Monthly Archives: June 2010

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Minnesota, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Politics, Writing

The Sublime Gift

Leave a comment

Beltane                                       Waning Planting Moon

” Life can’t bring you the sublime gift it has for you until you interrupt your pursuit of a mediocre gift.”

Woolly brother Tom Crane sent this to me.  It took me back to my recent post about Siah Armajani and his personal commitment to staying within his skill set.  When I worked for the church in the now long ago past, I had a boss, Bob Lucas, a good man, who had several sayings he used a lot.  One of them was also similar in spirit, “Don’t major in the minors.”

Stop focusing on the small things you might be able to do well to the exclusion of being challenged by the prajaparmita400serious, important matters.  Stop your pursuit of a mediocre gift.   The tendency to judge our worth by the accumulation of things–a he who dies with the best toys wins mentality–presses us to pursue money or status, power, with all of our gifts.  You may be lucky enough, as Kate is, to use your gifts in a pursuit that also makes decent money; on the other hand if  your work life and your heart life don’t match up, you risk spending your valuable work time and energy in pursuit of a mediocre gift, hiding the sublime one from view.

This is not an affair without risk.  Twenty years ago I shifted from the ministry which had grown cramped and hypocritical for me to what I thought was my sublime gift, writing.  At least from the perspective of public recognition I have to say it has not manifested itself as my sublime gift.  Instead, it allowed me to push away from the confinement of Christian thought and faith.  A gift in itself for me.  The move away from the ministry also opened a space for what I hunch may be my sublime gift, an intense engagement with the world of plants and animals.

This is the world of the yellow and black garden spider my mother and I watched out our kitchen window over 50+ years ago.  It is the world of flowers and vegetables, soil and trees, dogs and bees, the great wheel and the great work.  It is a world bounded not by political borders but connected through the movement of weather, the migration of the birds and the Monarch butterflies.  It is a world that appears here, on our property, as a particular instance of a global network, the interwoven, interlaced, interdependent web of life and its everyday contact with the its necessary partner, the inanimate.

So, you see, the real message is stop pursuit of the mediocre gift.  After that, the sublime gift life has to offer may then begin to pursue you.

Art and Culture

And some more misc.

Leave a comment

Beltane                                    Waning Planting Moon

A fine tribute to Michele Yates.  Merritt did a tour of various galleries and played music appropriate to the era.  Plain chant in the medieval and renaissance gallery, madrigals and recorder music in the Tudor Room, a movement from a Mozart concerto next to Ganymede and the Eagle, romantic music by Mendelssohn  in the large gallery with Theseus and the Centaur, Delacroix’s Fanatics of Tangiers and Silenus, ending with Debussy in the impressionist gallery.

Merritt is a musicologist by profession, now retired, and has a keen appreciation for the interplay between the musical and visual arts.

Today’s a bit fragmented in that I took my nap at 11:00 am.  Now I’m going to go work on some more Ovid.

General

Misc.

Leave a comment

Beltane                          Waning Planting Moon

A quick grocery run.  I do two kind of trips to the grocery store.  One is an urgent care run which picks up items which we need NOW.  The other is a more leisurely and comprehensive trip designed to get food for specific recipes, stock up on things like milk, cereal, vegetables and fruit.  This was an urgent care trip.

All the while I’m listening to lecture 72 out of an 84 lecture course on Great Minds of the Western Tradition. This is all ground I’ve covered before, but this course presents it from a different angle.  Today the lecture was about structuralism, a vastly influential thought system that originated in the work of a pioneering linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, and received elaboration from a name more familiar to me, Claude Levi Strauss, an anthropologist.

At 1 pm we have a tour honoring Michele Yates, our departing buddy from docent class 2005.  It’s also an event for the docent discussion group.

Aging, Bees, Family, Humanities

Bees, Latin and Learning

Leave a comment

Beltane                                       Waning Planting Moon

A sleepy, rainy day.  After a very busy Monday, I settled into the Latin and finished off chapter 18 in Wheelock.  It took most of the day with a couple of instances (well, maybe more than a couple) of head scratching and paging back and forth to find out what I was not understanding.

Kate and I have settled into our familiar and comfortable routines.  She went out today to have her nails done while I labored in the scriptorium.

Tonight is the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers Association meeting at Borlaug Hall.  I feel both mildly competent and wildly confused with both the beekeeping and the Latin.  I’ve now overwintered a package of bees, made a divide into parent and child colonies and hived a package of bees by myself.  The smoker stays lit for the duration of my work in the bee yard and I have not repeated my various stings event.

Yet.  When I pulled the frames from the parent colony and moved one to the package colony and one to the divide, I felt very unsure of what I had done.  Still am.  I look at the frames and I can tell the pollen filled cells from the honey filled cells.  I know what larvae look like and I can identify a drone cell and its unique domed structure.  Queen or swarm cells are also apparent to me.  Even so, I cannot tell healthy frames from troubled ones.

I get addled about what I’m doing because of the bees buzzing around and forget what I’ve done like I did yesterday with the reverse of the parent colony.  I have no clue about what to do with the honey the bees are making, I’m just imagining that I’ll learn about that in time to do it.

In the Latin I miss obvious things and pick up on some obscure ones like word meanings, verb forms and case endings for nouns and adjectives.  I have two index cards filled with words, mostly adverbs and conjunctions, that I can’t remember.   I puzzle over a translation, no luck, no luck, no luck, then a bright light.  Ah ha.

Learning has this daunting vulnerability to it.  Without placing yourself in a situation where you don’t know what you’re your doing, you cannot learn.  It keeps a guy humble that’s for sure.

Woolly Mammoths

The Patio of the Schwarzwald

Leave a comment

Beltane                                        Waning Planting Moon

The Woolly brethren gathered yet again at the Black Forest, sitting outside near the fountain with the metal sculpture, a twisted geometric of aluminum.  Warren, Frank just back from Ireland, Bill, Paul, Tom, Stefan and myself shared the stories and the shorthand that comes from having been together for so long.

When Tom and Paul ordered Erdingers beer, we had a laugh about the restaurant with a rock, a very large rock, in a conspicuous location near the entrance.   We discovered this restaurant, this rock and Erdinger’s beer in Hot Springs, South Dakota during our pilgrimage to the Woolly Mammoth site there.  It seems the rock just wouldn’t give way to the folks building the restaurant, so they said the hell with it and built the hotel and restaurant around the rock, leaving about four feet or so of rock exposed through the floor.

Paul has experienced, so far, positive results from his iron chelation and looks appreciably better.  Stefan recounted stories from his trip to Arizona to see Taylor and announced that he and Lonnie have purchased or in the process of purchasing land in Peru.  Frank had a good trip to Ireland, all but one day without rain, which is unusual.  Warren and I talked about his articles on the GAMC mess which has all but defunded health care for the poorest of the poor in Minnesota.

What was it Humphrey said?  You can tell the quality of a society by how it deals with the most disadvantaged?

This gathering of the clan keeps our friendships and our bonds alive.  It is important, even essential to our ongoing health as a group.

Bees

Bee Diary: June 7, 2010

Leave a comment

05-31-10_colony1Beltane                                           Waning Planting Moon

Hive inspections today.  Looking to see how the bees are using the other two honey supers I put on last week, now a total of four.  They have two almost full, but they have not begun to draw out much comb on the two with bare foundation.  At least not yet.  I did another reversal of the hive boxes–at least I think I did, the bees got pretty mad about the time for the reversal and I couldn’t recall afterwards if I’d switched the boxes or not.

Novices leap ahead where veterans fear to tread.  In the bee newsletter from the MN. Hobby Beekeepers Assoc. this month, Gary Reuter of the U Bee lab recommended taking frames out of a bustling parent colony, one per hive box and putting them in a divide or a package colony.  The divide, if you recall, is the hive box I moved from the parent colony late in April.  It received a new queen, a marked Mn. Hygienic.  I’ve not seen her, but I have seen brood.  The package colony is the one growing from the two-pound package of bees I got in mid-April.

There is, of course, a possible major problem with this maneuver.  What if you take the queen from the parent colony over to the new colony?  So, I decided that careful observation would take care of that.  I scanned both frames and tried to do it in an organized fashion, looking for a longer, more slender bee with her abdominal end deposited in a cell.  Didn’t see any.  Of course, as I learned long ago in philosophy, you can’t prove a negative, so all I can say for sure is that I did not see her.  If I was wrong, I guess I’ll know next week.

The divide and the package colonies have made progress since last week.  I decided to put another hive box on the package colony so all three now have two hive boxes.  The parent remains the only one with honey supers.  If the divide kicks into gear as the nectar flow starts (I’m not exactly sure what that is, but it’s good and a big deal and supposed to be happening about now this year.)  The goal for both the divide and the package colony is to have three hive boxes before winter with enough honey stored to feed the colony until the spring.

That’s what my current parent colony did, so I have evidence that it can be done.  It seems to me they’re both on track to get that much done and I would be surprised if I didn’t get some honey from the divide.

No stings.  I’m moving slower now and have mastered the art of keeping the smoker going for the length of time I’m working in the bee yard.  The package colony needed another bucket of syrup, but the pollen patty was fine.

I closed them all up, took off the bee suit, put my hive tool and smoker away and came in the house to make these notes.

Dogs, Family, Garden

Falling Behind

Leave a comment

Beltane                                    Waning Planting Moon

Life seems lighter now with Kate at home.  Shared life is so much easier than solo, at least I find it so.

Kate made oatmeal this morning and I went out to the garden and picked fresh strawberries.  A delight to have with our cereal.  Also a delight to have a partner at the table, a fellow reader of the paper.  Good.

Spent some time weeding this morning.  The whole package of the vegetable garden, the bees and our large perennial beds has gotten ahead of me, especially the perennial beds.  I had to repair all the damage Rigel and Vega did to the vegetable garden last fall, then plant the garden, then plant much of it again after the frost.  There was also some residual damage to the netaphim in the orchard and the vegetable garden that had to get fixed.

(on the other hand, it could be worse. we could have kudzu.)

The warm spring has put the bees and many of the plants 2 to 3 weeks ahead of time which has meant extra work with the bees (with potentially productive long term results) and good weed growing weather for the perennial beds.

In many ways it’s all good news except the aesthetic side of our property has definitely suffered.  Still, I’ll get ahead of it sometime in the next couple of weeks.  Then, I have to prune those shrubs that have reduced our front sidewalk to half its normal size.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Family

Love’s Fatal Flaw

Leave a comment

Beltane                                            Waning Planting Moon

When I punched Delta 2406 into Google, it delivered a website called Flight Status.  On Flight Status I could watch the progress of Kate’s flight from San Francisco as she moved across Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota and into Minnesota.  I looked over at the computer occasionally as I worked in Chapter 18 of Wheelock:  passive voice and the ablative of agent.  It seemed natural to me to go from ancient Rome to a computer tracing the flight path of a jet traveling 595 mph.

The term soulmate may not make sense to me metaphysically and I am an existentialist at heart–we die alone, we live alone–however I know my life is not complete without Kate.  Over time and with much love our lives have intertwined, her presence, her physical presence is important to me and to my well-being.

I’m a little afraid to admit that, in part to myself.  What if she dies?  Well, she will.  And so will I.  Also, I don’t want to seem so needy that I require another person to complete myself.  And I don’t.  Yet Kate makes the house full.  Talking and crying with her about Emma made the whole sad thing real and bearable.

Here is the paradox of love.  To love we need to be vulnerable, to open ourselves and let another person assume a critical and necessary place in our life, yet life itself has an end.  In this sense, I suppose, each love is a tragedy, that is, it has a literally fatal flaw.

She’s back and I’m glad.

Bees, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality

Tincture of Time

Leave a comment

Beltane                                     Waning Planting Moon

Bee work inside.  Kate finished several honey supers and three hive boxes plus frames before she left.  I didn’t know how many I would need in her absence.  All but one of the honey supers now have foundations.  I ran out of foundations and will have to order more.  All the hive box frames have foundations and I have added one new hive box and two honey supers in the time she’s been gone.  This Monday I may have to add one more hive box.

Feeling better now, tincture of time as Kate likes to say.

All the dogs are in bed and I’m headed up to read some more in the Three Kingdoms.  Night.