Monthly Archives: December 2008

GeekWorld, Our Land and Home

And A Happy…

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7oaks250.jpg9  bar steep fall 30.12  ENE9  windchill 9   Winter

Waxing Crescent of the Wolf Moon

Friend and cyberwizard Bill Schimdt reminded me of a wonderful show the sky put on tonight to celebrate the New Year.  The moon with Venus in its arms.  This is the waxing Wolf Moon, a sliver facing up toward the east with Venus just above and centered over it.  The moon has an immediate tug on my memories, often creating a flood tide of associations from Islam to nursery rhymes to Neil Armstrong and Jules Verne.  It also fires my love of the night, creating a light in the darkness, a light that does not cause the darkness to flee, but makes it more accessible.  And they say lunacy is a bad thing.

This new year’s I plan to celebrate in dreamland.  My new habit of a 10:30 bedtime is too fragile to wreck watching Dick Clark’s face-lift as the ball descends in Time Square.  Windy and -1 there.  Ouch.

The new year comes this time with genuine opportunity for change, change that matters.  I plan to be part of it and hope you do, too.

Sometimes I refer to our property as 7 oaks.  This is a photograph of those seven oaks, white and red.  They grow on a small hill, visible from where I write. They are a grove, a fine companion in all seasons.

-30-  until 2009

Faith and Spirituality, Memories, Weather +Climate

Home and Heart

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winter-solstice-08cbe2.jpg1  bar steep rise 30.42  WSW0   windchill 1  Winter

Waxing Crescent of the Wolf Moon

Oh, man.  To get the trash out I had to blow the snow.  Underneath the snow is ice.  The snowblower with its knobby tires spun out and the only reason I stayed on my feet was the firm grip I had on the snowblower.  Never before had taking out the trash had a hint of danger to it.  Tonight it did.  After the snowblower and I went slip sliding away, I still had to roll both the trash containers down the long slope of our driveway.  Risky business.  Made it ok.

In doing research for Homecomer I looked back over many of my sermons for Groveland and noticed that I’ve written several that deal with home as an idea.  Home has a certain poignancy for me, since my estrangement from my father and his subsequent marriage to a woman who made the problem worse.  The town and the house where I grew up seem faraway to me, as if the warm and comfortable feelings associated with home got eaten away by the acids of my family quarrel.

The rightness or wrongness of it all has long been moot, yet the hollowness with which I’m left when it comes to home and nuclear family must have lead me to consider this theme.  It is a rich concept, one with so many layers and metaphorical possibilities that I have not tired of it.

Perhaps out of this search of mine for home I’ll  find ideas useful to others.  The current environmental crisis both has its roots in and is made more intractable by our American sense of mobility, of looking over the next horizon for a new frontier.  This makes it hard to learn about the home that greets us each evening.  Well, more on that in Homecomer.

The cold has come again and that will make the sleeping even better.

Weather +Climate

Snow and Blowing Snow

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12  bar steep rise  30.18  W9  windchill 5    Winter

Waxing Crescent of the Wolf Moon

We have had snow and blowing snow most of the day.  Do not know how much right now, but the weather reports indicate as much as 6-10″.  That means snow blowing in the AM before Lois comes to clean the house.

Maybe tonight.  Forgot the trash goes out tonight.  Hmmm.

At 5:30 the webinar (new word I do not like much.  It feels clumsy.) on posting to the StarTribune weather blog set up.  Don’t imagine it will be too tough.

Did my upper body resistance before the call.  Aerobics after.  Yesterday my pulse rate stayed higher longer than usual.  Hope that is not a trend.

Still working on Homecomer, may start writing on New Year’s Day.

Sport

Half-Time

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23  bar steep fall 29.90  0mph SE  windchill 22   Winter

New Moon (Wolf Moon)

Vikings played well the first half against the Giants.  67 yard touchdown by Adrian Peterson.  Yeah.

Order in to Seed Savers.  Baker Creek next.

A sunny, warmer than last week day.  Shadows from the south in early afternoon.

Dreams

All These Years

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Dream last night.  I walked home, down Monroe Street in Alexandria, Indiana.  A man named Mr. Jones was with me.  His son, Bud, worked in an office tower in downtown NYC.  We walked three blocks to the stretch of Monroe Street on which I lived.  I turned, pointed to the skyline behind us, and said, “Look.  What do you see there?”  “Bud’s tower.”  “Yes. And right next to it?”  “St. Patrick’s.”  “How about that over there?” I asked, pointing to building, orange metal and looking somewhat like the Sydney Opera House.  “Hope.”   “Yes,”  I said, “Imagine. All these years I’ve been living in Alexandria and never realized it was so close to NYC.  I don’t have to go away from home to be there.”

Holidays

Twas the Night

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Christmas Eve note

-7 on the weather station and no wind.  Santa will have a frigid time here before heading on to the southern states.

Watched the movie Hancock tonight with Kate.  Pretty good.  Not great.  Interesting take on superheroes.

Tomorrow Kate and I will go the movies, joining Jews from all over the nation for this ethnic holiday observance.

Literature

Story of Edgar Sawtelle

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6  bar rises 29.89  3mph W  windchill 6  Winter

Waning Crescent of the Moon of Long Nights

Last night before bed I finished reading the Story of Edgar Sawtelle.  This is a big book and well-written.  The arc of the story brings Greek tragedy to mind.   A few people wend their way through a period of some 16 years or so, making choices and living out their consequences.  This book features notable passages of an American magic realism with ghosts playing significant roles.  There is, too, a village crone, Ida Paine, who dispenses sour wisdom as she runs a small grocery store.

Edgar, a mute boy, and the title character has a life of wonder and pain.  He interacts with a cast of well-drawn and closely observed dogs, his mother and father, an Uncle, a veternarian and his sheriff son.  The isolation of their circumstance in northern Wisconsin near Lake Superior and Chequamegon National Forest provides an at turns bleak and rich natural world for this story.

If you like a good story, well-told, this is a book for you, but beware.  It will break your heart.

GeekWorld, Great Work, permaculture, Politics

Tech in the Service of Political Change

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17  bar steady 30.19  0mph NE  windchill 17 Samhain

Last Quarter Moon of Long Nights

The best way to predict the future is to create it.   Peter Drucker

Quick note.  No, I’ve not gone away.  Just had a busy day.  Picked up the red car and drove it without incident into the Sierra Club and back.  Yeah.  Meetings at Sierra Club with Margaret and Michelle on anti-racism training and communications work during the upcoming legislative session.  I will have a lot to do:  research, weekly updates, action alerts, perhaps co-ordinating some op-ed and letter to the editor material.

Home.  Nap.

Just spent an hour compiling research into usable slots.  Handy with Google.  Technology in the service of political change.

An invitation to do some modest work in the Permaculture arena, too.  Helping Reed Aubin put together some material for a talk on Permaculture and ethics.  Should be fun.

Gotta hit the treadmill.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work

Emergence

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11  bar falls 30.22  2mph NE  windchill 7   Samhain

Last Quarter Moon of Long Nights

Here is a new term (new to me) that has become important in my thinking:  emergence.  It comes from a discipline that fascinates me, but about which I know very little:  complexity theory.  Emergence describes those characteristics of life forms, human history and human economics that arise from the fact of life itself.   Emergent realities like value, meaning and history, according to this line of thought, do not break the laws of physics, but cannot be predicted by application of those same laws.

Inability to predict the next action of a man or woman, the working of the markets or the next events in  human history creates a peculiar circumstance.  It means that though they break no natural laws these emergent realities do not conform to either.   Again, according to this line of thought, this lack of predictability has two sources:  agency and creativity.

Agency is the ability to act.  Combined with consciousness in human beings this leads to creativity.  Creativity and agency make for the rich, diverse reality that is human life.

I’m not going to go too far with this right now because I’m just beginning to absorb it. I want to understand how it relates to my work on a Ge-ology and read a critique or two before I get overly excited, but it seems like an important idea to me.