Category Archives: Great Work

Dogs, Great Work, Humanities, Politics

Busy Friday

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Beltane                                                                                           Waxing Last Frost Moon

Finally.  One chunk of the Metamorphosis finished in a literal (sort 0f) version.  That’s Book III:138-250.  My learning curve has been steep, sometimes so much so that I thought I might tip over backwards, but I seem to have reached a point where moving forward goes faster now and the hill no longer looks quite so daunting.  The next step is to take it apart and put it back together in idiomatic English, then compare it to other translations, see what insights that adds.  As a guy who thought the world of language had invalidated his passport years ago, I’m pleasantly surprised and pleased with myself.  It means a lot to do something at 64 that I’ve spent a lifetime imagining I couldn’t.

After that I drove into Little Sezchuan and had lunch with Justin and Margaret, the Sierra Club’s lobbyist and Executive Director.   We discussed evaluating our legislative work this year, wrapping things up and getting ourselves squared away for the 2011-2012 session.  This has been a difficult year and it’s not over.

Came home, ready for my nap.  But.  Vega lay in the kitchen, scrunched up in pain and bloodied from some kind of a fight.  No clue what happened, but we first examined her, then took her over to the vet who sewed her up, gave her antibiotics and pain pills and we brought her home.  She’s resting now, but the vet says she be very sore tomorrow.  She’s such a sweety, she just let them work on her.

Now, I’m sleepy, but can’t get my nap because it would interfere with going to sleep.

Aging, Art and Culture, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

What Get’s You Up In The Morning?

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Beltane                                                         Waxing Last Frost Moon

Several years ago, maybe twenty, I sat down with my friend Lonnie Helgeson at the Walker cafe, a table overlooking downtown Minneapolis and the Sculpture Garden.  Lonnie, I said, I could die now.  I feel good about what I’ve done with my life and would have no regrets.

Lonnie looked at me, thought a moment, then asked, “But Charlie where’s your passion?”

Oh.  Yeah.  A passionate man would not declare he was ready to die, he’d be asking, what’s next!

Now, at 64, I can honestly say, “What’s next!”  Not sure what was going on at that moment in my life, but I think I’d hit a caesura, a pause in the melody of my life, a rest stop on the way.  While there, I mistook the rest stop for a destination, rather than a place to catch my breath, consider what direction my path now lead.

Older now and several caravan serai of the soul moments later, I welcome those times when life ceases to press with urgency, when the TV or  a novel or a long vacation beckons.  These are moments of consolidation, a time perhaps to welcome the god Janus for a good look back and a strong gaze forward.

It feels like one may be coming.  Last night I finished my literal translation of Ovid’s story of Diana and Actaeon.  The legislature ends this session (we think) on May 20th or so.  The touring season begins to loosen as schools close down for the summer.  Then I’m left with the bees and the gardens, the novel, too, of course.

These kind of moments when the pacing changes dramatically often yield breaks.  Often, as I’ve looked back over my life, I’ve responded to these breaks with melancholy, a drifting down, moving into a sense of purposelessness.  What do I do now?  I might die.  That would be ok.

Probably where I was that afternoon long ago having lunch with Lonnie.

The melancholy is ok, too.  It’s an old friend, one I’ve come to appreciate as a gathering in, a time to be with myself, in myself.  The melancholy slows down my appetite for life, forces me to pay attention to subtler, inner things, so when I reemerge, I’m ready for another road on this one-way trip.

So, if you talk to me a month from now and I seem a bit distracted, maybe a little down, you’ll know I’m really just resting, getting ready to come out of my corner.  Again.

Aging, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Health

That Old Achievement Bugaboo

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Beltane                                                                Waxing Last Frost Moon

Deciding to take a gamble on the weather, with the aid of the forecasters, Kate planted some frost sensitive plants today:  coleus, especially.  She also planted artemisia, Jacob’s Ladder, alyssum and purple wave petunias.  Mark weeded.  Meanwhile I was in St. Paul doing my next to last session with Leslie.

Tonight was Tai Chi.  When I arrived, there was no one else there except the first teacher I encountered and an advanced student.  Nobody else showed up, presumably due to mother’s day.  That meant I had a personal class with two teachers.  It was a revelation.  This teacher, the one I met the first night of class, has a style that connects with me.

She spoke about learning Chinese, listening to the words at night before she went to bed and in the morning before class and recommended, again, since she had done the same thing at the one class she taught, that I practice morning and night.  Just immerse yourself, she said.  We come to these things with such an achievement orientation and we have to jettison it, let go of mistakes, think of them as occurrences, concentrate on the process.

Tai Chi has 13 different moves, a vocabulary of movement, a style of movement rooted in another culture.  I’ve learned 5 of them so far.  Well, sort of learned them.

It was a good class. What I needed at this point.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Great Work

Real Religion

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Beltane                                                     Waxing Last Frost Moon

“The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men – from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

Especially true if you insert mother earth for mothers and nature for women, viz.  The real religion of the world comes from nature much more than from men-from mother earth most of all, who carries the key to our souls in her bosom.

I am just back from seeing Leslie give her final presentation at Groveland.  Ran into Bill Mate.  He’s been doing work for the Methodist Church in New Orleans.  Sounded fun.

Wow.  No nap yesterday plus 5 hours driving, then up early for going into St. Paul to see Leslie.  Got hit by a sudden need to lie down and sleep.  Did so.  Better now, less foggy.

When I got back, Kate was in the front, raking and planting, earth mother to mother earth.  I made pizza, then crashed.  Still waking up.

Light rain, warm.  80’s in the forecast.  Spring, it seems, may have finally arrived, well after it has come and gone as a Celtic season.

Family, Great Work, Politics, Writing

The Great Lake

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Beltane                                                  Waxing Last Frost Moon

Have you ever had a love affair that ebbed and flowed like embers in a fire wavering between bursting into flame and dying out?  I have.  Today I visited that other lover in my life, Lake Superior.  A bookshelf full of books rest in a room not ten feet from here, each one of them related to Lake Superior in some way.  An entire file drawer of a vertical file drawer contains carefully organized files, each an eco-region in the area around Lake Superior and its watershed.  In another spot sit the maps, some USGS, some others representing the land around the Lake.  There are, too, files of notes from two circle route trips I took, each time stopping in various county historical societies:  Ontanogon, Marquette, Thunder Bay to pursue research about this phenomenon less than 2 and half  hours from my front door.

My brother Mark and I drove up there.  He wandered Park Point and hiked all the way up Lake Street to the top, turning then for a magnificent view of the lake.  While he discovered Duluth, I attended a conference on Sulfide Mining on the Mesabi Range.  This was a large group, 70 plus folks, gathered to hear experts discuss various aspects of sulfide mining’s impact on the waters of three watersheds and the communities of people, trees and wildlife that would share the land with this toxic producing form of mining.

It was one of those clear northern spring days.  The sun flashed off the lake, bouncing off the crests of waves made by lakers going in and out of the Duluth Harbor.  The temperature was cool by the lake, warmer up the slope of the hillside where St. Scholastica sits; it’s fortress like main building dominating the surrounding the area.

The drive was long and the stay short, a combination I try to avoid, though this is my second time recently.  The drive out to Lincoln, Nebraska to get the dogs was also a long drive, short stay, quick turn around.

Not sure where Lake Superior and I stand.  The old spark was there as we crested the hill and looked out over the St. Louis River toward Superior, Wisconsin and the lake spread out below us.  My research, though, sits unused, as it has for several years.  What’s the status of this relationship?  Not sure.

Cinema and Television, Family, Great Work, Politics, Writing

In A World Far Away

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Spring                                                                   Waning Bee Hiving Moon

Spent the day in the world I’ve created, Tailte, a sister world to earth, but separated by several thousand light years.  It’s strange to spend time there, a place that exists only in my mind, yet populated with people, creatures, landscapes, mountain ranges, oceans, islands, gods and goddesses.  Strange, but in a good way.  It’s one of the joys I experience in writing fiction.  It takes me to a place I can’t reach in any other aspect of my life.

I’m still typing in work I did at Blue Cloud Monastery though I’ve also advanced the word count by a few thousand words.  Plugging away.  Just have to keep at it.

We only have a month left to go in the 2011 session of the 2011-2012 legislature.  The number of bad bills, outrageous legislation and outright strange bills (like cutting down walnut trees in State Parks to save the State Parks continues to pile up as the party out of legislative power for years flexes its muscle.  The callous disregard for the future of our rivers and streams, lakes and forests, wildlife and prairie’s just doesn’t make sense to me.  I don’t understand the political calculus that trades temporary economic gain for permanent disfigurement and toxification of wetlands, cutting down old growth forests, polluting the Minnesota, the Mississippi and wetlands around and possibly within the BWCA.

Mark and I watched Salt, an Angelina Jolie spy flick.  Not bad, not great, but entertaining even with the cliches.  We also started watching a three part made for tv movie called Archangel.  It was good; we’re about half way through.

Bees, Family, Garden, Great Work, Humanities

Daffodils Are Up. The Bees Are Coming. Growing Season Is Underway.

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Spring                                              Waning Bee Hiving Moon

Tomorrow afternoon is the day the bee’s come to their new home.  They will have traveled by truck from Chico, California, spent a night at Jim’s Nature’s Nectar and will leave Stillwater for Andover around 2:00 pm.  Back home here at Artemis Honey they will go into their colonies, one per package, a tuft of grass tucked in the entrance reducer for the first 12 hours to keep everybody home the first night.  Sounds like 3 folks will come for the festivities.

Today is the first Latin day in three weeks.  I’ve had an unusually full period that eliminated the full day slots I like to use for translating Ovid. I find I have to get into a flow with it which takes some time.

In addition to bee hiving I have vegetables to plant this week, too.  Succession planting plus new veggies, cool weather veggies like peas and carrots.  My potatoes came two days ago.  They’re on a cookie pan while the eyes grow a bit more before I cut them up and plant them, probably late next week.

Mark will have been here two weeks tomorrow.  He takes long walks here in Andover, goes into the city with me when I won’t be long and takes walks in the city.  Still calming down after a tough period.

On to Diana and Actaeon.  I’m getting there with this story.  When I finish my first pass on the translation, mostly literal (which is not easy for me), then I’ll take on the next, equally difficult challenge, putting my translation into idiomatic English.  Prose, most likely.  Translating it as poetry feels like a different, more complex process, one I’m not ready to take on right now.

Also, Grandson Gabe’s 3rd birthday.

Art and Culture, Great Work, Politics

Touring

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Spring                                      Waning Bee Hiving Moon

A Titian tour this morning with students from Harding High School in East St. Paul.  My group was largely Asian, Hmong for the most part.  They were attentive and responsive.  At the end Peng and Veng, two boys who had shown a lot of interest, reached out and shook my hand.  An adult gesture.  Surprised me.  Made me feel surprisingly good, too.

Second tour, also from Harding, had kids in a drawing class focused on a project to produce symbolic portraits of themselves.  An interesting tour to design, to think through.  Not sure how this group, also all Asian though with some Chinese students, too, reacted.  They were more closed off, but remained engaged through eye contact.

After that, over to the Sierra Club to return the material from yesterday’s event at North Hennepin Community College.  Spent a half-hour talking to Margaret about mining, volunteers, fund-raising, then drove home in the heart of rush hour.  Bushed.

Great Work, Politics, Weather +Climate

Getting Technical

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Spring                                                         Full Bee Hiving Moon

Over to Hennepin Technical this morning for earth day.  I’m responsible for a Sierra Club table there during a three hour long green event.  Not sure what this will be like, but it sounds like an interesting day.  I’ve already worn myself out this week and I have two tours tomorrow, plus Latin on Friday.  Worked yesterday on my art student tour for portraiture, then went into St. Paul for a meeting with non-traditional allies for the Sierra Club.

Snow.  Snow.  Go Away.  Come back around All Saint’s Day.  I love winter, but I’m ready for spring.

Gotta go.  On the flipside.

Asia, Bees, Great Work, Weather +Climate

I Roll Over On My Belly

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Spring                                              Full Bee Hiving Moon

OK.  Enough.  Uncle.  I give.  I yield.  I roll over on my belly.  Please let us have spring.  Snow?  More snow?  Just when the Himalayan inspired mounds of soot black snow have begun their glacial retreat?  This is not insult to injury, but insult to insult.  Well, all right.  If it’s coming anyhow, but could this be the last one for this season?  Please.  I have plants that need to get back to growing.

T’ai C’hi.  Coming along.  I am within one move of learning how to grasp the sparrow’s tail, then one more, the long whip, of having the basic moves in some sort of order and execution.  My teacher says, insists, promises it will all get easier.  But, it took her, she also says, 30 years to get her form to its current level.  Wait.  I’m not sure I have 30 years of T’ai C’hi practice in me.  On the other hand, maybe with T’ai C’hi…

T’ai C’hi feels like Latin for the body.  It’s taking all of my concentration to stay with it when I practice and the learning is slow.

Then there’s that radiation problem in Japan.  Good news on it.  The power company says it can have things cleaned up in 6-9 months.  6-9 months?  We’ll see.

This is the time to move the bees.  Bee colonies do not like to have their homes moved once they’ve learned where they are.  Even a move of 2 feet can be too much for them.  If you want to move existing colonies, you have to do it in slow, incremental steps.  Right now, since I have no bees, I can put the hive boxes wherever I want.  Still mulling.  I want to put them in the orchard, but that will entail switching out the gear from the front garden shed to the back shed where I currently have all the bee equipment.