Category Archives: Art and Culture

Aging, Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Myth and Story, Politics, Sierra Club, Writing

How the New Year Might Look

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Winter                                           First Moon of the New Year

At an inflection point with the Latin.  Either I keep the pace I currently follow, maybe 6 hours a week; or, I ramp up, say to 10 or 12, maybe a couple of hours each day.  Some analysis of other texts–maybe Caesar or Suetonius or Julian, I have all of these in Loeb Library volumes–plus more translating of the Metamorphoses.  My inclination is to ramp up, do more, focus on Latin and the novel.  That’s what my heart tells me.

That other project, too.  The one I’ve got slotted for 5,000 word essays each month next year.  Where I’m going to give voice to my whirling ideas about the earth, about ge-ology, about what would help us help our home planet.  That one, too.

When you add these things together, they constitute real work and I feel good about that, not trapped or bummed.  Now all I need is a way of allocating my time so I can work them all in and still manage the art, the garden, the bees and family.

That may be my new year’s work.  Pruning activities and creating a new schedule.

 

 

Art and Culture, Cooking, Health, Travel

Empanadas

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Samain                              Moon of the Winter Solstice

Empanadas.  Kate and I came to enjoy this Latin perogi, or pasty, so we decided to make some ourselves.  This former baker did the dough while Kate made the filling and baked.  Cooking together is fun and I think we’ll do more of it as Kate eases in to full time retirement, possibly as early as March of next year.

By making more than we need we can then freeze some and have meals later from one morning’s work.

Whoa.  Ratcheted myself up about that presentation.  This happened because I agreed to do it before we left on our cruise, knowing I’d have barely a week to put it together when we got back.  It began looming as we hit Tierra del Fuego and turned north, the turn that in almost all my trips means heading home.

That meant I came home ready to cram, which I did.  After years of deadlines in college, papers and tests alike, I adopted an I’d rather get it done ahead of time attitude, so I prefer a relaxed pace, finishing something like a week before a due date.  I didn’t have that luxury this time.

The church did send me a nice e-mail a moment ago, so I feel good about that.

Since getting back from the cruise, I’ve begun a short burst training regimen.  That entails working at maximum effort for 45 seconds to a minute, I run on the treadmill at about 6.5 mph at 5% elevation right now, then getting off and doing resistance work or stretching, getting back on 4 minutes later, going full tilt boogie again, then off, until 4-5 minutes of maximum intensity have accumulated.

It’s fast and crams a lot of work into a short of period of time, plus, according to the literature I’ve read is much better than traditional workouts lasting much longer.  Even so, I also do a 50 minute low intensity treadmill workout on the off days.  I do the short burst three times a week.

Now, if I can figure out how to cut my calories in half.

Art and Culture, Great Work, Humanities, Politics

Art and Politics

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Samain                              Moon of the Winter Solstice

 

In to the city to meet with Justin, Sierra Club’s lobbyist and policy wonk.  We’re putting together a campaign strategy for this upcoming session.  I love the ins and outs of politics, the practical, no nonsense nature of the analysis, the calculations.  The realities of power, not its dreamy possibilities.

It is though, at this stage of my life, not as exciting as taking in a new painting, wandering through a new exhibition, revisiting a print I’ve seen many times.  Even so,  politics are deeper in my life, started earlier, continued throughout my life while the arts have been only a once in a while thing until the last ten years.

The man I am now, the man I am becoming, loves the museum gallery more than the legislative chamber, the exhibit hall more than the voting booth, research for a tour more than campaign planning.  Part of me is not sure what to make of this change, but that it has happened there is no doubt.

Perhaps these later years have bent the knee toward beauty rather than the lady justice.

No, of course it’s not either art or politics, of course not.  There is, though, a real matter of how much time I want to devote to life outside our home, how much energy I want to give to projects for others and how much I need to spend on my own work.

These are not easy matters for me, questions I’ve juggled my whole life, but I’ve always tried to remain true to what my inner life tells me.  Just now, it says open that new book with all the paintings in the Louvre.

Art and Culture, Health, Politics

Kevan the Tool

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Fall                                                Waxing Autumn Moon

We qualify for a special mortgage deal proposed by my favorite institution in America, Wells Fargo Bank.  We went in today to see Kevan, a home mortgage specialist.  Kevan had a computer screen we could see and he happily punched in numbers explaining the joys of this wonderful deal.

Until.  “Can I see the type of contract you’re proposing we sign?  You know, the terms?”  “It’s all right here,” Kevan said, pointing to the computer screen.  Oh, well.  Since it’s on a computer screen, that’s good enough, right?  Wrong.

“I’d like to see the language we’d be expected to agree to, Kevan.”  “The terms are right here.” Kevan pointed to the swing out computer screen.  Again.

They weren’t.  What the screen showed was the advantage to us of taking the deal.  That’s all.  No other contractual information.

Kevan and I did not get along.  We did, because I had my much smarter partner with me, go ahead and sign up because the deal could lower our monthly payments by a significant amount.  In the process of signing up however they collected information about our income and several pieces of what I consider proprietary information.  And we get nothing in return.

We can still say no, but this was the only way (ONLY WAY) I could get to see the terms of the contract.  Kevan said it was a national program.  I pointed to the phone.  He could call the national program surely and get us the information.  He got exasperated then because signing up was the only way.  ONLY WAY.  Kevan is a corporate tool.

Afterward, I toured a group of tall, elegant Somali teenagers through the MIA’s ancient art collection.  They were attentive and interactive.

At 1:00 PM I went over to the Eye Institute where I had my semi-annual glaucoma check up.  This was the first time in over 20 years that I have not seen Jane West.  I now see Dr. Brown.  My eye-drops have dropped my pressures into the safe levels and my optic nerve is stable.  Between the holes punched through my iris in 2004 by laser and the eyedrops, we’re keeping that nerve as healthy as possible.

I started out with a central hole in my optic nerve bigger than normal, so I have less room to accommodate change.

 

Art and Culture, Family, Our Land and Home

Saudi Arabia, Here He Comes

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Fall                                        New Autumn Moon

Go, now.  The visa process is ended.  Yes, it’s true.  Mark’s visa cleared the Saudi Embassy at 3pm today.  Hopefully his passport will get here tomorrow via Fedex.  If that happens, Dr. Ahmed will send Mark an electronic ticket and he could be on his way as soon as tomorrow night.

Kate and Mark just came in and said we had wild turkeys in the perennial bed.  Sure enough, 7 turkeys are up on the third tier, eating something, maple seeds perhaps.

Into the museum today for an hour long presentation on Dine blankets by a collector.  He said the Dine always made mistakes in their weaving so as not to upset the gods.  Greeks did the same.  Hubris is a terrible thing.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work, Humanities, Literature, Myth and Story

Breaching the Walled Garden of the Self

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Fall                                               Waning Harvest Moon

Prepping for a presentation on Spiritual Resources for Humanists.  Reading books, articles, letting ideas slip past as I get ready to sleep, keeping my antennae out for what feeds me now.

The book I mentioned before, All Things Shining, has convinced me of one thing.  It’s important to know why we need resourcing in the first place.

The title offers a rationale, unpacked.  Humanism embraces a world shorn of its medieval metaphysics; the Great Chain of Being has met Nietzsche’s Bolt Cutter, God is dead. God is dead, of course, was not an argument, but an observation, a sensitive man’s awareness that the God drenched era of the ancien regime had been drained by the empirical method, reason and the strangely acidic effect of the Protestant Reformation.

This world, a world with a strangled sense of the sacred, gave birth to the angst and anomie of the existentialist 20th century, a world with no center, or rather, a world with millions of centers, each person a godhead struggling with their own creation.

What can buttress the Self that must navigate these empty places?  Does our supernatural vacuum hold enough air to nourish the isolated self?

We stumble toward wonder, toward joy, hope for a glimpse of the sacred, of the moment that can lift us out of our isolation and put us in communion with others, with the natural world, with the stars which birthed the very atoms which constitute us.

These things we seek not out of some vestigial institutional memory, an anachronistic impulse to live again in a God drenched world.  No, we seek these things because the essential paradox at the heart of our lives is this:  we live alone, the only one with our world; yet we live together, up against galaxies of other worlds, sometimes with other worlds so close that they seem to intersect with ours.  We seek the venn diagram, a mandorla labeled self and other, where the other is another person, a flower, a sky, a lightning bolt.

So, spiritual resources in this context, then, would be those fragments of culture that can weaken or penetrate the walled gardens of our Selves, not in order to breach the walls, but to let in companion armies, allies in our quest.

The quest seems to similar to the one Sir Gawain faced when he beheaded the Green Knight and, in a year and a day, had to bend his own neck before the Green Knight’s sword.  That is, we somehow must will ourselves into a vulnerable, ultimately vulnerable position, to those we have beheaded.  Interestingly, as the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight proposes, this vulnerability is not only, perhaps not even mostly, a human to human one, rather, it is human to the whole Green world.

So we seek allies who will keep us strong in our vulnerability, mighty in our humility.  We seek at least love.

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Politics

Partners and Co-Creators

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Fall                                                       Waning Harvest Moon

Went out and picked raspberries for pancakes this morning.  With a definite chill in the air the garden felt different, a bit sleepy, ready to bed down for the cold season.  After a month or so of feeling burdened by it, wanting it to disappear, my spring affection reappeared.  This patch of earth, these beds, work together with the plant world and Kate and me.  We share a joint stewardship of this property, each in our way committed to making it healthy, beautiful and bountiful.

The soil has given of its nutrients, its water holding capacity, its sturdiness as a base for roots and stems.  The plants have combined the chemicals of the soil with that water and pushed themselves up and out of the earth, then blossomed and in many cases fruited.  Kate and I weed, tend the soil, watch the plants, picking bugs off of them, pruning, replanting.  We also harvest and, when the harvest ends, we replenish the soil with composted manure and mulch.

When we use the plants and their produce, we take the leaves and stems and other unwanted parts and put them in a compost bin to return to the soil.

This complicated working partnership among many different parties here is, in microcosm, the partnership we humans have with the natural world and the world of soils, air, water and sunshine.  It’s significant to note that the one unnecessary party to this the work is the human race.

Plants will grow.  Rain will fall.  The sun will shine.  Soils will improve.  Fruits and vegetables will be made and distributed, all whether humans enter in or not.  We exist only as part of a richly integrated chain of being and we exist as its wards, not benefactors.

We do have the capacity to intervene, but too often, far too often, when we do intervene, we disrupt what nature does willingly and foul the process, in the end harming ourselves.

I wish our gardens and our orchard were more than supplements to our diet, but that is all they are, to be otherwise would require a commitment to the work I no longer feel able or willing to give.  Even so, as a supplement, this growing of flowers, potatoes, tomatoes, beets, carrots, leeks, beans, onions, lettuce, chard, spinach and peas, this caring for bees and harvesting honey, does keep us intimately engaged as partners with the natural world, a partnership so often hidden from view in this, the most capitalistic of all possible worlds.

Art and Culture, GeekWorld

A Change Is Coming

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Lughnasa                                             Waning Harvest Moon

An edible Docent luncheon.  Whoa.  Sat with Emily, Grace, Allison, Linda, Cheryl, Amanda, Katherine, then Sheila.   The actual program contained as many boring bits as usual but the table companions more than made up for the dullness of the rest.

Afterward we all trundled over to the Pillsbury auditorium for Katherine’s speech outlining her vision for a new and improved volunteer experience at the MIA.  Many of her ideas and initiatives sound useful and needed.  The already changed rule that now allows volunteers in free to any museum lecture jumps the level of continuing education up a notch right away.  A needed notch.

As a self-professed techno-geek, many of Katherine’s plans have some link or another to various technological ideas.  The Docent lounge has been gutted and will undergo extensive remodeling to serve as a lounge and research area as well as, if I understood correctly, a center for Docents who want to moderate web discussions, write weblogs or blogs (I don’t understand the difference) and participate in digitalizing the collection in many different forms.

The intention is, too, to digitize all the object files and to first create streaming video of older continuing ed, then stream them live while creating video for later review.

Much of this comes under the guise of an NEH grant called the Extended Collection Project.

She had various other announcements, some related to the new structure of her department, Learning and Innovation, others to staff changes.  Staff got shuffled around, some, like Sheila and Amanda, to totally new positions, others, like Debbie and Ann, to newly named positions within the same programs.

I did notice a while back that one thing Katherine has done is to flatten the entire organization.  She took out the position that Sheila previously held, a middle level manager over all the guide programs and did not replace it, so all guide programs report directly to her.

A group of docents with which I spend time sent a list of suggestions to her and I’m not clear how many of them were addressed in this lecture.  I thought there would be some obvious sign.

Perhaps I’m a bit starry eyed here, but I believe Katherine’s work heads in the same direction many of us have wanted, i.e. better access to better resources.  I also believe she will work with us as we see the need.

There are elements still untouched and we’ll have to work on those some more.

Art and Culture

A Stroll Down Memory’s Lane

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Lughnasa                                              Waxing Harvest Moon

Took a stroll down St. Paul’s living museum on Monday.  That’s the way Emily Shapiro characterized Summit Avenue, the western end of it that turns sharply, avoiding Ramsey Hill and heads off toward the state capitol.

We visited the first SPA building (complete with a bronze sculpture of a young Fitzgerald), learned about Tudorbethan architecture, found Hale park complete with a D.A.R. sponsored statue of Nathan Hale (hands tied behind his back), saw Marcia Rinek’s early home near the Louis Hill house and an August Gauden Eagle in Lookout Park.

There is, too, a chainsaw sculpture of an ancient burr oak, right across the street from the University Club.  Emily has information identifying it as a prominent madame of early St. Paul.

Seeing, truly seeing, is one of the gifts that close attention to art nurtures.   We all walked this familiar area, driven past many times, but this time we stopped, looked and listened.

 

Art and Culture, Politics

A Member of the Loyal Opposition

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Lughnasa                                              Waning Honey Extraction Moon

Today members of the guide discussion group meet with Katherine Milton at the museum.  We’ve had specific concerns around continuing education and requested this meeting to discuss them with the head of the department that includes Art Adventure, Collection in Focus and Docent programs.

I had this in mind the other day when I wrote about complainers.  Instead of figuring out how to stamp down or stamp out complainers, organizations should welcome honest critics, often the only source of straightforward critique most institutional denizens ever get.   Too often cloaked in a self-justifying cloud of hopes and projects, all folks who work within large organizations of any kind, be they corporate or non-profit, run the risk of filtering evidence through their own biases, unintentionally slanting and weighting feedback.

That’s not say, of course, that every outside critic has the truth, but it is to say that the probability of unbiased feedback rises if it comes from folks whose lives are not intimately entwined with the institution.

My hope is that this process will establish clear channels for guides (all volunteers) and their representatives, that it will open the museum to the voices of that cadre of folks who most often interact with the museum’s public, and that the result will be improved education and resources to the end of excellent tours for museum patrons.

At the Woolly meeting last night we focused on gratitude, especially for those who had touched our lives in a formative way.  I admitted, as I’ve written here before, that I’ve held at a distance folks who would mentor me. (with one unsuccessful exception, Phil Johnson) “I have an oppositional personality,” I said, “Though none of you may have noticed that.”  Everyone chuckled.

It’s not a surprise to me that I’m involved with this effort.  My ear hears the frustrated, the unheard, the fearful and my heart always aches to make them heard and felt.  Mom and Dad, in different ways, both reached out to the avoided, the uncared about and did it in spite of considerable institutionalized opposition.  I suppose that’s why this feeling has an instinctive feel, something taught before language and learning.

We all have our peculiarities, our deep inclinations, this happens to be mine.