Monthly Archives: June 2008

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

Can We Count on an Escape to the Stars?

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63  bar rises 29.81  0mph ESE dew-point 51   Beltane, cloudy and cool

                 First Quarter of the Flower Moon

“Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.” from a New York Review of Books article by Freeman Dyson

Here’s a bit from his own webpage: Freeman Dyson is now retired, having been for most of his life a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Dyson is a smart guy and no follower of the crowd.  His article reviews books which count the cost of global warming.  His real point, though, seems to be that those who would silence the critics of global warming may find themselves on the wrong side of history, much like the Catholic Church and Gallileo, for example. 

Here’s another quote:  “In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be right.  It may–or may not–be that the present is such a time.” 

He seems to look toward a more nuanced stating of the case along the lines of this quote from Ernesto Zedillo, editor of  Global Warming: Looking Beyond Kyoto.  “Climate change may not be the world’s most pressing problem (as I am convinced it is not), but it could still prove to be the most complex challenge the world has ever faced.”  Dyson has written elsewhere that he believe global poverty, starvation and epidemic treatable diseases like malaria, cholera and typhus are more important than global warming.  These are, he argues, clear and present realities.  We should not let climate change take attention away from them.

This is important stuff for me since I got word last night that I will serve on the Sierra Club’s political committee this year.   I believe in the Great Work Thomas Berry describes in his book by that name, namely, that our generation is the one that will have to change the human presence on the earth to a sustainable one.

Still, I take the point of some conservative critics who wonder if the emphasis on the health of mother earth detracts from our specie’s self interest, i.e., our own survival.  My belief is that the two have become, or, better, we now recognize that they always have been, intimately related.  Only in the most optimistic space opera science fiction sense can we imagine scenarios in which our species escapes earth to colonize the stars.  Short of that we have to dance with the planet we were given.  This one.

Somehow we must make progress to mitigate the affects of climate change and to slow it down.  We must make that progress, though, in a way sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the human inhabitants of earth, our fellow creatures.

Faith and Spirituality, Woolly Mammoths

Gotta Take That Wild Last Ride

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61  bar steep rise 29.76  4mph W dew-point 53  Beltane, sunny and cool

                First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Decided to cancel the Gettysburg leg of my trip.  Need to be at home.  Another time.  Gettysburg is not going anywhere.

A bit more about radical individualism.  Last night I proposed, as I wrote here yesterday, that civilization, especially through work and love, constrain the unfettered, natural–wild part of us.  There was good criticism of that position, i.e. part of the natural state of humanity is life in family, in relationship.  Another position asserted that deconstructing (I’m not sure about this use of the term, but it is what was used.) ourselves so that wildness could break out denies the process of integration of the mature person. (individuation, perhaps?)  Wildness, in this view, must somehow come together with all of psyche’s zoo or, better, pantheon (my terms) to define a full person.

It is true that the very nature of what it means to be human gains its definition in a social context.  In that sense, yes, to be human is to be in a family, a clan, a community.  It is also true that the integration model of maturity requires a delicate balancing and harmonizing of disparate impulses, desires and drives into a well-functioning individual. 

Even so.  A first reaction over against both of these arguments is this:  we all die alone.  This is the existentialist’s key and, to my eye, keen observation.  It can be pushed back through life itself.  We are all born alone, that is we are the only one to emerge from the womb as that distinct individual.  Even triplets are born into different bodies, at a slightly different time, and have unique life experiences.  In life we inhabit our body and no other.  We may, more or less, empathetically walk in another person’s shoes, but we can never get in there while their foot is in the shoe.  You are unique and, whether you wish it to be the case or not, can have it no other way.

Second, the Jungian model of individuation, which I embrace, calls us to live into our Self, to become, that is, whom we already are.  This may involve harmonization and balancing, but it may also include embracing aspects of our Self heretofore submerged or repressed.  The journey is not to maturity in this view, rather it is toward the clearest and most distinct realization of our uniqueness.

As a note I read moments ago by James Hillman said, the individuation process prepares us to die.  Last night I did not mention my final thought on wildness.  The last wild act of our life is death.  It is that moment most natural, most terrifying, most awesome, least understood and never tamed.  Death is, for each of us, our wildest moment.  Individuation ensures that we come to that last natural divide, that last wild place, as who we are, shorn of cultural convention and psychological repression.  That we come dressed only in the clothes which our psyche had for us to wear from the very beginning.  That we come to the most wild moment in our life, in other words, as the natural, wild Self into which we were born.

This journey, this ancient trail, is the ancient trail.  It is one we walk alone from birth until death.  It is this realization that makes me a radical individualist, proud and happy to live in community, yes, but as a person free and unfettered.

Family, Woolly Mammoths

A Radical Individualist

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58  bar rises 29.69  0mph S  dew-point 51  Beltane, night and cool

                   First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Woolly’s on Wildness.  Some of us thought wildness was wilderness, or being in wilderness.  Others of us thought wildness lay in the the natural, the natural state, unconstrained by civilization.  Yet others believed wildness was one aspect of our psyche that needed integration into the larger, mature person we become over time.

I realized in the middle of the conversation that I am a radical individualist, along with Emerson and the Existentialists.  More on this at another time.

How to make another see the inherent worth they have, the beauty and the glory of their person?  The depth of their soul and the bounty they represent in the world?  I don’t know right now and I wish I did.

Travel, Woolly Mammoths

The Wild Man

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71  bar steady  29.66  1pmh ENE dew-point 49  Beltane, sunny and warm

                 First Quarter of the Flower Moon

We have had only 3 days above 80 this year.  The weather stays cool, which is fine, but the plants don’t like it.  They grow slowly.

Tonight is the Wild Man meeting of the Woolly Mammoths at Charlie Haislet’s pent-house condo overlooking downtown Minneapolis.  Not exactly the abode of a wild man.  Still, most of us would have trouble with it, too.  

This week feels compressed since I leave on Saturday for Maxwell AFB and Gettysburg.  It means I’m on the kind of work attitude I get into before a trip.  This time it will last a week.

Thankfully this time I head out on Hwy 94 not 35.  I will skirt Chicago by heading down the middle of Illinois, then on south, into the heat.  I can only hope that the hot weather will subside, at least a bit, before I get into Tennessee.

GeekWorld, News of the Strange

Exaflops, Zettaflops, Yottaflops and the Xeraflop

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72  bar steady 29.65 1mph SSW dew-point 53  Beltane, sunny and warm

             First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Sometimes the language surprises even those of who try to keep up with technological innovation.

“An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United States.

“The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop…”

Family, Garden

No Impairment of Our View

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71  bar steady 29.64 0mph SE  dew-point 51  Beltane, Sunny and warm

                  First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Ah, Costco.  A vast and cavernous market, as much a temple to the American obsession with stuff as store.  Two 40 pound bags of mature dog dogfood, Kirkland, and a box of dog biscuits plus $100 on the Costco gas card, a sort of futures market in which I bet that Costco prices will be under those of the competitor gas stations.  After a trip in which each tankfull of 11 gallons or so cost over $44 in my compact Toyota Celica, it seems like a good wager.  Through the lines with others and their carts, as American as fast food and credit cards, I spent $161 dollars on dog nourishment and car nourishment.

Back home I put the dogfood in the container we use for it, then went out to the shed that Jon built.  It houses the chainsaw.  When I found it needed gas, I had to schlep out to the further shed where I store the sharp and mechanical tools as well as gas and oil. 

Filled up I hiked out to the front yard and began pruning branches off Amur maples.  The first one to go was the one I mentioned yesterday, broken in some storm or another.  Then a couple that had long impinged on a spruce and a Norway pine.  At another clump of Amur’s I pruned some large dead branches, small trunks really all of these, and a few low hanging live ones.

While Kate mowed, I moved these cumbersome items down the hill and into the huge storm water drainage depression we share with our neighbor.  This wise feature is as far across as our lot and goes back about three hundred feet.  It slopes on all four sides down to a level bottom.  This ensures that the run off our roofs and yards soak into the soil, rather than into nearby wetlands or Roundlake.  Since it has no other purpose and is large, it can hide many branches, even tree trunks with no impairment of our view.

Kate’s finished mowing and I’m taking her out to lunch.  Bye.

Art and Culture, Friends, Garden

A Bad Break

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68  bar steady 29.65  2mph  ESE  dew-point 56  Beltane, Sunny and sort of warm

                       First Quarter of the Flower Moon 

“Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.” – James Russell Lowell

My docent friend, Bill Bomash, fell 10 feet into a culvert at a mountainside home in Brazil.  He had gone there to visit a friend who had recently completed his new house.  I wrote about him a couple of months ago.  He had two weeks in an all Portugese speaking hospital after the intial orthopedic surgery because he developed an infection, not unusual when a lot of hardware goes into the bone.  This happened in January.  He faced six months of recovery when he finally got back to Minnesota in early February. 

Now this:

Hi everybody.  Well I got some disappointing news the other day.  I’ve been having more pain in my leg and when I went into the doctor he said that he thought the hardware in my leg was failing.  As a result, there was too much movement in the bone. I’m going into the hospital again on Monday for surgery to remove all the hardware and have a rod inserted through the bone to hold it in place. I’m afraid it’s pretty much back to square one.
    It looks like it will be quite a while yet before I can return to touring.
    I’ll get back to you with an update after the surgery and I have returned back home.

In a much more modest instance I had three months of recovery after surgery to repair my ruptured Achilles tendon.  It drove me nuts.  Six months after the initial break Bill now faces another six months of recovery.  Geez.

Off to Costsco for dogfood, then chainsaw Charlie will emerge and start whacking off limbs.  Of trees.

Cinema and Television, Garden, Great Wheel

Sad Movies Always Make Me Cry

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60  bar steady 29.59  0mph NNW dewpoint 59  Beltane, night

              Waxing Crescent of the Flower Moon

What a beauty.  This crescent moon, nearing the first quarter, has two stars above it, one low toward the horn and the other on a thirty degree angle further away.  Rain scrubbed the sky clean tonight, so they sparkle.  We only to look to the moon and the stars to find ample inspiration.  Do we need another layer, a human interpretation of the wonder we feel when we see the great star road?  I’m not so sure anymore.

The list of movies I haven’t seen that others have a long time ago included Dances With Wolves until tonight.  Not many movies make me cry, but the closing scenes when Dances With Wolves and Stands With A Fist leave the winter village did.  Especially moving to me was Wind in the Hair crying from the cliff top, “Dances With Wolves, do you hear me?  Do you know that I will always be your friend?” 

When the soldiers killed Dances With Wolves’ horse and then his wolf companion, I also cried.  The wolf’s loyalty and love repayed with death.  These two incidents capture so much of the casual violence that American culture legitmates.  Once again, I cringed at the harsh lessons of the frontier. 

Weeding tomorrow.  Oh, boy.  Also, I get to do some chainsaw pruning.  We lost a main branch off one of our Amur Maples.  They have a tendency to fragility so it didn’t surprise me. 

Garden

The O Club

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73  bar falls 29.59  0mph E  dew-point 63  Beltane, cloudy

Waxing Crescent of the Flower Moon

Finished putting down Preen in the flower beds.  The straw for mulch in the vegetable beds took a bit longer, but not much.  The beets have grown, as have their bedmates, the carrots.  The corn is ankle high by the 8th of June.

The garlic nears its time for harvest.  The water is shut off and I wait now for the stems to die back.  Don’t know why I’m so fascinated with growing garlic, but I am.   Looks like a good crop.

The onion bed, too, has made great strides.  Green hollow leaves spear through the hay, sending food down to the bulbs underneath the ground, energy Kate and I will harvest.  Two hills of gourds and one of squash have broken through and begun to leaf.  The beans Kate planted are on their fourth and sixth leaves.  Lettuce sown a while back has enjoyed the cool weather and begun to flourish.

The tomato plants outside have yet to go through a real growth spurt and I finally pruned back the one inside.  A different, more hydroponic friendly variety will produce better and now I have to find one.  We continue to harvest lettuce each day for salads, so lettuce works.

We have a few other stray plants in odd locations some watermelon, cucumber and peppers.  They’re all healthy.

The bearded iris have begun to bloom, while the smaller purple varities have begun to fade.  Not much else blooming right now, save for the lilacs, the bleeding hearts and the annuals Kate planted.  The garden is lush, green. Healthy.

The almost II lieutenant called.  It has hit him that he needs a bed.   All the officers have to live off base at Tyndall and he will be there for well over a year.  He’s going to have to fly to Denver, rent a U-Haul truck and drive back to base.  He does not, however, have a bed.  Don’t know what to say to him.  Suppose I could drive the truck and take the bed in his old room down to him.  I don’t know.

He’s cranked.  His class got initiated into the wonders of the O club, as he called it.  The Officer’s Club.  It has traditions, though what they are he didn’t say.  His skin color has worked to his advantage so far.  He’s been picked for some extra duties, to show Generals and other dignitaries around OTS.  Face time with the high command.  He says he knows who he is and if they want to work it that way it’s ok with him.

Family, Politics

Cast Out Your Doubts. Carpe Diem.

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68  bar steady  29.67  3mph NE  dew-point 56  Beltane, cloudy and warm

               Waxing Crescent of the Flower Moon

“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

A wise thought from our third  greatest president (after GW and Abe).  What we doubt we can do today will not happen tomorrow.  It may even fade from the horizon line of possibility altogether.  A terrible example is the 3/5’s compromise.  The generation which founded our country had many leaders who knew slavery was a burden too great for the Republic to bear.  Among them were Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.  Too many, though, doubted a solution to slavery was possible at this time and so agreed to count 3/5’s of the slave population when it came to census figures determining congressional representation.  This doubt obscured slavery’s tragedy, a holocaust of freedom, in a nation founded on the principles of freedom and liberty for all.

The payment for these doubts came due in 1861 with the Confederate shelling of Ft. Sumter in  Charleston, South Carolina’s harbor.  The next four years would exact a price in blood so high and a rent in the body politic so deep that this nation has not recovered.  The tragedy compounded during reconstruction as freed slaves became tenant farmers, sharecroppers in states with Jim Crow laws.  Lynchings.  The KKK.  Segregation.  Limited practical voting rights.  Employment discrimination. 

Think how much further along our society would be in a movement toward a common culture, one shared by all Americans regardless of race, creed, gender, sexual preference or national origin if our founding fathers (yes, fathers) had set aside their doubts and made real the full promise of the American revolution.

With Obama’s candidacy we may be ready for a third movement forward toward such a culture.  The Civil War was one.  The 1950’s and 1960’s were another with Brown vs. the Board of Education, the Civil Rights act and the struggles of Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers, the Black Muslims–especially Malcom X, CORE, the NAACP, SNICC and grass roots uprisings in many American cities.

Take stock of the doubts you have today about what you may realize tomorrow.  They are the great barrier reef in your psyche between the ego’s fears and the manifestation of your full Self.       

Some time outside this morning laying down weed preventer.  This is prologomena to a thorough weeding this week before I take off for Alabama.  A major focus this week will be helping Kate.  She’s going to be here with the dogs for 10 days, again, after 6 days last week.  Anything I can do now to make those days easier will be good.