Monthly Archives: March 2010

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on the news, Health, Politics, US History

President Shoots the Moon

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Spring                                                 Waxing Awakening Moon

Moon viewing.  We don’t do it much here, except as a casual thing, a walk outside, look up, oh a nice moon tonight or shine on harvest moon for me and my gal then on to the drive in or what’s on your play list dude? In Japan they take the moon viewing a step further, ok, a whole nighttime stroll longer.  They build moon viewing platforms, have parties, and produce some wonderful art that features the moon.  Tonight the waxing awakening moon hung just above the trees in the west, behind a scrim of clouds, a faint glow surrounding the upturned crescent.  It is a moon to remember.

This crescent awakening moon will now memorialize for me the day the Democratic party got some balls.  Obama wanted to pass health care reform.  I saw a representative, I don’t know his name, with silver hair, looked about my age, get up and say, “Before we were born, reform of the health care system was begun, just waiting for this day.”

This is not a victory for Democrats, however, it is a victory for the American people, a victory for those who have lived their lives in fear of a cough, a broken leg, a child’s fever.  In this country, which can bail out billionaires and support subsidies to bank robbers, that is, banks that rob, to have 32 million people with no health insurance has been a crime of long standing, a crime that has produced serial deaths over and over with no fear of prosecution.

It is my hope that Republicans will understand that many of the folks who swallow the tea party line are the very people who will wake up some time soon with health insurance, health insurance they have never had. If you don’t believe me, just look at the Gallup map below and consider it with an overlay of the Bush and McCain presidential votes.

Obama has won a victory here, a hard fought victory and he should get his props.  He should also get more credit for calming the Great Recession and ushering in a period of up ticking economic news.  I imagine we will see more such substantive wins for him as his presidency continues.

Hurray for the red, white and blue!

Now a moment on partisan politics and post-partisan politics, the so-called third way.  Yes, our politics have become so polarized that it is difficult to recall the times when it wasn’t.  Yes, there is acrimony and ill will and yes, it does make governance more difficult than it needs to be.  Here’s the thing, though.  In the end it is politics.  This clumsy, broken, dysfunctional process is the way we have chosen, and keep choosing, to mediate our substantive differences.  I read a very compelling argument for changing the system of representation in the Senate where 10% of the states have 90% of the population, but have only a tenth of the votes.  The author of the argument went on to say that fixing this dysfunction was not possible and that we needed to work with the system we have.

It’s not ideal, but there is no system for managing the affairs of human societies that is and ours is better than most.  This vote proves it.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

Liberal II

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Spring                                    Waxing Awakening Moon

A writing day.  I put in several hours in a row on Liberal II:  The Present.  I was going to include the future, but in the end it took all I had to finish with the present.  The story, the present, is a difficult one to tell to liberal audiences like Groveland UU because the reality is that liberalism is victorious.  We live in a modern world that has liberal ideas as commonplace beliefs:  individual liberty, equality, the rule of law, government by the people, an openness to change, a market economy.  When I finish editing Liberal II, I’ll post it, but the hard to convey message is that more folks are not Unitarian because the worldview we embrace is widely shared.  Strange, huh?

I also worked a bit on Latin.  During this time Kate got outside and pruned the fruit trees in our young orchard.  She’s in charge of pruning and assembling woodenware, so I went out later in the day and complimented her on her work.  She did Latin in the morning.

I love these kind of days where a focused task gets completed.

After I finish the first draft of Liberal II, I also took on trying to get my networked computer in the study to share a printer with the other computers, like a nice computer should.  It took a while, but I got them all clicking together. Felt like a victory to me.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel

Spring

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Spring                                  Waxing Awakening Moon

Today is the spring equinox.  We’ve made it through another winter.

The bees have already begin to buzz and plant life has pushed light green shoots through the soil.   The days have begun to warm and yesterday I felt the warmth of the sun on my neck.  What a treat!

Spring, more than anything else, presses us into realm of fertility and abundance, the efflorescence of mother earth that feeds us all.  Birds come back from their winter homes.  Gardener’s start plants for their gardens.  Some folks lift their house, an expression I heard first in Minnesota.  It means spring cleaning.  Or spring cleaning means lifting the house.  Whatever.

This is a good day to consider the things that are tender shoots in your life.  Maybe’s its that new package of bees on the way from California, that novel you finally set down to write, that language you finally got started on.  Maybe it’s a redesign of your living space, your occupational space, your own, internal space.  Remember that tender shoots require care, yes, but also remember that those tender shoots have power behind them, power rooted in the part of you that made them surface.  Some of those shoots, most of them, the best thing you can do, let them flourish at their pace.  Don’t force them.

Watch for baby birds, puppies, infants, kittens, new plants.  They are the concrete hope out of which we make not only this world, but the future one, too.  They are reason you exist, to care for them, to provide a nourishing environment for their growth.  Those tenders shoots in your life are the same.  They are the concrete hope out of which you will make these moments in your life and the future ones.  So, be kind to them.  Let’em grow.

Art and Culture, Bees, Woolly Mammoths

Putting the Stuff Together

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Imbolc                                   Waxing Wild Moon

A tour for Academia Caesar Chavez this morning.  Delightful 4th graders with lots of questions and energy.  I think they liked looking over the railing into the fountain court about as much as anything.   The talent level in the docent corps always amazes me.  The two women docents who shared this tour with me were, respectively, a professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary and a retired professor of epidemiology from the Public Health department at the UofM.deep-hive-body

After the tour I had lunch at Keegan’s Pub with Frank Broderick.  He gives me the leftover corned beef after his St. Patrick’s day meal for the Woollies, but he forgot on Monday.  He had a corned beef sandwich for lunch and I had bangers and mash.  The bangers were much smaller than the ones I remember from England.

The first order this season from Mann Lake Bee Supply came yesterday.  It had eleven hive bodies and seven honey supers.  Kate has a hive body and a honey super already put together.  A hive body is deeper than a honey super since it contains frames that house brood, the queen and the nurse bees.  A honey super is about half the size to fit the honey frames.

(pics:  a deep hive body and a honey super with frames)super-frames

We’re buzzing.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Politics

Working In the Head

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Imbolc                                 Waxing Awakening Moon

A day with my head in the books, The Future of Liberalism by Alan Wolfe, for the most part.  I’ve also reviewed notes from my first research for Liberal I:  roots and branches.  My goal in liberal II is to tease out the social and inner context in which liberalism makes a difference, focused this time more on the inner life of the person in the liberal faith tradition and the political liberal in the outside world.  In addition I want to say a few words about the future of the liberal idea as modernity warps and changes, yet remains, in its social dynamics, much the same.

Let me open that up just a bit.  Alan Wolfe makes the point that liberalism has been and is the perfect vehicle for managing modernism, but that modernism itself created the world in which liberal ideas can flourish.  Modernism grew from the enlightenment emphasis on reason pushed into the political arena first by the American and then the French Revolutions.  Their mutual synergy with the Industrial Revolution created a political climate in which different political and social concepts had to sort out their differences.  Liberal democracy, of the sort enshrined in the American constitution and somewhat later changes in Europe and Great Britain, was and is the best vehicle for doing so. Liberal procedural law takes into account differences by its very design.  Consider how an authoritarian regime would handle substantial differences in citizen’s beliefs.

The same holds true for civil societies with multiple strains of religious belief.  In this case, too, the liberal temperament’s willingness to be flexible, to change and adapt has the best hope of creating a culture in which differences breed debate and discussion rather than suppression and violence.

Technological and scientific advances also create turmoil in the culture as does a dominant capitalist economy.  Here again the liberal core values of individual liberty, freedom and equality shave off the roughest edges of this chaotic change so a culture can sustain itself intact.

Bees, Great Work, Travel

Mid-Session, Mid-March

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Imbolc                                           Waxing Awakening Moon

A sunny, bright day, but cooler.  44 right now.  Temps will trend downward over the next week toward more normal March weather.  This week we’ve melted all of our snow away, unusual.

Put in a large order at Mann’s bee supplies for deep hive boxes, honey supers, frames and foundations, hive tools, feeders and pollen patty mix.  Kate’s taken over the woodenware phase of the process, agreeing to put stuff together as it comes.  This is great for me since handling such matters tends toward large amounts of frustration and blue language.

Spent yesterday AM doing travel arrangements for Kate’s trip to Denver (car) and her trip to San Francisco (air), writing our CPA, signing up for a healthy eating class from Brenda Langston and moving money around.  A fussy, businessy day with our business meeting in the AM.

The mid-session for the Sierra Club Legislative Committee finds us fighting defense on the Nuclear Moratorium and the Polymet Mining proposal, pushing a few bills, but, for the most part, working in the trenches.  An old flame of mine, now a tax staffer for the Minnesota Senate used to say “No one’s wallet or rights are safe while the legislature is in session.”  That emphasizes the need for constant surveillance as bills go into committees, especially after Friday, the 2nd deadline which winnows legislation down further.  As bills miss deadlines, authors begin to look for creative ways of pushing their legislation like getting it added to omnibus bills or arranging for amendments once a bill is on the floor of either house.

Today is a day for Liberal II:  Liberalism-the present (and, I think, the future since I have no slot this year to finish a trilogy.)  Research all day.  Writing starting over the weekend perhaps.  So I’d best get to it.  Later.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Poetry

On Not Celebrating St. Patrick

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Imbolc                                        Waxing Awakening Moon

St. Patrick’s Day.  I’ve always felt that the Irish celebrating St. Patrick’s day is much like the Dodgers celebrating a Yankee World Series win or maybe more like Native Americans celebrating the coming of Christianity to the New World.

Why?  The snakes St. Patrick drove out of Ireland represented the takeover of the ancient Celtic faith by the invading dogma of Roman Catholicism.  Not only did the R.C.s finish off the auld faith, but they did in a native Celtic version of Christianity that had a close relationship to Mother Earth and who offered to the church, Pelagius, a theologian who believed we were born good.  Augustine, yes, that Augustine, set out to crush Pelagianism and he succeeded.  In fact, Augustine was so successful that Pelagius rarely comes in church history at all.

What I know of Celtic Christian spirituality would salute this poem by e.e. cummings that Scott Simpson quoted at our last Woolly meeting:

O sweet spontaneous

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
beauty     how
oftn have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true
to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerest
them only with
spring)
Art and Culture, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture

Birds Sing, Sun Shines

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Imbolc                                             New Moon (Awakening)

Since last Friday when I had two tours through this afternoon around 5 (when I got stung), I’ve been on high intellectual alert touring museum goers, learning about Apis mellifera, doing Latin homework, going over the Latin with Kate, teeth cleaning (OK, that’s anti-intellectual), having a tutoring session and using all the faculties I possessed to fend off various small creatures intent on driving a food bearer away from their home.  I’m tired.

But.  Boy, I’d rather have this kind of exhaustion in my life than be sagging toward 75 with a remote in one hand and my putter in the other.  So to speak.

From a gardening perspective this is a time when the sun and the greening and the weeds returning make working outside seem very attractive, but it’s still about a month early.  Even the early veggies normally don’t go in the ground until the first of April or even a bit later.  The birds sing, the sun shines, the moist air smells of soil and the bees sting.

The Grout Doctor has replaced the tiles that had become loose over the shower door.  Now he has to seal the grout once, then come back and seal it one more time.  At some point in here the new door gets installed and then I can get back to my steam baths after my work out.  I’ll be glad to have it functional again.

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, permaculture

OUCH!

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Imbolc                                      New Moon (Awakening)

A virgin no more.  I went the whole last season without a single bee sting.  Today, when I brought food out to the hive, so they have something to eat until there are blossoms, I got stung.  Twice.  On the face and neck.  OUCH.  With the first one I forgot the wisdom from the weekend, threw up my hands, let loose with a few poorly chosen words and danced like ol’ St. Vitus.  The second came after I suited up and discovered that I had enclosed a bee inside my veil.  She was unhappy and it cost her.  When honeybees sting, their abdomen comes out along with the stinger.  So they die.

I’m glad it’s finally happened.  No more suspense.  I didn’t die, so I imagine I’ll react better next time.  Maybe.

While I was out there, I cleared the mulch from the garlic.  They like this kind of cool, wet weather.  We have daffodils breaking the surface.  Unfortunately, our magnolia tree thinks it’s mid-April.  That’s not good for its blooms.

The Awakening moon finds our land here doing just that.

Here’s something I’m playing around with.  I think there’s a difference between living on the land and living with the land.  To live on the land means we place our house there, perhaps a swing set, grass, maybe even a few flowers and trees, but our daily life happens on the land or in our dwelling.  To live with the land means some engagement with your land’s seasonal changes.  There’s something here I think.

Woolly Mammoths

Supper at Frank’s House

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Imbolc                                               New Moon (Awakening)

Tonight we sat around Frank’s long table, a green shamrock table cloth decorating its top, a pot of shamrocks in the middle, on it platters of corned beef, bowls of mashed potatoes and cabbage and soda bread in saucers.

Instead of our usual Irish related conversation we turned to a difficult topic.  A person known to several of us and close to one of us has been charged with murder.  The circumstances are not clear at this point, but it seems he had a fist fight with a much bigger guy and as a result of the fight the other guy died.

This is not the usual Woolly territory though we have children and friends who have stumbled badly with drugs and alcohol, even two instances of gang related activity, but murder enters a whole new realm.  This is a saga that has just begun.  He is in jail and the family has sought a defense attorney but not settled on one  yet.  A tragedy on many levels.

Afterward we discussed topics ranging from female mutilation to how to avoid urinary leakage, a common older male problem.  Mostly though we laughed and enjoyed each others company.  The extraordinary thing about the Woollies is how the ordinary becomes extraordinary.