Category Archives: Family

Faith and Spirituality, Family

Projection Is Not Just A Machine In A Movie Theatre

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Beltane                    Waxing Flower Moon

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.” – Herman Hesse

This is a fundamental tenet of Jungian psychology, projection.  I mentioned this acquaintance a while back whom I have begun to despise.  It became clear, as I wrote that, that projection was at work.  There is something about him that I despise in myself, just what I’m not sure.  It may be that I don’t think through things as clearly as I imagine since that’s the main problem I have with him.  It may be that his anger, a strong undercurrent in his approach to life, reflects a similar emotional undercurrent in mine.  As I write about it, that one makes sense to me.

One of the difficulties I’ve noticed in the transition from 60’s political work to the millennial political work I’ve done with the Sierra Club has its roots there.  In the 60’s our anger, our rage against the system fueled a willingness to live on the fringe of society and take the consequences.  Today, though, politics on the left has a quieter, more plodding nature.  I want to build a movement, mount the barricades, define enemies but my new colleagues use reason and persistence.  In part this mirrors the relative failures of the left in the last three decades, we have been weaker.

It has caused me considerable self-examination.

I’m not sure where the underlying anger comes from, but I suspect its origin lies in perceived mistreatment by my father and fate.  When I approach either of these from an older, calmer perspective, I can see both my role in them and their unintentional nature.  Anger and fear have ruled my life at critical junctures.  This may be the point where I finally confront them.

Family

Life At A Right Turn Off A Moderately Busy Secondary Road

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Beltane                 Waxing Flower Moon

Most of my life happens at a right turn off a moderately busy secondary road somewhere in the heartland of the North American continent.  This thought crossed my mind as I retrieved the orange fluorescent sign for our garage sale, the one posted at the corner of 153rd Ave. NW and Round Lake Boulevard.

When I turned back into our lot, then went back in the house, I realized how rich and thick the world is inside our house and how thin it is on the road leading up to it.  That’s not to say there’s nothing of interest along the way, of course there is.  Other people’s rich thick worlds for one thing.  The life of the oak, acacia and poplar woods  that surrounds our homes for another.

My comment is not so much about the thin world leading up to our door as the contrast between my experience of our home and of that space.  In here we have taken pains to have rooms devoted to particular needs.  In those rooms our life has taken place, at least our domestic life, for just at 15 years.  Memories.

We create here, too.  Kate quilts; I write.  We create a life together, a buttress of support for our family and our selves.  The garden and the flower beds, now multiple, have years of labor represented in their current configuration, labor that has made this place an intimate acquaintance.

This is  home.  Home is where the heart is, yes, but it also where life is.

Family

The Meaning of Garage Sales?

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Beltane             Waxing Flower Moon

The garage sale continues.  Kate’s out there right now, doing the crossword puzzle and waiting for customers.  They’ve been slow to come.  Kate thinks she’s got items that are too high end, though she advertised for collectibles.  That may be but my guess is the economy and the pandemic have squeezed shopping for other than essentials right outta folks.

We’ll see as the day progresses and she drops her prices.  There is some anthropological phenomenon going on with garage sales, the retailing of stuff and the occasional turn of domestic space into a faux business, like lemonade stands for adults.  Not only do we get to sell our stuff, but we get to display what we don’t need.  Look at this stuff I don’t need.  If I don’t need this, what more and better stuff lies inside!  Perhaps its a bargain-basement potlatch.

The pandemic seems further away right away now since Kate has four days off and we don’t have the daily updates from Minnesota Public Health.  Monday though she goes in to fit her N95, a special mask for doctors and nurses.  It needs to have an air tight seal around the nose and mouth.

Today is another day in the garden for me.

Bees, Family, Travel

Saling. Bogota. Bees.

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Beltane                 Waning Flower Moon

And on the second day of May we turned our garage into a retail establishment.

This reminds me of my first ever off the continent trip to Bogota.  The neighborhood of our small hotel was residential, living areas above garages, sort of like the San Francisco versions.  A middle-class to affluent neighborhood, not poor.

I went out one morning for an after breakfast walk, just to take in the unusual experience of a people who lived in a  country in South America, who spoke Spanish.  I was not at home and loving it.  As my walk went on, the neighborhood began to wake up and the garages, too.  Doors slid up to reveal small businesses.  This one had groceries, that one had cleaning supplies, another with snacks and pop.  The neighorhood was one giant, apparently perennial garage sale.

They had to do better than we did.  You’d think with a recessionary economy that people would turn out in large numbers.  But they didn’t.  The day was slow.  None of our big items the telescope, the dining room set, the bed sold.  It was a nice day, too.

The only significant retail moment for me came when I sold a Che Guevara t-shirt to a Mexican family.

Onions got planted today, a large bed weeded and prepared for peas.  The hive came open, too.  Inside the bees had gathered all at one end, working furiously on something, what I could not tell.  The smoker, filled with wet hay, smoked and the bees remained calm. The white bee suit and mesh head covering worked.  No bee got inside.

Did they accept the queen?  Couldn’t tell.  I’m glad Mark plans to come tomorrow.  We’ll look together and he’ll help with what I need to see.

Family, Great Wheel, Health, Holidays

Beltane Has Begun

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Beltane                Waxing Flower Moon

As is the case with all Celtic holidays Beltane began at sundown.  Over the years that I have kept the Celtic calendar, now 14 years at least, Beltane signals a real shift from the getting going of spring to the active growth of summer.  Some years that’s more obvious than others and this year the change has been slower than the recent past, yet the emergence of the daffodils, tulips, garlic and the blooming of our magnolia all point toward summer.

Kate’s back from work with new rules for influenza A(H1N1) novel.  They had a sick hallway at the Coon Rapids clinic tonight and they were, again, swamped by persons concerned about the flu.  She said a case has been reported at HCMC.  Tomorrow, however, her attention moves from pandemic to garage sale, the sort of odd shifts we all make between our work and domestic lives.

Family, Health, Politics

Baby Plants, Nuclear Energy, and Influenza A(H1N1)

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Spring                  Waxing Flower Moon

All my baby plants have moved from the nursery into big plant pots.  Now we have to wait until May 15, the average last frost date here, and all these babies can go outside into the garden.

The Minnesota House refused to repeal the moratorium on the construction of new nuclear plants citing waste storage and transportation as primary issues.

Kate’s off to the frontlines of the Swine flu (or, as it will be called from now on:   influenza A(H1N1) pandemic.  This has put some new energy into her practice as she approaches retirement, a real crisis which requires her medical skills.

If the pandemic moves to level 6, there will be a division between sick clinics and well clinics.  Doctors in the sick clinics will have to wear hazmat like protective gear when treating patients who have risk factors for the disease.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Health

Two Colorful People Together

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Spring                  Full Seed Moon

Yes, we need no appraisal, we need no appraisal today.  Our bank, Wells Fargo, decided we do not need an appraisal to refinance our loan.  Something about our loan balance, equity and that it would be a roll-over instead of a brand new loan.  OK.  That means we can refinance sometime next week.  A good thing.

The last week and a half, since the root canal, has had dealing with the infected jaw, then one organ after another taking up my mornings.  All important to my long term health, but it has left me tired and with a sense of little accomplished.

This need to accomplish, to achieve continues as a backdrop.  Kate says when she retires she’s ready to rest on her laurels, sit back and reflect on her life.  “We can just be two colorful people together,” she said.  I’m not sure I can give up the hope of something over the horizon, a realization, a book, a political action a defining event for this stage of my life.  If not, I may find the last two decades or so of life a struggle. Or, I suppose, they might be very productive.

Drifting right now.  The melancholy at bay, but not too far away, ready to bring a tear or a heaviness to my now.  Feels empty.

Family, Memories, Weather +Climate

The Post Office Was Gone

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Spring                Full Seed Moon

The folks at the Strib have asked those of us who blog for their weatherwatchers page to write up a storm story or two, a reminder of the forces of nature coming at us in the next few months.  As I’ve thought about this task, my own patronizing wonderment at folks who live on fault lines, in the path of hurricanes, or build homes in fire prone forest areas came to mind.

So, I’m going to start with a proper dose of humility, admitting that I, too, live in a place where nature can play havoc and let loose the dogs of war from time to time, yet I stay where I am.   After all we frequently get those 20 below zero or worse bouts of cold weather, often driven further down the temperature scale by high winds.  In the summer tornadoes and hail storms pound our area, so much so that we have a new roof and new siding after a bout with hail and tornadoes touched down within two miles of  our home, pretty damned close if you ask me.  That’s not to mention the weather that can and has punched us up the worst:  derechos.  These straight line winds reach speeds in excess of 58 mph.

Sorry about all those sarcastic comments southern California, west coast of Florida, San Francisco.

I’ll write one story today and few others over the week.

The first storm memory I have comes not from Minnesota, nor from Indiana where I grew up, but from Oklahoma, where I was born and still have family.   In 1956 or 57 my parents sent by Greyhound bus from our home in Alexandria, Indiana to Mustang, Oklahoma, then a rural community a good ways from Oklahoma City.  My uncle Rheford had the post-office attached to the front of his house and served as the rural mail carrier for the Mustang area.

Uncle Rheford and Aunt Ruth had, as many Oklahoma homes still do, a storm cellar located in the back yard, a dug-out with a cement floor and heavy barn doors covering the entrance.  During calm weather, most of the time, the storm cellar serves as a root cellar and a place to store canned goods, so it always smelled of stored produce and damp earth.

A few nights after I’d arrived, around 3 in the morning my cousin Jane came into my room, shook me awake, “Come on, Charles Paul, we’ve got to go to the storm cellar.”  Her urgency and the hour got me up fast.  I followed her out into rain and wind, crossed the few feet from the back door to the storm cellar and hurried down the four or five steps into this small, artificial cave.  My Aunt Ruth and two other cousins were already down there and Uncle Rheford followed quick behind Jane and me.

Uncle Rheford closed the doors with a thud, threw a large cast-iron bolt to lock them and put a cross piece into two metal brackets made for that purpose.  He also grabbed a chain and passed it through two eye-bolts, big ones, sunk into either door.  The end of the chain went around and hooked into another bolt that was part of the cement floor.  A little too sleepy and a little too young to be awed by all this preparation I sat down on a bench near a basket of potatoes.

The wind came.  The tornado must have passed right over us or very close because those heavy barn doors bowed up, called from their position by the voice of the storm.  The chain thrummed tight and the air left the cellar.  Then, just as it had come, the wind passed on by, the doors slumped back to their usual shape, slack came into the chain and sweet air rushed back into the cellar and to our lungs.

I don’t recall now how long we were in the cellar, probably an hour or so, maybe more.  After we got out we came up to a wet, distressed scene with leaves, tree branches, parts of buildings and machinery scattered in the  lawn.  The big surprise though came when we looked around the house.  The post-office, basically a long addition to the side of the house that faced the road, was gone.  Disappeared.  The rest of the house was intact.

In the days that passed I saw straw driven into telephone poles and other flotsam thrown up on the shore of this small Oklahoma town.  From that day forward I have always heeded instructions to go to the basement, remembering that night in the storm cellar in Mustang, Oklahoma.

Aging, Family, Health

Grandma Told Me So

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Spring            Waxing Seed Moon

Kate is home.  As is our habit, I met her at the Loon Cafe after she took the LRT into downtown.  To park I went in a ramp, promptly scored the first parking spot, which allowed me later to just pull around a concrete pylon, turn left and give my money to the cashier.  Very cool.

The other amazing part was the rat in the maze experience.  Getting out of the ramp I exited onto a skyway, walked until I found Butler Square, went into Butler Square, wound through a few hallways, found the entrance, exited, then turned left and went one block to the Loon Cafe.  The truly amazing part was that after Kate and I had supper I reversed field and followed the path back to the truck without a misstep.

I’m glad to have her back.  This tooth business has been a hassle and I wanted to complain to somebody about it, but she wasn’t here and who else would listen?  I complained for about a minute over supper and that was enough.

Ruth is a prodigy, capable of astounding feats of linguistic and muscular agility.  I know this because Grandma told me so.

Gabe is the cutest, friendliest baby ever.  I know this because Grandma told me so.

Grandma loves being a grandma.  ditto.

Family, Great Work

The Decider

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Spring           New Moon (seed moon)

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” – Theodore Roosevelt

Kate is a good decider(unlike the other Decider).  She makes a decision a second if necessary.  Somewhere along the line she and Teddy Roosevelt must have drunk the same water.  I’m a muller and wonderer.  It’s nice to have two different decision making styles at home because it allows a long view and a necessary, lets do it now attitude to reinforce each other.

Two iconoclasts have crossed my way of late.  Freeman Dyson is one.  He’s a really smart guy, a physicist and an employee of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.  He’s written all sorts of stuff; I’ve read his essays, but none of his books.  He thinks global warming is real, but that the radical consequences predicted are not.  One telling aspect of his critique involves the notion of climate models.  He claims that assumptions used to build those systems are not accurate.  If the assumptions are no good, the model can not be.  I don’t know the science, but he’s a guy whose thought matters.

I’ve not changed my mind.  At least not yet.  But he has made me wary.

The second is a Patrick Moore, a founder of Green Peace and now, ironically, a supporter of nuclear power.  In an article published in 2006 he makes the argument about base-load generation that I mentioned a couple of days ago.  He seems to think nuclear is the only generative source with enough oomph to replace coal in the interim between now and an eventual switch to renewables.  I found his arguments less compelling.  He seems to think reprocessing is a reasonable solution to the waste problem, but a Scientific American I read this week points out many problems with reprocessing, not the least of which is that it produces plutonium, material useful in a bomb.

It’s good to have received wisdom challenged by reputable people, it sharpens the debate and makes everyone think more clearly.