Category Archives: Great Work

Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Work

Mechanist or Vitalist?

May 24, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

58 bar steep fall 30.12 7mpn ENE dew-point 41 Beltane, Sunny

Waning Gibbous Hare Moon

“The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittegenstein is a notoriously opaque, but very influential philosopher. His Tractatus is a seminal work of 20th century philosophy, amazing for its brevity. In this quote, though, I grasp his line of thought. How often do you consider the solidity of a table, for example? The beating of your heart? The exquisite elegance of your hands? The comfort of darkness? The revelation in sunlight?

Have you ever considered, I mean really considered, the wonder of life itself? We are animate, moving through the world with intention. So are dogs, mosquitoes and groundhogs. The seed listens to its own voice, expresses itself and its genome through time and space. Alive. But. What is life? We see the results of life around us all the time; we experience it within ourselves, but what is it? What is the difference between the elements in my body–the same as those in a rock or in soil, or in the air–and their inanimate counter parts still locked in the fiery cauldron of a star or the massif of a mountain range?

A book I purchased recently, but have not yet read, argues against what the author calls the Gallilean conspiracy. I’ve forgotten why he calls it that, something about Gallileo’s approach to science, but the point is this: even if we knew all the laws of particles and quantum mechanics and could apply them with precision to all the matter in the universe, we could still not predict the future, though there is strong element of what he calls scientistic thinking that suggests just this possibility.

Why can’t we predict the future based on fundamental laws of nature? Because of complexity. As things grow more complex, the complexity itself inserts a new dimension, something that does not obey the fundamental laws: intention. Intention and complexity reach an apex in the phenomenon of life. You could not analyze the physical elements within my body, apply the laws of relativity and Newtonian physics to them, and predict what I will choose to have for breakfast. Why? Because consciousness adds intention, guided by will, and none of these added realities of complexity follow the laws of thermodynamics, say. Is the action of complex entities constrained and guided by laws of nature? Of course. Entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, will snuff out the complexity that I am. But not right now. While I’m upright and consciousness, and yes, you, too, I can choose to defy entropy by taking my blood pressure medication and staying on that good cholestrol lowering drug. Exercising. Good diet. None of these, nor my decision to go to the grocery store this morning have a necessary predicate in my constituent parts.

In part this all boils down to a divide which remains an abyss between, say, the Richard Dawkins and Sam Harrises of the world, and those of us who insist on considering the divine: vitalist or mechanist? That is, is any organism merely the sum of its parts–mechanist, or, is it the whole more than the sum of its parts–vitalist. I side with the vitalists.

Garden, Great Work, Politics

Jazzed Up and Ready to Rock

May 22, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

63 bar steep rise 29.90 0mph NNE dew-point 40 Beltane, sunny

Up at 6AM. It’s light! Out the door at 6:30 AM. Drive fast to Hwy. 252. Stop, edge forward. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. All this fossil fuel going up in exhausts of vehicles barely accomplishing anything.

It took me an hour, as I thought it would, to get to the Sierra Club office on Franklin Avenue for a meeting with Cathy Duvall, the national Sierra Club’s director of political activity. It was worth it. Cathy is a political insider, in this case, too, a Beltway insider. That means she takes politics for what it is, not for what it could be in the best of all possible worlds, but as a place where competing forces drive against each other for power and resources.

The non-profit world, including the church, often works much like the traffic jam going into the city this morning. Every body gets revved up, drives fast, then gets stuck in the resolutionary lane, confusing action with intention. And a lot of political energy goes up in the exhaust, barely accomplishing anything.

Not for Cathy and the Sierra Club. She understands the numbers, the people, the zeitgeist and still believes this could be a transformative year for the environmental agenda. Could be. Could be if we put the effort into a ground level campaign to educate the public. Could be if we identify voters sensitive to our issues and see they could get to the polls. Could be if we identify those races where a bit of extra oomph, in allies or dollars or both, could make a difference and deploy our resources wisely. Could be.

I got jazzed up by the meeting, ready to rock. The political committee, it turns out, has not yet formed and I may have a chance of getting involved. This kind of energy is so different from the MIA, fiction creating and scholarly work. It’s also different from, but closely related to the gardening energy. This energy has an edge, a buzz. It makes my finger tips tingle. Old neuronal paths, long abandoned, have begun to fire. We’ll see where it goes, if anywhere.

That said, there’s still plants to get in the ground, weeds to kill and dig up and trees to cut down, land to level. All things in their time.

Garden, Great Work, Writing

Making My Soul Hum

May 21, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

Superior Wolf is underway again. The other day I hit on the point that had me stuck, a character I’d carried over from another novel. He didn’t belong in this one, but it took me 25,000 words or so to figure that out. Now a new plotline, more salient and tight, has emerged with a strong character, a protagonist who will drive the book.

It feels good to be back at fiction, a long caesura, and I hope the next one is brief. Fiction speaks from my soul, the rest tends to be, as we said in the sixties, a head trip. Over the years since then, I’ve learned to respect head trips. I earned a living with them for many years and they’ve kept me engaged with the world. They do not make my soul hum, though my Self speaks through them as well.

Kate made a trip to the Green Barn, a nursery she really likes on Highway 65 near Isanti. She picked up composted manure, sphagnum moss and several plants. We have some new ferns, cucumbers, morning glories (the ones I grew in the hydroponics died outside, though the tomatoes have done fine.) squash and several grasses.

Tomorrow morning I’m going in for a breakfast meeting at the Sierra Club, a meeting with the political director of the national Sierra Club. Politics makes my soul hum, too. Though I can’t say exactly why, water issues matter a lot to me, so I’m angling (ha, ha) to get on the committees that deal with Lake Superior, rivers, lakes and streams. Watersheds seem very important to me, so I hope to work on projects related to watersheds, too. One thing I know about politics is that showing up matters, so I’m gonna show up.

Great Work, Politics

Port-A-Potties A’Plenty

May 18, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

58 bar falls 29.65 4mph N Dew-point 27 Beltane, cool

Full Hare Moon

Those tiny baby bunnies born under the Hare moon gotta shiver in their bunny nests. This has been a cold spring.

Went to the State Capitol grounds for 2 hours of volunteer work for the Vote Yes campaign. We’re pushing a constitutional amendment to dedicate funds for clean water in lakes, rivers and streams. There is also a dedicated funding stream for the arts.

For a major sesqui-centennial event, this was kept secret. Who knew about it? Hardly anyone apparently. They had port-a-potties for a large crowd, but they all had green on the go in tab. # of porta potties is a good estimator for how many folks event organizers anticipated. It was a cool, blustery day. The crowd seemed hurried and the tents poorly organized. Not an up day.

Kate made Omaha Steak Company steaks for supper, a gift from Annie. Mashed potatoes, corn on the cob and a tenderloin–a regular heartland meal. That is, its destination was heartland via my circulatory system. If God hadn’t meant us to eat meat, why would she have made it so good?

Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

Rites of Spring

May 14, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

52 bar rises 29.94 2mph NW dewpoint 20 Beltane, sunny

Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon

Nope, this isn’t about naked pagans dancing under a full moon. Sorry.

Rather, it’s about those things we do. In spring.

The Mickman’s guy just left. “Charlie,” he said, “We came through the winter pretty good. Just one dead sprinkler.” He handed me a sandy, wet plastic sprinkler head, smiled and went on his way.

Kate bought her annual supply of, well, annuals. Alyssum, impatiens and coleus. She’ll go back for a few more.

We prepared and planted new beds, cleaned old ones.

The furnace last ran in April, but, unlike most years we have not turned on the air conditioning yet.

The dogs spend more and more time outside, just like we do.

The guy who cleans the gutters and does the outside windows will show up after the cottonwoods disperse their seeds.

We moved the snowblower to the back of the garage bay and the riding lawnmower to the front. These are his and hers machines. Snowblower–his. Lawnmower–hers.

We have all of these mechanical/electronic servants. Instead of a gardener, we have a sprinkler system and a riding mower. Instead of servants working mechanical fans we have an air conditioner. Instead of a summer kitchen we have Vent-a-Hoods. Instead of the post office we have e-mail. Instead of shopping in real world stores we have Internet retailers.

These are sophisticated technological devices and they replace human labor of the domestic variety with skilled human labor. The skilled folks make more money because they work in several locations rather than just one.

I find though, that when I work in the garden, I prefer hand tools: a spade, a spading fork, pruning saw, trowel, rake. In general I allow only one mechanical tool into my work on our grounds. The chainsaw. It replaces labor I’m not sure I could perform even if I had the time. On occasion I’ll rent an industrial strength chipper, but only after many hours cutting down trees and brush, then delimbing. I plan to rent a stump grinder sometime this spring, but that’s a very special purpose piece of equipment. Otherwise it’s shovel and pick, adz and drawknife. Small sledge hammer, wire cutters and bolt cutters, Japanese weeding knife, serrated sickle and unserrated sickle. A tool in the hand is worth two in the bush. Or something like that.

Garden, Great Work

2008 Gardening Season Is Underway

May 8, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

59 bar steady 29.83 3mph WNW dewpoint 31 Beltane

Waxing Crescent of the Hare Moon

Hemerocallis (the daylily) is a sturdy member of the plant kingdom. Every time I plant, no matter where I plant it, nor the care I give it, the daylily spreads and grows happily. That’s why years after the fact the foundation outlines for many rural home are still obvious, tiger lilies continue to grow and bloom just like the house was still there. Today all the daylilies in the first raised bed we ever had, made, as all of them, by Jon, got moved.

Jon also put in a cedar rail fence and last year I deconstructed it down to the original cedar fencing. We had him add wire fencing to keep out nuisance animals–our dogs. An older me saw them as less of a problem, Kate agreed, so down the wire fence came. The daylilies have gone from the bed to the edge of the cedar rail fence. Two peonies have likewise made the transition, but they went into a tree circling bed that is about a quarter finished. We have a young, sturdy elm on the fence line. I removed the fence around it and will soon complete digging out a circular bed around its dripline.

The former daylily and peony bed will get sweet corn. I’m also going to try the Native American method of planting climbing beans at the base of the corn stalk.

Three tomato plants grown from seed to 1 foot + under the lights are now in place, too. They went in the former lily (Asian and other true lilies) bed. I’m taking a chance planting them directly outside with no hardening off, but I wanted to try it, see how it works. If they die, we’ll buy a couple of tomato plants. If they don’t, I can skip a step in the future if I watch the weather carefully. Which I do.

Also had a brainstorm for what to do with the hill that has succumbed to raspberry canes. Moss. This is a shady area and I read an article about how to convert lawns to moss. It won’t work for our front lawn yet, but it should work on this slope shadowed by the seven oaks at the top. Gonna try it. The result can’t be worse than what we have.

While I dug and transplanted, Kate made a trip to the Greenbarn, a nursery and garden store up near Isanti. She bought a number of things: impatiens, onion sets, Coleus, sphagnum moss, small onion sets already well underway, some seeds as well as other things. Anyhow all this means the 2008 gardening season is off and growing.

Garden, Great Work

End of the Treadmill Season

May 3, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

54 bar rises 29.85 4mph WNW dewpoint 20 Beltane

Waning Crescent Moon of Growing

Over to NOW fitness to check out new Landice treadmills. Not what I wanted to purchase, but the old one seems more and more problematic and it gets in the way of my workouts. As Ecclesiastes said, everything has its season. Turns out this is the end of treadmill season. Looks like I can get a deal. Sorta makes sense. Folks break into the great outdoors for aerobics.

I used to do all my aerobic work outside, all four seasons. In the winter I snowshoed, in the other three seasons I hiked in the regional parks and rode a bike. My bike rusted up and I started doing resistance work, which requires an indoor environment. Over the last few years I’ve switched to 100% indoor. The treadmill is a necessary part of my fitness regime.

Groceries. They had fresh, wild walleye. I bought some and made baked walleye, corn on the cob and asparagus for supper after Kate came home. She got a big bonus this quarter and she’s floating right now.

Spent some time outside. I fertilized the flowering bulbs, trimmed all the perennial grasses and dug up some ornamental annual grasses that finished their run. Have not yet hit my stride with the outdoor work, but I will. I prefer to do garden work early in the morning, then use the rest of the day for writing, reading, exercise and MIA related work. All that falls into place as the days become warmer.

Friends, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work

A Fed? LOL

May 2, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

43 bar steady 29.47 11mph NNE dewpoint 42 Beltane

Waning Crescent Moon of Growing

Well, ok then. The reader who wondered about my hydroponics is not a Fed. LOL they said.

It is a weirdness about the Web that we can connect directly with people, yet know nothing about them. The weirdness compounds when we realize the people with whom we come in contact in this way, we don’t know at all beyond a few words on a computer screen. In the case of comments on a website or a blog like this one the stakes are, for the most part, low, but when you consider the apparent number of people who meet up in person after such interactions.

All this reminds me of Alvin Toffler and his book, Future Shock. I still remember many ideas from that book because he was a good phrase maker. High tech, high touch is the one that comes to mind here, but in a slightly different vein than Toffler’s. His version was that the more we connect through technology, the more we will want to see each other in person. I believe that’s true, but I’m on another tack here. High tech, high touch heightens the need, the desire for personal interaction, yes. It produces that desire–the original sense of eros in the Greek, the desire for human contact–in a situation we have not evolved to understand.

We are animals wired over hundreds of thousands of years to read the language in another person’s eyes, the way they hold their hands, the set of their neck, the wrinkles and twitches of the mouth. Though we are often wrong even with those cues, at least in face-to-face encounters we have a chance to assess, to ponder. Words on a page are not the same. Not even close. It may be that we have a sophisticated reader’s intution about how language reveals the author, but that’s a game often got wrong by critics, so how good can we be?

The point is this, words without flesh, disembodied words put us at a disadvantage. We can’t judge the intent of a phrase, the reason behind a conjecture. This has led to the all too familiar problem of flaming where some unhappy soul takes this anonymity and uses it to vent, often just to vent.

Toffler also described Over Choice, a situation where we face more decisions about more matters than we can handle with anything approaching wisdom. This applies to people we meet through the electronic ether, too. The reader interested in hydroponics might be a valuable interlocutor, one whose journey with indoor gardening might supplement and enhance my own. And vice versa. Or, they could be, as I speculated, a law enforcement officer hiding behind the web’s anonymity. Because it is my nature to trust first and question later, I accept the response to my speculation at face value; but, I have no face. Therein lies the dilemma.

We must evolve some method, some means of reading people we meet on the web. I suppose that’s what Facebook, Youtube, Myspace propose to accomplish, but there it is often meeting people to be meeting people. And those social networking sites get gamed, too. An endless loop.

Enough on this. I have to get to work writing my piece for the Muse. It’s taken an odd turn. Wonder how it will finish?

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work

Hey, Buddy, Got Any Pictures?

May 1, 2008 Charles 2 Comments

55 bar falls 29.59 8mph NE dewpoint 36 Beltane

Waning Gibbous Moon of Growing

This is Grandma and her descendants, Gabriel and Ruth. Gabe still has to learn to suck and swallow. He also needs to wean himself from the canula that deliver an oxygen stream. Both of these are maturational tasks that would have completed on their own in the womb, so he just needs to grow and get older. Right now everyone wishes he’d do both quicker, unmasking one of the many contradictions in human development. As we age, no one wants to get older and grow bigger.

Kate came home last night. She was sad. Ruthie now knows her and runs up with a smile and arms out, “Grandma!” That’s tough to leave. Gabe, too, is in a vulnerable place even though she’s confident he’ll be fine. She also helped out Jon and Jen with domestic matters like cooking, grocery shopping and Ruth care when Ruth was not in daycare.

Having a child in the hospital creates stress just because, but there is stress, too, because work goes on while the daily routine gets disrupted. No one gets enough sleep. A tough time for the Olson family, Denver branch. It will receded into the past, someday, and become the stuff of family legend. When you were a baby, Gabe, you were in the hospital so long and we were so worried.

A reader from the Webiverse asked to see some photographs of my hydroponic setup. It occurred to me that it might be the feds trying to catch a not too intelligent dope grower. Go, ahead, buddy, show me your pictures. Heh, heh, heh. I hope so, but because boy are they going to be disappointed.

From this and the next angle all you can see are lettuce and tomato plants, but there are also morning glories, cucumbers and three varieties of beets. These last are not as far along in the growth process and will go outside as soon as the weather warms up.

As I’ve begun to work with the hydroponics, this setup seems small. The megafarm is the larger of the two; the smaller is sold as Emily’s farm.

Here’s the whole deal, including the seed sprouting area. The halide bulb and shield are just out of sight near the top.

It’s amazing the charge I got out of working with seeds and young plants when snow and cold weather blew around the house. I plan to branch out (ha,ha) a bit over the year to include flowers and, maybe, carnivorous plants. No, I don’t know why.

Family, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work

Hazards in the Learning Process

April 29, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

41 bar steady 29.96 0mph ESE dewpoint 24 Spring

Last Quarter Moon of Growing

Spent a good part of the afternoon on mechanical and electronic stuff. It was time for the first changing out of the nutrient reservoirs in the hydroponics.

I first tried the way the setup suggested, that is, drain the reservoirs onto the plastic shelf on which they both sit. This is not as crazy as it may sound since the shelf has grooves pressed in to carry used nutrient mix and water toward a drain plug at the end of the shelf. So, I hooked up some plastic tubing by cutting a small hole in the end of the cap and opened the taps. This is slow. The drain hose is not too big. It’s also messy since the hole in end of the plug allowed a bit of the liquid to drain around the tubing and drip on the lights (electric!) and the floor.

Hmmm. Had to be a better way. Then I thought of all those car thieves hard at work stealing gas. Siphon! By chance I had one hundred feet of plastic tubing and it fit inside the drain tubing quite neatly. I pushed this tube through the hole in the drain cap, sucked on it a bit and voila! Both of them drained all by themselves. Still took a while, but it is a handsoff operation.

As I read somewhere, I took the used nutrient mix out and poured on the garlic, garlic is a heavy feeder and impervious to the cold weather we’ve had. That’s important because you can’t encourage growth in most plants when the temperature can still go below freezing. That possibility exists here until May 15th. I also poured it on some daffodils about to bloom.

Then I made 9 gallons of fresh nutrient mix and poured it back into the reservoirs through the pots holding the lettuce, tomato plants, three kinds of beet and morning glories. A tip I read in the hydroponic bible (according to the folks at Interior Gardens) suggested swapping out the nutrient every three rather than four. So, I did. This is fun.

The treadmill still has some hiccups. I had to rewire it again this afternoon. Landice apparently thinks they may have sent me a bad rheostat. If so, that means I swapped a bad one for a bad one rather than a good one for a good one. More work ahead there.

I also put away all the material from the Weber tours and the bronze tour I have a month or so ago. The library is neat. (in a manner of speaking. That is, my manner.) I have a file to read for the three hour bronze session I have for Family Day on the 11th. I also have a number of articles and objects to use as reference while I write something about Urania visiting the MIA.

Kate called today, too. Ruthie ran out of the kitchen yesterday, into the dining room and tripped, falling on the corner of the coffee table. Big cut. Lots of angst. But super grandma was there to be calm. She and Jon took Ruthie to urgent care for stitches. This is a busman’s holiday for urgent care doc, Kate Olson, but it gave her a feel for the other side of the examining table. As she often does, she felt guilty. Not her fault. Ruth is a puppy, running and playing and trying out the world. There are hazards in that learning process and none of us escape.

She comes home tomorrow and I’m glad. The bris has been delayed because Gabriel still has not decided to eat enough and he’s still on some oxygen. Until he can eat and breathe on his own, he’ll remain in the level 2 nursery.

And. No snow!