Imbolc      Waxing Moon of Winds

Finished the Asmat tour and a visual thinking strategies (VTS) tour for 3rd graders.  I give them tomorrow morning.

Put together the legislative update for the Sierra Club blog and a morning entry for the Star-Trib.  Soon, it will be nap time.

This afternoon and over the weekend I’ll dig back into the American Identity piece for the 15th. It’s been fallow since Monday, but it has not disappeared from my consciousness.  I’m leaning now toward a definite geographic hook, an addition to the more usual psycho-political work I’ve read in Huntington and some of the other essays.  I’m not sure yet whether I consider it an equivalent to those notions or whether it is a more important category.

Here’s what I mean.  The notion of a nation is abstract, in the instance of a nation as geographically large as the USA, it can become even more abstract.  My hunch is that, as all politics are local, so are all experiences of national identity.  In other words, my experience of my land, my hometown, my home state or region is, both of necessity and emotional depth, the basic ingredient of my affection for my native land.

That is not to say that This land is my land, from California to the New York Island doesn’t also inform my national identity.  I feel the Rockies and hollers of Appalachia, the rain forests of Washington State and the glaciers of Montana have a place in my sense of national identity, some of them in spite of my never having visited them.  They recede in importance for me, however, when I compare them to acre after acre of corn and wheat.  They do not have the emotional resonance for me the Great Lakes have, especially Huron, Michigan and Superior.  My life has been lived in the towns and cities of the Midwest and I love the Midwest.  When I think of my US identity, I think first of the Midwest.

More on this to come.