Monthly Archives: June 2010

Asia, Cinema and Television, Family, Humanities, Literature, Weather +Climate, World History

Still Reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms

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Summer                                   Waxing Strawberry Moon

Hot today.  At least by our standards.  85.  Plus a dewpoint of 70.  Not outside weather for this gardener.  I did work outside this morning, weeding in the orchard and checking the trees.  I’m going to need a consultation with Ecological Gardens because some of the stuff they planted, I don’t recognize and I don’t want to remove friendlies out of ignorance.

Kate’s off getting a pre-op physical, having dental work done and nails and hair.  A sort of clean up, paint up, fix up day for her.  Her surgery is a week from tomorrow and can’t come a day too soon for her.  The pain in her hip gives her fits during the day when she walks and at night when she sleeps.  She looks forward to having more than two sleeping positions.  So would I.

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms has held me for several weeks now, though I’m not reading in large chunks.  It’s a three-volume work about the end of the Han Dynasty and the emergence of the three kingdoms of Wu, Wei and Shu.  This period only last for about 45 years, but it holds a position of particular importance in Chinese culture, with many of its figures like Liu Bei, Cao Cao, Zhuge Liang and the three brothers:  Guan Yu, Zhang Fei and Liu Bei attaining iconic and archetypal significance.

(Liu Bei, Zhang Fei and Guan Yu)

It’s not an exact analogy at all, but it resembles the mythos of the American West, a time when men were men and some men were very good and others were very bad.

If you enjoy political and military tales or have an interest in the logic of other cultures, then the Three Kingdoms may enthrall you as it has me.  If you’re not sure, I recommend seeing the Red Cliffs, the two disc version.  The movie showcases all the main characters and records a pivotal battle, one that has ongoing importance in Chinese culture.  Not to mention that it’s great fun.  Again, if political and military intrigue fascinate you.

Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Great Work, Humanities, Politics

Cultural Relativism

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Summer                                 Waxing Strawberry Moon

“The trouble with life isn’t that there is no answer, it’s that there are so many answers.” – Ruth Benedict

Long ago, back in the Paleozoic 1960’s I majored in anthropology.  Anthropology taught me a lot, shaped my view of the world.  In anthropology, long before it became fashionable enough to merit bashing on the then non-existent Fox News Network, multi-culturalism was an everyday conversation.  Ruth Benedict, herself an early anthropologist and student of Franz Boas, the father of anthropology reflects just that sensibility in this quote.

Anthropologist’s developed the idea of cultural relativism and it was and is crucial to anthropology as a discipline.  Anthropologists do field work using the participant observer method, which involves immersing oneself in the cultural of another, then writing about it.  Boas and the early anthropologists, among them Margaret Meade, had to undergo psychoanalysis as a preliminary to field work.  This was to enable the field worker to grasp, as best he or she could, the difference between something they brought to the interaction and the actual expression of a different worldview.

Cultural relativism meant that much as we might like to believe otherwise (manifest destiny, Hail Britannia) one culture’s solution to the way of surviving and flourishing is as valid as any others.  This is the core idea behind multi-culturalism, not merely a liberal tolerance of difference, but suspension of our own values and beliefs in order to accord respect to the other.

Does this have problems?  Yes, it does.   Critics like Alasdair MacIntyre in his book, After Virtue, say it represents an essential of Modernism, that is, ethical relativism.  MacIntyre suggests we consider Hitler’s Nazi party or, I suppose, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.  Using the notion of cultural relativism are we not bound to honor their horrific outcomes?

Academics often get caught in the absolutizing of their notions.  It’s either cultural relativism or a solid tradition, like the Thomistic Catholicism that MacIntyre puts forward.  In fact, I think these are more tendencies, ways we lean when assessing data.  Cultural relativism and the thinner soup of multi-culturalism are an inoculant, a vaccine against imperialism, against the unthinking imposition of a more powerful culture on a weaker one.

Tradition, on the other hand, seems an inescapable and therefore most likely necessary ingredient of the human lived experience.  Within in it we learn how to behave as an American, a Vietnamese, a Hmong, a Trobriand Islander.  We come to assume that the tradition and the culture in which we are raised is normative, and, in fact, it is normative in the vast majority of situations which we encounter.  It is when we cross cultures or traditions that questions arise that we may not have considered.

Who says democracy  is the only acceptable form of government?  Who says individual rights always come before the needs of the tribe or the state?  Who says marriage between homosexual couples is wrong, ipso facto?  Who says circumcision is critical?  Who says we cannot execute anybody we want to by firing squad, lethal injection or the electric chair?

It occurs to me that cultural relativism is a necessary defense against the arrogance of power, just as tradition is a defense against the moral relativism that a global perspective seems to require.  To position these two powerful aspects of human life, culture and tradition, against each other goes too far.  Instead, we need to learn the lesson each has to teach us and apply them both with humility and care.

NB:  Back to Hitler and Pol Pot.  We do not need to accept their violent prejudice as normative even under the notion of cultural relativism. What is necessary in those cases is to go within the culture of Germany and Cambodia, to mine their traditions and to critique them from within their worldviews.  It can be done and can easily be shown to be possible.  Then, we respect culture and yet have an avenue for expression of our deeply held values in a different cultural idiom.

Aging, Friends, Garden, Humanities, Minnesota, Our Land and Home, Woolly Mammoths

Into the City

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Summer Solstice                                   Waxing Strawberry Moon

The Woollies gathered tonight at Charlie Haislet’s place in the Rock Island condos, just north and a bit east of downtown.  We gathered, our numbers shrunk by various summer activities to:  Charlie, Warren, Frank, Scott, Bill, Mark and myself.  The conversation went on as it does, checking in on how folks are, what’s going on, but Charlie turned the conversation toward Father’s day.  It seemed to  me, as I listened, that we have all rooted ourselves in family, our nuclear and extended families, and, further, that as we have grown older, those connections have grown richer and deeper, occupying the central spot in each of our lives that the voice of tradition has suggested they might.

Charlie’s 7th floor (top) condo overlooked downtown; the waxing strawberry moon hung over the glass and stone cityscape, the dying sun reflecting in the mirrored surfaces of the IDS, the Northwest Building and all the modernist architecture there.  I’ve been critical of it as lacking flair and imagination, but tonight, a clear warm summer night, the reflections and the twilight, then the advance of night and the reflections of lights was glorious.  It looked like Oz, as I think of it when I turn on Hwy 610 heading south and see it far away, maybe 15-20 miles.

Before the meeting, I arrived a little early and took advantage of the time to walk through the neighborhood, a now populous community that is no more than 20 years old.  There was a couple with a young boy in a stroller and a dog, a young man with his white shirt half out, tie askew with his dog, a couple with a puppy, all walking, off work and at home.  The buildings were brick, a few old, like the Rock Island and The Creamette, but many new.

Some had iron barred and locked fence doors protecting patios which anyone could easily vault onto from the railing.  There were signs: no walking on the grass, dog waste here, guest parking only, towing $260.00.  The green space that existed had a manicured and distant feel, as if its purpose was to recall, to remind rather thanto be.  The windows had blinds and shutters; thanks to air conditioning almost none were open, so the few people I encountered while walking were all I could see other than tailored walls and well hung windows, the odd bit of decor.  It felt, not empty, but not lively either.

Putting myself there as a resident, I tried to decide if this would work for me.  It has the advantage of being near to the main library, downtown, the shopping around University and Hennepin, the Mississippi and its parks.  There would be neighbors aplenty and the urban feel has a certain up energy to it.

These days, though, when many folks I know have moved or want to move from the burbs into the city, I’d have to say I surprised myself.  It felt too confining, too many neighbors, too many shared walls, too many signs and restrictions.  Too little room to plant, to have dogs run, to exercise a horticultural or apicultural inclination.  It surprised me because I consider myself a city boy, wedded to political work and aesthetic work that require the urban environment for their realization.

I’ve changed.  I’m now an exurban man, grown used to the quiet here, the open space, the land on which we can grow vegetables and flowers, have a bee yard, a honey house and a separate play house for the grandkids.  When I drive by Round Lake, I’ve come home.

Aging, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story

Summer. It’s About Time.

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Summer Solstice                                      Waxing Strawberry Moon

 

The longest day of the year.  Light triumphant, streaming, steaming.  The darkness held at bay.

Summer Solstice

This is an astronomical phenomenon transformed and translated into a spiritual one.  We humans have over millennia taken solstice and equinox alike as moments out of time, a sacred caesura when we could review our life, our path as the Great Wheel turns and turns and turns once again.

The Celts first divided their year into two:  Beltane, the beginning of summer, and Samhain, literally summer’s end.  As their faith tradition developed, they added in both solstices and equinoxes.  Since Beltane and Samhain occurred between the spring equinox and the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice respectively, they became known as cross-quarter holidays.  Imbolc and Lughnasa filled in the other two cross-quarter spots.

It is the eight holidays, the four astronomical ones and the four cross-quarter, that make up the Great Wheel.  In the most straight forward sense the Great Wheel emphasizes cyclical time as opposed to linear or chronological time.  This seems odd to those of us raised in the chronological tradition influenced by Jewish and Christian thought in which there is an end time.  With an end to time the obvious influence on our perception of time is that we progress through the days until they become years, which become millennia until the Day of the Lord or that great risin’ up mornin’ when the dead live and time comes to a stop.

That this is an interpretation rather than a fact rarely crosses the mind of people raised on birthdays, anniversaries, celebrations of one year as it comes followed by the next.  Our historical disciplines from history itself to the history of ideas, art history, even geology and the theory of evolution all reinforce the essentially religious notion of time as a river flowing in one direction, emptying eventually into an unknown sea which will contain and end the river.

Immanuel Kant, in attempting to reconcile the dueling metaphysics of two apparently contradictory philosophical schools (rationalists and empiricists), hit on the notion of time and space as a priori’s, in a sense mental hardwiring that allows us to perceive, but is not inherent in the nature of reality.  That is, we bring space and time to the table when we begin ordering our chaotic sense impressions.  My interest in the Great Wheel and in the traditional faith of my genetic ancestors came in part from a long standing fascination with the question of time.  We are never in yesterday or tomorrow, we are always in now.  What is time?  What is its nature and its correct interpretation relative to the question of chronological versus cyclical time?

I have not settled these questions, not even in my own mind, and they continue to be live topics in philosophy.  Learning to pay attention to the Great Wheel, to the now, and to the specific place where I live has pushed me toward the cyclical view, as has gardening and now the keeping of bees.  It is, today, the Summer Solstice.  Again.  As it was the last time the earth visited this location in space (ah, yes, space.  another conversation which we’ll bracket for now) and as it will be the next time.  This is a literally cyclical view of time based on the earth’s orbit around the sun, one which returns us, over and over to much the same spot.

Next summer when the solstice arrives the asiatic lilies will be ready to bloom, Americans will be getting ready to celebrate the fourth of July and kids will be out of school.  The mosquitoes will have hatched, the loons returned and basketball will finally be over.  These kind of phenological observations depend on the repetitive, cyclical character of natural events.  There is a real sense in which this time does not move forward at all, rather it exists in a state of eternal return, one solstice will find itself happening again a year later.  Is there any progress, from the perspective of the solstice, from one to the next?  Not in my opinion.

I don’t deny the intellectual value of arranging knowledge in what appears to be a rational sequence. It aids learning and explanation, but it may well be a mistake to think that sequence exists outside our mental need for it.  It may just be that time is, in some sense, an illusion, a useful one to be sure, but an illusion none the less.

Even if it is, we still will have the Summer Solstice and its celebration of light.  We will still have the Winter Solstice and its celebration of the dark.  We can see each year not as one damned thing after another, but as a movement from the light into the dark and back out again.  We can see the year as a period of fallowness and cold (here in the temperate latitudes) followed by a period of fertility and abundance.  This is the Great Wheel and it currently makes the most sense to me.  That’s the light I have today anyhow.  Let’s talk next year at this time.

Aging, Family, Garden, Humanities

Catching Up

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Summer’s Eve                                  Waxing Strawberry Moon

More weeding along the fenceline.  It feels like I’ve beaten back both the weeds and revealed the now minimal amount of repair still required to bring the vegetable garden area back to where it began last fall.  I planted another round of beans, doing so at weekly intervals.  Took some photographs.  A full morning.

Having put on sunscreen first today I don’t have that slightly queasy feel I got yesterday.  Us Celts have a delicate situation when it comes to sun.  We have fair skin and burn easily.  Might be why I’ve never liked the beach.

Kate planted coleus and marigolds, did some weeding and put in some annual grasses.  All of this work is a little behind for us, but we’ve begun to catch up in the last few days.  I believe we’ll be on top of it by the end of the week.

Greg, my Latin tutor, is in Portugal the next two weeks with his sweetheart, so the Latin will slow down.  We decided I needed to go back over the last two chapter’s sententia antiquae, ancient sentences, and work them carefully.  If I have time, I’ll go on to Chapter 20 which is, in fact, halfway through Wheelock’s 40 chapters.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Memories

Ordinary Stuff

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Beltane                                       Waxing Strawberry Moon

The half Strawberry moon hangs just above the basswoods in our woods.  The night has a velvet texture, not the Elvis portrait kind but the backing for a stunning diamond necklace kind.  The moon lays upon it as a gem of unique character, instead of fire it has a subtle glow, a depth that promises mystery.  As it always is here at this time on night, it is quiet.  Solitary.  Right now it’s just the moon and our house floating along on a dark, silent river.

Somehow melancholy can be transformed now, as if the inner and the outer merge for a moment and the ache dissolves, only a small blackness measured against space.

A friend from long ago, the Alexandria days, wrote on facebook that he had had a tumor removed from his bladder.  His sister-in-law wrote to say she loved him.  I got a quick jolt of time having passed, so much time.  We were high school buddies when I left and now he’s an aging baby boomer like me with health problems and a family that loves him.

This is ordinary stuff, yes.  But it has history, breadth, too, for Larry and I know many of the same people, grew up with them, played little league and sat through 5th grade with Mrs. Craig and listened to Hit the Road, Jack on the high school public address system.

We remember when Alexandria had a thriving downtown, a strong sense of itself, a small town with muscle.  Now it has and has had for a long time, a wasting disease.  Empty storefronts.  Chain businesses on the edge of town with big box architecture and big city charm.  Ferguson’s, a women’s clothing store, is gone.  So is Baumgartners for men.  There was a moment when Alexandria had two movie theaters and plenty of patrons.  We all remember it.

The place where the child has played can never be recovered or repeated, only remembered.  It was there, for me, in that little town, with all those others.  My friends.

Garden, permaculture

The Garden Today

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Beltane                            Waxing Strawberry Moon

This year’s garlic harvest hangs in the honey house to dry before coming inside.  It was a good year for the garlic with enough large bulbs that I will again plant my own 06-20-10_garden_6705garlic in August.  Over time the plants become acclimated to this particular place, its moisture rhythms and temperature variations.  It is becoming what it is because of where it is.  Just like me.

Another over wintered crop, parsnips, also came up today, at least part of them.  Nice big parsnips.  I also picked some volunteer mustard greens and a bok choy that looked good.

The rest of the morning I joined Kate in weeding, clearing out first the raised beds (not too bad) and after that along the fence rows (not too good).  I still have a few areas to repair from the canine depredation last fall, but much fewer than when the year began.

The leeks, onions, sugar snaps, potatoes, chard, kale, spinach, carrots, radicchio, beets, tomatoes, bell peppers and fennel also look good, but they all have a ways to go.   By the Woolly meeting we should have honey, too.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Minnesota, Politics

Minnesota: Where We Are

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Beltane                                   Waxing Strawberry Moon

Had another bowl of strawberries fresh from the patch, grown under the Strawberry Moon.  There’s something special about food that comes from your own land, nurtured by your own hands, a something special beyond the nutritional and taste benefits.  It relates to be who you are because of where you are.  We’re a Seven Oaks family and you can’t be a Seven Oaks family if you live in Ohio.

I had another frisson of this yesterday when I sat in the Minnesota Environmental Partnership offices and looked across the conference table to a black and white photograph of a boundary waters lake.  Since I shifted my political work to the environmental and away from the economic four years ago, I have sat in meeting after meeting (the unglamorous fact of political life) dedicated to making this state’s overall environment better in some way.  Seeing that photograph as we discussed initiatives for energy in Minnesota, the context for our work snapped into place.

We’re talking about our home, this place, the place where we are who we are because we are here.  You could say a gestalt of the work gelled.

Been a little down since yesterday’s stop by the policeman.  It embarrasses me, as it is supposed to do, and calls the rest of my life into question, which it is not.  Then, my Latin tutoring session today found me floundering, wondering where my mind had been when the rest of me engaged this week’s translation from English to Latin.  Mix it up with the fact that I missed my nap yesterday and my exercise.  Result:  glum. In spite of the sun.

So. Exercise now.  It always makes me feel better.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work

We are who we are because of where we are

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Beltane                               Waxing Strawberry Moon

Among the many heart-rending stories related to the Gulf oil spill is one I heard on the radio yesterday.

“We are who we are because of where we are.   We are Grand Bayou people, and you can’t be a Grand Bayou person if you’re living in Ohio. Grand Bayou for us is our place in the universe. This is where since time began the Creator saw fit to set our feet here. And we’re going to do whatever we have to do to remain,” Phillipe says.

There is, for me, a very important clue here about the Great Work.  I haven’t mentioned the Great Work in awhile, so here’s a thumbnail.  The notion comes from a book by Thomas Berry, The Great Work.  He posits that each culture and era has a Great Work.  Ours, he says, is managing the transition from a malign to a benign human presence on the earth.

Back to the Grand Bayou.  We are who we are because of where we are.  To a nation built on mobility, picking up stakes and moving the family in search of the American Dream, a heritage, in part at least, of our boat people  past, Rosina Phillipe’s description of the Atakapa-Ishak people, her small tribe that lives on the Grand Bayou, has little meaning.  We are who we are because of our work, the things we do, perhaps our family, but definitely not because of where we are.  Because we could be somewhere else tomorrow.

This has fed a growing disconnect between Americans and the land, between Americans and feral nature (as opposed to the domestic nature composed of our built environment and our managed landscapes and farms) an urban and technology reinforced disconnect that makes us not so much insensitive as inured to  feral nature so that all the waters and minerals and trees and mountains become a source of raw materials, an obstacle to progress or a distant theme park filled with exotic animals and plants.

This separation, alienation really, from feral nature makes it difficult for us to imagine an identity tied up with place, especially a place defined by feral nature and not our concrete, glass and lighted enclosures.  In that alienation lies the true barrier to the Great Work, we have much less actual awareness of the earth than we imagine.  With little awareness of feral nature we have trouble grasping our current malign relationship to the earth and with little insight into it we will be forever unable to foresee a benign relationship.

What we cannot see and what we cannot imagine cannot come to be.

What to do?  The Grand Bayou folks have a way.  Some of us can become who we are because of where we are.  We can let the rhythms of our local feral nature guide us to an understanding of the fate of mother earth.  We can subject ourselves to the demands of the soil while we grow food.*  We can orient ourselves to the lives of feral animals, even hunting puts us closer to mother earth than potted plants on our balcony overlooking downtown.  We can dig into the natural history of our home, learning about the three biomes, say, of Minnesota:  The Big Woods, the Great Plains and the Boreal Woods.  We can spend time in them, listening to them, learning their language.

We can reexamine the American Dream. We can ask if our perceived rootlessness (I say perceived because recent demographic studies suggest we may be slowing down, in part because of the recession) is necessary.  What if, instead, we saw ourselves as citizens of watersheds?  Of local ecological systems?  What if we began to eat food grown or raised close to our own home?  At least some of us might begin to follow the Atakapa-Ishak way and become who we because of where we are.

Then, the Great Work will follow naturally.

*This may seem like a contradiction to my inclusion of farming and managed landscapes in domestic nature, but it is not.  While we grow according to the demands of our soil, not necessarily organic, but with an eye to integrated pest management, regular amendment of the soil with organic matter and growing vegetables, fruits and flowers native to your area and gardening zone, we have to listen to the land as it speaks to us.  What makes it richer, more fertile?  What do I need to do to live with and in touch with the place where I garden?  This is very different from industrial agriculture with round-up ready crops, annually tilled fields and heavy does of chemical fertilizers.

Asia, Weather +Climate

Well, You See, Officer…

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Beltane                                   Waxing Strawberry Moon

Every once in a while the universe reaches out and shakes you a bit.  Just to make sure you’re paying attention.  In this case the universe came into my life via a Roseville policeman who pulled me over for a passing violation.  I was guilty, guilty, guilty.  Here’s the message from the universe:  Slow down, take a breath, get there when you get there.

As a German influenced guy, punctuality is important to me, perhaps too important.  In my desire to make it to a meeting when road construction had already made being on time unlikely I passed a woman on Rice Street by going out in the turning lane.  It had a clear yellow stripe and under normal circumstances I would never done anything quite that stupid. But I wanted to get there on time.

“In a hurry this morning?”  The nice man in blue asked.  Yep.

Oops.

After that further delay, I spent the morning at the Minnesota Environmental Partnership in a brainstorming meeting about energy policy issues for the upcoming elections and legislature.  I had volunteered to fill in for Margaret Levin, executive director of the Northstar chapter of the Sierra Club, so some of it went over my head, but it was fun to sit with a bunch of very bright people sifting through routes to a sustainable energy future.

When that meeting finished at noon, I drove (sedately) over to Minneapolis to the Rainbow Chinese restaurant on Nicollet and had lunch with several docent colleagues.  That was a definite switch in tone, though it was still a group of bright folks.  After lunch we all went over to the Art Institute for a lecture on the Matteo Ricci map of the world recently purchased by the James Ford Bell museum at the University of Minnesota.

Now I’m home blogging for the Star-Tribune as a parade of thunder storms march across our area.