Category Archives: Great Work

Great Work, Memories, Minnesota, Politics, Third Phase

A Minor Leftie Memoir

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Lughnasa                                                                   College Moon

Groveland UU has asked me to speak on December 14th. Their theme for the year is social justice. They wanted me to talk about restorative justice, a topic about which I know little. Instead I suggested this:

Social Justice: Reflections       Looking back at work for affordable housing, neighborhood organizing and neighborhood economic development, against corporate control of neighborhoods, organizing for jobs, for equity in philanthropy, for a sustainable human presence on the earth, for undocumented immigrants, for progressive politicians like Wellstone, Karen Clark and Peter McLaughlin, against the Vietnam War, for women’s rights, against the draft.

Looking forward at work necessary to retain and expand gains made.

When looking at it again, I realized it had the character of a summing up about my political work over the years, mostly in Minnesota. Sort of a minor leftie memoir, but not for the purpose of the memories, or not mostly for them, but mostly for teasing out the themes, the underlying rationales, the whys. What worked, what didn’t. What might work now, what might not.

This topic came to me because I realized it would be my last time at Groveland, with whom I’ve shared a two decade plus relationship and possibly my last time speaking in Minnesota, maybe ever. I don’t, at least right now, intend to find a religious community in Colorado since such institutions no longer interest me.

There is a modest bolus of energy in reviewing a body of political work that arose mostly in response to individual issues and moments of time, that never followed a straight path and that, like most serious political work, had some successes and many failures.

Where I wondered, did all this energy and effort come from? It wasn’t a good career move, yet the political path was the one I followed anyhow, pushing away more logical trajectories. There was, of course, my father’s role as a newspaper editor and his often weekly airing of his Rooseveltian liberal opinions, basically pro-social welfare and anti-communist, pro strong defense. That may have shaped my willingness to be seen publicly as a representative of unpopular points of view.

Also important was the nature of my hometown’s work force, the parents of my friends. With few exceptions, my parents being among those exceptions, my friend’s parents were either factory workers or stay-at-home moms. It was the 1950’s after all. As factory workers, a very high percentage worked for General Motors, others often in suppliers to the auto industry or other vehicle related manufacturers like Allison-Chalmers. They were members of the UAW.

These folks, the majority by far from the hills of West Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and other southern states, usually had not finished high school, but had jobs in General Motors, jobs that, thanks to the UAW, had health care, pensions, regular vacations, good wages and decent working conditions. As a result, Alexandria, Indiana hummed. When the auto industry went into decline and the UAW with it, Alexandria crashed into a ghost town.

A third factor was my mother’s unwavering compassion all people, no matter their condition in life or the color of their skin. Her example shaped me profoundly in that way.

The final ingredient came when the U.S. went full force into Vietnam. I started college in 1965 and would be in higher education for the duration of the war. The struggle against the war radicalized many students and I was one of them.

Bees, Garden, Great Work, Science, Sierra Club

This Should Stop. Now.

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Lughnasa                                                                        College Moon

The Northrup King building in Northeast Minneapolis houses artists, floors and floors and floors of studios: potters, painters, metal workers, collage artists, sculptors, print makers. 5 years ago a docent group did an event there during Art-a-whirl. The room in which the event was held had remnants of the building’s original purpose. Slick concrete columns fat as oil drums flowered toward the top, supporting the weight of feed grains that would come into the top floor of the building, then get separated below through the chutes still visible in the large open area.

While the band played, memories of another time, in the late 1970’s swirled around. Back then Northrup King was still an independent seed company, selling seed to farmers. But in the mid-1970’s a specter stalked the seed industry. Large pharmaceutical companies had become aware of the great concentration of power available for those who controlled patents on seeds, on their genetic makeup. A huge buyup of seed companies was underway.

A group attempted to stop the buyout of Northrup King by Switzerland’s Sandoz corporation, but failed. Northrup King, or NK, became a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical company and was later sold to Sygenta, an agrochemical and seed company.

You may recall a post here on July 12th of this year that contained this quote: “Today, humans rely on fewer than 150 plants for nourishment, and just three cereal crops—wheat, rice, and corn—make up more than two-thirds of the world’s calories; along with barley, they own three-quarters of the global grain market.” Wired This could be the strategy statement for that buyup, which went unchallenged.

The result has been the concentration and subsequent manipulation of genetic material for many of those 150 plants and an even tighter focus on the big three: wheat, corn and rice. An article in today’s Star-Tribune mentions just one small outcome of this process, but one with big consequences for those of us who raise bees, the use of neonicotinoids. This pesticide-slathered on the seed before it is sold to the farmer for planting-has a role in colony collapse syndrome which has led to hive losses as high as 20% even for professional bee-keepers. It weakens the bee or kills them outright, geometrically increasing the effects of habitat loss (often created by the same agrochemical folks through “round-up ready” crops), mites, bee strains unprepared for the hygienic requirements these changes produce.

More than trouble for bees is exposed in the article Bees on the Brink. Here is the true problem (which is not to trivialize the problems for bees, but to see its place in a much larger and more insidious problem):

“Though they represent just 2 percent of Minnesota’s population, farmers control half its land. And their embrace of the monocultures and pesticides that form the basis of modern industrial agriculture has been implicated in the decline of bees and pollinators.

But as long as farmers sit at the receiving end of an agri-chemical pipeline that fuels the nation’s rural economy, not much is likely to change…“

The centralized control of seed genetics, with its beginnings in the mid-1970’s, has now become the apex of a command and control apparatus that dictates how over 1/2 of Minnesota’s land is used. And that’s just Minnesota. That control is hardly benign. Witness the Minnesota river and its agricultural runoff polluted waters.

The payoff, the ransom for which these lands are held in thrall by big pharma and big agrochem, of course, is higher yields. This however only reinforces a decades long collusion between agriculture scientists at land grant universities like Purdue, University of Minnesota Ag campus and Iowa State. Long before big pharma got involved crops have been manipulated not for better nutrition but for higher yields and crops that are easily harvested, shipped and processed.

The result? A farm sector which pollutes our waters, uses huge amounts of petroleum products in fertilizers and fuels, kills our bees, diminishes genetic diversity and worst of all produces food with less nutritional value. This is criminal and should stop. Now.

 

Aging, Family, Great Work, Weather +Climate

Nocturne

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Lughnasa                                                            New (College) Moon

Rain so hard it sounded like hail has scoured the air, washing the dust out and dropping the temperature. The tornado watch expires in half an hour though we’ll have more thunderstorms later tonight. Weather is local; climate is global. Climate change in this case has given us days with more moisture in the air, driving up the chance of stronger storms and more concentrated rain fall.

(Curry The Line Storm)

Robert Jay Lifton, a grand old man of American letters, known for his psychological and psychiatric work on war and nuclear weapons, has written an interesting article in the NYT, The Climate Swerve. He’s careful, doesn’t overstate the evidence, but he makes a point similar to one I made here a month or so ago. Something’s happening to public opinion about climate change. Something pressing the public toward concern, possibly creating the political climate necessary for making difficult choices. Read the article for his thoughts about “stranded assets.” It’s a concept you will hear about more often in the future.

Had lunch with Jon today at the Craftsman on Lake Street. He was in town, briefly, for the wedding of a long time friend, flew in yesterday and out today. Dressed in a new blue striped dress shirt, dress slacks, neat beard and his curly hair, he hardly looks 45, almost 46. More like mid-30’s.

The bond of this family has begun to gel, why now I’m not sure, though it must have 500Jon Gabe Mesomething to do with Ruth and Gabe getting older. There’s a realization about our own aging, our fragility that comes as kids advance in years, but in this case it’s a sweet realization, a realization that the future, as the song says, is not ours to see. But that that’s ok since we know well some who will inhabit it, shape it, lead it.

The future they inhabit will have its own set of agonies and joys. When Ruth and Gabe confront a world altered by climate change, by the polarization of political parties in our time, by the struggles to drag some of the Middle East back to a seventh century golden age(that was never golden), by the rise of China and India and Brazil and Indonesia, they will be in that world as we are in ours: a bit confused, somewhat hopeful, mostly living their lives from day-to-day just as we do.

 

 

Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

Boys and their Tractors

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Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

Into St. Paul this morning for another America Votes meeting at the Minnesota Nurses Association. Solid, information packed as usual.

On the way in I listened to a radio discussion of masculinity and on the way back an Ira Flatow Science Friday story on regenerative farming. NPR is listening to my brain.

Men in America has its main hook in the changes since the 1970’s in men and women’s education status. Women have pushed ahead of men, or girls ahead of boys steadily, until today girls dominate boys in all of the academic disciplines through high school. While in itself this is neither alarming or surprising, when joined to the decline in manual labor and other manufacturing jobs, a disturbing picture emerges. Men begin to look left behind in the contemporary labor market. There are a lot more matters to discuss here. Another time.

Regenerative farming pushes forward the no-till farming movement, moving beyond merely sustainable agriculture to an agriculture that positively enhances the soil. In this show a number from the book The Soil Will Save Us by Kristin Ohlson got my attention. She says that if 11% of the worlds agricultural land were to convert to no-till farming the resulting natural sequestration of carbon dioxide would balance the climate change equation. Don’t know if this is true, but it’s intriguing.

It took me immediately to rain follows the plough which I mentioned here not far back. That was the belief that created the vast agricultural lands of the plains where industrial agriculture has combined with center pivot irrigation to drain the Ogallala aquifer and destroy the once ten foot deep top soil created by prairie plants. If that land were to convert to no-till agriculture, water use would plummet and the plains could begin to heal themselves. Might be the 11% right there.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Weather +Climate

Wild, Wild Grapes

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Lughnasa                                                                 Lughnasa Moon

500P1030676A cool breeze predicted autumn as I picked wild grapes this morning . These wild grapes have overgrown our amur maples and will get cut back when the lawn restoration work is done later in the fall. That will hardly diminish their presence though because wild grapes grow all over our woods, some branching out from vines thicker than my upper arm. The woods also provides morels in the spring.

Over the years I’ve highlighted the opossum, the great horned owl, wild turkeys, pileated woodpecker, woodchuck, salamander, newt, toads, frogs, dragon flies, deer, rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, bumblebees, raccoons and snapping turtles that live on this property, too. A significant aspect of living in the exurbs is the diversity of wild flaura andIMAG0506 fauna, often on the chunk of land on which you live. This is a melding of the human built and the wild.

The Denver Post recounts encounters with bears, mountain lions and rattle snakes. In Minnesota residents encounter bears and wolves, perhaps the occasional lynx. Most of these encounters occur because human habitation encroaches further and further into formerly wild lands.

These predators are certainly part of the wild eco-system, but the bulk of wild life are prey species, amphibians, reptiles and birds. It’s these we humans encounter most often and which we often discount, as if their small size or lack of tools for killing make them less significant. Yet the woodchuck, or land-beaver, that occupied a tree here for a day, is a wild animal just as much as the wolf or bear. So, too, the opossum and all those others that flee when humans arrive, who try to keep their visibility to a minimum.

We are co-habitants, not owners really, of this land. Though we will sell it to other humans, we are not selling the wild life. Their lives will adapt to the new humans just as they adapted to us, either by leaving or hiding or just going on about their day.

The wild flaura includes not only morels and grapes, but ironwood, jack-in-the-pulpit, oaks white, red and burr, elm, ash, black locust, cedar, nine-bark and rhus radicans, or poison ivy. Barring a clear cut of the woods, which I consider unlikely, they, too, will remain.

Art and Culture, Asia, Cinema and Television, Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Humanities, Latin, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The Move, Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

A Purging We Will Go

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Lughnasa                                                     Lughnasa Moon

Over the weekend and as deep into this week as I need to go, I’m packing up my former study. I’ve purged one file cabinet and consolidated its content into boxes for moving. A horizontal cabinet awaits attention. A large plastic tub full of art supplies went into the move with care pile. One small bookcase has been emptied and moved. The shop work bench I’ve used for storage is empty, too. That old printer, the one I bought in 1994, is in the truck and ready to go to a recycler.  An HP laserjet, it still functions.  That leaves three larger bookcases and some miscellaneous things on various surfaces, plus the art on the walls.

(what I hope to create in Colorado, my own version of this.)

When this room has been tidied up, the next and last big push begins. My study. This room has walls of books. Many will go in boxes with red tape, but most will not. The other areas have gone well, but this one will present some difficulty. So many projects. Some of the past, some of the future, some of today. Which ones do I imagine I’ll continue in Colorado? Which ones have enough spark to be valuable in the final third of my life? These are hard decisions for me and packing this room will be both valuable and difficult.

This is a chance to prune my work over the last third of my life, clear out the branches that have grown across each other. Take out that large branch that flourished then died. Increase the circulation amongst the remaining branches so they have air, can breathe. Pruning gives renewed vigor to plants and I hope to achieve the same thing when I pack up these materials, those closest to my heart, leaving behind what I no longer need.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Lughnasa 2014

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Lughnasa                                                                      Lughnasa Moon

In times before the pagan revival this holiday had the name Lammas, even among witches. Lammas, a modern English transliteration of an Anglo-Saxon word for loaf-mass, was celebrated on August 1st. The Roman Catholic imperial strategy of subjugating, then eliminating rival religions moved forward in part by absorbing and renaming other faith’s holidays.

It is not so easy, though, to stamp out folk religions. The old ways were held tight in rural areas and those doing so were called heathens (on the heath) or pagans, from the Late Latin paganus, or country-dweller.

Here’s an example. On Lammas parishioners would grind the first of the wheat harvest, then bake loaves of bread and take them to the church for blessing. According to this wikipedia site, many would then take the bread home, break it into four pieces and put them at the four corners of the grain storage building for protection against spoilage and rodents. So Lammas remained a first-fruits harvest festival, even under the Roman Catholics, but they replaced celebration of the grain itself with incorporation of the grain into the Catholic eucharistic symbology.

(a welsh corn dolly)

As the wheel turns, so does the nature of belief and faith. In this more pagan friendly world most neo-pagans, though not all, have returned to the original Celtic, Lughnasa. While I don’t align myself with any of the contemporary pagan splinters like Wicca, neo-paganism or Asatru, I do align myself with the impetus for the Great Wheel, the changing seasons themselves, and with the value of holidays to celebrate those changes. The Celtic holidays come from within my genetic heritage, so they make sense for me.

Sitting on the counter upstairs is a large laundry basket, the plastic kind that can be IMAG0382carried on the hip, filled with collard greens and chard. In the shed, drying, are yellow onions and garlic of different varieties. Downstairs, in the pantry, Kate has already stored bright orange jars of carrots, blood red jars of beets and jars the solid green of green beans. We have, too, eaten onions, chard, carrots, beets, green beans and collard greens already, so this is a good time to thank the land and the weather and the plants for the food they’ve already produced.

(onions and garlic, 2014)

In Celtic lands Lughnasa would have seen a corn maiden brought in from the fields in the first grain cart holding harvested wheat. (corn, in the British use, being wheat) And corn dollies would represent this symbol of the land’s fertility throughout the long, fallow months.

These holidays were not a single day (as we tend to celebrate them now, if we celebrate them at all), but were market weeks, when produce and crafts would come into a town and villagers and farmers would shop. Games were played, dances held, and marriages, of a 3-month or a year-and-a-day length could be entered. Both were considered trial marriages, the 3-month trial up at Samhain or Summer’s End.

Since these markets enjoyed the first fruits of many harvests, they were occasions tied to the rural life. In the United States Celtic peoples continued the Lughnasa heritage with county fairs and state fairs. Though the Minnesota State Fair is a much more expansive event than the typical Lughnasa festival, the Anoka County fair held recently or the 4-H fair held annually in my hometown of Alexandria, Indiana were probably similar.

In my world Lughnasa is much as it always was in terms of intention, a moment to stop and consider the strong bond between our land and our stomachs, our land and our survival. If nothing else these holidays make us pause and reflect on what’s happening in a world, the plant and animal world, that we might otherwise ignore. It’s for this reason chiefly that I think broad awareness of the Great Wheel and celebrations of its holidays could be a balm for an overheated world.

 

 

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

What Is This Faith?

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Summer                                                            Lughnasa Moon

So, continuing the subject from below, we might ask, what is faith? I will bring in my favorite definitionary, the O.E.D., but before we get to that I want to offer a couple of other observations. In the simplest, and therefore perhaps best, sense, faith is what gets you up in the morning. When you first wake, it comes to you that another day has started (another micro-life). What is it, on reflection, that makes getting out of bed worth it? Or, better, that makes getting out of bed seem possible at all?

Here’s my answer and I’m going to take a risk here and suggest that my answer is, roughly, universal. The body/mind that rises as you has confidence (Latin for with faith) that oxygen will be available. That food of some kind, either plant or animal, will also be available, if not today, then soon enough to sustain life. That your feet will land on the floor or the earth or the stone and not float up into the sky. That when your eyes open the visible world will flood into them once again so you can guide yourself.

Let’s extend this confidence. That the earth will spin and so the sun rise and set, the moon come and go. That our earth will speed its way around our star, tilted, with seasons appropriate to our place on it following as a consequence. That as those seasons come and go, the vast waters of our world will rise into the heavens and fall back to earth, splashing and rejuvenating all they touch. That as those seasons come and go, certain crops will grow and be harvested. Certain animals will be fed and will give their lives in a sacrifice for others so ancient as to be one of earth’s most holy acts.

This is the kind of faith that I believe we all, all native Terrans, share. It may sound trivial and inconsequential compared to the Book of Job or Genesis, the Rig Veda or the Diamond Sutra, but consider its great virtue: we know it to be true. We have to consult no wise men or women. We need no book or ritual. No institution decides whether gravity and the sunrise and the taste of tomatoes, the sweetness of cherries are correct. These are, quite literally, our birthright.

Now is the time for the O.E.D.

Faith, in its form understood from the Greek and Latin is:

1. Belief, trust

2. That which produces belief, evidence, token, pledge, engagement.

3. Trust in its objective aspect, troth; observance of trust, fidelity.

You may say, well. This is trivial. Obvious. And besides, faith, as Paul said, is faith in things unseen. Life is neither trivial nor obvious. Neither is its continuation. The wonder of this planet, so tiny compared to the vastness of the universe, swinging its way around Sol, only one star among a hundred octillion stars, nested inside one galaxy of ten trillion galaxies, is not trivial at all. Neither is it, speaking from the universe’s perspective, obvious.

And what, to agree with Paul, is more unseen than the future? Yet I have faith that these same matters which encourage me to rise each morning will sustain me, into and through the future. Even if that future is only this day, or this hour, or this minute.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

The Song of the Earth, Herself

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Summer                                                            New (Lughnasa) Moon

croppedZOE_0022At first, as I dug my way into a new faith, it was about a symphony: the early crocus, snowdrops, grape hyacinths followed by tulips, then iris and hosta and bleeding hearts, giving way in July to a the bold notes of the asiatic lilies until the daylilies and clematis, both bushy and climbing, the liguria and the snakeroot began to dominate followed by the soft crescendo of asters and chrysanthemums. This literal rising and falling, in palates of color always framed by many shades of green, played out in my mind, a curious analog to the mental images inspired by listening to Mozart or Haydn or Pachibel.

Then, with Kate’s guidance vegetables came to have more and more importance. They too come in their own season, following their own melodic lines, as do the fruits and the nuts. Even, I would later learn, so did honey and the concerto of the honey bee.

Amending the soil with compost and peat moss and decayed leaves and hay, finding the 06 27 10_beekeeperastronautheirloom seeds for the vegetables we grow and the beautiful varieties of perennials like the iris and the lily, made the whole a process laced with memory and filled with change.

It is no surprise that the Great Wheel, the ancient calendar of a people whose blood runs in my veins, came into this earthy process as a celebration, as a sacred abstraction of a very real lived experience. This was not systematic theology. This was neither dogma nor holy book. No, this was and is the song of the earth herself, composed in her own medium, the plants whom her body supplies with nutrients and her body which receives their dead bodies to replenish herself.

So this is a material spirituality, a spirituality that lives in the praxis between human awareness and the earth’s ordinary wonders, a paradoxical sacredness created by the essential, the necessary bond between the human body and the plant body and the earth’s body. It may be, probably is, that paradox exists here only when seen against the various gnosticisms of the world’s many religions. In fact, a faith rethought and reimagined without religion entering into the mix needs no spirituality other than that mysterious, miraculous link that binds the entire web of life into one interdependent whole.