Monthly Archives: May 2008

Family, Garden, GeekWorld

Life Proceeds in Its Ordinary Way

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58  bar steady 29.81 1mpn SW dewpoint 20 Beltane

                    New Moon (Hare Moon)

Waiting on the service guy from Allied Generator to fill us in on how our generator works and what we need to do with it.  We went ahead and bought it, now it remains to learn how to use it.

Another work outside day.  Cleaning up continues, though I imagine today I’ll expand the clean up to the garden bed.  Kate may get started on the pruning.  9 days or so until the average date of the last frost, May 15th, so planting annuals is still not a good idea.  Transplanting though can proceed apace and I plan to remove day lilies from one bed completely and move them to other sites along the edge of our woods.  The peonies, large now, will get divided and move to the front.

It is the most distressing or reassuring reality, the fact that life proceeds in its ordinary way no matter what the drama in your own life.  I find it reassuring for the most part, though at times it seems cruel, unspeakably cruel.  Sometimes it seems that the pain my life should cause the whole world to stop spinning, to pause for a moment while I adjust, solve or resolve the dilemma, then someone can push play.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel

A Burning Tree

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 65  bar falls 29.94 0mph S dewpoint 30 Beltane

              New Moon (Hare Moon) 

The forest is a peculiar organism of unlimited kindness and benevolence that makes no demands for its sustenance and extends generously the products of its life and activity; it affords protection to all beings. (Buddhist  Sutra)

Though this comes from a Buddhist sutra (thread) it resonates with Taoist thought.  These two ancient traditions crossed paths over and over again in China.  At least one of those occasions created Chan Buddhism, which, in Japan became Zen Buddhism.  

The Buddhist element I see here is the notion of unlimited kindness and benevolence, an attribution to the forest that I do not believe my brother Taoists would make.  They would agree that the forest is a peculiar organism (among many) and would further concur that it makes no demands for sustenance (on humans) and does extend its product of life and activity (generously–well, maybe to a Buddha, but probably not to a tree) and would also acknowledge its protection to all beings (except those plants killed by competitive toxins and the small prey animals killed by predators).   

Taoism is a fascinating (to me) blend of reason and organismic thinking which produces a vibrant metaphysic understandable at the tinest particle of matter and at stages of complex organization from thence upwards to the Heavens themselves, the 10,000 things.

Mostly clean up outside today.  Getting ready for the more ambitious projects that will soon occupy my time.

From the deck last evening I looked at our Magnolia.  It stood against the seven oaks like the flame atop a Thai Buddha.  Its white glinted, mirrored back by white daffodils.  This evening, for this moment, the Magnolia had a nimbus, a sacred aura, as if it had transcended its treeness and become another living entity all together a vegetative, blooming fire.  A burning tree.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, Memories

There Are Days, Ordinary Days

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58  bar rises 29.80 2mph W dewpoint 30 Beltane

New Moon (Hare Moon)

There are days, ordinary days, days you can recall, when your life took a sharp angle turn, or created a swooping curve, perhaps dipped underground or soared up, up into the sky.

It seems I remember, though how could I really, the day I got polio.  I don’t know how this memory got shaped or if it got shaped in the way all  memory does, by our selective recollection of snippets of moments, but here it is.

My mother and I were at the Madison County Fair, held every August on the grounds of Beulah Park.  Mom had wrapped me in a pink blanket and we wandered through the Midway.  There were bright lights strung in parabolic curves and the smell of cotton candy and hot dogs.  I looked out from the blanket, safe on my mother’s shoulder, held in her arms.  And I felt a chill run through me.

Years later I was with my Dad, early in the morning.  We sat in those plastic cuplike chairs in a pale green room.  My mother came up in an elevator on her way to emergency surgery.  Surgeons would try to relieve pressure on her brain from the hemorrhage she had suffered a week before during a church supper.  I got in the elevator and rode up with her.  Her eyes looked away from me, but saw me anyway.  “Soaohn.” she said.  It was the last time she spoke to me.  I was 17.

The evening of my first marriage I wandered down a path in Mounds Park where the ceremony had taken place.  I wore a blue ruffled shirt, music of the Rolling Stones carried through the moist July air.  Butterflies landed on my shoulder.

The night the midnight plane arrived from Calcutta carrying a 4 pound, 4 ounce boy.

The third week of our honeymoon, a northern journey begun in Rome, found us at our northernmost destination Inverness, Scotland.  We had rooms at the Station Hotel, right next to railroad terminal.  It was a cool foggy night and we took a long walk, following for much it the River Ness, which flows into Loch Ness.  We held hands and looked at this old Scots village, the capital of the Highlands.  A mist rose over a church graveyard on our right.

And today.  Planting beets and carrots.  Kate taking a phone call.  The news from the lab about Gabe. Now, after this sunny spring day, life will go on, but its trajectory has changed, changed in a profound way, in a way none of us can yet know.

Faith and Spirituality, Family

A Sisyphean Task

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68  bar steady 29.78 0mpn SSW dewpoint 22  Beltane

                        New Moon (Hare Moon)

The day has passed as we both tried to get our arms around this notion of Gabe as hemophiliac.  As a dedicated user of the internet, I have looked up and printed out several different articles, brochures, information handouts.  Canada Health Services had some good stuff; so did the CDC; and, the World Hemophiliac Federation.  The amount of data, good data, available quickly astounds me every time I reach out for it.  I have not had a disappointing search, ever.

The emotional problem is this:  lifelong.  This tiny guy, still in the hospital from birth at 35 weeks, now has a mountain to climb every day, every hour for the rest of his life.  This is a Sisyphean task because every time he rolls the ball up the mountain, it will come right back down.  There is no cure.  There is only amelioration.  After looking at the various treatments, I became even more convinced Gabe has the right Dad.  It will require fortitude to climb this mountain,  go to sleep, get up and climb it again.

So, life will proceed.  We will all come to some terms with this and develop ways we can support Jon and Jen, Ruth and Gabe.  We all need to learn a lot more right now.

Daffodils have begun to pop open everywhere, so yellow and white is a dominant accent to green here now.  Tulips should come into bloom any day now and the magnolia is out in all its snowy fineness.  Working in the garden, even for a bit, literally grounds me, draws anxiety out and replaces it with the strength of life’s eternal cycle.

General

Gabe

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63 bar steady 29.86 1mph SSW dewpoint 32  Beltane

                            New Moon (Hare Moon, English medieval)

Outside this morning planting Chiroggia, Golden and some other kind of beets–this morning they were plants, already started indoors.  Nantes Carrots, too.  Same thing.  All four are heirloom seeds, species of long ago, kept alive and healthy by the folks at Seed Savers Exchange.  This also means we can collect seed from any plant we let go to see and expect them to reproduce their parent plant, an expectation only realized among hybrids by cloning or vegetative reproduction.

Kate made a call, after we consulted about where to plant the beets and carrots.  “This bed,” she said, “was not too stressed.  It hasn’t had tomatoes for a couple of years.”

The call was to Jon, checking up on little Gabe, still in the hospital.  As she talked, I only heard one end of the conversation.  “You’re kidding.”  She looked toward the ground, eyes hooded, “You’re kidding.”  You’re kidding is Kate talk for OH MY GD.  Gabe is a factor 8 hemophiliac.  This is the same kind as the Czar’s family, a particularly intractable kind.  Treatable, but tough to deal with over a lifetime.  A chronic disease.

Gabe has the right Dad.  Jon is a model diabetic, controlling his insulin levels and remaining lean, athletic.  He’s suffered from diabetes, fought his own demons with it.  Once he had it fairly well controlled, he developed Addison’s, another immune mediated disease.  He had already added a poorly functioning thyroid gland.  In each instance he has learned about the disease, managed it and gone on with his life, allowing himself no secondary gain or restrictions other than those absolutely necessary for handling his conditions.  Then, on top of that, he began to have aches.  Rheumatoid arthritis.

Jon understands both poles of handling a chronic disease:  the physical and the psychological.  They are equal in importance since a stubborn resistance to manage a chronic condition only makes it worse.  On the other hand, good management creates a sense of psychological well-being impossible otherwise.  Good psychological health makes handling the various regimes more doable.

I’ve never been sure of the old, God doesn’t give us more than we can handle, but in this case I can say that if any one can handle Gabe’s life in a psychologically and physically optimal way, it’s Jon.
 

Faith and Spirituality, Politics

I’m with Rev. Wright

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44  bar rises 29.89 0mph SW dewpoint 23  Beltane

              Waning Crescent Moon of Growing

A first tonight.  A salad made from lettuce I cut from the plants in our kitchen.  Enough for two with plenty left on the plants.  So, one test of the hydroponics down, a few more to go.  I want to produce tomatoes and herbs on a year round basis, while also using the setup to start plants for the outside garden.  Flowers, too, would perk up the kitchen and the inside, especially in winter.  Slow, steady.  Learning as we go.

Kate has tomorrow off, unexpectedly, so we’re going to go over to NOW fitness and buy a new treadmill.  Tres exciting.

Looks like a couple of good days for outside work Sunday and Monday.  I have plenty to do.

I haven’t said anything here about Rev. Wright and Barrack Obama.  I’m with Rev. Wright.  I know, I know.  He comes off like a fruitcake, an angry voice untethered from day to day reality.  His sermons are strident, cut deep.  His critique of American society as a racist, vicious culture seems to describe a place none of us know.  And we don’t.

Preaching has a long and complicated history.  Its strongest and its most dangerous form comes when a minister decides she must speak truth to power.  This always, always comes from a particular situation which the minister holds up to the Christian tradition, most often scripture in the Protestant community of which Rev. Wright is a part.  The preaching task is never done in the abstract; it is always a spoken word to a people, a spoken word shaped by the scriptural and historical roots of today’s Christian church.  When the community to which you speak and from you yourself come have experienced marginilization, unearned disadvantage, then the spoken word will express the truth of God’s justice to the powerful forces aligned against your community.

This type of preaching is never easy.  It costs blood.  It often produces pain.  Clergy who insist on prophetic preaching, because they feel they can do nothing else, often lose their jobs, get branded as crazy, misguided, idealistic, out of touch.  This is just power talking back, trying to press the truth to the margins again, where it can be contained.  We, that this those of us in the white upper-middle classes do not know what it means to live as marginal persons, bereft of influence, beholden to power.  We are the main-stream, the influential, the holders of power.

Naming truth hurts.  But, as Jesus said, the truth shall set you free.  But, he might have added, only after a really long painful time.  Even so, it doesn’t make the truth any less true.   

I never served a congregation as a minister for just this reason.  I knew my politics were too radical for a congregation of Presbyterians.  The tension and pain would not have had  a constructive outcome.  Rev. Wright made a different calculation and I support him in it.

Garden, Great Work

End of the Treadmill Season

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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.

General

The Sun. The Sun.

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 42  bar steep rise 29.72 12mph NW dewpoint 42  Beltane

                 Waning Crescent Moon of Growing

The sun.  The sun.  What a relief.  Sunlight is a balm all on its own.  No wonder we worshipped it in so many of our cultures across the globe.  And why not? 

More and more daffodils have opened, they give a cheery feel to the garden.  Tulips will open in the next few days if we warm up as predicted.  The garlic has shot up and all the iris look healthy.  The hemerocallis has emerged, too, giving the whole garden a greenscape.  I’ve got way more hemerocallis than I need or want, so a lot of it will get moved or given away.

Tonight we will have the first salad with lettuce from the hydrponics. 

Another errand Saturday.  I’m going to go check out Landice treadmills in Arden Hills, pick up some groceries and wait until it  warms up a bit this afternoon, then plant beets and morning glories.        

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

In Tutelage to My Self

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41  bar steady  29.41 4mph dewpoint 39 Beltane

           Waning Crescent Moon of Growing

Wet.  Cold.  Dreary.  An inside day.  I was gonna plant beets and carrots outside, but not today.  Maybe Sunday.

Lunch with Tom Crane.  We discussed the meeting at his house where I serve as his assistant.  The topic is mastery.  The word poses some problems for me because it is difficult, if not impossible, to extricate it from its linkage to subordination.  The idea that lurks behind it, though, is strong.  Somewhere in the terms Zen master or Taoist sage or master gardener, even master craftsperson lies a life time of practice, the honing of a skill or a life way on the hard stone of experience. 

We had an interesting conversation about who we had come across in our lives we would consider masters.  I’ll get back to you, but no one leapt to mind.  We also discussed the possibility of naming for others where we see mastery in them.  This gets around the culture bound reticence we upper-middle class Midwesterners have to tooting our own horn.

I admitted that I had not allowed anyone to mentor me, nor had I been willing to be anyone’s disciple.  This is a weakness, I believe, borne of a need to figure things out for myself, to do things on my own.  Tom had the same experience, but for a different reason.  He was thrust into responsibility and expected to survive.  And he has.

This is, in part at least, a vulnerability question.  Can I make myself vulnerable enough to another person to become their student, their disciple.  The result of not doing that is, as Tom and I admitted, a sense that we have never quite arrived, not quite done enough.  A niggle of uncertainty that has no reference within us which we can use to dislodge it.

We also spoke a bit about being in tutelage to the Self.  I said I have been willing to trace my own journey by the vague outlines I feel in that part of me that participates in the greater universe, and which calls me forward to my own destiny.  As a Taoist, I would call that my attunement to the Movement of Heaven, the Tao.  A good lunch on a wet day.

Friends, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work

A Fed? LOL

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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?