Daily Archives: April 12, 2011

Bees, Family, Our Land and Home

Bee Diary: April 12, 2011

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Spring                                                   Waxing Bee Hiving Moon

Hobby Bee Keepers tonight.  Kate and I heard a presentation on Minnesota Grown, a very interesting initiative by the Minnesota Department of Agriculture that supports local food 400_garden_0084based businesses with marketing assistance.  A woman gave a presentation on cooking with honey.  How to make truffles.  Uh-oh.  They were really good.  Not a healthful food, but my were they tasty.

The hobby beekeepers have a farmer look, a rural feel, even though there are many urban and suburban beekeepers.  Guys with hat line tans, checked shirts and blue jeans; woman with sensible cloths and no make up.  Tonight I learned what to do with all the honey I have left over from the demise of my two colonies; use it four frames at a time to feed my new package bees.

The night was clear and warmish.  Today was busy, as was yesterday and as tomorrow and Thursday will be.  My energy is up and I’m having fun.  I’m glad we’ve had the warm weather and a chance to get into the garden.

About that land my sister, brother and I own in West Texas.  Probably not gonna be used for a housing development.  Forty acres of mesquite and sand, plus, natives assured me, quite a few rattlesnakes.  Taste like chicken I’m told.  A certain, lonely hermit part of me finds West Texas desirable because of its emptiness, its vast spaces and little civilization.  I loved Marfa and could imagine a winter retreat down there in Imperial that could serve as a base for outings to Great Bend, Marfa, Guadaleupe Mountains, Carlsbad Caverns.  Maybe.

Think I’ll send Mark down there to scout it out, maybe hire a surveyor.

West Texas

The 2010 Census confirmed what anyone passing through the scrublands of West Texas already knew: People are leaving, and no one is taking their place, even with oil at more than $100 a barrel. The people who remain often drive an hour or more to visit a doctor, buy a pair of jeans or see a movie.

So you might wonder why anyone is still there, in this place where natural beauty is defined by dry creek beds and scraggly mesquite, where public transit is a school bus and Starbucks is a punch line.

“The greatest sunsets. The stars are just right there. You hear the coyotes howling,” says Billy Burt Hopper, sheriff of Loving County, home to 82 people and the least-populated county in the United States.

Art and Culture, Great Work

The New One

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Spring                                                Waxing Bee Hiving Moon

(50th anniversary of human spaceflight)

An encyclopedic museum like the MIA has such a broad collection–by definition–that gaining familiarity with all of it is a practical impossibility.  This may sound like a disadvantage, but from my perspective, it’s pure joy.  Why?  Because it means I get to discover new art and new artists, even if they’ve been in our collection for a very long time.

Case in point.  John B. Flanagan, a graduate of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (1916-1919), a hard luck story wedded to artistic success and an early death.  The New One, brand new to me, has been in our collection since 1951.  I found it because I have a sculpture tour on Thursday and, since I’d never done a sculpture tour, I had to poke around the many, many sculptures we have.  In the process I discovered this artist and our example of his work.

He attempted to keep the personal distant from his work which he saw as searching for the unity that exists in nature.  This unity led him to the belief that a powerful organizing and vitalizing force could be found in all creatures, not just humankind.  This small sculpture, 6 x 11 x 6 inches, shows the unfolding of a fetus.  His work shows no identifiable influence, so wrapped up he was in this quest for what nature could reveal.

Flanagan and his search for the heart of the natural world expresses in stone a search I identify as my own.  How do we, all of us, living and non-living, express a link, a bond, the link, the bond that finds us all born of the same atoms and, in our decay, returning those atoms for use again and again and again.

This is not pantheism, as one art critic labeled Flanagan’s perspective.  It has no need for a deity, rather, it grasps the kernel of sameness that makes us all one:  star, toad, stone and whale.  What a wonder to find someone on the very same path as your own, someone skilled enough to turn stone into personal vision.  Miraculous.  Delightful.