Category Archives: Great Work

Strawberries and Bull Snakes

June 9, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Garlic Moon

Kate picked strawberries and rhubarb yesterday. Two pies later we still have a plastic container filled with strawberries. We have two separate strawberry plantings, the ones that are only June bearing have not begun to mature quite yet.

With well over 150 apples and four pears bagged over the last three or so days, the currants, blueberries, cherries and plums still come and the raspberries arriving in the fall, we’ll have an abundance of fruit this year and for years to come.

We’ve also had asparagus already, are eating green onions and small shallots now and I had a sandwich filled with young beet greens. Though we’d starve if we had to depend totally on our own produce, still we grow more and more each year; the variety of what we grow has lessened somewhat as we get more intelligent about what it makes to sense to grow and what to buy.

This morning we got up early and drove over the Red Ox, a real old timey restaurant and had breakfast. When the waitress asked if we’d like homemade bread, we said sure and I asked who makes it? Robin. She’s here 7 days a week and she opens and closes five. Wow. That’s a lot. She must like it. The waitress gave a low chuckle, Yeah or she doesn’t like it at home. That’s what I’m beginning to think. Made sense to me.

After breakfast we drove over to the Cedar Creek Nature Preserve, a University of Minnesota outdoor lab and nature center that trains ecologists, botanist, biologists, entomologists, herpetologists and the like. It’s usually close to the public, but this weekend they’ve partnered with the Bell Museum to put on naturalist oriented programs for an evening and a day, last night and today.

We went on the snake walk. Our guide, Brian, a totally hairless biker, knew a lot about snakes. He works as an engineering tech for a pharmaceutical company, but spends his off years hunting for and tending snakes. The picture to the right is a bull snake, a rodent eater.

They are, apparently, mistaken for cobras because they fan out their head when threatened. (Why anyone would fancy a cobra in Minnesota is beyond me. But, hey.)

A walk along a shaded trail produced a sighting of a prairie skink. It released its tail after capture, the tail continuing to wiggle, looking for all the world like a tasty earth worm. Clever trick. Sacrifice some body mass and live to eat another day.

This snake is a prairie garter snake, identifiable by the black stripes down from its mouth. She looked gravid.

Anyhow, the outdoors providing a lot of the entertainment this week with the transit of Venus, fruit and bee tending and Cedar Creek today.

Great Work, Politics

Over

June 6, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Garlic Moon

Over. The last Sierra Club legcom meeting, the end of the 2012 session, a wrap up meeting and evaluation. Over. My return to politics, which lasted a bit over four years. Out because after the cruise I wanted to focus on work only I could do. That means, to me, bee keeping, garden tending, novel writing, Ovid translating and reimagining faith.

A combination of sadness and exhilaration. Sadness because a time with good people, working on important matters, in an arena I have loved all of my life has passed for now. Yes, a choice, a personal choice, yet, still a loss and some grief. Exhilaration. I have made a choice and decided to guide my life in a particular direction. That’s a positive.

Now we’ll see if the things I mentioned above and the work at the MIA is enough to hold my life together. I think it is, probably more than enough, but more than enough in a way that will give me some synergy.

The Sierra Club work, no matter how good, involved drawing my attention away from the novel, from the Latin, from the garden and the bees. Both the distance and the time commitments had begun to chafe. It’s time for someone else to step up and time for me to step back.

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

A Consolation of Philosophy

May 23, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Garlic Moon

The philosophy department at Ball State resided in a brick building littered with the remains of other days. Religion was there too. The chair of the Philosophy department Robert (his last name has fled for the moment), a buzz cut positivist, an ornery, no see it, no believe it kinda guy. Let’s just say metaphysics were taught under sufferance in this department.

Bob drove me out of philosophy, convincing me that the most pressing questions of the day were what hot meant, or cold. Couldn’t see it. Not then, not now. But then I didn’t explore much more, now I’ve been in the wide world and know there are more things than that dreamt of Bob’s dreary positivistic philosophy. Much more.

In fact, if I’d listened to my self, I would have known it then, did in fact, but didn’t know I knew.

Many of us disenchanted with postivism found a real ally in Alfred North Whitehead, the creator of process philosophy. I used to think I understood it, now I’m not so sure; but, I knew this about it, Whitehead said the universe was alive. And that made sense to me.

Still does. In some deep place it made a whole lotta sense, because one October morning a chill hit me as I left that brick building, a class in metaphysics just finished. The next step, the one over the threshold into the quad, never happened, at least not in my consciousness, because my consciousness was otherwise occupied.

My heart filled up, my mind expanded, the whole of myself plugged itself into the throbbing matter of the cosmos. I was one with the whole and it with me. A sensation of light and vastness and yet intimacy became my reality. Just for a moment. I don’t know how long it lasted and at this remove, some 45 years later, I couldn’t reconstruct that aspect if I had to.

Since that time, if I remember to recall this, I have never felt alone. The universe can be known through one flower, one bird, one puppy, one rock, one college sophomore, that much I learned for sure that day. And more.

The universe can not only can be known (or felt); it knows (feels) back! Now this is not revolutionary nor advance news. Mystics before and after me have had similar experiences, remarkably similar, in fact. The positivists and their ilk might explain this away through brain chemicals, but even if that were to turn out to explain this experience, it would only serve to under write its power.

It just occurred to me today that long ago moment on the quad, in the chill of an October morning, might have hints for how to live my third phase.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

Legislature Lurches

April 25, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Beltane Moon

The legislature lurches toward adjournment, up ending decades of environmental legislation as it goes, e.g. permitting relaxation, a transfer of school trust lands out of the DNR’s purview (about 50% of land currently under their management), a probable wolf season.

A major reason for the bad outcomes (from my point of view) is the legislature’s focus on three big issues: Viking stadium, a bonding bill and the Republican tax legislation. These are the issues with which the governor has engaged and around which he has used his leverage in negotiations. Our issues have not risen to the top of any of these debates.

This session, my third as chair of the Sierra Club’s legislative committee, is my last and I don’t like going out on this note, but there you are. The next big target for all environmental activists has to be the 2012 elections where a concerted effort will be made to change control of both chambers of the legislature.

The ebb and flow of political fortunes, effected as always by many factors outside anyone’s direct control–economy, world military engagements, current social issue orientations–will give us a favorable climate at some point. We need to work to make that point the 2013-4 legislative session.

Commentary on Religion, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Our Land and Home

See the Heads?

April 24, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Beltane Moon

Coming north on Highway 10 (or east, I can never figure it out and I’ve lived up here 18 years) just before the big Lowe’s store, it’s no longer unusual to see cars parked along the side of the road, drivers clomping out through the high grass, camera with a big telephoto lens in hand. They’re headed toward a dead tree with a big clump of sticks in a high fork.

Kate told me she saw heads there a month or so ago. I began to look, too, and finally saw a bald eagle circling the nest, coming in for a landing, presumably with food for the young’uns. I’ve seen a head or two though I’ve never been able to suss out whether they were chicks or adults.

We hunger for peeks into the wild world, a personal glimpse of the life and times of creatures that live among us, but we rarely see. Over the last 18 years Kate and I have a great horned owl hooting at night in our woods. I’ve seen him/her once, it’s giant wingspan remarkable, yet hardly ever observed.

We have opossum, raccoon, woodchuck, rabbit, deer, coyote, skinks, snakes, frogs, pileated woodpeckers, bald eagles, great blue herons, egrets, too. These last three we see from time to time, usually in flight, though the egrets are often there, serpentine necks ready to dip suddenly into the water. The rest, almost never.

Around Christmas tree three or four years ago, back when I still fed the birds, a opossum took to visiting the bird feeder around midnight. I happened on him one night and checked back frequently after that. His small pink paws looked almost like human hands and I delighted in watching him do his opossum thing. Why? Because it was a glimpse of a neighbor, a close neighbor, one who shared the very land I claim to own, but whom I rarely–up till then, never–saw.

This takes me back to the discussion of mystery I had here a few weeks back. We do not need to imagine a world beyond the one to which we have ready access; there is a large, unimaginably large world shrouded in mystery that lives near us, with us, within us. Take the billions of one-celled entities that share our bodies, help us live our lives in return for some benefit derived from the eco-system that is our body. A mystery, certainly.

Or the baby opossum I found huddled up far inside a dead tree, doing what all prey does when confronted by snarling predators–Vega and Rigel–hiding in an inaccessible location. If Vega and Rigel hadn’t been obsessively interested in this tree, I’d never have known the opossum was there.

The morels that visited us once 18 years ago, never to return. Or, at least never to be found. A mystery. This is a revelation to us, the way for us to an original relation with the universe. And, it’s in our backyard.

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

Bee Diary 2012: Hiving the Packages.

April 13, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

“Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you’ve been and remember the person you were meant to be. The person you want to be. The person you are.”
H.G. Well

Drove out to Stillwater and picked up my California girls. About 16,000 of them. Sprayed’em down with sugar water when I got home. Unloaded a 5 gallon pail of prosweet, a food supplement for this early period when nectar is in short supply, and two gallon pails with holes in the top for feeding (turned upside down).

Later today, around 5 pm, I took the packages, the two gallon pails filled with syrup, a pollen patty and went out into the orchard. There I took the hive’s copper tops off, then the hive box cover and removed three frames from the center of the hive box.

Rain, a light rain fell. And Rigel came in through a gate I had forgotten to close and ate the first pollen patty. In spite of not being a bee. Sigh.

So, back down to the refrigerator for another pollen patty.

Back up to the orchard and out to the packages. I pried the syrup containing can out of the package, sprayed the bees again with plenty of sugar water, removed the queen cage and put it in my pocket, then rapped the container sharply on the remaining frames and 7,000 to 8,000 bees fell onto the floor of the hive box.

I spread them around with a bee brush, then took the queen out of my pocket. First, check that she’s alive. Yep. OK. Pull back the small screen on her cage while placing the cage in the hive box. Tap it and make sure she falls into the bees.

Replace the three frames, gently. Not killing the queen is an important part of this whole process.

Put a pollen patty on top of the frames, away from the hole in the hive cover since that’s where the syrup will come into the hive box and put the hive cover back on the box. At that point invert the white plastic pail over the oblong opening in the hive cover, place a medium sized box over the pale and the copper top over that.

That’s it for the first day.

There were a couple of moments. A bee crawled up into my glove. I removed it. All the time saying, if I’m calm, the bees are calm. This is sort of true though even now, four years in, I still get an adrenalin pump when the bees hit the mesh on my bee veil.

I didn’t get all the bees out of the packages, most, but not all. It was those stragglers that took off after me. They were not a problem. But, they could have been.

The hives look great in the orchard; they give it a productive, yet homey feel.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

Growing

April 3, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Put in my seed order to seed savers yesterday. This is the first year in a few that I’ve not started any plants. We moved the hydroponics cart into the garage to gain room for consolidation of all our dog crates in the kitchen. Not sure whether we’ll use it this winter or not. Maybe. But this year, we’re planting seeds or buying transplants.

I ordered 8 tomato plants and 6 pepper plants from seed savers. I still need to pick up onion sets, leek transplants and kale, probably tomorrow at Mother Earth Gardens at Lyndale and 42nd. Our potatoes will come from seed savers, too.

We’ve got raspberries, strawberries, apples, pears, plums, cherries, blueberries, currants, wild grapes and asparagus that are perennials, plus the overwintered garlic and some onions. Even so, I’m glad we don’t have to survive off of our produce. Gardening would be real work then, a chore.

Instead, our garden sustains us spiritually, maintaining that constant and close connection to the seasons, to the vegetative world, to the soil. It also provides food throughout the winter and we’ve chosen to emphasize that aspect of our garden by planting vegetables that we can put up.

Plus the bees.

Great Work, Humanities, World History

Old Flames

April 1, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Masters of the Planet. Started reading this book by Ian Tattersall, a paleoanthropologist. A popular narrative about the evolution of the human species, Tattersall covers ground I learned well over 40 years ago when I majored in anthropology. Trouble is, the ground has shifted a lot since I learned about australopithecus and paranthropus robustus and all the other hominids.

(Logo Institute of Human Origins)

When I finished my study, the time line of human evolution ended about 3 million years ago. Now it stretches to more like 7 million. I learned bipedalism was a way to hunt for game and watch out for predators in the grasslands of the open savannah. Hmmm. Problem with that theory is that more recent finds show the first bipedalists hung out at the edge of forests and often went back into the forests. Lots of experiences like that for me.

The book did relight those old flames, the reason I added anthropology to my already in place philosophy major. Something about the human story, that long arc of time when we differentiated from the ancestor we held in common with the great apes. How it happened. What it means for us, now. All the different disciplines necessary to be a good anthropologist: ethnology, linguistics, archaeology, physical anthropology. It was just so much fun.

I’d recommend this book, but I think calling it a popularization is misleading. Tattersall is a good writer, clean prose, very logical, that’s all good, but the subject matter often veers into the apparently esoteric. If this stuff fascinates you, it’s a good way to catch up the last 40 years or so. And they have been amazing years in the project of learning our story.

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

Religion Collapse Disorder

April 1, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Had a chance to speak to Groveland UU this morning, a regular event each year for me for over 20 years now. Some years more, some years less, always congenial.

The Reimagining Faith piece (see Current Work at the top of this page) resonated in a way a bit different than I had intended. The conversation was not so much about reimagining faith as it was about the falling away of religious life and what that might mean. That’s where the discussion led.

The Reimagining Faith project needs to deliver a fuller account of what I call religion collapse disorder. Better documentation of this accelerating trend in the US and more on its implications for individual and group spirituality will be important. I had sort of skipped over that and gone directly to the challenge facing deinstitutionalized Americans.

Between now and the Summer Solstice I’m going to start investigating possible Asian resources. I’ll look especially at Taoism, Shinto, and the ukiyo-e artist Hokusai who belonged to a Buddhist sect that worshiped the north star.

There is also more work to be done on tactics, or methods, of constructing a new faith and I think the constructive theology exercise lined out below will be fun and a good step in this direction.

Realized, with a bit of surprise, that I’ve spent a lot of my life putting myself in front of people: preaching, organizing, acting, touring, writing. Never thought of it all like that before and it made me wonder what drives it. Don’t know.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Reimagining Faith: The Chauvet Cave Art

March 31, 2012 Charles 2 Comments

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

32,000 years ago. In Europe. When the Alps had glaciers 9,000 feet thick, in a valley in what is now France, in a cave concealed by an ancient rock slide, these astonishing works remain, a galleries of ancient art, a museum with no light, no movable images and nothing between us and the artists who worked here but time. These are the oldest works of art. Period. And their lines flow from one place to the next, moving with the grace of an angel in flight, creating forms with ease, with economy of line.

Werner Herzog makes strange and wonderful films. He finds human narratives in fascinating places. That the French allowed him to film Chauvet testifies to his reputation and he only enhances it with this work.

He interviewed a man, I didn’t get his name or profession, who said to understand the photograph below there are two attributes of life then that could help make sense of it. The first he said is fluidity. That is, trees talk, rocks talk, entities are not fixed, they are fluid, one can change into the other, so a woman can become a river, a tree can become a man. The second is permeability, the forms are not fixed, a woman might have the head of a bull, or a horse the head and upper body of a human.

He suggests, and it certainly makes sense to me, that this drawing from Chauvet Cave illustrates exactly that first example of permeability. It doesn’t take much to get to Picasso’s Minotaurs or the Labyrinth in Knossos. Or, Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Imagine living in a world where life, sentience, spirit embedded itself in everything. More, image a place where the boundaries of your form and your life were not firm, where the boundary between this place and the Other World seemed always thin. More, imagine lions with the head and forearms of a cave bear. Or, a woman turned into a tree by a stream. A hunter turned into a stag and eaten by his own dogs.

This is a world where neither faith nor belief are necessary because the world is as it is. Magical. Changeable. Wonderful. Horrifying. Unpredictable. Just imagine.