Yearly Archives: 2011

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Humanities, Retirement

This is life.

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Imbolc                                            Waning Bridgit Moon

Sunday night Kate and I went to St. Anthony Main, overlooking the Mississippi and St. Anthony Falls, for a Roots Music festival put on by KBEM, a local jazz station.  While we ate at the Aster Cafe and listened to a small group, Kate looked up at me and said, “Ah, the life of the retiree.”

I understood what she meant.  Free at last.  But….

I had another reaction too, “Yes, I know what you mean.  But, really.  This is life.  Not retired life, but life itself.”

In that moment I realized the category mistake everyone makes when speaking of retirement.  It is seen as special, different, unique, something to be fussed over and transitioned into when really it’s just life, life continuing.  Not different, not special, not unique, not to be fussed over.

Or, to say the same thing another way.  It is different, special, unique, to be fussed over because it is your life, your life, your one and only special and true life.  We have to want our life and lead our life before we work, while we work and after we work.  We do vacate the workplace, but we do not retire from our lives.

In fact, the fuss is too often that we’ve left our lives up to others.  Our boss, our clients, our patients, our corporation or agency.  The past times and activities that seem so necessary, but are really only the ideas of others.

So, the problem and the promise lies not within the change in our work, but with the change in ourselves.  If we have known what our life is, if  we have chosen activities and friends for their intrinsic value not their external rewards, well, then, on with your life.  If not, the issue is not the transition, but the need for self-examination, for honesty with the you that you bring to life as  you grow older.  No one else can do this work for you.  It’s up to you.

General

Tracks in the Snow

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Imbolc                                       Waning Bridgit Moon

Whew.  Just got back from snowshoeing to the ridge crest, leaving from from a side door in the Monastery’s east side.  Along the way I came upon other tracks, rabbit and deer I recognized, but one large tubbs-snowshoes-altitude-36_280609708106print I did not.  Can’t imagine what it could have been though it looked like bear to me.

I used to snowshoe every morning for my aerobic workout, a few years ago now.  In fact, I worked at it so hard that I ripped a boot mount off the base of the snowshoe.  That stopped me that year.  I’ve never really gotten back to it.  Felt good.

So far today about 4,300 words.  A better than normal day at home, by about a factor of two, so I think this concentrated time will pay off.  I’m learning how to work away from home.  Not expert at it yet by any means.  I left two chapters at home, late ones.  I don’t know how I missed them, but I’m working around that just fine.

Working on the yellow pad is less stressful on the arms than using the keyboard on my knees.  That’s a plus.  So is the quiet and the lack of interruption.  On the downside.  No Kate.  No dogs.  Not my bed.

It has already got me back in the traces.  What I wanted.

Commentary on Religion, Writing

Writing on Yellow Pads

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Imbolc                                Waning Bridgit Moon

After all the effort last night to acquire a new keyboard, I decided this morning to start writing on yellow pads.  I’ve never written a book this way, but I wanted to try it.  Don’t know how many words, but I filled 4 and a half pages this morning.

I’m not sure there’s much difference for me since I type as fast as I write, but it is easier with this chair that I have here.  Much better on the back and eyes.

Breakfast and dinner are in silence.   I asked Brother Benet about the rationale for silence.  He thought for a while, “Tradition.”  He said they used to read at lunch, too, but stopped that a while ago.  We talked about monastics for a while.

He mentioned getting over to Aberdeen.  I might just do that.  It’s about 80 miles he said.  Have to see how the writing goes.

The computer gets turned off now.  I have to nap, yes, but more than that the electricity will be turned for half an hour, Brother  Paul said, “At least that’s what I’m expecting.”

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Writing

Breakfast in Silence

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Imbolc                                  Waning Bridgit Moon

The monks and individual retreatants like me all eat together in a long, tiled room.  There are six long wooden tables, a blond wood reflecting the era when the Abbey was built.  These tables sit at a slight diagonal to the western wall, mostly below ground level, only narrow windows above letting in light.

Trays, the blue plastic kind familiar to me from Alexandria Elementary School over 55 years ago, come up first with the silvered racks for tableware above them.  A steam table is next, roughly the size of the one Kam Wong’s Chinese restaurant has for its afternoon crowd in Andover.  Butted up against the steam table is another long wooden table on which sat this morning plastic bags of bread baked here in the monastery.

I picked up some creamed wheat–makes me think of the bear opening the creamed wheat crates in the Art Institutes American collection–brown bread, spread the bread with a little peanut butter, a tangerine and took my tray to the retreatants table.  After putting some milk in my cereal and getting some tea, all along the southern wall, I returned to the the table, eating my second meal here in silence.

Monks came in and out, some dressed in black robes, others in jeans and work shirts.

While eating, I looked up from time to time.  Above my chair was a painted crucifix with the words, God Rules from a Tree.  On the eastern wall, above the steam table, there is a long panel that contains the four symbols of the gospels:  Ox, Eagle, Lion and Angel.  In between each symbol is a graphic and words like:  Happy is he who is hungry.

We ate, the monks and I, in quiet, the only sounds an occasional chair scuffing the floor or silver ware against plastic.  The mood invited mindfulness so I imagined the field in which the wheat for bread and the cereal had grown.  The fall day on which it was harvested.  A barn full of Holsteins, water vapor steaming off them in the warm barn while they were milked.  The sunny vineyard in California where these grapes had grown fat and full of the water dried from them now.  Maybe a sugar beet field along the Red River or a sugar cane field in Hawai’i for the sugar.  I didn’t get as far as the tangerine and the tea and the peanut butter as my mind drifted, no longer mindful.

Now I’m warming up for the morning’s work, writing this piece.

From the Benedictine Monastery, Blue Cloud Abbey, near Marvin, South Dakota.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Literature

Tech Savvy Milbank

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Imbolc                                          Waning Bridgit Moon        Blue Cloud Abbey

Since I plan to spend most of my time writing, I brought one of my split keyboards which make typing much easier for me.  Only thing.  It had an old fashioned pin style plug-in.  I have a USB exclusive laptop along.  Sigh.

Got on the web and discovered a Radio Shack in Milbank, only 13 miles back toward Minnesota.  They were redesigning the store tonight, so, though they would have been closed otherwise, tonight they were there.  After supper, I drove to Milbank, had a nice chat with the clerks and the owner, who offered me a beer, bought a new keyboard–they couldn’t find the adapters due to remodeling–and schlepped back to the Abbey.

When I pulled up in the Abbey parking lot, I opened the truck door and the bells started clanging.  7:30, time for Vigils.  Scared the B…well you know, out of me.

So here I am, typing on my new keyboard, ready to get up tomorrow and start writing more pages of Missing.  The Abbey is a peaceful place, set high atop a prominent hill in an otherwise flat topography.  As a result, you can see for miles.  At night Milbank twinkles off to the east and farm houses dotted across the prairie are outposts of electricity, television, the modern world.

What would Per think?

The meal was in silence tonight and Brother Bennet read while the rest of us ate.  Another Minnesotan is here, a woman, and me.  The monks were all in black robes and cowl tonight.  I don’t know what signifies, but I’ll ask  tomorrow.

The drive out here is a long one, over 4 hours, and I’m tired.  Early bedtime tonight.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story, Woolly Mammoths

Obits Optimists

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Imbolc                                                                       Waning Bridgit Moon

The most optimistic page in the newspaper?  The obituaries.  Every day and especially on Sundays I see evidence of the hopefulness and optimism of Minnesota citizens.  I imagine it’s the same everywhere.  With no evidence for an afterlife at all, let alone a particular one, person after person greets their mother and father, relaxes in the arms of their Lord and Savior Jesus, are welcomed by God the Father or pass over to their next adventure.  The range of metaphysical perspectives may be narrow, usually encompassing some version of the Christian afterlife or the less well understood world of late 19th century spiritualism, the passing over folks, but the confidence and clarity braces me every time I read it.

I’ve not done a comprehensive study of obituaries, let alone a cross cultural one (though it would be fascinating), but it seems likely each place has its own, culturally specific brand of confidence about the unseen world.  In ancient Rome a favorite epitaph mentioned here before:  I was not.  I was.  I am not.  I don’t care. represents a very different take on the after death experience, one more in tune with my own existentialist one, though I’m not as nihilistic.  I do care, at least now, about my death, though, with my Roman fellow travelers, I’m pretty sure that after death I won’t care either.

This kind of optimism has ancient roots.  Certain Neanderthal remains have been found with ochre painted on the body, indicating some thoughts about life after the grave.  Just what that thought was, of course, we have no idea, but burying a body and decorating it moves well beyond the animal world’s relative disregard for their dead; relative because elephants do have mourning rituals*.

The new atheists like to lampoon all this as magical thinking or evidence that the human race has not yet grown up, but there are ways of looking at it.  To my mind it is a poetic, metaphoric way of declaring that the person’s memory will live on among there descendants and friends.  It also a means of consolation in the face of a forever event, perhaps the first one the family has experienced.  Since there is no evidence, it is possible that one of the many perspectives has got it right.

Long ago I made a pact, a version of Pascal’s wager, with the afterlife.  I will live my life in as straightforward and useful a way as I can, being true to my own understanding of the world.  With Camus I stand with those who would make the trip toward the great river of death easier for all.  If, as I suspect, death is a personal extinction event, then the wager ends.  If there is a supernatural being who cares about living entities and their future, then the minor or even major screw ups in my life will be forgiven since their/its perspective will embrace all things, giving a context to any individual life that even the most forgiving friend cannot.  Either way, I’m ok. Continue reading Obits Optimists →

Humanities, Politics

Union, Yes

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Imbolc                                                              Waning Bridgit Moon

This week had a lot of Latin time.  I made it through ten lines of Diana and Actaeon which Greg and I discussed at length during my tutoring session today.  I need to pay more attention to the verb and its object; when I get that, I get the translation; when I don’t, I make it fit anyhow, the Procrustean bed of my mind.  The work of translation, at least in Latin, lies within my competency level, I can see that now.  All it will require is ongoing attention.  All.  Well.  Good thing there’s a lot in Latin that interests me.

Madison, Wisconsin.  Politics, the way they work in our country, allow this mercurial swing from one perspective to another in the course of one election.  Republicans seem to need two things in the public arena:  enemies they can flog and to be the enemy themselves.  It’s a peculiar combination, like group sado/masochism with both aspects of S&M in action at the same time.  Enemies right now:  public sector unions, bloated budgets and those that love them, perverters of the constitution–at least they one they read, environmentalists, the environment.  Being the enemy right now:  ruling with a peculiar maliciousness–witness the Wisconsin Governor’s “conversation” with billionaire David Koch,  acting as if the nation were a one party system, theirs, with a pesky group of liberals who act like horseflies and insist on inhabiting seats in their government, choosing a mainstream way of interpreting the constitution, the living document school, and pushing it, in their minds, to the dustbin of history as if it had never existed.

We need parties that represent different communities and different interests, that’s what politics is for, the mediation of disputes, but our politics don’t work unless respect for the others existence stands as a given. Continue reading Union, Yes →

Bees, Friends

Precious

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Imbolc                                                  Waning Bridgit Moon

Sheepshead tonight.  I took in honey for Ed, Dick, Roy and Bill plus honeycake that Kate made from our honey.  Artemis Hives honors the ancient Greek Goddess of the hunt who also had honeybees within her domain.  Worshippers took to her altar honeycake as an offering.  My original idea was to call Artemis honey, “The honeycake honey” and include honeycake recipe and a bit about Artemis with each sale.  Might still happen, some year.

The card gods were good to me tonight, again.  They gave me three good hands when I dealt, a good position when playing sheepshead.  Ed and Bill both spoke about their wives with Bill reporting the good news that Regina’s cancer score has already begun to trend down after only a brief time on the hormone therapy.  That’s the kind of news it’s good to hear.

Ed’s wife has challenges surrounding a knee replacement gone bad compounded by her other health related issues.  She’s in a transitional living facility right now while they try to calm her body down.

As life goes on, I appreciate more and more the precious nature of the relationships I have at this sheepshead table, at the Museum, among the Sierra Club folks and the Woolly Mammoths.  Each place enriches me and gives me a place to just be, be who I am.  What a gift.

So, good night to you and to Artemis Hives matron Goddess.

Commentary on Religion, Humanities

Latin and Clergy

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Imbolc                                                         Waning Bridgit Moon

Another opportunity to spend some quality time with Ovid.  Two days in a row with considerable focus on Latin.  I like the continuity, the carry over from one hour to the next, one day to the next.  It feels like things have chance to cement themselves, take  hold.  On the other hand this is still very hard for me, a lot of uncertainty, guess work.

Spent time today, too, with Leslie, the intern from United Theological Seminary whom I’m mentoring this year.  Learning is such a difficult task, especially at this point, second or junior year, of seminary.  Occupational formation, especially for something as fuzzy as ministry, takes a long time.  Years.  At this point its more confusing than enlightening.

Cooking, Health, Weather +Climate

Nix Still Comes Down…Geesh

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Imbolc                                                       Waning Bridgit Moon

This has been a nix two-day event.  The Woolly’s, for the first time I recall, canceled.  Too little parking around Charlie Haislet’s condo.

The days events scattered around me, I never quite got traction, feel a little down.  Nothing bad, just wheels spinning.  Don’t like it.

The snow-blower, which needs a tune-up, chugged, coughed and sputtered, but worked long enough to blow the snow off the sidewalk.  I was glad.  This was too heavy for a shoveling session.

Kate and I do plan to join the Y here after I get back from Blue Cloud.  I’m after a personal trainer to get a resistance work out going again, plus I’m going to do my first Pilates and attend a bodyflow class that uses a combination of Tai-Chi, yoga and Pilates.  Sounds fun to me.  I’m deconditioned right now when it comes to muscle mass, so shoveling the walk would have hurt.  My aerobic conditioning is fine, no heart attack likely, but a lot of back and shoulder ache.  Looking forward to getting back to resistance work.

So, I’m gonna workout then roast a chicken with garlic cloves under its skin and onions on the inside.  These are our garlic and onions, still useful this far into the season.  I’m also going to use some canned beans from 2007.  A little bulgur and we’ll have a meal.