Category Archives: Great Work

Aging, Art and Culture, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, Travel

And Now, Reverse Field and Head Home

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Spring                                                          Bloodroot Moon

Everything’s rolled up and in the bag, ready to check out, then board the metro for Reagan International.

This was a trip where I had to confront some unpleasant truths about traveling.  For me.  My physical stamina, which I rate as pretty good, is still less than it was.  And that matters for my planning.

Also, not new, but apparent during this trip, too, was the easy slide into OMG, what am I doing?  This is a neurotic pattern that I recognize, having largely learned to slip its bonds, but in a foreign place, separated from my regular routine, wife, friends, dogs it can and does easily return.

On the up side I have learned that my new interaction with art will include embedding art history within the larger history of ideas, letting these two large disciplines bump into each other, suggest questions and directions for each other.  One place I know these streams will converge is in Reimagining Faith.

There is, too, a renewed interest in early American history, especially the Revolutionary war period and its immediate aftermath.  Not sure how strong this is, though it did occur to me that it might be a good journey to take with our Western raised grandkids.

(Hotel fire stairs.  1910 vintage)

There is, as well, a definite sense of my own regional identity, an Upper Midwesterner, and the way that identity differs from and could inform the culture of national policy.  This is an odd phenomena since I feel very much a man of the North, of the continent more than the country; yet I feel more and more like a citizen of the planet, also more than the country.  Whether this is a personal experience or a more broadly shared one interests me.

Specifically I wonder if the internet intensifies globalization of perspective while reinforcing local identity.  I wonder if think global, act local and the whole locavore movement might feed this pattern, too, making the local the touchstone not for national identity, but for Terran identity.

 

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Memories, Poetry, Weather +Climate

Yet.

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Imbolc                                                                   Bloodroot Moon

Snow came in the night.  Maybe 2 inches.  Freshened up the landscape, pushed back the melting time.  Last year today it was 73, ruining my vision of the north, turning it into a slushy Indiana/Ohio/Illinois.  Climate change stealing my home.  It disoriented me, made me feel like a stranger in a strange, yet strangely familiar, land.  Now.  30 degrees.  8 inches of snow.  Home again.

A book on my shelf, important to me:  Becoming Native to This Place.  The idea so powerful.  One so necessary for this nature starved moment, as the pace of the city as refuge lopes toward its own four minute mile.  Cities are energy, buzz, imagination criss-crossing, humans indulging, amplifying, renewing humanness but.  But.

All good.  Yes.  Yet.

That stream you used to walk along.  The meadow where the deer stood.  You remember.  The night the snow came down and you put on your snowshoes and you walked out the backdoor into the woods and walked quietly among the trees, listening to the great horned owl and the wind.  The great dog bounding behind you in the snow, standing on your snowshoes, making you fall over and laugh.  Remember that?

There was, too, that New Year’s Day.  Early morning with the temperature in the 20s below zero and another dog, the feral one, black and sleek, slung low to the ground, went with you on the frozen lake, investigating the ice-fishing shacks, all alone, everyone still in bed from the party the night before but you two walked, just you two and the cold.

Before I go, I also have to mention those potatoes.  The first year.  Reaching underneath the earth, scrabbling around with gloved fingers.  Finding a lump.  There.  Another.  And another.  And another.  The taste.  Straight from the soil.  With leeks and garlic.  Tomatoes, too, and beets.  Red fingers.  The collard greens.  Biscuits spread with honey from the hive.

GeekWorld, Great Work

Look. Up in the sky…

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Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

A big day for Asteroid 2012 DA14, but an even bigger one for the Chelyabinsk fireball.  Must have a great PR agent.  Timing its fiery entrance as space shuttle sized DA14 passed by ensured the Chelyabinsk meteor, “only” the size of an SUV according to an MIT scientist, a forever memory in the hearts of all of us interested in astronomical phenomenon.

(Asteroid 2012 DA14, seen from the Gingin Observatory in Australia. Image via NASA.)

I heard a New York Times reporter ask the same scientist from MIT if Siberia attracted these kind of events, referencing, of course, the Tunguska event in 1908 that flattened an area of the taiga roughly 1,000 square miles in area.  No, he said.  Coincidence.

When asked about the how much we should be concerned about an extinction level event, the same scientist, dodged the question.  Didn’t make me feel secure.  Here’s a link to the article and the video interview.

 

Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work, Holidays, Our Land and Home

Pruning Weather

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Imbolc                                                                   Valentine Moon

Last of the furnace vendors.  Get your hot one, right here!  Red hot and cozy!  Discounted. Tax credited.  Rebate worthy.

We’ve made a decision.  We’ll go with Centerpoint, a dual-stage, variable speed motor operating at 95% or 96.5% efficiency.  A bit more with these options but they optimize the conservation of both natural gas and electricity.  Once we get it in that’s one less matter we’ll have to worry about over the next few years.  A good thing.

After Brad left, an interesting guy, knowledgeable about food as a former catering manager for Lunds, we put on our winter gear.  I got out the Sorel’s and clapped my work gloves on, wool hat and down vest.  Kate got ready.  She has less stringent requirements for work in the cold than I do.

Outside in the deep snow, bright with a clear day’s sun, we first cut back to the ground all the raspberries.  In clearing the snow with a coal shovel, I discovered that I could clear snow and prune in the same motion.  Kate went in afterward and cleaned up.

When I finished in the raspberries, I went to the tangle of grapevines that have grown on our front 6-foot chain link fence.  Originally a Celt (our first and dearest Irish Wolfhound) escape prevent barrier, it now serves mainly to give us an ample supply of wild grapes in the fall thanks to the volunteer vines.  Last summer though there were few grapes.

Lots of leaves and vine, not many fruit.  We’d never pruned it before, or if we did, it was a while ago, so it had overgrown.  I whacked away at the orchard side today;  I’ll finish it tomorrow.  Kate got after the bittersweet.  It was a good day for this work.

Back inside I had a snack of bacon and blue cheese with chestnut flower honey, the first installment in my birthday gift, a monthly specialty bacon club.  How cool is that?  Thanks, Kate.

Cinema and Television, GeekWorld, Great Work, Health, Latin, Our Land and Home, Translating Metamorphoses

95%

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Imbolc                                                                                Cold Moon

So the parade of salesmen has begun.  First up was Reliant heat and cooling.  They sent out a really good guy.  Told us what would fit, how much it would cost.  Very reasonable price.  Good furnace.  If I hadn’t had the others scheduled, I would have bought this one.  Still, we’ll hear the others out, too.  You never know.

This furnace runs at 95% efficiency.  As opposed to our current 80%.  Think about a difference of 15% less gas used.  Then multiply it by hundreds and thousands of homes.  Hard to believe.  Of all the strategies to combat global warming, the easiest and most immediate ones involve conservation.  More fuel efficient cars, furnaces.  Better insulation in homes.  Switching from coal-burning electricity generation.  Having cleaning crews in large buildings clean during the day.  Strategies that have broad application yet involve relatively straightforward choices and proven technologies.

Finally wrenched myself away from the image moving to work on the Edda’s some more.  Brunhild today.  A sad story.  Sigurd jumped into that burning ring of fire, but boy it really didn’t work out for him or Brunhild.

Also back to my one sentence of Latin.  Again, it seemed to flow today.  Based on past experience I’ll hit an impossible head-slapper tomorrow, but today.  All right.

I’m in my second week of rest for my patella-femoral syndrome.  I’ll start back on the workouts on Monday.  I’ll see how, or whether, this helped.

Been watching House of Cards on Netflix.  As the brave new face of television, I like it.  13 episodes up all at once.  We can watch it as we like it.  Cool.

 

Commentary on the news, GeekWorld, Great Work

There’s No Reason to Worry, Dave

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Winter                                                                     Cold Moon

Here’s an analysis in the January issue of Wired that caught my attention.  I don’t doubt that the numbers they use are right, though I haven’t confirmed them.

“It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields… Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.”  Wired January 2013

The argument here defines technological triumphalism, not only does technology solve all our ills, it always will.  And so it was good.

However.  Let’s go backwards to the time period before the industrial revolution when most folks still lived on farms.  I’m no romantic about subsistence agriculture having owned a farm, The (not so) Peaceable Kingdom, and engaged in intensive permaculture horticulture here at home.  It’s hard work and a bad year can literally kill you.

(Davos, World Economic Forum, A_Lunch_at_the_Belvedere)

Even so.  There’s a price to pay for salvation by the machine.  Think of it, machines take humans off the land and put them in service of making more and smarter machines.  That’s the essential argument this whole article makes.  Yes, it relieved the awful strains of serfdom, tenant farming, subsistence on increasingly smaller plots as inheritance ate up legacy lands.  But.  It created the hells of the looms, the coal age, the coal mine.  Child labor.  A cash economy where no cash spells doom faster even than failed crops.

Then there’s that relationship to the land.  We’ve removed so many people from the land, distanced them further and further to the sources of their own foods and we’ve done it via industrial processes now ruining those sources, those faraway yesterday sources.  That we cannot live without.

Technology has triumphed.  Along with its handmaiden, capitalism.  Neither of them care that they eat not their young, but yours.  Each of them assume an instrumentalist view of natural resources and human labor, seeing them both as infinite and replaceable when in fact they are neither.

I’m no luddite.  I love my computer and I look forward to a robot that can take over weeding our garden.  It’s that price.  Who tallies up the human and ecological cost of this capitalist, techno future?  Who thinks about how to reduce and when possible eliminate it?

Not the authors of articles for technology’s cheer leaders.

Great Work

The Way of the Vegetative Powers

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Winter                                                                  Cold Moon

Here’s an interesting story from our Singapore stringer, Dr. Mary Ellis.  She lives close by the Botanical Gardens where this tree is currently in bloom.

“The flowering Talipot Palms have been the focus of attention for the past few months at Singapore Botanic Gardens. It is a majestic sight and a lifetime treat to see the massive flowering structure.

In August 1920, Talipot seeds were introduced from the Calcutta Botanic Gardens, India. The seedlings were planted in the Palm Valley in 1925 and now after 79 years, two Talipot Palms (Corypha umbraculifera), flowered from October 2004 to January 2005.

This palm flowers only once in its lifetime, producing the biggest inflorescence in the flowering kingdom. The palm grows for 30 to 80 years, storing up energy and strength in its trunk to send out this massive inflorescence. After flowering and fruiting the plant will die. (read more)”

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Myth and Story, Writing

Living in Season

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Winter                                                               Cold Moon

Winter is upon us.  Beginning to give more thought time to my Living in Season presentation for Groveland on the 27th.  The short version is this:  learning to adapt your life to the season, rather than the seasons to your life.  I mean this on at least two levels: the literal and the metaphorical.

(A seasonal round.  This is a new idea to me, but I like it a lot.)

The literal can include such things as caring for plants outside during the growing season.  Maybe in a container, a window box.  Maybe in a flower bed or a vegetable garden.  Could be an orchard or a woods.  Maybe a community garden.  Something to synch up at least part of your daily life with the emergence of plants from winter’s fallow time.

It can also include intentionally leaving time in your winter schedule for retreats, inside projects like crafts or writing or visiting friends.

Perhaps in all the seasons hiking might be part of your plan, a liturgical response similar in all seasons but changed by them in profound ways.  If you can’t hike, get someone to help you be outside some amount of time each week.  Yes, even in the dreaded middle weeks of January.

Metaphorical:  first, know which season of your life you are in.  Are you college age, in the still vigorous growth years?  Or, are you in the mature years, the years of the late growing season, the early harvest days?  Or, like me, are you in the days of the late harvest, headed toward the long, eternal fallow time?

Here, too, we can find analogical help from living in season.  When sun and rain and warm temperatures push a plant up, up, up, perhaps that time right around flowering, then it must attend as well to its roots, not forgetting the stabilizing and nutrient gathering powers of those underneath surface parts.  So, for example, when college and the world of work begins to beckon, as graduation nears and your own unique bloom begins to present itself to the universe at large, this may be a time to recall hometown, old friends, family.  Favorite hobbies and pets and places.  It may seem that these people and places hold you back, hold you down, are heavy anchors weighted to yesterday.  But, no.  Instead these are the anchors in the deep subsoil of your life that hold you up, feed those parts of you that remember the child you once were, remind you of the long strengths that balance the new, shiny ones obtained through education.

Anyhow, stuff like that.  More by the 27th.

Art and Culture, Great Wheel, Great Work, Writing

A Sabbatical

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Winter                                                                    Moon of the Winter Solstice

Winding down.  Last two days of tours.  A vast stretch of mornings between next Monday and July 1st.  I’m excited.  Rewriting.  Writing.  Marketing.  Lots to do.

One outdoor to do over the next few months.  Get out in Anoka county.  Hike.  Take pictures.  Make some phenological observation.  Maybe take a week plus somewhere, hiking from a cabin or perhaps, if I can find one, a trail going from inn to inn.  I’m feeling the need for some natural rejuvenation.  Not cities.  Not books.  Not movies.  Not art.

Mostly though I want to lean into the writing.  Make it as full time as I can.

Bees, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture

Considering the Lilies of Our Fields

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Winter                                                                  Moon of the Winter Solstice

Greens.  Peppers, especially those sweet hot peppers.  Leeks.  Garlic.  Onions.  Shallots.  Beets.  Collard greens.  Tomatoes.  Carrots.  Herbs.  Then, we’ll have the apples, plums, cherries, pears, raspberries, strawberries, goose berries, currants, wild grapes.  And honey.  That’s our plan for next year.  Most of it anyhow.  We’ll probably sneak a few things in just to see what happens.

Three or four years ago we began a gradual winding down of the flower beds as annual events, turning them gradually toward perennials following one another, growing on their own.  We have to do some major work this spring along those lines, especially the garden bed on the house side of our front path.  That one I’ll dig out, amend the soil, and replant altogether.  Gonna take out the Viburnum.  It’s never done well.

We have pruning to do yet this winter.  And I still have more trees to fell.  Winter’s a good time for both.

There is, too, the fire pit and its immediate surround.  Mark helped us on the fire pit when he was here.  This year it will become functional.

Indulging the mid-winter sport of garden planning.  An indoor prelude to the outdoor music of the growing season.