Monthly Archives: December 2007

Family

Death, Disaster and Deck the Halls

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10  80%  24%  0mphESE  bar 30.02 steady  windchill 10   Winter

                         The Full Cold Moon

Since Kate came back from a disaster preparedness event at work in May, we’ve had a manila folder marked death and disaster.  After a couple of postponements (and, I’m glad to say, neither death nor disaster), we got around to it today.  An odd choice for Christmas Eve, but it fit our schedule.

We now have a plan and a kit with those things they always tell you to have somewhere.  You know, matches in a waterproof container, blankets, first aid material, things like that.  It’s a large kit, stowed in a plastic container and destined to live in our coat closet until that moment.  My own analysis tells me that fire, tornado and lengthy power outage are the most likely disasters to hit us here in Andover.  I have a hard time imagining Al Qaeda having an interest in Anoka County.  Any of it.  We’re on the high point for some miles, on sand, and far from any body of water that acts up.  Minnesota has no history of hurricanes; but, the folks that did Kate’s event claim we have a moderate risk of earthquake.  Geologically I suppose that’s true, but it seems improbable.

We also have insurance documents, financial papers, wills and power of attorney stowed in our safe. (No, I won’t tell you where it is.) 

While Kate dug out the stuff we needed for the kit, I spent time looking up material on cremation and donating a body to the U of M Medical School.  Cremate or donate.  I’m leaning toward donating my body since it seems like a worthwhile thing to do and I do have some anatomical oddities, my ear bones in particular, that my ENT asked me to preserve.  This raises another question though and that is where do kids, grandkids, friends go to remember?  Haven’t solved that one yet, but it’s on the list.  Hope we get to it before its necessary.

And a merry christmas to you, too!

General

Winter Well and Truly Begun

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8 78%  25%  0mph SW bar 29.86 steep rise winchill 8  Winter

                        Full Cold Moon

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.  Christmas will come to a snowy world here in Andover, a white landscape for the celebration; the moon on the crest of the new fallen snow does give a lustre of mid-day to objects below.

We spent a quiet evening at home, reading and watching the Vikings, frustrated again.  Perhaps they’ll pick their game up next week.  We’re into the the second week of the nutrisystem and I’ve gotta say it seems like a good plan.  The only negatives so far are that some of the food isn’t great–not bad, but not great–and I still get hungry late in the night.  Like right now.  The upside is that Kate has lost 4 pounds and I’ve lost enough to not feel squished into my jeans anymore.  I’m going to weigh myself at the end of the 1st month and the end of the 2nd.  I do feel lighter, better.

After Christmas we come to our version of the Mayan’s five useless days at the end of the year.  These have always been days when I’ve chosen to focus research on a topic of special interest.  This year it will be immortality.  There is this novel that keeps trying to get born and it has something to do with immortality although what I don’t know.

This is a special time for me, a time to think, to consider the year past and the year to come.  I love the snowed in , cold outside feeling.  It’s just right for this kind of inner work.

Weather +Climate

A Snow Day

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14  83%  25%  3mph  WNW  bar 29.60 steep rise  windchill11  Winter

                                      The Full Cold Moon

Snow began in the early morning and it has kept on steady since then.  The winter brown where grass had begun to peak through our first snow cover is gone, replaced with a carpet of white.  Most of the boulders in our garden tiers have disappeared.  It is quiet.

From where I sit as I write this the magnolia, the grey dogwoods, the red and white oaks have changed from their summer green clad to a seasonally appropriate white.  These days, the essence of what it means to live in northern latitudes, change the landscape from the faded browns of late fall to a soft and fluffy world of unexpected joys.  The bird feeders have small caps of snow. 

It may be, at our house,  a year without Christmas, but it is not a year without joy or holiness.  Both have come today, the second day of winter.   Blessed be.

Art and Culture, General

Art and Snow at the Beginning of Winter

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                            jjwsolstice250-0.jpg 

A Winter Solstice shot by Jim Johnson from the plains near Hecla, South Dakota

18 73% 28% 0mph windroseWNW  bar 29.87 steady windchill17   Winter Solstice

                          Winter began at 12:08 AM this morning

A bit of refinement on the arts and literature ideas from yesterday. The overarching idea is this:  some works of art included literature, usually poetry but not always.  In those instances it is clear that for the artist the written material had critical importance to the piece, otherwise, why include it?  In other instances, the image or sculpture gives form in print, painting or three-dimensions to a specific moment, either in story or in history.  Again, for the artist the textual base for the piece has to inform the work, so knowing the work, especially as it was known in the artist’s time and to the artist seems as important as understanding the piece itself.  Also, painting and sculpture and prints were never the only art form of their day; insteady they existed in an artistic milieux that not included fellow workers in the plastic arts but also poets, novelists, musicians, architects.  We often see reference to architecture in art history books, but very little reference to literature.  This last point becomes even more important as we move into the impressionist era and beyond when artists often wrote proclamations, began to intentionally blend their work with poetry and some moved into performance.

These are ways in which literature is important to the field of art history and therefore our job as docents.  The use of other books, about artists and movements and particular works, is another intersection between art and literature.

A light snow.  The snowblower moved out of the garage with its usual growl and eagerness to eat snow, then throw it.  Temperatures have begun to trend down again after a brief warmup.  I’ve done some additional moving, but I think today, certainly tomorrow will see the end of the bookcase/exercise equipment reshuffle.  That means I’m ready to move onto learning about hydrponic gardening and planning the vegetable gardens for next year.  Looking forward to it.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel

The Sun Stands Still

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                                     jjwsolstice250-0.jpg

 A Winter Solstice shot by Jim Johnson from the plains near Hecla, South Dakota

23 88% 30% 0mph windroseWNW  bar 29.86 steep rise windchill21   Winter Solstice

     Winter Solstice began at 12:08 AM this morning

While doing some reading and meditating late last night, I came across something new to me.  Solstice comes from the word solstitial, to stand still in Latin.  This explains a phenomena I noticed in the day and night lengths on the calendar for the next 5 to 6 days, that is, they remain about the same; the sun seems to stand still, to pause at it’s northern apogee, then slowly begin to slide more toward the south, granting a slighter longer slice of daylight with each arc of change. 

In the same reading I also discovered that the Zuni and the Hopi both have men whose duty is to mark the reemergence of the sun.  The Zuni man does it with a low, deep moan.  When I read this, it gave me a chill.  Imagine a situation where the sun begins to hide longer and longer each day; the days and nights grow colder and the plants are long dead.  The only food comes from stores and animals caught in the hunt, but they are leaner too for their food sources have diminished.  The longer dark brings families together around fires, the smoke spiraling toward heaven emphasizes the blackness outside; the  fear the sun may never return.  A priest who knows the heavens climbs to the peak of a village structure or a sits on a mesa one night late in this season.  Based on faith and knowledge, his familar voice fills the air, a wailing that recognizes the grief in your fear, yet its persistence, its calm creates hope within you.  You know he has seen, in his spirit life, the promise of the sun to rise and rise and rise, bringing again the warm days.  What a moment.

Last night I also realized that this is my holinight, not a holiday, or even a holiseason, but a particular night, a special night, a night filled with holy wonder.  As John Matthews said in his book, The Winter Solstice, the quiet of Christmas, that moment in the dawn when commercial activity has ceased, children shiver eagerly in their beds and no one moves, is the later adaptation of the Christian community to the stillness of this Solstice night.  It is a calm we need all year, one we can drink in with our senses in these 6 nights while the sun stands still.

Family

A Truthful Christmas Letter

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A note before bed.  The nights are long now.  The sun set at 4:32 PM today and won’t rise again until 7:48AM.  This is good news for those who like dark, cool nights for sleeping.  I do.

We’ve received a few of those letters in the mail; you know the ones, dense paragraphs filled with people you don’t know, pets and projects.  One of them stood out.  It was from a former partner of Kate’s.  She wrote of a year filled with her husband’s boss, “and former friend,” indicted for several felonies.  She went on to detail a year with the usual kind of vaguely horrific stuff that happens in all our lives, but usually goes unrecorded, suffered, yes, but not written down.  It was wonderful and made me hopeful for this folk art form.

We also get a few Christmas cards each year, fewer and fewer since I haven’t sent cards for decades and Kate hasn’t either.  My favorite one so far this year came from cousin Melinda and her husband, Bill, aka, the Hoosier Cowboy.  It had two guys on horses greeting each other in the snow.  The line below them read, From our Outfit to Yours.

The bookcase consolidation and purging, moving the exercise equipment and downstairs TV project moved closer to completion today.  It would look better with built-ins.

Brother Mark is back in Bangkok and Woolly brother Mark is back in Minnesota.  Brother Mark had an accident in Phnom Penh. He was hit by a motorcycle, but not injured too badly.  This just before he left for Bangkok.

Sister Mary, in Singapore, has used all of her vacation days this year to complete her dissertation.  She handed it in and now awaits a verdict as to its acceptability so she can move onto the next stage of the process.  No fun, that waiting.

Art and Culture

China With Elementary School Kids

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Two tours today.   I went through China with fourth graders and 6th graders from Lincoln Elementary School for the Arts in Anoka.   They were bright, receptive kids though they had a rigid teacher who had given them a booklet to fill in with information about objects in the museum.  This would have been ok if we’d known about it, but we plan our tours in advance and of the objects she wanted them to see only a few were in on our tours.   It would have been easy enough to include each object on a tour, but with no information in advance, it makes the situation difficult, not the kids fault, of course.    The kids enjoyed learning about the literati and the court aesthetics.  They were good at comparing and contrasting the two art forms.  Give me hope for the future of American education.

When I came home, Kate had sorted out all the Nutrisystem foods and stalked them in neat rows.  Tomorrow morning we’re going to start two months of nutrisystem.  I’ll report here on what I think of the food.

After a nap, with little Hilo snuggled in close, I worked out.  The endurance part of the program I’m using right now I like a lot, but the resistance work doesn’t seem to fit.  I’ll probably go back to one of the other resistance programs next week.