Monthly Archives: February 2011

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.

Retirement, Weather +Climate

Nix Still Comes Down

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Imbolc                                                                      Waning Bridgit Moon

Boy did we get the snow.  Don’t know how much, but it sure piled up in the driveway.  Up to the top of my Sorels when I retrieved the paper.

Business meeting this morning.  Still reconnoitering retirement finances.  They look good right now, real good in fact.  The recent market up tick has made our IRA look strong and has helped our savings fund, too.  Even so, we need to get comfortable with the income, outgo realities of this new reality.  We will.

Need to go out and do some digging, find our sidewalk.  I’m sure it’s still there.  Somewhere.

Humanities, Politics

The Holly King Still Reigns

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Imbolc                                                            Waning Bridgit Moon

The snow has well begun and the winds howl outside, evidence that the Holly King has not yet been defeated by the Hawthorn Giant.  Even so, the snows of this time of year do not last long, even when they come in depth.  The sun vaults higher and higher in the sky each day, already 11 degrees higher at 33 than it was on January 1st at 22.  This elevation concentrates the sun’s rays, warming the days faster and faster until finally the Holly King will retire to his growing season abode far away in the ice of the northern regions.  I don’t know what he does there, but when he returns after the crops have been harvested and the land left fallow, he will be rested and ready to reassert his dominion.  Today he shows that his reign has not yet ended for this year.

Translating Ovid has been slow, as it always is, looking up individual words in the Latin dictionary, investigating verb forms and the declensions of nouns and adjectives.  The trickiest part, for me anyhow, remains holding the various words and their possible conjugated and declined meanings in my mind, assembling and reassembling them until, like the keystone into the arch, the sentence or phrase hangs together.

I like being in my lower floor study, half below ground, windows opening at ground level show the wind and the snow.  In here I have created a library set up for my needs:  art history references, philosophical texts, books on the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Sierra Club and environmental politics, travel guides from Greece, Cambodia, Turkey, Rome, Great Britain, Cambodia and Thailand among others,  texts, little read, on neuro and cognitive science.  Files for objects at the MIA, old presentations, short stories, novels and research material on the Great Wheel, the ancient Celts.

This is a peaceful place where concentration comes easily and hours can pass without leaving.  I suppose it’s also a meditation room.  Now the snow and the work of the morning have me leaning toward a nap.  Kate’s at work this Sunday, so I’ll sleep alone.  Unusual these days.

Humanities, Literature, Weather +Climate

Ante Nixem

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Imbolc                                              Waning Bridgit Moon

The bubble of calm before the winds begin to blow and the snow to fall.  Predictions have increased the amount from 8-10 to 12-18.  I’ve never outgrown my joy at a snowfall, so I’m looking forward to this one.

My plan for the snow is this:  Ovid and some reading.  I’m translating the story of Diana and Actaeon right now since Titian painted a large canvas on this theme, a painting now in the MIA for three months.

The reading right now is Empire, a s0-so novel of imperial Rome.  I’m sure the idea seemed like a winner when the guy started.  Take one non-imperial family and follow them through the years of changing emperors.  If the through in were stronger, it might have been strong, but it’s more like a pastiche.  He throws in well known stories of this emperor or that, trying to palm them off on the reader as if they were imaginative leaps, but I know too much of the history.  The saving grace to the book is that it is a decent survey of the changing fortunes of Rome under emperors from Augustus to Hadrian.  So far.  I’m almost done and look forward to a new novel written with more narrative flair.

Can you tell I’m sort of caught up in Rome right now?  That’s the way it goes for me.  Ancient China.  Ancient Egypt.  Ancient Celts.  Ancient Greece.  Ancient Rome.

GeekWorld, Weather +Climate

More Fun With Computers

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Imbolc                                                       Full Bridgit Moon

After 52 on Monday and a good deal of melting, with a good deal left to go, too, the red button on my status bar has lit up again with a winter weather advisory, a winter storm warning.  If all goes as predicted, we may end up with 8-10 inches of new snow.

Today I spent a good bit of time installing a new printer, a multi-function HP, so-called plug and play.  Well, sort of.  I finally got it set up to print from all three computers on our home network.  Felt good to get it done.  Now I may tackle that old laserjet one more time before I buy a new one.

Groceries, then time on the treadmill and time with the grandkids on Skype.  Now to bed.