Monthly Archives: July 2010

Art and Culture

The Butterfly Maiden

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Summer                                            Waxing Grandchildren Moon

Once again I have a spotlight on the Kachina, Butterfly Maiden, and an Anishinabe to Zapotec tour.  It went well last time and I hope I get some takers again today.  Roy Wolf may show up with friends to see the Matteo Ricci map.  It’s up until August 29th, then it moves to the James Ford Bell Museum at the University of Minnesota.

Still at about dull normal energy wise, but gaining.  Kate and I plan to attend a blue-grass concert at Andover Station tonight.  I want to use some of the time freed up from Latin’s intensity to do things with her.

Gotta get dressed.  Bye.

Asia, Faith and Spirituality

How We Discover Who We Are

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Summer                                         Waxing Grandchildren Moon

Sl-o-w-i-n-g dowwwnn.  Ah. Life returns in the emptiness.  Doing gives us fuel, puts us in life, covers our lives with experience, action, momentum.  Without doing we would not live, not be different from the rock in the garden.  But.  Without emptiness, without ceasing from action, from planning, from expecting, from measuring ourselves against markers important only to us or, worse, to others, we will not see the experience, we will not see where our all our momentum and flurry takes us, we will have no way to tell the movement of heaven.

On a blog about Taoism I read that Taoism says the universe is our body and the tao of the universe our nature.  I don’t know if this accurately reflects taoism–so much I birthplace-of-starsdon’t know–but no matter, it does speak a truth, at least a truth that speaks to me, to my journey.  This Hubble telescope photo of the birthplace of the stars–Star-Birth Clouds in M16: Stellar “Eggs” Emerge from Molecular Cloud–is our own fertile womb, our own site of elemental fecundity, our own inner world changing and becoming the outer reality, the 10,000 things.  Fertility lies at the heart of our nature, then, and we need not worry for our nature will see us born and reborn, this time as queens, that time as infant stars, the next time as stellar dust.

Our purpose as humans lies not in the doing, but in the opening of ourselves to wonder, to the awesome majesty of our nature, letting it guide our being and our doing.  How?  By being still, by sitting in emptiness, by slowing down, by waiting, by humbly accepting the matters and tasks that come to us.

The doorway and the window, the room and the tea cup are all useful because they are empty.  To discover our own way we need to become empty like the room in which we sit, the doorway through which we move, the tea cup from which we drink.

This lesson has come, or should I say, comes, to me with some difficulty, born a man, a white man of privilege, a man of whom things are expected, for whom life has a path governed not by my nature but by accident of birth. Note that in this I differ from no one.  Each of us has a life path laid down by the circumstances of our family, the particularities of our person, the exigencies of our time, yet this path is not the way, it is not our way.  Our way lies in waiting upon our body, the whole universe, to reveal our nature, the nature of the whole universe, to us.  Then our life will unfold as a flower in the spring sun.

Aging, Family, GeekWorld, Health, Politics

Leviathan

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Summer                             Waxing Grandchildren Moon

I decided to take a month off from Latin tutorials.  Not from Latin, just the every week preparation of a new chapter.  I need to cement my learnings about verb conjugations, pronouns and certain uses of the ablatives and genitive.  Also, I need a break from expectations.

Kate’s up seeing her Physiatrist, a regular check up on pain meds.  She considers Beewin her medical home since her health issues focus on spine deterioration and arthritis, both of which have pain management and physical fitness as key treatment components.

Over the last two weeks I’ve had an ear infection and pink eye.  Good thing this 63 old kid has an in-house pediatrician.  I got expert care for these afflictions of the rug rat set.  Makes me feel young again, but not in a good way.

Have you caught any of the Washington Post’s report on the US counter-terrorist establishment?  It’s a fascinating example of how a genuine problem can breed responses that I’m sure make sense to each person who created each entity.  The whole, probably largely invisible in the–I know it’s way overused, but I’m gonna use it anyway–silos of various bureaucracies, is a Hobbesian Leviathan.  Hard to know whether to be amused, frightened, outraged or complacent.

Aging, Family, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Great Work, Politics, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Whew

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Summer                                      Waxing Grandchildren Moon

OK.  This will be last of this.  But.  Kate reminded me of her surgery on June 30th.  Which preceded preparation for and the arrival and stay of Jon, Jen, Ruth and Gabe followed then, as I said yesterday, by our too inclusive preparations for the Woollys. No wonder I wore out yesterday.  Let my prop it up and keep going inner coach have the day off.  Better rested and more clear-eyed today.  Ready for ancient Rome.

These two paragraphs came my way in the last two days.  Their conjunction speaks for itself.

“Speaking of heat, NOAA reports that June was the hottest  month in recorded history, worldwide. That is the fourth
month in a row of record warmth for planet Earth. June also marked the 304th consecutive month “with a global temperature above the 20th century average.” The last month with below-normal temperature worldwide? February, 1985. 2010
temperatures from January to June were the warmest ever recorded for both land and ocean temperatures, worldwide. Stay tuned.”
Check out Paul’s blog startribune.com/pauldouglas

(I imagine it’s photoshopped, but still…)

Mark Odegard found this quote in a book he’s reading about walking with caribou:

Henry Beston in the beginning of book.

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of wild animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creatures through the glass of knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken a form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, greatly err, For the animal shall not be measured by man, In a world older and more complex than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethrern, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

Asia, Family, Humanities, Literature

One Cute Ruth

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Summer                                      Waxing Grandchildren Moon

ruthThree out of three grandparents agree.  This is one cute Ruth.  She’s four and smart as a whip.  Athletic, artistic and stubborn, too.  Watch out boys.

I’m still exhausted from the last week and a half.  Spent today getting to 95% in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  This is an amazing work of art and one I will reread for sure.

Tried Latin but my eyes wouldn’t focus.  Tomorrow.  If I can’t get far enough, I’ll just cancel class.  When you’re paying by the hour–literally, you can do that.

Night’s quiet cloak has fallen over us.  Again.  A time of serenity, of possibility.  Of vulnerability.  It’s allure is so strong, so winsome.  Easy to create in this time.

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work, Memories, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

A Herd Remnant

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Summer                                               Waxing Grandchildren Moon

The thundering herd of 11 Woolly Mammoths had dwindled to 5 by the time it found the outer reaches of urbia, the ex part.  Tom, Bill, Frank, Mark and Stefan joined me to make 6 of us for the July 2010 meeting.  Kate put together sandwiches, hor d’oeuvres, her rhubarb pudding with nutmeg cream sauce and various vegetables.  The food kept us all this side of the tar pit for another 24 hours.

We had a pre-meal excursion through the dog-proofed garden and over to Artemis Hives.  Various questions were asked and some were answered.  Most kept a respectful distance from the now upwards of 100,000 total bees at work.  It was fun to share the bee keeping work and the colonies with the crew.

Since I learned the cut comb method of honey extracting from Linda’s Bees, I gave each Woolly an aluminum foil square with the first ever Artemis Honey to leave the hives.  It was a signal moment for me and a highlight of my evening.

We checked in, discussed the natural world and listened to a couple of excerpts from “Hair”, reminiscing as we did about the 60’s, that moment in our lives, the unusual and powerful forces at work then.  Woolly Scott plays drums in a rendition of Hair directed by his son in Carbondale, Colorado.  He will be out there the whole month of July and shared some powerful emotional moments he has already had mounting this late 60’s classic musical.

The second picture itself took me back to those times.  I had forgotten the pure, animal joy of having long hair and flinging it around to the Doors, or Led Zepplin or the tunes from Hair.  Being stoned helped, too.

Mark Odegard, our only dam lock keeper, reported on his 7 pm to 7 am shifts at the #1 lock and dam.  There is a peregrine falcon nest nearby and he has observed the rearing of two peregrine chicks, including a late phase in which they peck so fiercely at their parents that the parents stand outside the nest and drop food into the razor beaked young.  I have known parents of adolescents who might have benefited from the example.

He also saw one chick’s first flight, a tumbling, gliding, clumsy landing affair.  Night on the river casts a spell, he says, and all down there succumb.

Kate and I, introverts by nature and preference, have just finished a week with the grandkids and their parents followed immediately by several days of preparation for visitors.  It wore us out.  We got up, ate breakfast, went back to bed and got up again around noon.  I’ll probably get another nap in before workout time.  Next time we’re going to have a cook, a cleaner and a gardener.

It is quiet here now.  Blessedly so.

General

Bee Diary: Supplemental

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Summer                                Waxing Grandchildren Moon

Ah.  Today I discovered a way to harvest/extract honey.  It’s called the cut comb method and the particular information that was most helpful came from Linda’s Bees.  If the general notion of bee-keeping interests you, there is this local website, Nature’s Nectary, that focuses on northern beekeeping.

The comb honey process made it easy to create small aluminum foil gift packages of honey from Artemis Hives.  Fun to have a homemade treat to give away to friends.  Homemade in the parent colony, that is.  I just collected it, cut it and packaged it. Damned retailers get all the profit, the producers get stiffed every time.

In a shopworn phrase this lifted my bee-keeping to a new level.  The usual bee work, building woodenware (Kate), installing foundations (me) and doing the hive inspections (me) plus hiving packages and doing the divides and reverses (me) has an intrinsic fascination.  This superorganism performs its work in an astonishingly graceful way, choreographed by millions of years of evolution and attended to by me, but only in the most superficial way.  I don’t fly out to the flowers, lay the eggs, take care of the nursery, remove dead bees, store pollen and honey or flap wings to cool the hive.

A magic exists in the natural world that requires no mystics, no spell books or grimoires.

Garden, Woolly Mammoths

Ray

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Summer                                    Waxing Grandchildren Moon

Ray, the Andover High School junior who mows our yard, came over today and we moved the shredded bark into its home on the beds and walkways of the vegetable garden.  He’s 15 or 16.  I’m not.  Nap time will be important today.

We discussed his swimming.  He swims for the Andover High School team.  “Is the Andover team any good?”  “Well, it’s a young program.  Not like Anoka’s.”  He admires Michael Phelps and has that swimmer body with the developed upper chest and broad shoulders.  He came here from swimming.  5 days a week during the summer, 6 during the school year.  Dedicated.

We found him courtesy of a copied flier he put in our mail-box.  It was good timing since Kate, our mower, had hip surgery scheduled in June.  Ray also does other yard work, like helping me re-mulch the vegetable gardens.  He works hard, thinks ahead and is generally pleasant.  A testament to his kind.  The teen-age boy kind.

The Herd rumbles into Andover around 6 or so.  Kate’s worked hard to get the food ready.  She also did a lot of weeding over the week-end.  It’s nice to have her home and I’ll be glad when she retires in January.

Garden, GeekWorld, Woolly Mammoths

A Snap. No, Really.

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Summer                                             Waxing Grandchildren Moon

Started the morning with my favorite kind of work, mechanical.  Question:  how to get the mower deck off the lawn tractor.  It is, I recall the salesman saying 14 years ago, “A snap.”  Well, he should have been here.  Nuts and bolts, screws and hammers don’t respond well to my ministrations.  If it can be done the easy way–a snap–and the hard way–my way–guess which I end up pursuing?  Yep.  Same deal with the bagger.  So easy.  Hmmm.  The best that can be said is that, in the end, I figured out that the easy way was also the only way to get them off, but it took a good while to realize that.  Plus some words I wouldn’t use in a polite blog.

After that, hooking up the new wagon to our 15 year old Simplicity was a snap.  No, really.  One cotter pin, insert bolt through wagon tongue and tractor hitch and away we went to the 5 cubic yards of shredded mulch.  A few pitchfork moves later I was back in the front yard delivering shredded bark to Kate who toiled away in the vineyards (literally) of our long untended front flower patches.

Much better than the wheel barrow method I’ve used all these years.  I took the weeds back to the woods and put them in their very own pile.  Nice.

After the nap I’ve spent time recovering wooden steps and slabs from eroded sand, sweeping, piling, that sort of thing.  It’s hot, but not too bad outside.

All this in service of the upcoming Woolly Mammoth meeting.  We have visitors out here twice a year and this year they came within two weeks of each other.  Great planning on our (my) part.  Well, I shouldn’t say in service of the meeting.  This work really prompts us to do things we’ve neglected over this year and they’ll stay done for a while.  One of the many positive functions of friends.

More meeting related work later on, too.  Groceries.  Start cooking. (helping Kate) Cleaning furniture.  Those sorts.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Memories

The Odor Of Sanctity

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Summer                                    Waxing Grandchildren Moon

Have you ever smelled fresh bees wax?  A smell that takes you right to the essence of the natural world.  It exudes a sense of well-being, freshness, vitality.  I harvested some honey today for the Woolly meal on Monday night.  The honey and the honey comb offer that same sensation; perhaps, as latter day Catholics might have said, it is the odor of sanctity.

The experience this morning took me back to two other smell, for me equally enmeshed with the natural world as our obvious home.  The first one, of the longest standing for me, I experience in the  produce cooler at Cox’s Supermarket when I worked there as a boy.  This smell combined apple scents, oranges, bananas, lettuce, watermelon, whatever was in season into a perfume that drew me back often.  I would sneak away from stocking shelves or breaking down boxes, push the plunger that opened the door, step inside and be transported to paradise, a place where everything suggested abundance, nourishment and fine flavor.

Another one of these scents came to me only this year as I harvested parsnips.  Lifting the tapered white parsnip out of the ground, I brought its roots, only just holding the parsnip in its intimate relationship with the soil, to my nose.  Ah.  Again, freshness, vitality, well-being.  It was as if, for a moment, I inhabited the parsnip’s underground world, the place where it truly lived.  There, with the scent, I could trace the connections between the parsnip and its source of nutrients in the soil around it; I could feel the back and forth of vegetable and soil as they interacted in a dance older than the oil beneath the Gulf, older than the iron ore on the range.

Yes, as I think of it, the odor of sanctity is it, exactly.  The sacred blossoms into molecules that excite this oldest sense, the one that relates us most closely to the rest of our animal brothers and sisters.  The sacred emerges from the sophisticated work of the honey bee turning nectar into honey.  The sacred emerges from the fruits of the earth as they await transport to our tables.  The sacred emerges within the top layers of  soil, that thin web of living things that supports the plants from which we all take our sustenance.  Yes, the sacred emerges in these places, and it sends out an aroma to draw attention to itself.