Category Archives: Great Work

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.

GeekWorld, Great Work, Politics

Home Work

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8  bar steady  30.27  0mph NW  windchill 6   Samhain

Last Quarter Moon of Long Nights

A busy morning here at the homestead.  I played around with various formats and methods of research for the Sierra Club legislative committee.  One setup uses Google News Alerts and Google Docs to create a real time log of news articles, web entries and video feeds on the five issues the LegCom will target during this years legislature.  This much I can do at home.

My new datalogger for my weather station has not yet succumbed to my troubleshooting, but I imagine I’ll wrestle it to the ground sometime soon.  Something about ports seems to be hanging it up right now.  Requires detailed attention and I have to set aside time for that.

Kate and I had our business meeting.  In spite of the negative financial weather swirling around we’re fine; not as wealthy as we were in, say, August, but fine nonetheless.

Good news on the car front.  It was only a blown tire as far as they can see.  Everything else looks fine.  Under $400 bucks and I’d imagined multiple thousands.  Quite a relief.  We decided we’ll keep this one running until the plug-ins make sense.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Politics

Star Filled and Wonder Saturated

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-4  bar steady 30.28   0mph SW  windchill -4   Samhain

Waning Gibbous Moon of Long Nights

I have a run of almost 3 weeks with no outside obligations.  This is a time of the year, even when I worked for the Presbytery, that I would stay home, take up a research project or a book I’d wanted to really absorb.  This habit probably started during the Presbytery time because no congregational folk wanted to talk to judicatory people during the Christmas holidays and immediately afterward.  Which was fine with me.

Right now it’s quiet.  It has been dark since about 4:30 PM.  The long nights have begun to swell and take over the rhythm of the day.  This means more silence, more time to enjoy the darkness of mid-winter.  This is a time of year and a natural cycle that draws us all inward.  This inward pull pushes some of us to string up lights, go to multiple parties, perhaps drink to excess, spend money beyond our means.   We’ll wake up sometime in the new year, ought 9 in this case, with a hangover wondering how the season got so out of hand.

The season can be filled with holy nights, silent nights.  Starred filled and wonder saturated nights.  It matters how we come to the season.

Instead of driving in to the Sierra Club meeting tonight I chose to participate by phone, as did all but two of the other legislative committee members.  By the time I got done with my workout and shower, a lassitude crept over me, borne of the tensions and aches of the last couple of days.  If I had driven in, as it turned out, my trip would have taken twice the time of the meeting.  Not very efficient.

My original reason for driving in, to match peoples faces with names, would have been thwarted, too.

As it was, I was on the phone for 45 minutes, took notes, then hung up and went upstairs to read the Story of Edgar Sawtelle.  Without the long drive it felt like I’d cheated.

Garden, Great Work, permaculture

Two One Hundred Yard Pots of Soup

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15  bar steep rise 29.50  5mph  W  windchill 9   Samhain

Full Moon of Long Nights     Day  8hr  45mn

It’s 4:48 and the sun has been down for 20 minutes, twilight almost run its course.  We are a week away from the Winter Solstice, the high holiday in my personal calendar.

There is a simple pleasure, at once profound and straightforward.  Grow a vegetable.  Save it in the fall.  Use it in soups in the winter.  Today I made bean based soups with white and black beans from our garden.  Onions and garlic went in each of them, too.  So did some Swiss Chard grown in our hydroponics.

Clive Thompson, a writer for Wired Magazine, had a column this issue titled Urban Food.  He said to heck with the 100 mile meal, I’m talking about the 100 yard meal.  These two pots of soup are 100 yard pots of soup.

Feels great.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, permaculture

Make Meadows, Not Lawns

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38  bar steep fall 29.49  2mph N  windchill 36   Samhain

Full Moon of Long Nights

Another TED video worth watching:  Where Have All the Bee’s Gone?  In it apiarist Dennis vanEnglesdorp gives a brief overview of the honeybee disappearances in the U.S.  We have lost about 1/3 of the total hives each year for at least the last two years.  Beekeepers have prevented this from reducing our total bee population by splitting hives and buying queens, but the price of doing this year after year will become prohibitive.

Just this year I saw some honeybees in our garden for the first time since we’ve lived here.  They surprised me.

At the end of the video he diagnoses the primary problem behind the bee disappearances as NDD:  Nature Deficit Disorder.  We have become, he says, too distanced from the natural world and no longer pay attention to how our lives influence the rest of the nature.  His solution?  Replace lawns with meadows.  Works for me.

This is an example of the followers of the old faith.  Each beekeeper, amateur or professional, is in the community of the saints, necessary in large, large numbers for this old faith to survive.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Myth and Story

An Old Faith Taking on New Raiment

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18  bar steep fall  1mph  SSW  windchill 18   Samhain

Full Moon of Long Nights

How do you stretch out the creative muscle, let the reins loose on the resources hidden somewhere beyond or under the rational wall?  When the Pegasus of new thought tries to rise from its tether inside the amygdala, the fear raiser of the brain, what can be done to smooth its way?  To calm the nakedness of the soul?

There is, I am sure of it, an old faith taking on new raiment.  It says nothing new; it proclaims nothing that is not obvious; it offers no new wisdom.  It cares not for written texts, for prayers or priests, for churches or temples.  It does not require protection under the first amendment or any amendment of any laws of humankind, for its law is writ in the language of the stars.

It has holy places.  Places we know by their Torii or their thick ropes.  Places we know by worn paths that lead us through forests, along rivers, up mountainsides, into the garden.  Places we know by the trembling sense of wonder they evoke in us.  A crashing waterfall.  An erupting volcano.  An opening tulip.  The birth of a howler monkey among the ruins of ancient Angkor.  Places we know by the care others have taken: paintings, poems, cairns and prayer ties.

These holy places were not decreed in some council or by a guru or selected by a committee.  No, they were decreed by the hand of Pangea, sculpted by the artisans wind and water. They were discovered, not made.

This old faith has so many followers, so many who take its truths with them into the fields, onto the lakes and oceans, alongside them in struggle, carried in wicker baskets into the flower and vegetable gardens.  So many followers.

There is no common book, save the verdant field.  There is no common book, save the flowing stream.  There is no common book, save the vasty deeps.  There is no common book, save the azure sky.  There is no common book, save the dark night sky filled with stars.  And these are more than enough.

If you are a member of this faith, you know it.  You need no congregation, you require no chant or hymn.  You need only a quiet moment beside a brook or a butterfly.

Art and Culture, Great Work

Long Day

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22  bar steep fall 29.71  1mph SSW  windchill  22   Samhain

First Quarter Moon of Long Nights

Two tours.  2nd graders.  Fun, but not as much fun as the dual language immersion kids.  A home-schooling group.  Some of the boys looked like they might go all Columbine except they had no school.  Could not get them to talk.  The moms, however, enjoyed the tour.

A long day, from 9am-3pm, long for a home boy like me anyhow.  I took an Alleve before I went and that seems to have worked well.

Tomorrow Sierra Club anti-racism training.  Now it’s about the inner work, the soul work of organizing.  Hmmm.  We’ll see.  The budget numbers for the state will make the next session pretty interesting.

Great Work, Hydroponics, permaculture

A Prolegomena to All Future Gardens

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17  bar rises 30.08  3mph NNW  windchill 13  Samhain

Waxing Crescent Moon of Long Nights

The black plastic has been laid down; the marsh hay rests on top of it in fluffy abundance.  A good snow right now would marry the two until early spring.  May it come soon.

This was a long project.  I had to cut down weeds, trees, raspberry canes and shrubs, pull vines and dislodge a deadfall. All this was prolegomena.   The black plastic had to be rolled out, made to conform to the odd shapes created by various impediments, then cut and staked or held down with logs.  After a piece of plastic was cut and laid in place, then the marsh hay went over it.

This process, too, is prolegomena for the next phase.  In that phase we will plant serviceberry, hawthorne, and other shrubs and small trees that produce food edible by and interesting to birds and varmints.  That phase ties in with the orchard as a distraction from the human edibles, in the hope that more–or enough–will end up for us.  It is this linkage of one piece with the other, all in the service of creating a sustainable enviornment for people and animals, that excites me about permaculture.

I have also mulched all the bulbs I planted and/or transplanted at the end of August and the middle of September.  These are daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, snow drops, lilies of many kinds and iris.  I have both mulched and not mulched over the years and find that mulching the first year for all new plantings and after for those plants sensitive to cold increases the germination rate considerably.

There are also many peppers now in the hydroponics.  Only one is large so far, but they keep sucking down nutrient fluid at a rapid pace so they are growing.  I have not yet convinced any eggplant blossoms to move on to fruiting but I imagine that’s only a matter of patience.