Lughnasa Waning Artemis Moon
The chicken leek pie has cooled down and sits in the refrigerator awaiting lunch tomorrow. Using our own leeks, onions, carrots, parsley and thyme made the cooking fun and satisfying.
Kate’s first night back at work and she was the only physician scheduled. Unusual. She came home tired, but no more tired than I would have expected after major surgery and a two month lay off from the standing and walking she does at work.
Well, tomorrow will come soon.
Lughnasa Waning Artemis Moon
Kate’s at work. Two months almost to the day after her hip surgery she has returned to the Allina Clinic in Coon Rapids for her last four months of full time practice. I anticipate a successful evening and final four months for her, having seen a remarkable recovery in terms of her day-to-day pain. The hip is wonderful, the back’s pretty good, the only clinker right now is her bursitis on her left hip. Still, compared to the awful weeks just prior to her surgery, she’s a different woman and it’s great to see.
Having her home full time, practice retirement, helped us see the possibilities in the next phase of our life together. We’ll manage our gardens and our orchard and our bees with greater ease, two persons engaged from the start of the growing season. We’ll have time to go into art galleries, out to lunch, just wander around more.
Other people must find the one who gets them, around whom they can be their authentic selves, I’m glad to say I’m among them. And that the experience is reciprocal.
Eternal tru luv, as we used to say.
Lughnasa Waning Artemis Moon
The onions, red, yellow and white, are in the storage room ready to go on the wooden racks when I have a minute. The honey, too, is on the bottom row of our shelving unit, collected in canning jars and resting in the boxes that held the canning jars in the store. Kate’s just put up 7 packages of frozen kale and swiss chard, for use in the dead of winter when greens from the garden seem very special. She’s also making applesauce from our six apple crop. I picked them a bit too early for eating. Chicken breasts and pie dough have been set out to thaw since I will make chicken and leek pot pie later today. This is a busy time of year, but it is also a fun and satisfying time.
The potato plants have not died back, so they await digging and drying and storage. The garden of 2010 has begun to wind down. I still have to plant garlic, mulch a few beds, weed the perennial flower beds and later plant the bulbs, but the number of tasks has begun to dwindle even though the size of some of them make a lot of work still left.
Lughnasa Waning Artemis Moon
Bob Feemster owned the Alexandria Times-Tribune which my father served as editor for many years. In 1951 Bob bought us a black and white TV because the believed newspaperman should be aware of this new media. My earliest memory of television and politics comes from watching that little TV in the 1952 race between Stevenson and Eisenhower. A Democratic household, we were pulling for the Unitarian Stevenson against the former General of the Armies, Eisenhower.
This was long before news organization using exit polling and computer modeling to declare victors. The actual number of votes was what mattered and they showed up at different points in time. The far west results didn’t begin to come in until midnight or so. Dad let me stay up and watch the election returns with him. Of course, it was partly staying up late at night that intrigued me, but I had also caught my father’s passion for the process. What would happen?
You know the result. Far from turning me away from politics, that long ago late night served as a foundation for a life of modest political activism. You know, student politics in high school, student politics in college, radicalization during the Vietnam war era and engagement since then in various levels and kind of activism from Indiana Presidential politics and Minneapolis City politics to Minnesota state politics, neighborhood politics in Minneapolis as well as community based economic development and a raft of other state and local efforts.
In some ways politics has been the defining theme of my life. I’ve been at it, more or less, since that night in 1952. Rarely I have gone for more than a year without some concrete form of political engagement. When I encounter problems in our broader community, my first thought is of a political response, how to organize it, where to start.
But. I’m losing my taste for it. Why?
These days I work on political issues related to environmental concerns. I have a responsible position in a large Minnesota organization with a track record for achieving change at both the state and national levels. My role is directly political in that I serve as a sort of manager for the organizations legislative work. My passion for a peaceful, verdant, and just world (as some foundation says) is not less than it has been. So, what’s the problem?
It may be broadly an analytical problem. That is, my political work has a good deal of calculation attached to it. Analysis of political realities and the nature of changes we want often conflict. The political path is the one on which something can be made to happen. This puts the work largely in my head, when my motivation comes largely from my heart. Over the years, now the many years, of political work, I have learned dispassionate detachment perhaps too well.
The work no longer serves as a vehicle for my passion. Where has that passion gone? Into art and writing. When I have downtime, art comes to mind. The world of art has drawn me, given me space for my passion and an arena in which to share that passion. Writing has done the same. I even have a passion for the Latin work I’m about to start up again. But, no longer for politics.
This is a difficult place for me to be. It feels as if I’m denying a part of myself or about to become irresponsible. However, here’s what I’ve concluded.
When I pressed my way into the Sierra Club’s work a few years ago, I did it through the political committee, which seemed the natural fit for me. Long experience in non-profit organizations and in political contexts have given me skills that helped me move up in the organization’s leadership. Yet it feels increasingly like a burden. I wonder now whether this work with the Sierra Club isn’t a regression like my return to the UU ministry.
Regressions, my analyst told me, occur because there is something you need to retrieve or repair. In this case it might have been my agency. Agency is the capacity to have an impact and I wondered, when I reengaged with the Sierra Club, if I still had it. Yes. The answer is yes. A more important question now, however, is this: Do I need to assert my agency at this point in my life? No. I don’t.