Samhain Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice
Groceries. Grit. (small chunks of granite that give me traction.) Organizing meetings. Some English to Latin, trying to implant participles, the ablative absolute and the passive periphrastic. A nap. Worked out. Watched TV.
Tomorrow a half-day conference on environmental issues in the upcoming legislature. It will be a more interesting event than I imagined when I signed up for it.
Samhain Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice
The NYT has started a series focusing on the civil war, looking back 150 years ago. Lincoln has just been elected and the country has an internal division not matched again until, perhaps, the 1960’s, the War’s one hundredth anniversary. The Civil War fascinates me and I’ve visited several battlefields, as I’ve said here before. I’ve been especially interested in the war’s execution, why did the North win and the South lose? What have been the subsequent ramifications? Did Lincoln’s execution, which put Andrew Johnson in the Presidency, set back the integration of African-Americans into American society by a century or more? What did we learn? I look forward to a several year focus on the war, raising these questions anew.
A quiet physical. Saw Tom Byfield there, apparently we share a doctor. Tom, Davis that is, collects pueblo pottery and has a couple on loan to the MIA. I didn’t recognize his description, but I’m gonna check’em out. This time, the first time in a long time, I had no particular concerns to raise. He found nothing new or remarkable. The labs will come in, of course, and we’ll see then, but for now, I’m feeling good.
When I drove in today, each exit off Highway 94, starting at Broadway, then 4th street and finally Hennepin/Lyndale had cars backed up onto the freeway. I took Hennepin/Lyndale thinking there must a traffic jam in the city because of the snow. Nope. A peculiar situation, one of those imponderables that happens here when we get lots of snow and very cold weather. People drive strange.
On the news sheet: 4 bodies in NYC, dumped along a Long Island freeway, might mean a serial killer. Motorcycle thief steals $1.5 in Bellagio chips, rides away. So, is it news stories ripped from the television cop dramas or the other way around?
Samhain Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice
The Winter Solstice comes in a week. The longest night. I’ll be there, remembering the triple Goddess, Bridgit, burning a candle and honoring the deep inside of us all.
Yesterday I used the Himalaya’s as a metaphor for parking lot snow. According to the newspaper this morning I shot too low. We have all new mountain ranges going up in parking lots and city streets throughout the metro and they’ll be there a long, long time. This is not a good thing for city budgets. Snow plowing is expensive.
Looking at snow mountains and threading my way through snowy city streets I have to take this body to its test. Bye.
Samhain Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice
Annual physical tomorrow morning. This ritual obeisance to the gods of health and long life are, of course, futile. No matter how closely we monitor our health, no matter how compliant with diet, exercise and medicines, no matter how meditative and calm we can keep ourselves, entropy will win the day. It just takes too much energy to keep us fastened together much longer than 90 years, give or take 10 years. My goal has been, for a long time, not to die from something I could have prevented. So far, so good.
All kidding aside, I’m happy to do these visits once a year since it’s a minimal investment in surveillance of and for my health. I do have some anxiety each time though. Any one of these visits could be the one. You know, the one where doctor calls back. Ooops. We need to do more tests. Uh-oh. And, I’m sorry I have to tell you this, there’s just no good way.
In my fantasy this visit never happens. I live a reasonably healthy life into my late 80’s, early 90’s, then death comes calling. That’s what I’m aiming for, being healthy till I’m dead.
My new doc, Tom Davis, is a careful guy, an i dotter and a t crosser. I like that in a doctor. He’s also calm, unflappable. I like that, too.
This is my next to last physical under the old regime of private health care carried by Kate and paid for jointly by her and Allina. Two years from now, I’ll be just another anchor on the ship of our economy, dipping into Medicare to pay these bills.
Here’s to a boring visit and uneventful news.
Samhain Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice
Worked on learning the ablative absolute and the passive periphrastic. This last one is also the name of a colon problem. Not really. But this is strange about it, periphrastic is a latin derivative from the Greek. The actual latin equivalent is circumlocutio, to talk around something. Do you see the irony here?
This goes to the work of translation and the ways in which literal renderings don’t always, in fact, often don’t, serve idiomatic English.
Also spent time today with Leslie Mills, the UTS intern for whom I have been supervisory clergy over the last semester. She’s a young woman, growing into her sense of herself and her understanding of a very odd beast, the UU ministry. UU gatherings mimic protestant forms, e.g. congregations, church buildings, clergy, Sunday worship, but have none of the underlying biblical or church historical rationale, at least in their Midwestern humanist incarnations.
It is a peculiar fact of Unitarian-Universalism that the true radicals in the movement are and have been in the Midwest for some time, since the early 1800’s as the east coast heresies of unitarianism and universalism followed the frontier. In the time of Jenkin Lloyd Jones and his creation, the first World Parliament and Congress of Religions, the liberal faith tradition in the Midwest gained breadth.
In the post WWI years Minnesota and Iowa, respectively, Des Moines and Minneapolis in particular, became the center point for a non-theistic approach to the human condition, an approach focused on the human and the human experience, as it played out in this vale of tears not in the triumphant heaven of certain Christian beliefs. In this atheological turn the Midwest Unitarians gained depth.
(happy Minnesotans dancing around a local outdoorsman)
Now, in the first decade of the third millennium, the third thousand year period after the dramatic events played out in Palestine, the Midwest has come the front again, this time building on the humanist legacy, but moving the human from the center as the humanists moved God from the center. In its place now the diverse world of pagan thought has put the natural world and our home planet within that world. It has been, you might say, a Copernican revolution in metaphysics, moving first away from the heavens to the consciousness and lives of humans, then moving those same humans to a place in that world, rather than pride of place.
This dramatic, unusual chain of thought and faith experience makes the gathering places of those humanists now something other than churches, something different from the great cloud of witnesses, or the gathering of saints. Just what they are is not clear, nor will it be for a while, I imagine, maybe decades, maybe centuries. They may be unnecessary now, vestigial organs of the Christian traditions. Or, maybe not. Time. Only in time will we know.
Samhain Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice
Kate woke me up, wiggling my ankle. There’s no dog food. Oh. I’m not at my best just after I get up, but in this case I had to throw on some clothes and step outside, to the back of the truck and hoist a bag of dog food, 40#, carry it back inside, slit it open and pour the next week and a half’s worth of food for Vega and Rigel into the bin. It was a sharp surprise, the difference between the bed and the outdoors. It was -12 out there. Geez.
The headline on the sports page this morning was great: Roof Da! I’ve not seen anyone take up my many worlds hypothesis as an explanation, but it might be that the cosmologists and theoretical physicists haven’t seen my facebook post yet.
These are the times that try men’s snowblowers (Women’s, too, for that matter.)
OK. Here’s a headline I never expected to see:
This takes adventure tourism to a new place. You’ll glow. You’ll shine. You’ll see your inner self.
–
Samhain Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice
You may go now, the storm has ended. Well, maybe. The MIA, noted for never closing, closed yesterday and today. The metrodome collapsed. See. We told you. Zyggi Wilf and family. I threw thigh high snow off our front sidewalk and trimmed down a waist high drift on our deck so the dogs could get out and come back. Roughly a foot fell, always hard to measure.
A local meterologist developed the gold standard for measuring snow depth. He puts a hard rubber mat on the ground, lets the snow fall on it, then pushes a yardstick through the snow. Check where the top of the snow meets the yard stick. Voila! No kidding.
Snowapocalypse. Snowmaggedon. Snowmygod. Local weather weenies tried to raise this to mega-event standards, but it just doesn’t get there. Yes, we’re a major metro area and a foot to a foot and a half (south) makes the metro pretty miserable for travelers, but our snow totals are no record breakers.
We do have a difference from a lot of other snowy locations. When our snow comes in winters like this one, it cools the air above it and remains on the ground until spring. That means accumulating snow fall becomes a challenge with parking lot snow mountains rising up like retail Himalayas and city streets sometimes going from two-sided parking to one-sided. It begins to get interesting then.
Is there a collapse vortex near this location? Perhaps a quantum field breaking through into what we conceive of as the one and only true reality? I mean, it’s a brane teaser I know, but it could be. Think of the many worlds hypothesis favored by string theorists. Why do I ask? Well. This next picture, taken less than half a mile from the site of the dome collapse tells the story.
Samhain Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice
The orchard has at least two feet of snow. The currant bushes have snow near the top of their branches. The blueberry beds have almost disappeared. The garlic lies now beneath a couple of feet of snow cover in the vegetable garden, as do the strawberries and the asparagus. The bees have huddled up in their balls, all three colonies, rubbing against each other, creating warmth, keeping the colony at 93 degrees, maintaining body heat for the cold blooded individuals, the whole acting as a warm-blooded animal, using their mutual metabolisms to fend off the cold. There are, too, all the bulbs, the ones planted this fall and those planted in years past, resting now, waiting for the signals, still months away, that will send them seeking sun and warmth.
Out the window shown in the pictures below I often see chickadees and sparrows scurrying from one warren of shrubs to another. A rabbit or two come by at some point in the winter, as the chipmunks did earlier in the fall. A squirrel dug a burrow in the snow near the end of November, coming and going several times. I have not heard the great gray the last two nights, perhaps she’s out hunting in other places.
This is a Minnesota winter, the kind most of us here know well. I’m glad to see it.
Samhain Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice
The storm seems to have slowed down a bit, winds have decreased as has the snow. It looks we got around a foot, but I can tell you that many of the drifts exceed that.
First, my insulating vest over my sweatshirt. Then the wind pants over my sweats. Down coat. Mad bomber hat with rabbit fur flaps secured under my chin. Scarf around exposed neck. Insulated socks pressed into Sorels. I was ready to get the mail and the newspaper. Successful. Minnesota, a state where getting to the mailbox from the house can be a challenge worth dressing up for.
After that adventure, I strapped on my snow shoes and headed out to Ruth and Gabe’s playhouse to retrieve the little giant ladder system still standing out there. I waited until a historic snow storm to grab it just to test my true mettle. I’d say it was thin aluminum.
The damn ladder system is heavy and clumsy. Walking in snow shoes is not an elegant dance in the best of situations, but navigating around small shrubs without snagging and trying to thread my way between an electric fence and a snow-drift narrowed passage up onto our deck, all the while dragging a ladder–priceless.
The ladder went in the garage to melt off its snow and be ready for Adam Lindquist, the improbably named Chinese lighting specialist from Lights on Broadway, who is coming out on Wednesday to install our new fixtures. Huffing and puffing I sat down to drink some hot chocolate Kate made. Decided to give myself 20 minutes of aerobic workout since I also shoveled the deck some.
Just finished my other 30 minutes on the treadmill. Now I can settle down and enjoy the storm. Tomorrow, more Latin.
Samhain Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice
We are in the midst of a storm that will be remembered, one like Halloween, 1991 and Armistice Day, 1941. The snow and the wind have continued or intensified since I remarked last night that the snow had begun.
Below are a series of photographs taken out of my study window facing north, some looking out over one of our boulder walls. The last two are from today.
October 26th, 2010
November 14th
December 1st
December 11th
December 11th, northeast