Monthly Archives: March 2008

Memories, Travel

An Indiana Farm on Kauai

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                             9  bar rises 30.24  1mph NNW windchill 5

                                                    New Moon

                                   roosteranddoves300.jpg

When I was a boy, say 12 and under, each summer I would visit my Uncle Riley and Aunt Virginia for a couple of weeks or so.  They lived on the farm my grandfather had put together.  It was a couple hundred acres of corn, a few cows, a pig or two, harness-racing horses and chickens, Bantams with the Banty roosters and their mile-high attitude and morning curdling cock-a-doodle-doo.  These memories have a particular smell, a mixture of gravel dust, hay and cow manure.  They also have an increasingly antique feel as they recede further and further from the present day.

Imagine my surprise when these memories came alive all day, every day while we were on Kauai and all because of Hurrican I’niki.  In 1992, just before we first visited Kauai, it was struck by a rare and devastating hurricane.  This hurricane eliminated many resorts, including the famous Coco Palms where Elvis shot his movie, Blue Hawai’i.  Many homes blew away, trees and plants got pushed over and beaches changed their shapes. 

I’niki also opened up all of the many chicken coops on the island.  Once free, the chickens never again came home to roost, but instead have now made the entire island their home.  They are, like the feral pig, wild animals, freed to roam wherever they like in a paradise of bugs and small worms.

The result is that often throughout the day the sound of a Banty rooster crowing reverberates whether you’re on the beach, in the forests, up a mountain or near a river.  The chickens come around pic-nic tables and wait patiently for food.  Local children pick up the roosters and carry them like puppies down to the beach.  As a result, Uncle Riley and his farm came to mind day after day on the most isolated islands in the world, in the midst of the Pacific Ocean. 

Now that was unexpected.

Politics, World History

Is Integration Always Good?

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21  bar rises 30.00 1mh WSW windchill 19

    Waning Crescent of the Snow Moon

Ethnonationalism may seem an antique or xenophobic topic, but this article in Foreign Affairs suggests not. 

Singapore made me scratch my head about an American article of faith segregation bad, integration good.  Little India, Chinatown, Malaytown, Arab Street and the old English quarters exist alongside each other with little apparent friction.  Apparent is a key word because speaking to Singaporeans I found Malaya’s and Indians who talked about discrimination in the larger community. There’s also the matter of the undercover police that monitor Singaporean’s daily activity.

White’s and Chinese have long been part of Singapore’s ruling elite so they tend not to have the same concerns.  Even so, I noticed a vibrancy and a sense of cultural identity in the ethnically defined communities that I do not notice in similar communities in the US.  Also, well after midnight, I saw women walking alone through relatively deserted city streets. 

To expand on experiences from the same trip the Thai people have a wonderful sense of identity and cultural assurance based on their long experience in the same geopolitical region; likewise the Cambodians, though their situation has deep seated corruption and the legacy of the Pol Pot years that complicate their situation.

I don’t know if all this has any application in the US where our value of  the melting pot has long history behind it.  Even that history though has an ethnonationalistic twist.   The Civil Rights law of 1964 opened immigration to countries outside western Europe, especially to Asians who had been excluded since the days of the Yellow Peril.  Until 1964 our immigration policies favored Anglo-Saxon countries.  Then there was the 3/4’s compromise and the resulting shame of slavery for which we paid in blood and destruction.  

Part of what made me think about this was recent material I’ve seen advocating separate  classrooms, even schools, for boys and girls.  Are we blind to some truths about human nature, or are we visionaries, a city on the hill, lighting the way for the rest of the world when it comes to a multicutural society?  God, I don’t know, but this article made me think.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Travel

The Days Look Potent

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26  bar rises 29.93  5mph  NNW windchill23

       Waning Crescent of the Snow Moon

The angle of the sun has changed; the days look potent, ready to burst open and let plant life smash through winter.  Even the snow today has a futile, last gasp appearance.  It is not the snow fury of midwinter when the drifts pile up and driving snow blinds motorists, making the home a cozy refuge.  Yes, temperatures will plunge the next couple of days, but we know this is just the Hawthorne Giant reluctant to let go his grip on the land.  The Oak King has already seized the season, opening the eyelid of nature wider and wider until one day soon the snow will melt and the ground begin to thaw.  Then, all hail breaks loose.

This drama, the back and forth of seasonal change, is not felt in the tropics.  I remember the struggle my brother Mark had explaining snow to his classes of Thai students learning English.  How to grasp cold and frozen water falling from the sky when all you know is wet seasons and dry?  As a child of this land between the Rockies and the Appalachians, the vast Midwest, and as an adopted son of the northern reaches of it, the seasons long ago seeped into my bones.  The sun’s countenance changes and I know it; I know it in the animal part of my brain that tells me when it’s time to migrate toward the growing season or to put up stores for a coming winter.  The subtle variations between late season snow and the early spitting of snows in November have deep meaning for me.  We are, all of us, practitioners of meteoromancy, attempting to tell our futures through cloud cover, length of day and temperature.

I would have it no other way.  Visiting the tropics is  wonderful, a chance to see another life way, another adaptation to the planet’s many faces, but to live there, to wipe out lifelong learning about spring and its puddles or summer and its heat, does not appeal to me.  This has been and will be my home.  As I said the other day, I am kama’aina of the heartland, a child of the Upper Midwest on the North American continent and this is where I belong.

Art and Culture, World History

A Honu for Dylan

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30  bar steep fall 29.97  1mph W windchill 29

       Waning Crescent of the Snow Moon

Back to the MIA for the first time in almost a month.  Took Jennifer a Honu (green sea turtle) t-shirt for Dylan.  Talked to Jennifer and Paula, picked up my mail-box stuff and went over to Kristine Harley’s office and checked out the Weber lecture by Matthew Welch. 

After that, I went upstairs and did a quick once over through the exhibit.  Loved the Nara era Buddha, Hotei reaching toward the moon, the demon queller and the tiger, the Brine Maidens, the turtle kimono, the oribe tea-ware, the Edo paintings, some of the monochromatic stuff the name of which I can’t recall right now.  I also thought the modern robes with ice-crack design, open book and colored lights patterns were great, too.  Next work is to read the object labels I printed out and the catalog, then take tours with 2 or 3 docents doing the tours and at least one CIF guide, Kumiko Voller, so I can learn how to pronounce everything.

Amanda’s pregnant.  Saw Shiela, too. 

On the drive I’ve begun relistening to From Yao to Mao, the 5,000 year history of China.  This history has lasted so long and has had so many twists and turns, I find it hard to keep straight, so I’m hoping repetition will work.  It’s more interesting the second time through since I now have some context.

General

No Joy in Packerville

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17  bar steep fall 30.04 3mph NNE  windchill 14

    Waning Crescent of the Snow Moon

Brett Favre Set to Retire After 17 Years

No joy in Packerville tonight.  Favre has turned in a lunch bucket career, a monument to the always play ethos of the NFL which seem valorous and really hides a strange form of rich man’s servitude, but within the upside down ethical world of pro football, Favre has been a straight ahead, play ugly and win type of guy.  Football won’t be the same without him.  On the other hand, as a Viking fan, I’m glad he’s going back to Mississippi.

On my way to the MIA to pick up material for learning the Weber collection.  Back in a few. 

Great Work, Our Land and Home, Politics, Travel

Kama’aina of the Heartland

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15  bar rises 30.17  2mph WNW windchill9

    Waning Crescent of the Snow Moon

“People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this, that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.” – John Jay Chapman

I would add to Chapman, it often means a taking a bone from a vicious dog and a strong one.  That’s why it’s fun.  And dangerous.

Just made an attempt to sign up for the Sierra Club’s political committee for this election year.  I want to put my hand back in, but with Taoism as my mentor this time, rather than liberation theology or neo-marxism.  We’ll see what that means if I get selected.

Slept late today.  Still getting used to the center of the continent. 

One realization I had while in Hawai’i is that I am kama’aina of the heartland, the center of a large landmass, the actual geographic opposite of island life.  As a child of this land, I relish significant even sudden changes in weather.  The cycle of planting, growth, maturity, harvest and a fallow time is as essential to my Self as it is to the rhythm of life here.  I am, in every sense of the word, an American.  A Midwesterner.   A Northerner.  Each of those geographic identifiers impacts key aspects of my person, my approach to life and my deep values.

Travel

Deadlines, Bah!

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Gray, dirty snow, chill with humidity.  A dull, gray day as my Aunt Roberta used to say.

This morning I looked at my calendar, the stuff that March requires of me.  It looks ok, doable.  That’s thanks to writing a sermon, my workshop for the Woolly retreat and a presentation on the strange place of religion in contemporary art for the docent book club before leaving for vacation.  A good move.

Deadlines do not stimulate me, unless they are a long way off.  I can finish tasks well before they’re needed, but as time gets closer, I get frustrated and willing to put up with whatever to get stuff done.  Not a recipe for my best work and I like to do my best work.

The blog presents an interesting quandry in that regard.  By its nature the blog is better fresh and without edits.  It’s more like speech than writing.  Still, over half the time I run spell check and go back over the entry after it’s written, just to check.  Even if errors sneak through, I’m ok wid dat.  It’s a blog, not War and Peace.

Seem rested, but still undermotivated.  A trip into the MIA should help tomorrow.  There’s a continuuing event and I can check Matt Welch’s lecture on the Weber exhibit.  After going on a few tours next week I want to start touring that exhibit the second week in March.  I’ve also picked up a China tour later in March that should be fun.

By tomorrow or the next day, I’ll be back in the Aeron and ready to write. I still have mail to go through, but that’s about it as far as vacation-related catch up I have to do.

Memories, Our Land and Home, Travel

Back on Central Standard Time

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23  bar falls 29.90 2mph  NNE windchill21

     Last Quarter of the Snow Moon

Gonna get the weather changed back to Andover tomorrow.  Still a little fuzzy.  I stayed up all day to reset my biological clock and it feels like its worked.   I’ll be ready for bed around my usual time.

This was 6:30PM on Hawai’ian Standard Time.  Time to hunt for dinner and begin to wind down from a day of hiking or visiting gardens or beach combing.  It’s always strange, at least to me, that when we return from a place like Hawai’i that it continues, in the same rhythms, after we leave. 

Most of the year I don’t hold the distinct memories of two places in my mind as I do right after I return from vacation, but for now and the next few weeks Hawai’i will be as clear as if it were a short drive away.  This is partly a function of jet travel.  We walk down a jet way on Kauai, wander around a few mostly similar airports, walk down a couple more jetways, then we’re home again.  No landscape passes by as we travel.  There are only vague indications of cultural change.  OK, the banks of slot machines in the Las Vegas airport were not subtle, but you know what I mean.  No changes in cuisine, no different towns, license plates, grocery stores, just the world air travel culture and its modest inflections as we pass from one gate to another.

Getting to bed time here on good ol’ CST.