Daily Archives: November 14, 2007

Art and Culture

Groceries and Bauhaus

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34  57%  37%  5mph  windrose WNW  bar steep rise  dewpoint20  Waxing Crescent of the Snow Moon   Holiseason

Spent an hour in the Modern design galleries discussing the Frankfurt kitchen, Tatra, arts and crafts, bauhaus and art moderne with people from Supervalu. 

The event started at 5:30 PM and I showed up at 4:45PM.  Went up in the gallery, 3rd floor, new wing to check out my objects.  The museum announced closing and a guard checked to see why I was still there.  Supervalu.  Oh, OK.

That gave me a half an hour after the museum closed to the public and before the Supervalu folks began to trickle into the galleries.  It was strange, like being in a store after closing.  The feeling is intimate, as if for a suspended moment the museum, or at least these galleries, had only me to appreciate them.  

To carry the store analogy a bit further, as I walked the two galleries of my assignment, I had to engage people ad hoc, as they looked at an object.  At first it felt intrusive, then a long ago memory floated into consciousness, working the floors at the WT Grant company when I was in managment training.  It was the walking back and forth, seeking moments to engage people that resonated, partly aimless, partly repetitive, partly hopeful.  The only difference was that at WT Grant I had pets and toys while here I had a hundred years of skilled design.

The time went fast, only an hour, then I was away, back into a blustery November night with a cloudy sky, headed home.

GeekWorld

New land, New language

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37  54%  37%  6mph  windroseWSW bar steep rise  dewpoint22  Waxing Crescent of the Snow Moon    Holiseason

Learning how to use a new program is a little like visiting a foreign country, one where you may understand a bit of the language, but not all.  The customs and folk ways of the new country are odd, unfamiliar.  If you don’t follow them, you might get by ok, but you also might find yourself in a world of trouble.

The program that drives this site is WordPress.  The old website used FrontPage, a Microsoft product.  WordPress is an open source, Linux based program which means anyone can fiddle with the code and it uses Linux, the open source operating system.  All this may seem like babble to you, but it is as if you landed in Rome and tried to read the street signs based on high school Latin.  Sometimes you’ll guess right, sometimes not. 

Let me give you an example.  I liked the first theme with the Hubble horse-head nebula shot, but I found this moody lake and forest scene and liked it better.  Bill Schmidt had showed me how to upload themes, so I did that, clicked it into use and went on the site to observe my handiwork.  Ooops.  I couldn’t figure out how to get to the admin. page.  Important because that’s where you write posts and manage the overall blog.

So.  I called Bill.  He got into the admin. pages by clicking on edit.  I could have thought of that, but didn’t.  The folkways of this new land had me bamfoozled.  Bill is the local who knows the language and knows your language, too.

Faith and Spirituality

The Dark Night Comes

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40  60%  40%  5mph  windrose SSW  bar steep rise  dewpoint 27 Waxing Crescent of the Snow Moon  Ordinary Time

A great wind blows through Andover today.  Literally.  40 mph gusts.  The grass in my window bends to the ground, leaves swirl up from the ground and my shed door, left open yesterday, bangs against the frame.  A change in the weather, air coming from the arctic.

This is the brown season, a season in which the only garden color is green.   The bleakness corresponds to a certain wildness in my soul and I revel in it.  Lower the lights, crank up the wind, bring on the snow.  Then, then we can get down to it, the travel toward the deep places, the caverns and secret gardens hidden by too much light. 

This is holiseason, a time when external beauty and easy movement vanish, clearing away a swath of maya, leaving us bare before ourselves.  The Winter Solstice is the well, the sublime and darkest moment.  St John of the Cross gave us the phrase “dark night of the soul.”  He saw the dark night as a place of challenge, of despair and hopelessness, the extinction, or near extinction of faith, salvaged only by re-emergence into the light of faith.  This is one ancient trail.  There is another that sees the dark night as the very place, the site of connection with the sacred depth.  Here in the darkness from which we came and toward which we move our entire life we embrace fecundity, the richness inherent in blackness.