow and black garden spider my mother and I watched out our kitchen window over 50+ years ago.  It is the world of flowers and vegetables, soil and trees, dogs and bees, the great wheel and the great work.  It is a world bounded not by political borders but connected through the movement of weather, the migration of the birds and the Monarch butterflies.  It is a world that appears here, on our property, as a particular instance of a global network, the interwoven, interlaced, interdependent web of life and its everyday contact with the its necessary partner, the inanimate.

So, you see, the real message is stop pursuit of the mediocre gift.  After that, the sublime gift life has to offer may then begin to pursue you.

Bees, Latin and Learning

Beltane                                       Waning Planting Moon

A sleepy, rainy day.  After a very busy Monday, I settled into the Latin and finished off chapter 18 in Wheelock.  It took most of the day with a couple of instances (well, maybe more than a couple) of head scratching and paging back and forth to find out what I was not understanding.

Kate and I have settled into our familiar and comfortable routines.  She went out today to have her nails done while I labored in the scriptorium.

Tonight is the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers Association meeting at Borlaug Hall.  I feel both mildly competent and wildly confused with both the beekeeping and the Latin.  I’ve now overwintered a package of bees, made a divide into parent and child colonies and hived a package of bees by myself.  The smoker stays lit for the duration of my work in the bee yard and I have not repeated my various stings event.

Yet.  When I pulled the frames from the parent colony and moved one to the package colony and one to the divide, I felt very unsure of what I had done.  Still am.  I look at the frames and I can tell the pollen filled cells from the honey filled cells.  I know what larvae look like and I can identify a drone cell and its unique domed structure.  Queen or swarm cells are also apparent to me.  Even so, I cannot tell healthy frames from troubled ones.

I get addled about what I’m doing because of the bees buzzing around and forget what I’ve done like I did yesterday with the reverse of the parent colony.  I have no clue about what to do with the honey the bees are making, I’m just imagining that I’ll learn about that in time to do it.

In the Latin I miss obvious things and pick up on some obscure ones like word meanings, verb forms and case endings for nouns and adjectives.  I have two index cards filled with words, mostly adverbs and conjunctions, that I can’t remember.   I puzzle over a translation, no luck, no luck, no luck, then a bright light.  Ah ha.

Learning has this daunting vulnerability to it.  Without placing yourself in a situation where you don’t know what you’re your doing, you cannot learn.  It keeps a guy humble that’s for sure.

Falling Behind

Beltane                                    Waning Planting Moon

Life seems lighter now with Kate at home.  Shared life is so much easier than solo, at least I find it so.

Kate made oatmeal this morning and I went out to the garden and picked fresh strawberries.  A delight to have with our cereal.  Also a delight to have a partner at the table, a fellow reader of the paper.  Good.

Spent some time weeding this morning.  The whole package of the vegetable garden, the bees and our large perennial beds has gotten ahead of me, especially the perennial beds.  I had to repair all the damage Rigel and Vega did to the vegetable garden last fall, then plant the garden, then plant much of it again after the frost.  There was also some residual damage to the netaphim in the orchard and the vegetable garden that had to get fixed.

(on the other hand, it could be worse. we could have kudzu.)

The warm spring has put the bees and many of the plants 2 to 3 weeks ahead of time which has meant extra work with the bees (with potentially productive long term results) and good weed growing weather for the perennial beds.

In many ways it’s all good news except the aesthetic side of our property has definitely suffered.  Still, I’ll get ahead of it sometime in the next couple of weeks.  Then, I have to prune those shrubs that have reduced our front sidewalk to half its normal size.

Love’s Fatal Flaw

Beltane                                            Waning Planting Moon

When I punched Delta 2406 into Google, it delivered a website called Flight Status.  On Flight Status I could watch the progress of Kate’s flight from San Francisco as she moved across Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota and into Minnesota.  I looked over at the computer occasionally as I worked in Chapter 18 of Wheelock:  passive voice and the ablative of agent.  It seemed natural to me to go from ancient Rome to a computer tracing the flight path of a jet traveling 595 mph.

The term soulmate may not make sense to me metaphysically and I am an existentialist at heart–we die alone, we live alone–however I know my life is not complete without Kate.  Over time and with much love our lives have intertwined, her presence, her physical presence is important to me and to my well-being.

I’m a little afraid to admit that, in part to myself.  What if she dies?  Well, she will.  And so will I.  Also, I don’t want to seem so needy that I require another person to complete myself.  And I don’t.  Yet Kate makes the house full.  Talking and crying with her about Emma made the whole sad thing real and bearable.

Here is the paradox of love.  To love we need to be vulnerable, to open ourselves and let another person assume a critical and necessary place in our life, yet life itself has an end.  In this sense, I suppose, each love is a tragedy, that is, it has a literally fatal flaw.

She’s back and I’m glad.

The Residue of Sacred Time

Beltane                                           Full Planting Moon

I’ve done some weeding, well, a good bit of weeding, but the heat, now 89 and direct, drove me back inside.  At least the dew point is reasonable, but over 80 and I begin to wilt.  Three cheers for central air conditioning.  Over the years I’ve adapted to the Norwegian lifestyle, that is, living like we were in Norway with no windows or doors.  Now it’s important to me.

That holiday penumbra has fallen over time, a sense that fireworks and hot dogs, or gods on pedestals carried by shouting crowds, or parades with car after car of  young women doing the wave or a hushed night filled with candles and quiet might break out at any moment.   Sacred time comes to us in many guises and its residue, as we grow older, collects on our soul, offering us a taste of eternity each holiday, birthday, anniversary.  This residue is one of the unexpected and great joys of aging.  I can hear the marching bands passing, the quiet congregation praying, family members talking while decorating the offrenda, the winter winds howling on a solstice night.

A weekend to remember.

Japanese Armor and Flights West

Beltane                           Waxing Planting Moon

Up early.  For me.  7 am.  Had to get Kate to the bank and to the airport by ten.  We made it.  Her plane took off at 11:45, (turned out to be 1:15 pm instead) so Delta promised.  I haven’t heard from her yet, but I imagine she’s there and in her hotel and asleep.

The airport always makes me laugh.  The alert level remains at orange.  Does anybody recall what that means?  I don’t.  Also, the sign suggests, report suspicious activity.  Call 911.  Irony aside, I wonder how many calls they get?  After, of course, you screen  out the people who call all the time.  Not that threats are not real, and certainly not that they should be taken lightly, rather the government that gives the same message over and over and over and over while nothing happens begins to look silly, out of touch.  They need to do something different.

Since I live up north, I rarely have the opportunity (challenge) to drive on Hwy 62, but I took it into the Museum.  Boy.  What a ride.  The new ramp that carries west bound 62 traffic onto Hwy 35 sweeps up in a broad, elegant curve.  At its apex, the view offered of downtown Minneapolis has a picture postcard look.  A great way to introduce newcomers to the city.

George Hisaeda, Consul General of Japan at Chicago, offered commendation to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for its dedication to Japanese arts, and the acquisition of an important suit of armor.  I went to this hoping to hear the lecture by Matthew Welch that I missed earlier.  The Consul General offered kudos to the MIA for its fine presentation of Japanese culture and arts.  He also commended Matthew Welch on his remarkable work building the collection since 1990.

After the Consul’s presentation, Matthew gave an abbreviated version of his explanation of the armor.  Tom Byfield, my seat mate, wrote notes in spite of the dark.  I hope my eyes improve enough to work as well as his do.  In fact, I hope they improve, very unlikely.

After the armor conversation, we had a meeting of the docent discussion group or whatever it is and decided on events for the summer:  a tour on music by Merritt, a public arts tour in July and a photography event with the curator of photography in August.

Back home for a nap.  This cold I’ve got, the first I can remember in 2+ years, made me very tired, so I slept soundly.  Worked out.  Had a political committee meeting with the Sierra Club.  I serve on this one as a non-voting member.  Works out well since I can use the phone.

Talked to Kate whose flight was delayed an hour and a half here and the baggage was delayed an hour in San Francisco.  She got assistance at both airports though and reported a tiring journey, but a successful one.  As only a meeting of physicians can do, registration for her conference is at 6:30 a.m. tomorrow morning.  Perhaps, it is just occurred to me, based on peoples time zone habits.

Over and out.

Staying Inside

Beltane                        Waxing Planting Moon

Heat exhaustion put an end to my outside work today, so I came in and did Latin.  I’m done with ch. 16 in Wheelock, so I can move on to Ovid.

Kate got her nails done, did some laundry and has organized her packing.  We’ll leave around 9 for the airport.  After I drop  her off, it’s over to the MIA for a lecture on Japanese Samurai Armor and lunch with the docent discussion group folks.

Expatriate Kin

Beltane                                       Waxing Planet Moon

Expatriates.  Both my brother (see below) and my sister live the expat life in Southeast Asia, Mary in Singapore and Mark in Bangkok.  I’ve only been over there once, in 2004, for one month, they have both been there over 20 years.  That’s a long time to live in another culture, to live politically disenfranchised from the community in which you work and have your home, to live in a place where the familiar cues of home are either non-existent, weakened or have a different meanings, to live far from the places where you grew up and the people you knew then, including family.

On the other hand it gives you an opportunity without parallel to become a global citizen, to take in the lifeways of persons whose basic assumptions about life are different than your own.  It gives you a chance, if you take it, to get to know yourself much better, for the you that you are stands out in bold relief in places radically different from your own.

It exposes you to the kind of danger Mark experienced over the last few weeks when his host country, a place he lives in because he loves it there, turns feral.  Not only that, the wild citizens set up the zoo right outside his soi.  Scary.

The expat life interests me, but I view it from a distance.  The closest I come to it is the life of a Hoosier in the Gopher State.  Sometimes it can come pretty close to that expat feeling, except I felt like an expat in Indiana, never in Minnesota.  Except when they crank up the music for hockey or start hauling those ice-fishing houses out.  Then, I feel a bit lost.

Bangkok Dangerous

Beltane                                                    Waxing Planting Moon

From my brother, Mark Ellis.

He was there:

Dear Charlie, I mailed you a letter today from my neighborhood post office. That sounds very banal. However, it represents the end of the long siege of Bangkok. The Post Office, although it was only about 200 yards from my soi, was in the Red Zone. It was shut for a long time. It was open today, for the first time in a while. It felt very good to go there and mail a letter. I know it sounds simple, but the positive feeling was profound. I walked around to see all the destruction yesterday. Charlie, it was very senseless. These Reds burned a TV station on Rama 4. They burned and attacked the ground floor of the Thai Stock Exchange on Soi Asoke. They destroyed the Metropolitan Electrical Office on Rama 4,in Klong Toey. They destroyed several Bangkok Bank branches on Rama 4. They destroyed a Tesco-Lotus shop. They destroyed and looted a 7-11. They hit another bank on Rama 4. I went to Silom, which looked okay. I went back up Rajadamrai. Apparently, bombs were found near Rajadamri Station, the morning I walked by it. I took a left, past the destroyed Zen Department store. It looked like a bomb had gone off there. I walked up Rama 1. Siam Square’s shops were burned down. I walked up to Victory Monument. Center One, a shopping center and Watson’s was totally destroyed. I walked up to Din Daeng intersection. The Police box was burned down. Backhoes were burned. Electrical junction boxes were destroyed.  A bank had been set afire on Ratchaparop Road. There were burn marks in the road where tires had been burnt. I walked up Ratchaparop. I took a left at Makkasan and walked home. Charlie, it was totally senseless violence. I am afraid that CNN and BBC ‘s coverage was not balanced. The Red shirts flipped out. They are a leaderless mob. Further, provinical halls were burned down in: Ubon Ratachatani, Mukdahan, and Khon Kaen, all in Isan. Some trucks were burned in Chaing Mai. It was totally unreal. I feel sorry for the poor peasants who died supporting Thaksin. The Isan people are really nice. Some of them have been terribly mislead. They do not represent all the peole of Isan or Chaing Mai. I hope this violence stops. Regards,Mark