Monthly Archives: January 2008

Art and Culture

One Month and Three Belt Notches Later

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22  80%  28%  0mph WSW bar29.78  windchill 22  Winter

         Waxing Crescent of the Winter Moon

Fifth graders today from Harambee Community Culture School.  We marveled at Shiva’s four arms, heard a Tibetan monk who happened to be in the gallery explain the Mandala, walked through the Celebration of Bestowed Glory and looked at the four noble professions.  We investigated the scholar’s study and found implements for calligraphy, poetry, painting and music making.  We teased out differences between the Greco-Roman influenced Ghandara Buddha and the Japanese depiction of Amitbha Buddha.  Both groups were fun, responsive.  My questions helped somewhat, but generally I just went with the flow, answering questions, prodding, making linkages.  So my project manager can rest easy about this one.

Of course, there’s that highlights tour and another Asia tour next week…  But, shh.  We won’t tell him just yet.

The second nutrisystem order came. It is a sensible, straight forward weight loss program.  It works.  Don’t know how much I’ve lost but I’ve gone in three belt notches and can wear pants I gave up on long ago.  Tomorrow I plan to weigh in and take my fasting blood sugar.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality

This Is Your Project Manager Speaking!

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22  78%  33%  0mph SSW bar29.74  windchill21  Winter

            Waxing Crescent of the  Winter Moon

(Moon names this year from American Colonists)

Wide awake at 5AM this morning.  Oh, man.  I really love that.

Why?  Three things rolling around.  First, I want to improve my use of the inquiry method, so I’m focusing on the questions I’ve created for the Asia tours today.  At 5AM my inquiring mind wanted to know:  what are they?  Oh, brother.  Then, as these things go, another, bigger task, more fun, but more work trundled itself forward:  What ever happened to the influence of the Judaeo-Christian tradition in modern and contemporary art?  In March I have to present a discussion on this topic to the Docent Book Club.  What will I say, my mind wondered?  As if I could think clearly enough at 5AM to solve this riddle.  As I pushed it down to later in the day, when I can read and take notes, the third item leaped up to be noticed:  Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Transcendent Unitarian.  This is also a for March project, capsulizing transcendentalism, Emerson’s role relative to it and his influence on early Unitarianism.

You might reasonably wonder why these other two projects were on my mind (in my mind?  on top of my mind?) on January 11th, 2008.  On February 6th, I leave for a retreat with my fellow Woolly Mammoths at the Dwelling in the Woods in northern Minnesota.  I leave from there for Hawai’i where I will stay until February 29th.  In my mental world that means I have a choice between finishing the Art and the Emerson projects before I leave for Hawai’i or trying to finish them as I return. 

My mind keeps a project manager running at all times.  Most of the time it works in the background, following my work, assigning priorities and evaluating progress.  Some times it moves into the foreground, like at 5AM on January 11th.

OK. OK.  I sleepily ran through the objects:  Jade Mountain, Shiva Nataraja, Gandhara Buddha, Mandala, Ceremonial Gate, Studio of Gratifying Discourse, Korean bronze Buddha, Amitbha Buddha. What were the questions for each one?  I dutiful recalled them.  When I finished, the project manager let go and slipped beneath the surface again, content to work in the background.  I went back to sleep.

Family, General

Between the Legs

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29  85%  31%  1mph WNW bar29.64 windchill27  Winter

                New Moon

The new grandchild is a boy.  Here’s a poem composed by the proud parents for the occasion.   

What is it?

We went to the doc for the ultrasound
And what we saw was quite profound.
There was the heart, the brain, the spine and all
And between the legs was a penis and balls.

IT’S A BOY!!!!!!!!!

Sheepshead this evening.  If you don’t know what sheepshead is, there’s a link on the right.  Two consecutive times now I  have hit the positive column.  These are a great bunch of guys.  We had a lot of fun tonight.  Jokes, pro-Packer football talk (I listen.), analysis of doing in the Roman Catholic Church and events in each others lives.

GeekWorld

Has Your Light Gone Out Yet?

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32  72% 27% 1mph N bar20.68 steady windchill32  Winter

                    New Moon

Simplicity.  Ah.  About two hours ago I called Comcast to activate the new digital box I got downstairs because the old one, according to Comcast, was a non-responding box.   So, I call this guy.  A disembodied voice that asks me all the usual questions:  phone number, address, name, size of my boxer shorts and my ring finger.  As he talks, he says he’s aboot got my account up. 

I say, so, you’re in Canada.  Yes.  I am.  How did  you know?  An o or two that stayed longer than usual for my ear.  Oh.

We talk about Stratford and his fiance and how they want to go their once.  How Chatham, where he lives, has just had a remodel.  He thinks it will become an art city like Stratford.  Then he sends a jolt to my box from Chatham, Ontario.

It should go out.

It hasn’t.

I’ll send another one, a stronger one.  This from a guy in Chatham, Ontario.  He’s communicating directly with my TV converter box.

Still not out.

Well, wait about 20 minutes. That should do it.  If it doesn’t, just call back.

It’s not out yet–an hour and a half later.  So, I’ll call back. Talk to someone else in Chatham.  Start over.

Faith and Spirituality

What Moves Your Heart?

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34  68%  26%  0mph  bar 29.66  steep fall  windchill33  Winter

                 New Moon

“Let your capital be simplicity and contentment.” – Henry David Thoreau

Yes, it’s a stretch after a week of wires and bytes and high definition, but Thoreau’s got it right.  If we can’t be happy with what we have and content with our life, then we doom ourselves to slavery, handcuffed to the next big thing as sure as if we rode in the middle passage.

Then what?  After my change of mind about the exclusivist claim of Christianity, I floundered for several years. 

There had been a prior change in my spiritual life, of a seemingly subtle nature, but it began to play increasing importance.  At some point on my Christian pilgrimage I began to resist transcendence and the many, many metaphors for it that take us up and away from our Selves, our inner journey.  Heaven, God as a being resident there, the Bible or the Pope or church doctrine as a source of truth.  Remember Bacon on method?  Ascension.  Rapture.  Rooting my ethical decisions in the literature of a long dead people. 

Emerson made a lot of sense to me here:  “Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”  Introduction to Nature

Since I found Emerson in my first church experience after Presbyterianism, I oriented toward liberal religion.  Liberal religion is more a method than a faith, that is, it proposes to apply the Enlightenment to religion:  reason, tolerance and freedom.  At first the literally heady mix of those three allowed me to swing wide the doors of my spirit and just play, considering this possibility and that.  At some point, though, I can’t pinpoint just when, this tradition began to raise in me the same quandry Emerson had seen after only three years in the Unitarian ministry:  it was corpse cold.

Reason, tolerance and freedom are good tools to open up a space for free thought in politics, religion and science.  In the end, however, they are tools, not content.  They can take apart political ideology and scientific speculation, but in themselve they neither decide for or against, say, democracy or socialism or communalism.  Though they also are great aids to understanding the world through scientific investigation, they offer us no clues as to why there is a world investigate, a cosmos to explore.  In religion, again, they are tools handy for dismantling false claims like the inerrancy of scripture, or, even, the universality of a particular religion’s dogmas, but as constructive tools they do not build a faith of the heart.  No, that can only happen when, as John Wesley said, the heart is strangely moved.

More on that which moved my heart later.

GeekWorld, Politics, Weather +Climate

Yes, You’re Right. It’s Hillary, not Hilary.

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12  86%  28%  1mph NNE bar30.09 rises windchill9  Winter

                      New Moon

If I give you a pfennig, you will be one pfennig richer and I’ll be one pfennig poorer. But if I give you an idea, you will have a new idea, but I shall still have it, too.

First, an apology to the Hillary Clinton campaign.  My chief proof reader (Kate) caught me in theft of an l from Hillary’s name.  Sorry about that, Hill.  Her win in New Hampshire should sharpen up her campaign and her campaign presence, just as it will do the same for Obama’s.  Both of them need to move a little more to the left for my tastes (ok, a lot more.), but their eventual campaign against the Republican, whoever it will be, will be stronger for having had to clarify their identities and stances.  This is what the primary season does, when it works properly, and, much to my surprise, it is.

One small step for technology this morning. Kate wants to see a documentary about Jewish Americans broadcast this evening while she’s at work.  I went into the dvr menu, found the how to record stuff, clicked a couple of times and we’re ready.  I’ll believe it when I see it, but, geez, it seemed easy.

The weather has turned cold again and I’m happy.  As if to underscore my let winter be winter and spring be spring attitude, we had a series of January tornadoes that reached as far north as Milwaukee.   This seems to define a world out of joint, whether climate change or bad luck.  Get out that book of Job.  It’s the only way to deal with this kind of random nonsense.

Cinema and Television, GeekWorld, Politics

Coming Down off a Techno High

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30  96%  30%  omph WSW bar 29.85 rises windchill30  Winter

                     New Moon

Watched an HD movie tonight:  An American Haunting. Sissy Spacek, Donald Sutherland and James D’Arcy provided the core of a good ensemble cast.  This movie tells of the Bell Witch, an early 19th century century haunting in Adams, Tennessee. There is a cottage industry of folks who believe, including debunkers of other believers.  A bit like a snake biting its own tale.  The book An American Haunting: The Bell Witch recounts the supposedly true events which ended in 1821 with the death of John Bell.  The movie suggests incest, but fails, at least to my satisfaction, to link it to the strange occurrences at the Bell House.  Here is a website with further information.

Feel like I’m coming down off a techno high, a sort of cyber electric dream occasioned by optical cables, coaxial cables, HDMI cables, speaker wire, subwoofers and high definition televison.  Alice could tumble through an HDMI cable into a virtual wonderland, I have.  This is an enchantment of sorts, and as such it must be encountered with awareness, not naivete.

Hey, how about that Hilary, huh?  Coulda fooled me.  Looked like Obama was a shoe-in in New Hampshire.  Just what this means for the race is anybodies guess right now.  I love it.  Real candidates in a real horse race.  Jockeying for position, fighting over the issues and over how to organize campaigns for types of candidates who’ve never run before in this serious a manner.  This is (to use a much abused phrase) a historic moment for American democracy.  It can be a time when we win back the world’s admiration if we allow ourselves to enter the process without cynicism.  Hard, I admit, but possible and desirable.  Imagine a campaign about real politics and not weirdo ideologies.

GeekWorld

Can You Hear Me Now?

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32  72% 28% 0mph WNW  bar29.83 rises windchill32 Winter

                 New Moon

Inching closer.  I now have sound through the av receiver and into the surround sound speakers from the DVD player.  That’s a step in the right direction.  But.  After I plugged in the HD box from Comcast, I noticed it has coaxial outlet–coax to coax on the AV receiver.  That would be the coax cable I returned this morning.  Hmmmmmm……  So, maybe one trip.  This is a lot like plumbing except I don’t understand plumbing.  This I get; it’s just more complexity than I’ve dealt with for awhile in terms of externals like wires and connections.

Took a nap, feeling somewhat refreshed.  Gonna workout now.  Faery and the Gunflint Trail has become a fascination to me, carrying me places I didn’t know existed.  Which is the fun of writing. 

Faith and Spirituality

We Stand at the Jabbok Ford Many Times

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30  96%  30%  omph WSW bar 29.85 rises windchill30  Winter

                     New Moon

At 2 AM this morning I finished Ken Follett’s, Triple.  Don’t know whether it was Turkish tea, an unusually large meal or envy over the traveling and work related adventures of my fellow Woollys, but I couldn’t get to sleep last night and woke up at 6 AM today.  I hope it’s not envy, the other two I can handle.  Envy is a monster that makes you miserable through a combination of self-flagellation and jealousy.  Each time I feel I’ve wrestled the demon ambition back into the pit from which He springs, it seems instead I’ve wound the crank on a jack in the box.  Or not.

Could be I’m feeling this way because I’m tired, lost sleep and can’t decide why.  In fact, as I write this, as often happens, the words provide their own catharis.  I’m happy for Mark, Paul and Stefan, not envious.  They make me proud to be a Woolly and their friend.  I’ve chosen a different path for my later life, one with its own benefits and downsides, not a worse one. 

Just occurred to me the Jacob at the Jabbok ford nature of the demon wrestling metaphor.  We may wrestle demons as well as angels and to equal affect.  If we hold a demon at the ford, we prevent them from crossing over into our spiritual lives; we keep them on their side of the river.  There is no reason to believe, either, that we will only have one match in a lifetime.  If history serves, we will all stand at the Jabbok ford many times in our lives, arms wrapped round one adversary or another, devil or angel. 

Had a strange dream last night. 

I was in charge of a storage room in a hospital.  It had shelf after shelf of boxes, equipment, various light bulbs all of which were there when I came to the job.  At some point I left the room, maybe to go home for the day, and returned to find it turned into an employee lounge.  When I asked where all the stuff went, I was led into a small laboratory where one row of three shelves held the pared down contents of the room. 

Deflated, I asked if I still had a job.

Oh, yes.

A tub of silverware appeared in my hands. 

I carried it through the hospital to the kitchen area, through two automatic doors only to discover when I got to the dishwasher that the tub was empty.  When I tracked back, looking for the silverware, a woman I knew came up to me and said I had dumped it in the wastebasket of a woman’s hospital room.  Sheepish, I went to the room and retrieved the silverware. To make sure I got it all, I flipped on the light and the woman in the hospital bed said, “Can’t you see I’m sick?”

I turned off the light and got out of the room as quickly as possible.

Art and Culture, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

The Buddhist After-Life and the Killing Fields

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25  93%  27%  omph NNW bar 29.77 windchill25  Winter

                  New Moon

Had a summary of our gathering (Woollies) at the Istanbul Bistro, but lost in a multiple cascading of Internet Explorer browser pages.  Probably a sign I should go back to Firefox.  I used to use it, then I abandoned it, used it again, and abandoned it again.  Just like Darth Vader I keep coming back to the evil empire.

Mark, Warren, Paul, Tom, Frank, Bill and Stefan showed up.  We spoke of politics and Rome, of Green Knights present and long dead. A brief comment was made about the Istanbul not being a sportsbar, a positive.  It’s quiet and it has a round table around which this latter day collection of Knights Errant can sit.  That does mean knights in error, doesn’t it?

Mark has a gig in Bangkok designing teen sex exhibitions for Unesco/Thailand.  It’s a campaign to promote safe sex in a nation where AIDS among youngsters has become a problem again.  After that he will return to the US, then go back to Cambodia to construct an exhibit near the killing fields, one dealing with the Buddhist afterlife.  To continue the international theme Paul Strickland will host a trip to Syria in November and his organization will co-host a trip with the Hindu Temple of Maple Grove to Southern India.  Stefan chimed in with the fact that he’s taking his kids to Rome to visit a person he knows who works in the American Embassy there.  Makes for good dinner table conversation.  Those who’d been to Rome all agreed the most memorable moment was the first coffee. 

We discussed the political scene.  All of us were happy with the real choices represented by the candidates.  Of course, SuperTuesday will eliminate any chance for us to pariticipate in candidate selection and after we will have 7 months of attack ads, but right now it is glorious.  Tom wondered if any of us had supported any candidates financially.  Frank said, yes, he and Mary had sent money to Obama.

Warren reported good news about his mom and dad.    

 The retreat and a theme came up, but we put it off until Paul’s.  Mark will not attend since he’s got to be in Thailand the first week of February.  I’m leaving early for Hawai’i.  One of those years.

 Forgot to mention here I watched Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast the other night. It’s one of the Janus Films collection I got for my 60th birthday, 50 films from 50 years of their distribution of foreign films in the US.  This movie floats across the mind like a dream, a fairy tale given form and substance.  It’s images have remained with me.  It sat in my DVD player for a long time because I didn’t want to watch it; but, like each one of the films from the collection I’ve watched it had its own unique charm.