Yearly Archives: 2011

Aging, Humanities, Travel, Woolly Mammoths

The OWM

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Spring                                                    Waning Bloodroot Moon

The Order of Woolly Mammoths, or OWM, the sacred sound that created the world, met tonight at Frank’s for our annual corned beef and cabbage feed.  Bill Schmidt gave us an insiders perspective on the nuclear crisis, explaining the safeguards in place and said, with some emotion, that if called and if he could contribute, he would go.  It gave me a personal connection to the brave, even heroic effort that engineers and other workers at the Fukushima facility have already offered and confirmed what I suspected.  These are men and women who have a wartime level commitment to their jobs, knowing that if doing them costs their lives; it’s a sacrifice both necessary and worthwhile.  They deserve our deepest admiration and respect as humans tested in a type of cauldron most of us will never, thankfully, see.

Tom, a new grandfather-to-be, asked for advice, stories, thoughts from current Woolly grandfathers.  He has chosen to devote his meeting, our next one, to the topic.  Gray heads discussing gray-headdom.

Stefan and I discussed a possible visit to Aerquipa when our cruise hits Peru.  It would involve a plane flight from Lima of about an hour and a half.  I want to make it work, seeing Lonnie and her folks at work, visiting someone I know.  Some planning to be done.

These men, this crowd of silverbacks, men I knew when our hair had color are a central part of my life.  It was good, as it always is.

Aging, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Retirement

Mind/Body

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Spring                                                                Waning Bloodroot Moon

The yard!  The yard!  If Tattoo had been here this winter, he’d have gotten pretty excited about this dreary muddy mess now more visible than not.  The mountain of snow over which I could not see as I degaraged my Celica has melted to foothill levels, allowing me sights not seen for two + months.  Yippee.

Business meeting this morning and we acknowledged both the new tax burden and our wisdom in saving adequately to deal with it.  This transition year into the retired life has had surprises, mostly pleasant ones, but this one caught us up short, at least at first.  We have enough money to pay the taxes and still go on with our cruise.  I’m glad because I’ve already got that Panama hat picked out.

I’ve entered a new phase of physical activity, one with not only aerobic and resistance work, but also with body movement exercise like the Tai Chi and the Body Flow class at the Y.  It feels different, maybe better.  The better aspect comes with the more body friendly Tai Chi, yoga and pilates.  Aerobic and resistance are necessary to retain muscle mass and heart/circulatory system health, but the others work the body in a way designed to calm, loosen, stretch.  The Tai Chi, too, has a strong element, as does yoga, of the Eastern mystical.  Yoga as taught here has lost much of that, but the Tai Chi world remains rooted in the ancient Taoist traditions of China.

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Humanities, World History

Welcome Home, Tai Chi

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Spring                                                   Waning Bloodroot Moon

Once in a while something comes into my life and it feels like a part of me already, as if a missing piece had come back home.  Meeting Kate was like that for me.  My split-off.  When the Wednesday classes for the two-year docent program began, art history came home.  When I found a Jungian analyst over 25 years ago, my Self began to return.  Last night I attended my first Tai Chi class.  Another wandering aspect of myself has joined the others at the hearthside.

When my hands floated up last night into the second position, I felt an energy pushing away from my body, just I felt it collecting as I pulled my elbows in and those same hands back toward my body.  A sense of inner peace, momentary, but real, emerged.  My first class, but not my last.

It may be true as an article in the Star-Tribune this morning claimed, that memory takes longer to cement as we grow older, may be, but for me, I hold out for variability, that some things to take longer to seat, yes; but others, because they’re compelling or because they’re split-offs that have found their back to the homestead, just rejoin as if they’d never left.

I’m going to confess something here.  There’s a part of me, a looky-loo part, that hopes disasters will go all the way like the earthquake and the tsunami in Japan or the financial crisis or the riots sweeping the Middle East.  A part of me wants to see what a nuclear meltdown would entail.  What if that chief villain of high tech actually happened?  What would the consequences be?  Really?  This is not at all a desire to see more disasters or worse catastrophes, rather it is a sort of morbid curiosity, a curiosity about extremes.  What if a volcano like Mt. Rainier or Mt. Fuji erupt at full force?  What if the sea levels do rise by 2 feet or more?  This is the immoderate part of me, that aspect that wants thing to extend to their logical conclusion.

I wouldn’t feel embarrassed about this at all if there wasn’t the possibility, the great likelihood, of serious injury and death to people and eco-systems.  So, I feel embarrassed, but still interested.

Faith and Spirituality

Public Speaking

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Spring                                               Full Bloodroot Moon

Redefining the Sacred is now available.  The discussion around it was solid, engaged, intelligent.  It felt good in delivery.  I enjoy public speaking engagements.  I’m mostly down to Groveland, now, but I’d like to do some more.  Not a lot, but some.  Have to think about how to make that possible.

Kate and I tried, without success, to eat at Saji-ya and then the Heartland Restaurant, both not open until the evening.  We finally settled on Osaka.  Udon for me, tempura for Kate.  Now, a nap.

Garden, Great Wheel

Spring, 2011. The Great Wheel

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Spring                                                       Full Bloodroot Moon

The winter solstice came under a full moon and now, so the does the spring equinox.  Last night the full Bloodroot moon was a super moon, both full and at its perigee; though here the system bringing rain most of the night, also blocked our view.

In most old religions the equinoxes and the solstices had special meaning, but not for the early Celts.  They divided the year between summer and winter, summer beginning on May 1st on Beltane and the new year beginning at summer’s end, Samhain, on October 31st.  The Celts did later add Imbolc that celebrated the triple Goddess Brigit and the freshening of the ewes and Lughnasa, on August 1st, which is a first fruits of the harvest festival.  At some point they added the equinoxes and solstices, in effect making them cross-quarter holidays to their already established four divisions of the year.  This was all before the advent of recorded history so the actual sequence and motivations behind these changes are matters of speculation.

Here in Minnesota the spring season, officially beginning at 6:21 pm today, can go by in a blink as the weather downshifts into a sharp curve from the cold of winter to the heat of summer.  Today I’ll get the leeks started in anticipation of getting them in the ground as soon as the soil can be worked.  The hydroponics are well underway and we’ll have our first greens from it in the next couple of weeks.  We’re using technology to smooth out the curve, make it a bit less violent for our garden.

The rain that beat against our bedroom last night won’t make the river folks happy since it speeds the snow melt, adds more moisture and puts both into motion over still frozen ground.  The river may be 10 feet high and risin’ in a couple of weeks, maybe sooner.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality

Sacred

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Imbolc                                                                  Full Bloodroot Moon

“Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today.” – Ernest Hemingway

A wordy sentence for the master of terse.  Still.  Not only is it true, it will be true each and every day.  It could also be said that this hour is only one hour in all the hours to come, but what happens in it can influence all the other hours you’ll ever have.  Be here now has its detractors, I know, those who want to talk about history and the future, yet with all their reluctance or eagerness, they must still leave the past behind and the future for the next moment, because we are never in any time other than now.  Life comes to us in the present tense.  Always.  And ends the same way.

A presentation tomorrow morning at Groveland, Redefining the Sacred.  I’ll post it here after I’ve given it.  There’s a whole book, maybe several, in this general theme, a way of understanding the awesome, terrible, wonderful, magical, sacred nature of the lives we live and the world in which we live them, understanding them, that is, without needing an authority to tell us how, understand them within the experiences we have now, not ones we might have later, after death or in some altered state.

You might think my flat-earth approach to religious mystery rules out an after-life or a supernatural possibility.  Not at all.  It just means I don’t have anything to say about it.  If death includes a future, well, I’m there.  If not, I won’t be.  If there is a supernatural realm, a realm of the gods, I want to visit, but I’ve not seen the evidence for it.

So, a way of understanding the sacred within our lived experience excites me, makes me want to tell others of the possibility.  Which I will do tomorrow.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Politics, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Carpe diem

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Imbolc                                 Full Bloodroot Moon

Got my novel a boost by going out to Blue Cloud, got back and dove into the legcom, MIA, Latin sequence plus finishing my presentation,  Redefining the Sacred, and have gotten little novel work done.  The times.  Now the air has begun to warm up and the snow to melt.  That means more time outside, which I’m eager to get started, but that, of course, means less time inside and all of the winter work is desk bound or at the museum.

When I talked to Kate about my despair for human life on this planet (see yesterday’s post), I also commented on my zest for life.  It’s never been higher, I told her.  OK, yes, the sun shone, the sky was blue and it looked warmer, all boosts to the life zestometer, but it’s more than that.  Kate’s retired and that’s removed a lot of stress from my life as well as hers.  I know this for sure because I have a mild case of psoriasis and its gotten much, much better since her retirement in January.

I’ve also got two challenging volunteer roles, docent at the MIA and the legcom at the Sierra Club, each of them test different skill sets every week.  The Latin work has given renewed confidence in my learning capacity, plus it’s fun in ways I hadn’t anticipated.  We have two grandkids with birthdays coming up.  The dogs are healthy.  Our orchard should begin producing this year.  I know what seeds I’m going to start and what I’m going to plant outside, early.  There’s a novel underway.  I’ve made new friends at Bluecloud and through the MIA and Sierra Club work. This will be my third year as a beekeeper. The Woolly’s are in our 25th year.  Finally, Kate and I have started new physical routines.

Said another way I get to be around art, practice politics, create, grow, love, laugh, visit with friends and family.  Life is full of matters that can keep us excited and eager to get up in the morning.

No matter what the world may be like tomorrow today is a day filled with promise.  So, like my friend, Bill W., I’ll take my life one day at a time.

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on the news, Great Work, Weather +Climate

Body Flow

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Imbolc                                                        Waxing Bloodroot Moon

Some of our front yard is visible!  This is the first time in over 125 days, maybe more.  A friendly patch of brown lawn and the base of a spruce, an amur maple and a pine tree.  The bloodroot cannot be far behind.

Two tours today.  A Japan tour that reminded me why I love the Asian art so much.  Great kids.  I prejudged them as potentially inattentive, non-talkers.  Boy was I wrong.  We barely got past the teahouse.  A second, Titian tour, had about 30 folks.  Again an engaged and interested group.  The Titian exhibit has been a pleasure to tour, too.  I love the Renaissance anyhow and these are great images.  Love that Bassano and the Lotto, too.

Kate and I will hit our first Body Flow class tonight.  I don’t know what to expect.  It’s a combination of T’ai Ch’i, yoga and pilates.  To music.  When I found out it was set to music, I almost decided not to go.  I’ve never done group exercise and doing it to current dance songs doesn’t seem to add much.  But, we’ll see.

Japan.  Hard to know what to say.  As the big history guy I’ve been listening to off and on over the last couple of months keeps saying, our developed civilizations are so complex that they are very fragile.  Japan is teaching that lesson in a too vivid, too painful way.

Aging, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Minnesota, Politics

They’re just being Republicans

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Imbolc                                                          Waxing Bloodroot Moon

Latin.  Subjunctives, indirect questions, tense sequences.  Done in a bit of a fog, almost like school.  The verb conjugations still have not taken full root in my mind, though at this point I have had exposure to all of them, for all four tenses.  I’ve had exposure likewise to five noun declensions, comparatives, superlatives, pronouns, interrogatives, adverbs, adjectives, ablative uses, dative uses, participles and participial clauses, and subordinate clauses of several types with more  to come.  I’m almost three-fourths through Wheelock and have now translated  75 verses of Ovid’s Metamorphosis.

As unintended outcome, I have found myself metamorphosed, changed.  Just how, right now, is not all clear, but it has something to do with facing a challenge, a language, and coming to grips with it, incorporating it into myself.  Just why I waited until I was 63, I don’t know; fear, yes, time, yes, but the largest barrier was lack of purpose.  When I began to want to know what was behind the translator’s veil, and, in particular, when I wanted to know what was behind the translations of Ovid’s master work, the purpose emerged and a teacher appeared.  There is no time when we stop growing, learning.

Later in the day I prepped for and ran the Legislative Committee for the Sierra Club’s weekly meeting.  This political season will not be kind to our lakes and rivers, our forests and wildlife, our prairies.  The burden will be laid at the foot of the Republicans, but really, they’re just being Republicans, giving political expression to the wills of those who support them.  No, the burden lies squarely at the feet of those of us who want to see our forests, rivers, moose, wolf, prairies and lakes healthy and whole now and into the future.  We have not fought with the same passion today as the Tea Party folk or the Christian Right or the Libertarians.

Over the retreat at Blue Cloud I read two novels focused on the political life of Cicero.  At the end of a brutal period for his political perspective he said, “All regimes come to an end.”

I agree.

Aging, Asia, Cinema and Television, Commentary on the news, Great Work, Memories, US History, World History

Elemental

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Imbolc                                                                     Waxing Bloodroot Moon

August 6th. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Rendering the friendly atom a deadly enemy.  Since that time, mutations became a favorite meme of  scary movie in the 50’s and early 60’s.  Since that time movies like On the Beach, Fail Safe, Doctor Strange Love, the China Syndrome have dealt with one scenario or another based on the catastrophe inherent in nuclear fission and nuclear fusion, even in peacetime uses.  Since that time Chernobyl and Three Mile Island became synonyms for danger, making even the nuclear generation of electricity scary.  The cold war and the DEW line and the Strategic Air Command, missiles in silos and on submarines heightened our awareness by putting a continuing military face on the nuclear threat.

The grim possibility highlighted by the doomsday clock since 1947, the minutes to midnight decided by the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago.  (Ironic like the photograph below because the first splitting of the atom occurred below Alonzo Stagg Stadium on the University of Chicago campus.  Some jinn just won’t go back.)

Those of us born after the end of WWII have lived ever since with the threat of nuclear annihilation.  That threat continues to this day. The most chilling photograph out of 8.9 earthquake and tsunami ravaged Japan was not the dramatic footage of the flood waters carrying burning buildings inland or the ships carried ashore or the fearful Japanese racing away from destruction, no, it was this one.  Thick with irony, unintentional in its resonance with over 65 years of military, cinematic and domestic horror, this scene, a scientific response to a scientific disaster–not the natural one–chilled me the first time I saw it.  It still does.