Category Archives: Great Work

Aging, Dogs, Family, Friends, Garden, Great Work, Health

Garden Crusader

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Samhain                               Waning Dark Moon

Welcome to another sunny, warm November day.  These are days I’ve come to expect from October, but, as Paul Douglas often says, nature tries to balance, so here we are close to Armistice Day with a 60 degree and bright day about to unfold.  That means time to finish what I hope will be the last Rigel barrier of the season, extending a wire across the top of our wooden orchard fencing to make it really, really hard for her to get a purchase.

Kate’s lying low for the next few days, taking care of that not yet healed back.  A wise decision on her part.  She’s most at risk just as she begins to feel better, chasing down dogs, picking up the mail down our sloped driveway, loading and unloading the dishwasher, making Danish pancakes.  These are all part of the routine of a normal  life, not important, perhaps even a bit annoying on a daily basis, until you cannot do them at all, then they loom large as important, even critical parts of identity.

A shout out here to Vicki Nowicki.  I met Vicki at the annual Seed Saver’s Exchange conference in July.  I ate dinner with Vicki and her husband.  We talked about permaculture, Celtic holidays, the odditys of American landscape preferences and the importance of becoming native to a place.   Vicki told me she’d won a Garden Crusader award from Gardener’s Supply Company.  The notice came today in a e-mail from them.  I’ve excerpted a bit from the interview with her.

When we spoke, and as I read this, I found myself speaking when she talked.  We were in synch.  She also has a Liberty Garden project that I admire.

2009 Garden Crusader Vicki Nowicki

Vicki’s life work has been to help people slow down, learn about the land they live on and take better care of it. “What I’ve been trying to do for 30 years is to glorify the place where you live,” she said. “I want to use food gardens to nail people down to their place. A garden helps to reveal the nature of your site and bonds you to the land,” she said. “When you have a garden instead of a lawn, you are now producing something, not just consuming at the maw.”7150-nowicki-bench

Liberty Gardens

Her newest project pulls together everything she knows and believes about gardening. It is a website called libertygardens.com. The site will include tutorials and garden journals and will be a resource for anyone interested in gardening.

Here is how she describes it:

“It’s for the 21st century and it’s about growing food at home in order to make it a home. Our lives will change and our world will change when we start to plant food gardens at home. It’s a simple act that each person can choose to do at any time without a new law being passed, or a feasibility study being run or a stimulus package being doled out. But talk about a shovel-ready project! If our land is worth caring about and if our families are worth caring about, we can each choose to create the food supply that we have been asking for. We have the liberty to choose what to grow and how to grow it. People have always done it.”

And with Vicki Nowicki’s help, more and more people will be joining in, and doing it too.

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work

Litter Mates

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Fall                                       Waxing Dark Moon

A word about litter mates.  Kate and I buy litter mates when we get puppies.  Once in a while we’ve gotten adult dogs given to us by a breeder and we did buy one solitary wolfhound, but otherwise litter mates.  Of our current pack all of the dogs were litter mates.  Hilo and Kona were born 8 years ago from a champion whippet bitch.  Emma and Bridgit (now deceased) we bought 14 years ago from a woman who was line breeding for really fast whippets.  They were both crazy, but they loved each other.

Rigel and Vega don’t look like litter mates.  Rigel looks like a miniature Irish Wolfhound (miniature at 100 pounds, of vegarigel400course) and Vega looks like, well, Vega.  She’s a giant coon hound with a huge head and a lot of muscle.  Appearances in this case deceive.  These girls have been together since last December when they were born.

Litter mates have mutual space.  They lie on each other, eat each other’s food, play together.  They retain the bond you might expect from animals who shared a womb, then a mother’s breasts.  The intimacy and trust they display toward each other is so sweet, so innocent and enduring.  We buy them just for this reason, so they will have a partner through life, one they can count on, one their own size in the case of Rigel and Vega.

These relationships have been part of the magic for Kate and me over the years, an addition to the joy of knowing animals as friends and companions, we also know them as sisters.

Aging, Dogs, GeekWorld, Great Work, Politics

Fencing

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Fall                                          Waxing Dark Moon

Dan the fence guy came and measured the fenceline for our garden.  He hopes to finish by tomorrow and I hope he does.  Rigel will then be relegated to digging holes in the woods and the backyard rather than the garden and the orchard.  This home’s most expensive dog greeted Dan with a lot of energy.

Kate’s doing a bit more each day, though she still tires easily.  She walks without her walker for short distances and stood up for a good bit last night to cook the Danish pancakes.  Her recovery is a testimony to Viking pillaging genes, I think.  No Viking would let a bad back stop them from raiding a monastery or sacking a castle.

Dan has had back troubles, too.  In fact, he goes in to see the top spine surgeon at the U on Monday.  He had surgery on L-5/S-1 twelve years ago and now has trouble there again and in his neck.  He keeps telling Jake, his cousin, that he can have the fence business, but that he needs to protect his back.

After burning through the majority of the new toys I bought yesterday, Rigel and Vega seem enchanted with the frozen peanut butter Kongs.  A good sign.

Here’s a link to a fascinating Scientific American article on economics titled Does Economic Violate the Laws of Physics? It raises issues I would put in the conceptual arena of the commons.  It makes a ton of sense to me.

Bees, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Great Work, permaculture

Fall Clean-up

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Fall                                         Waxing Blood Moon

Out in the garden this morning taking down plants that have finished their labors.  Large cruciform vegetable plants grew from the seeds I started inside, but they never developed any fruits.  They’re in the compost now.  All the tomato vines save one have come down.  The last tomato harvest went inside today, too.  A few straggling yellow and orange tomatoes and a cluster of green tomatoes for a last fried green tomatoes.

A new crop of lettuce, beets and beans are well underway, lending an air of spring to the dying garden.  While examiningdieback091 carrots I have in the ground awaiting the frost, I discovered golden raspberries large as my thumb.  A real treat at this late stage in the year.  They await the vanilla ice cream I’m going to buy when I go to the grocery store.

The 49 degree weather made doing these choirs a pleasure.  Odd as it may seem, I like the fall clean-up part of gardening as well as I do any other part, perhaps a little bit more.  Most of these plants I started as seeds in February, March or April and they have matured under my care, borne their fruits and run through their life cycle.  From some of them I have collected seeds to plant for next year.  The clean up then represents a completion that goes one step beyond the harvest.  It honors these living entities by caring for their spent forms in the most full way possible:  helping them return their remaining nutrients back to the soil.  I want no less for myself.

Got a new toaster and a new ladder in the mail yesterday from Amazon.  Boy, shopping has changed.  I rarely go to a big box store anymore, once in a while to Best Buy to check out DVD’s or for some computer accessory.  I still go to hardware stores and grocery stores, the things you need weekly or right now or fresh, but everything else I buy online.

The bee guy, Mark Nordeen, had to cancel again today.  His wife, Kate’s colleague, got kicked in the head by her brand new black mare.  E.R. and a concussion later she’s home off work.  Guess I’m gonna have to figure out how to over winter my bees all by myself.

Aging, Cooking, Dogs, Great Wheel, Great Work

Picking Grapes With Hilo

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Fall                                       Waxing Blood Moon

As the sun went down this evening, I picked grapes.  Picking grapes reaches back in time, especially wild grapes, as these are.  It reaches back to our hunter-gatherer past, a past much longer than our post neo-lithic, agricultural and urban  world.  This vine grows here because it can.  Maybe someone planted grapes long ago here, but these small grapes, almost like miniatures, offer themselves in the eons old rhythm of plant reproduction.

To get at the clusters, all smaller than the palm of my hand, I found it easier if I first removed a covering of vines and leaves that obscured the grapes.  Do these leaves shade the grapes, keep them from desiccating too soon?  Is there some part of the grape’s maturation that requires a cooler, shadier environment?  I don’t know, but the layering of leaves, then grapes up near the main vine, where it crawled across the top of the six foot fence we have toward the road, appears intentional, at least intentional in the way that evolution works through its blind selection of more adaptive characteristics.

Hilo, our smallest whippet, accompanies me when I work outside.  She hangs around and watches me, wanders off and finds something smelly to rub on her shoulder, watches other animals go by on the road.  Her companionship also reaches back into the  paleolithic when humans and shy wolves began to keep company, fellow predators brought together by the similarity in the game they hunted and the also similar method of hunting in packs.

This time of year, the early fall, would have been good then too.  The food grows on vines and on trees, on shrubs and certain flowering plants.  Game eats the same food and becomes fat, a rich source of nutrient.  My guess is that there was a certain amount of anxiety, at least in these temperate latitudes, for the older ones in clan would know that winter comes after this time of plenty and that somehow food had to be preserved.

Kate takes the grapes and turns then into jelly and apple-grape butter.  The act of preservation, though now more sophisticated technologically, was essential back in the days prior to horticulture and agriculture.

The resonance among these fall related acts and our distant past adds a poignancy mixed with hope to them.  We have done it, we do it, others will do it in the future.  As the wheel turns.

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

The Afterlife

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Lughnasa                                Waxing Blood Moon

The energizer box, a low impedance model, has a connection to the rope.  There is not enough high capacity underground wire left to do the grounds so I’ll stop by Fleet Farm on my way to Wayzata tonight.  The Woolly meeting convenes on the grounds of the old Cenacle retreat center, now an addiction treatment center.

Tomorrow morning we’ll power up and see if the damn thing works.  My best guess right now is that it will.  Then we wait for word from Rigel that it has begun to serve its intended function.

Warren has posed a question about the afterlife for tonight’s Woolly meeting.  What do we believe about it?

A few years ago I used this  analogy for the question of the afterlife.  It still expresses what I feel.

Think of the universe as a great tapestry woven from the life and death of stars, the solar winds, the orbits of planets and the emergence of life, especially on the planet we know intimately.  Our life, lived as best we can, blinks on at some point in this tapestry and adds color, texture, intensity and vitality to the design.  This tapestry never loses anything and it extends as far as the Great Wall of Reality extends.  Without your life the tapestry would be a poorer, less beautiful creation.

This is my Credo:
From the very stuff of this cosmos we were made.

Each life is a unique, energetic organization of this stuff.

Human life is neither less nor more unique than any other, with one exception (maybe):  consciousness.

Each of us has a Self into which we try to live.  The Self pulls us and prods us to be who we are.

You are a special and important contribution to the story of the Universe, so you must live as who you are.  If you live as you believe others would have you be, then the world loses your unique and precious story.

Economic justice is a means of assuring each persons chance to be who they are.  Therefore, political action in support of economic equity is important to the universal story.

We need the world of plants and animals, oceans and sky far, far more than they need us.  So, work to protect them, and you will protect your loved ones.

The human family and friends we love and support in this life will, in all likelihood, be our primary legacy.

An open heart and an open mind keeps the Self fresh, defeats stagnation, and assures a vital life at any age.

Learning from our gardens, our children, our friends, our spouses or partners, and from the collected wisdom of others connects us to the past and links us to the future.

Art, children, dogs, jazz, and travel have the capacity to jolt us into new perspectives.

Aging, Dogs, Great Work, Politics
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Lughnasa                                       Waning Harvest Moon

Yesterday and today were full of new information, new faces.  Both days challenged my capacity to sit in one place for a long time.  The 40+ Aeron chairs in the Minnesota Foundation’s board room made finding a good chair easy and did make the day more bearable than the plastic backed metal chairs in the Northstar Ballroom.  Both days were long and challenging mentally.  A good thing.  But tiring.

Tomorrow Kate and I go see our financial planners, I call it visiting our money.  We want to discuss how they will generate cash for our payouts and have them run them run our projections using a 4% drawdown rather than the 4.6/4.7% they used.  This will give us a new and hopefully longer time horizon before our money runs out, but it will also shrink the amount of money available each year.  This is a trade-off than another consultant, Ruth Hayden, says is necessary since we’re all living longer.

Unless you are very wealthy, living large and living longer are incompatible.  That’s not to say we will, in any wise, be hurting in retirement; it does mean the cruises, trips to Hawaii and expensive purchases will have to be truncated.  Bearable.  Our life does not revolve around luxury.

The solution to our fence jumpers, according to Junior Lehman, the breeder and caretaker for a large pack of hounds, is an electrified fence.  I thought this was most likely the cheapest and easiest solution, but until I heard from somebody with some experience I didn’t want to spend money on it.  Now it will be off to Fleet Farm and hopefully we can begin letting Rigel and Vega outside again to romp and play, develop as dogs.

Great Work, Minnesota, Politics

Give Me a Good Balance Sheet

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Lughnasa                                    Waning Harvest Moon

Back from a day of hard rock mining,  a lot of rock and little roll.  One of the criticisms of the environmental movement focuses on its obsession with chemistry, geology, climatology and animal living conditions to the exclusion of human concerns.   The session today on Polymet Mining’s proposal to put a copper mine near Minnesota’s Iron Range proved the point, though it would also have applied to the industry representatives who were there as well.

This was a day of law, FeS2 and FeOS2.  A cascade of copper, nickel, palladium and platinum tinkled onto the audience.  This fight, and it is a fight, has clear sides and the sides have been at it long enough that they know each other by first names and recall each others data from meetings in the past.

Not the cozy day, though, that might seem natural in a Minnesota nice crowd like the one gathered at the Northstar Ballroom in the St. Paul Campus Student Center.

The information presented today may have been old news to many in the room, but it was new to me.  This is a complex issue for several reasons, the chemical reactions that lead to sulfuric acid in the groundwater being the cause celebre, but far from the only one.  There is, too, the tendency of mining companies to exhaust a resource, close the mine and go bankrupt after loading the assets onto another corporate entity.  The tax payers get stuck with the clean up bill.

In addition the cyclical nature of metal prices accentuates the boom and bust nature of resource frontiers, giving the employment situation a roller coaster ride of high times segueing into desperation.

In the end the information that impressed me the most came from a Montana economist named Thomas Powers.  He made the point first about benefits always being trotted out and high-fived while the costs associated with mining get set off to the side.  I came away convinced that if we could get a decent balance sheet for the life cycle of the Polymet plant, public costs and public benefits, that we would have a compelling argument for stopping this mine.

Just another day in the education of a neophyte environmentalist.  But a good one.

Great Work, Politics, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

A Yellow Moon

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Lughnasa                        Waxing Green Corn Moon

A yellowed moon hung in the sky tonight, almost full.  It made the drive back in from Minneapolis a delight as it sailed in and out of view.

In tonight for the Land Use and Transportation Committee meeting.  What a dynamic group!  They are still fighting the Stillwater Bridge issue after all these years.  They also have transit oriented development on their agenda as well as a new issue called Complete Streets.  In essence Complete Streets wants street planning to have all users in mind (pedestrians, bicyclists, cars and the handicapped in particular)

A crisp meeting that ran on time.

Thunder has begun to roll in so I’m going to have shut down soon.  After the Sierra Club meeting, I drove over to the Black Forest where the Woolly’s first monday meeting had just begun to wind down.  I saw Mark and Frank and Stefan before they left.  Warren and Scott stayed and we talked about Moon, Scott’s 95 year old Cantonese mother-in-law who lives with them.  She’s having a show of her calligraphy and painting at the Marsh.  It goes up on August 16th.  There will also be a book of her work available at the show.  Amazing.

China tour tomorrow for 7-8th graders.  I added a tour this Friday of Chilean students connected with St. Johns who want a tour of American art.

Family, Great Work, Politics

Barking Dogs

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Summer                     Waxing Green Corn Moon

Oh, oh.  The neighbor called and said our dogs barked constantly from 3pm to 7pm.  He’s home all the time now with his m.s.  I empathize with him about barking dogs, even my own, because they drive me nuts, too.  I doubt they barked the whole time, but it did probably seem like it.  Have to manage them for noise again.  That means keeping the two mouthy whippets, Hilo and Emma, inside more.  They won’t mind that a bit.

On a sad note tonight was Max’s last night.  Tom said today that he and Roxanne had an appointment with the vet tonight.  Max was a sweet dog, a wounded soul from his previous owner, but with more depth of character because of it.  I’ll miss him.

Worked out and then went into the meeting of the Clean Energy and Renewable Energy Committee.  The first hour of the meeting was a presentation by Steve Taff, an ag economist/environmental economist, on low carbon fuel standards.  He advocates keeping the focus on reducing carbon build up rather than on the policy tool.

Another important part of his presentation involved the complexity of the various policy areas:  low carbon fuel standards, CAFE standards and cap and trade.  The tendency, he says, is to consider only one policy area at a time and to ignore the total field of policy initiatives.  Keeping the whole field in mind is key to the eventual development of effective green house gas reductions.

Over the upcoming weeks I’ll unpack some of this jargon.

The committee understood the need for taking the initiative with developing legislative priorities.  Makes my work easier.