Category Archives: Great Work

Great Work, Weather +Climate

Housebound and Loving It.

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-15  rising 30.65 WSW0 wchill -15   Winter

Waning Wolf Moon

My work with the Sierra Club’s political and legislative committee’s have lead me to a group of folks who really understand the political process.  They are focused, goal oriented and work hard.  They write bill language, round up authors and co-authors, supporters from both parties.  The grass roots support gets rallied when needed for a push.  I’m lucky to be in this process.  I’ll learn a lot. (and I thought I knew a lot.)

I now Twitter, blog for the Star-Tribune weatherblogs (if they ever go live.) and write this blog.  Once in a while I get on facebook and myspace.  I’m not a true child of this age though because I have resisted thus far the allure of cell-phone e-mail and internet.  But.  I do have a cell phone.

I’ve not left the house since Monday.  I have been outside to blow the snow, take out the trash and get the mail.  But that’s it.  The really cold stuff should break over the weekend.  I do have two tours on Friday, so I’ll get out into it then.

Great Work, Politics, Weather +Climate

Cold and Tired

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“Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.” – William Butler Yeats

We can use all the heat we can get here tonight.  We’re 8 degrees cooler than we were last night and it was -22 when I got up.

Just a note to say the Senate committee meeting by TV worked fine, but it wore me out.  2 hours of watching, then an hour doing a summary for Michelle.  Tired tonight.

Great Work, Hydroponics, permaculture, Politics, Weather +Climate

Traveling By Television

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-6  steep fall 30.26  E1  windchill -8  Winter

Waning Wolf Moon

Boy do I feel good.  I recalled that some legislative meetings are webcast, broadcast, or taped.  Turns out the one I need to cover will be on Channel 17 at 3pm or I can watch it live on the web.  God, you gotta love technology.  Normally, I’d head into the capitol anyhow just to get the feel of the place, but the hassle of really cold weather and a long drive, capped with a return trip in rush hour makes the couch a much more sensible option.

I finished the seed database today for all the new seeds.  Tomorrow I’ll enter our left over seeds from last year.  It shows the work ahead in getting transplants ready.  Some plants like the mustard greens and huckleberries will go under the lights in the middle of February.  In two week intervals until May 1st, I’ll be starting different plants inside.

The weather today is what we usually get in the third week of January, really cold.  Paul Douglas, local weather guy, says this air was over Siberia two weeks ago.  And it’s still this cold?  Geez.

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

American Identity: What Is It?

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2  steep rise 30.30 WNW9  wchill -5  Winter

Full Wolf Moon

Got my copy of the Mahabarata today, four doorstopper sized books.  You read a long book the same way you read a short one, one page at a time.

The seed database has most of the seeds entered with planting dates, inside and/or outside.  It will make the process of following the garden this year much easier.  It will also make evaluating the varieties and their production much simpler.  The garden has a straightforward demeanor this time of year.  It resides in the realm of fantasy, hard to even imagine with several inches of snowcover and windchills really cold.   The windchill just changed to -9.

Tomorrow I’m going to cover a meeting of the MN Senate Energy, Utilities, Technology and Communications Committee. The Sierra Club’s Government Relations person, Michelle Rosier, has a meeting in New Orleans until late in the week.  (Windchill now -10. )  This meeting has an interesting focus: Discussion of anticipated federal stimulus package.  In a state with 5B+ deficit, the conservation should reveal some lines of attack.

Emerson’s American Scholar contains his usual wise bits and some extraneous thoughts, but I’m half-way through it and he has not gotten to the American scholar yet.  I’m starting here on American identity piece:   American Identity in the Time of Obama.   Emerson’s time set about with clear intention to create an American character, an American identity.  If they could, we can, too.  But first I want to know what they did.

BYB:  I’m interested in the ex-pat perspective on American identity.

Family, Garden, Great Work, Politics, Weather +Climate

Winter Happy

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7  rises 29.48  WNW2  wchill 5  Winter light snow

Waxing Gibbous Wolf Moon

The seeds for the 2009 vegetable garden sit on my desk beside me in piles according to growth habit:  viny, climbing, bushy, root or leafy.  When I get the chance, they’ll go in my homemade database with pertinent data and places to record germination, first bloom, first fruit and eventual production.  I’ve gardened for years, but never taken this much care.  Why now?  Not sure.

Kate’s off to see the physiatrist in Elk River.  I hope he suggests some things that help her. She’s going to stop by Cottage Quilts on the way home.

I’m off to the cities this morning to count ballots for the ex-com and see Michelle.  Michelle liked my first draft of the legislative updates, so it will go out Sunday evening.   Many more to follow.

A light snow this morning, enough to make the outdoors beautiful and wintry.  This kind of winter makes me happy.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Sport, Weather +Climate

An Existential Cry?

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-8  falls 30.32  SW0 wchill-8 Winter

First Quarter of the Wolf Moon

The Great Horned Owl who lives in our woods calls tonight, right now as I write.  Whether he, or she, speaks to a lost love or wayward children I do not know.  On a night this cold it could be the existential cry of the world, proclaiming the season at its depths.  I often imagine this owl whose wingspan extends longer than my body and whose talons can lift a small dog or a young child with ease; I imagine this owl perched on a top limb of our tallest poplar.  The gaze of this fierce predator, the apex predator of our woods, rakes the Wolf Moon, perhaps blinded by the light, but looking just the same.  Because, like us, the moon attracts the eye.

The Vikings lost to the Eagles.  I don’t feel as let down as I have when the Vikings have lost other playoff games.  Not sure why.  Maybe because they did not come into this game a prohibitive favorite, then give it away.  Perhaps because they played with heart and made some young team mistakes.  I don’t know.  But I’ll watch again.  Peculiar, eh?

Writing Homecomer took up the writing juice today.  Little left over for this blog.  I’ll let it sit a day or two, then read it with a red pen in hand. Go back to the computer and revise it.  Then let it be.

Now, back to The Given Day by Dennis Lehane.  If you have not read it, and enjoy period pieces with rich characters and real historical drama as I do, then you’ll find this a treat.

GeekWorld, Great Work, permaculture, Politics

Tech in the Service of Political Change

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17  bar steady 30.19  0mph NE  windchill 17 Samhain

Last Quarter Moon of Long Nights

The best way to predict the future is to create it.   Peter Drucker

Quick note.  No, I’ve not gone away.  Just had a busy day.  Picked up the red car and drove it without incident into the Sierra Club and back.  Yeah.  Meetings at Sierra Club with Margaret and Michelle on anti-racism training and communications work during the upcoming legislative session.  I will have a lot to do:  research, weekly updates, action alerts, perhaps co-ordinating some op-ed and letter to the editor material.

Home.  Nap.

Just spent an hour compiling research into usable slots.  Handy with Google.  Technology in the service of political change.

An invitation to do some modest work in the Permaculture arena, too.  Helping Reed Aubin put together some material for a talk on Permaculture and ethics.  Should be fun.

Gotta hit the treadmill.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work

Emergence

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11  bar falls 30.22  2mph NE  windchill 7   Samhain

Last Quarter Moon of Long Nights

Here is a new term (new to me) that has become important in my thinking:  emergence.  It comes from a discipline that fascinates me, but about which I know very little:  complexity theory.  Emergence describes those characteristics of life forms, human history and human economics that arise from the fact of life itself.   Emergent realities like value, meaning and history, according to this line of thought, do not break the laws of physics, but cannot be predicted by application of those same laws.

Inability to predict the next action of a man or woman, the working of the markets or the next events in  human history creates a peculiar circumstance.  It means that though they break no natural laws these emergent realities do not conform to either.   Again, according to this line of thought, this lack of predictability has two sources:  agency and creativity.

Agency is the ability to act.  Combined with consciousness in human beings this leads to creativity.  Creativity and agency make for the rich, diverse reality that is human life.

I’m not going to go too far with this right now because I’m just beginning to absorb it. I want to understand how it relates to my work on a Ge-ology and read a critique or two before I get overly excited, but it seems like an important idea to me.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work

Falling Deeper Into Darkness

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12  bar steady 30.27  0mph  ENE  windchill 12   Samhain

Last Quarter of the Moon of Long Nights

As you can tell by the temperature, we have a heat wave in progress.  12 degrees!  Break out the shorts and t-shirts and sandals.  This is a good old-fashioned Minnesota winter so far and I’m liking it.

I spent this afternoon reading material for part III of Heresy Moves West.  This one will explore what I sense is an emerging new faith, one rooted in the soil of the Midwest and given space by our skies.  It is not unique to us, nor is our embrace of it unique.  What is unique is our location, a place from which this new faith can take wings and begin to test the air of this 3rd millennia after the West focused on Jerusalem.  With 2,000 years of Christianity and 500 or so of reason, we need a new way to view our situation in the universe.

Those of us who live among the wheat fields, corn fields and dairy farms of the Midwest have grown up with this faith attached to our Selves.  The very factors which make the bi-coastal crowd smirk as they fly over over our green land are the ones which give us a birthright understanding of ourSelves as part of, rather than apart from, the natural world.

As we fall deeper into darkness, heading toward the Winter Solstice now only three nights away, our time underground, Persephone-like, reaches it deepest point.  This is a time for meditation and contemplation.