Category Archives: Great Work

Garden, Great Work, Health, Latin, Politics, Sierra Club, Translating Metamorphoses, Weather +Climate, Writing

The Week Ahead

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                                              Valentine Moon

Weather has warmed up over 40 degrees from the last few weeks and it’s still cold. That’s about where we live.  No volcanoes erupting to interfere with our lives though.

Today or tomorrow I’ll finish reviewing the edits made by Bob Klein to Missing.  Then it’s off to the agents.  I’ve probably taken more time getting to this point than a novel of this type warrants, but I’ve wanted to produce as good a book as I can.  The first two or three books sold can determine success over all (that is, being allowed to continue publishing) and I want to present clean, focused stories.

 

Also tomorrow I’m going to resume my P90X workouts.  I’ve taken a week + off to allow my chest to heal and it seems mostly calmed down now.  Dave Scott, the handy-man I mentioned a bit ago, has installed the new pull-up bar, the Stud Bar (Tm).  It will not pull out of the ceiling studs (aka Stud Bar) and I will not drop unceremoniously onto the concrete anymore.  This last makes me happy.

When Kate and I discussed my attendance at an Ira Progoff workshop, I initially wanted to go to an event in early May.  It was in Asheville, N.C. and the thought of contemplative work in the Blue Ridge mountains appealed to me.  But, she rightly observed, this was soon after our Colorado trip for Gabe’s birthday and at the beginning of the growing season.  Other dates and places I liked were either in the middle of the growing season or at the time of the honey harvest.  That’s how we chose the end of March.  No planting, no bees.  And I can make Denver on the way home, wishing an early birthday to granddaughter Ruth.

Another way of saying Tucson was not on the top of my list for places to go.

The polishing begins on the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha this week. Back to the beginning with careful attention to commentaries, dictionaries and other English translations.  The goal:  as well spoken a translation as I can muster plus commentary notes.

(st. jerome, patron saint of translators. and yet another great beard model)

It’s also week 7 of the Climate Change course.  This course has proved as influential for me as a weekend Kate and I spent in Iowa City with PSR, Physicians for Social Responsibility, a conference on climate change. That one propelled me into my work with the Sierra Club. Just where I’m headed now is not yet clear to me, but I’m for sure going to increase my activity level on adaptation.

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

Enough. Almost.

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                                                          Valentine Moon

Reimagining my faith, as I understand now, lies in the synthesis of the work here on the vegetable garden, the orchard, the flowers, the woods, the bees and the Great Work.  The work set out by Thomas Berry in his book of that name.  The great work for our generation is to create a sustainable path for human presence on the planet.  The carbon loading information alone makes this both true and necessary.

Placing my faith in the praxis of work at home and in the political world means it is incarnational and immanent in nature, key for me.  Incarnational means the sacred has no meaning apart from the corporal, the material world. Immanent means it is not about the transcendent, but about the here and now.

And that’s enough.  Almost.  There are though the mystical, the emotional aspects of the life of faith.  They were once deeply important for me.  And I miss them.  Liturgical music, contemplative prayer, the sense of mystery and profound depth.  Not transcendence, never a God or a power above, but the calm strength of the Ave Maria or a session of lectio divina or a quiet meditation sinking into the inner chapel.  The emotional resonance of these familiar, ancient practices still speak to my soul, but the metaphysical structure which validated them has crumbled and fallen away.

(Thomas Cole, Expulsion From the Garden)

Just noting this, not sure what to do with it, as I have not been for the last 20 some years. Perhaps a new path will open for me that includes these things.  Or, perhaps I will have to create one of my own.  Might be part of the task of reimagining faith.

 

GeekWorld, Great Work, MOOCS, Politics, Science, Weather +Climate, Writing

Back on Tailte, Peering Into the Climate Future

Leave a comment

Winter                                                        Seed Catalog Moon

After a frustrating morning with a balky computer, I got into Robert Klein’s work on Missing.  He’s good.  Careful, detailed.  I’ve only rejected one of his edits so far and that one I understood what he did, but chose my construction over his.  I didn’t get far, but I’ll keep at it.

I wrote a private post earlier about my anxiety as I approached this stage.  It’s still there, but the anxiety decreased as I worked.  I hope that continues to be the case.

As I mentioned on Great Wheel, my computer is running a climate model with its unused processing power.  This is part of an Oxford Study to determine the results in a particular model if it is run many times with slight variations.  These slight variation can be very significant (think butterfly flapping wings), but without running these complex models over and over, tweaking them in slightly different ways each time, it’s impossible to know for sure what a particular adjustment will do.

Climate and weather modeling are big users of super computer resources and the work on my computer is part of a massively parallel processing strategy to, in effect, mimic super computers without having to buy them.  The concept is simple.  Each home computer has many times the computing power necessary for almost, if not all, the tasks it performs and, in addition to that, most of them sit idle most of the time.  By downloading parts of larger task onto many, many home computers use can be made of both the idle and under-utilized processing power.  The first one of these projects was SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestial Intelligence, and I was part of that one, too.

They are resource intensive, however, so some of my computer frustrations might have come from it modeling global climate in the background.  I’m 95% with the task the Oxford folks assigned to me (well, my trusty Gateway is 95% done) and it may be a while before I take on another one.  This run takes approximately 350 hours of processing time.

I can and do shut it off at times.

 

Great Work, MOOCS, Science, Sierra Club

Carbon on the Go

Leave a comment

Winter                                                                  Seed Catalog Moon

This am in the climate change mooc listening to lectures about the international policy dimensions.  Boy, there are very real dilemmas.  Let me mention just one.  Coal.  To get emissions down coal use has to drop and drop a lot.  But.  Energy use in a nation has a linear relationship to the country’s wealth.  So.  If country A significantly reduces its coal consumption, two things follow.  1.  It will have to use a lot more of some other kind of energy unless it wants to beggar its citizenry.  2.  Country B, perhaps with less financial resources, now discovers that a lot of coal is available, cheaper than ever since one larger user has stopped or greatly diminished its use.  Result?  Country B buys the coal and uses it to generate electricity, thus increasing both its wealth and its emissions.  Hmmm.

There’s a knock-on here that amplifies the problem, embodied emissions.  Sounds like a horror movie premise and that’s not far off.  An embodied emission is when one country produces a product using a polluting energy source, say coal, but instead of consuming the product sells it on the global market.  Which country is responsible for the emissions?  The producer or the consumer.  That’s an embodied emission, when the product you consume sent up its production emissions in another country.

(international movement of coal)

Guess where that happens a lot?  Yep, China exporting to U.S.  So, while our emissions have fallen modestly thanks to first the 2008 great recession then the increasing use of natural gas, China’s been scarfing down coal reserves, many from Australia, then selling the furniture, electronics, appliances here in the U.S.

Embodied emissions have become a big problem since 1990.  Over that time international shipping has undergone a remarkable transformation lowering, then lowering again, the price of shipping even bulk goods like coal and, then, the products created by its use.

The solution to this happens to be simple but politically very unpalatable:  border tariffs. Tariffs are a big no-no to free market ideologues and they do raise the specter of tariffs used as weapons not just to balance the embodied emission problem.  Makes my head ache.

Family, Great Work, Science, Sierra Club, Weather +Climate

Accentuating the Negative

Leave a comment

Winter                                                            Seed Catalog Moon

Again the even heat is so fine.  Makes this feel like a work space instead of a commandeered backroom.

Most of the time today reading materials for the Climate Change MOOC and then listening a set of lectures by Richard Somerville.  He’s a theoretical meteorologist which means that his work includes creating and running weather prediction and climate models.  He is understandable and dispassionate.  And all the more troubling for it.

(this “ski slope” graph shows the rates at which emissions have to reduce when peak CO2 emissions happen on three different dates, one already past.  And we’re currently accelerating. again, see Great Wheel for particulars.)

It’s bugging me right now that I’m putting up all this negative information on Great Wheel, but the terrain ahead of us has become clearer and clearer the further I go in this course. The world needs to act soon and the developed world needs to show leadership.  The EU has committed to emission goals that will meet the challenges and they have more people and a larger economy than we have.  We need to act.

Then, we have to figure out the issue of sustainable development in the developing world, especially China and India, but in Brazil and Russia, too, the BRIC countries.  And we really don’t have much time.  In order to avert literal disaster (see Great Wheel for particulars) emissions worldwide have to peak no later than 2020 and begin then a very sharp reduction.  By very sharp reduction I mean getting to a world with 80% less carbon emissions before 2050.  80%!!!!!!!!!!!

This, the Great Work of Thomas Berry’s work of the same name, is one on which we cannot fail.  If we do, we consign our grandchildren (Ruth and Gabe) and their children to a world of currently unimaginable extremes in sea level rise, temperature, significant rainfall events, coral bleaching, ocean acidification and probably an increased severity of hurricanes and typhoons.  You wouldn’t want to live in this world and your children’s children won’t want to either.

Great Wheel, Great Work, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

The Weekend

Leave a comment

Winter                                                           Seed Catalog Moon

Got caught up with the Climate Change MOOC, part of the process involved getting my head turned toward scientific reading, following graphs and numbers and equations. I’m past the first really brain busting part and the flow of the reading went much better this morning.  Another challenge to, as Hercule Poirot would say, “the leetle gray cells.”

Spent some time with an easier task, translating more of the Metamorphoses.  In these verses Neptune rides the waters, urging them on as they flood the earth, then strikes the ground with his trident and creates earthquakes.  Poseidon, earth-shaker, as Homer knew him.  This was an earlier human generated, outsider mediated, apocalypse.  Climate change is our very own.

The Great Wheel blog continues to take shape, a bit here, a bit there.  Changes, tweaks, but growing.

 

Great Wheel, Great Work, MOOCS, Weather +Climate, Writing

And Things Were New

Leave a comment

Winter                                                                  Seed Catalog Moon

So much new.  There’s always a lot of energy at first, Loki’s Children and the Great Wheel, a new workout regimen, getting back on the low carb horse, Climate Change MOOC, then there’s the slog, the keeping at it when the slump hits, a plateau and another push, then more.  Right now I’m mostly in the energy phase, lots of excitement and eagerness.

There will come a time though when the effort seems too much, when the energy has gone from positive to negative, becomes a drain, exhausting.  That’s when past experience helps.

Learning new tools for the Great Wheel.  Diving into the difficulty of reading graphs, percentages, equations, maps, pushing my body in a different way.  Listening to the ideas, the splinters of ideas, the ways forward as research and writing open up a new world.

In it now and glad of it.

GeekWorld, Great Work, Politics, Tea

This and That

Leave a comment

Winter                                                              Seed Catalog Moon

Started another MOOC, see more on Great Wheel.  It’s gonna be work.  Note, Great Wheel is still undergoing development.  It won’t roll out officially until February 1st, but there are several posts up already.

Found some white tea I liked that is unavailable on the market.  So, I wrote the guy, who grows in his tea in Kurtistown, HI.  On Oahu.  He wrote back and offered to sell it to me wholesale.  Good deal.  Still expensive but it’s the best white tea I’ve had so far.  A low bar I’ll admit.

(not Maui Wowee.  Bob Jacobson’s white tea.)

The NYT has redesigned its webpage and I like the new look.  Cleaner.  But.  The types pretty small for these presbyopic eyes.

I see there that the Republicans plan to claim poverty as an issue, to make them look more compassionate and inclusive.  Wonder if they know they actually have to reduce it?

Great Wheel, Great Work, Weather +Climate, Writing

In the Zone

Leave a comment

Winter                                                                Seed Catalog Moon

We skated through the day never getting warmer than -14 by my weather station.  That’s a chilly day by any standard.

Got some news on Missing.  It will be back in a bit.  Bob said it had a lot of capitalization and formatting errors.  Oops.  Plus a lot of pesky 1st person remainders from an early experiment in first person story telling.  Sorta makes me chagrined, but, hey, that’s why I hired the guy in the first place.  Better him finding them than an agent reading my manuscript cold.

Also got a ways into Loki’s Children today.  I have a pretty clear idea about the way forward with it and I’m excited.  Decided to just get at it, write away so to speak.  It was fun to get in that space.  Lost track of time.

So, with the work on Great Wheel and Loki’s Children, I’ve been in a creative space most of this very cold, good to be inside, day.  Feels good.

Then a good workout.  Plus news that my PSA was normal.  All in all, a good day.

Great Wheel, Great Work, Weather +Climate

A New Site Begins

Leave a comment

Winter                                                             Seed Catalog Moon

If you want to take a peak, www.ancientrailsgreatwheel.com is live.  I’m still pondering the look, the content and I don’t plan to get at it methodically until late January, so it’s very early days.

It’s easy to get obsessed with a project like this and do nothing else for a good while, but I want to let this percolate before I decide on a look and while I get the idea of content refined.  I’m very open to input right now about either look or content.  What’s up right now will change as the year goes on, as it does here on Ancientrails.

In other news it’s -14 now at almost 3:00 o’clock.  We’ve probably hit our high for the day.

Time feels oddly, well, frozen.  As if life goes on here, but has come to a stop outside.  That may not be too far from the truth.