Monthly Archives: May 2011

Aging, Garden

An Old Cannabis Farm, Right?

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Beltane                                                Waxing Last Frost Moon

A long, 3 hour, nap, perfect for a gloomy, chill spring afternoon.  Then off to the grocery store.  With Mark here there are items on the list peculiar to him like Raisin Bran, lots of bread, more fish than usual (a good thing) and a greater quantity of fruit.

The same kid from Anoka/Ramsey Garden came with the pocket sized dump truck, navigated it through our gate and dumped the load right in front of the orchard, saving several steps with a heavy wheelbarrow.  He remembered our place, “An old cannabis farm, right? Not as much up now.”

Yep, during WWII the government wanted more rope so hemp farms were common in Anoka county.  The weed grows everywhere, will get 8-9 feet tall if allowed to mature and has a stem at maturity that is so thick a machete takes two or three whacks to bring it down. It laughs at weed whips.  And, no, its THC content is too low to be any good.  It made rope, not laughing teen-agers and college students.

True story.  When we first moved up here to Andover, back in 1994, we were the only house in the development.  A white car pulled up on 153rd about two hundred feet from our house and two young kids popped the trunk and hopped out.  They busily pulled hemp plants from the lot across from us and threw them in the car, not even bothering to shake the soil off the roots.   Someone, we think it was the developer, Harvey Kadlec, called the police.

When they arrived, the kids were still at work.  Oops.  The police impounded the car and gave the kids a lift back to the Anoka County Jail.

Kate always tells this on me, so I’ll just go ahead.  I had laced several hemp plants through our chain link fence, reveling in the fact that the forbidden weed grew wild on our property, a sort of dream lot for a sixties kid.  When the police came, I went out through our back garage door and pulled the plants out of the fence.  Can’t be too careful in these circumstances.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

At Peace

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Beltane                                                                    Waxing Last Frost Moon

Woke up this morning feeling the week past.  Intellectually and physically tired.  Gonna take a day off to play, sleep.  Maybe go to the Walker, which I haven’t visited in far too long.

We have a large truck gate in the front section of our 6 foot high chain link fence.  It opens to ten feet wide to allow delivery trucks, mobile lawn mowers and other wide things into the back where the orchard and the garden are.  It’s open today because we’re having five cubic yards of mulch delivered.  To open it, because it’s used infrequently, I had to dig out the accumulated soil in front of the two panels that create the gate, just so they could swing out.

Being tired, in a good way, with things done, matters accomplished gives me a feeling of peace.  I like it.

Dogs, Great Work, Humanities, Politics

Busy Friday

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Beltane                                                                                           Waxing Last Frost Moon

Finally.  One chunk of the Metamorphosis finished in a literal (sort 0f) version.  That’s Book III:138-250.  My learning curve has been steep, sometimes so much so that I thought I might tip over backwards, but I seem to have reached a point where moving forward goes faster now and the hill no longer looks quite so daunting.  The next step is to take it apart and put it back together in idiomatic English, then compare it to other translations, see what insights that adds.  As a guy who thought the world of language had invalidated his passport years ago, I’m pleasantly surprised and pleased with myself.  It means a lot to do something at 64 that I’ve spent a lifetime imagining I couldn’t.

After that I drove into Little Sezchuan and had lunch with Justin and Margaret, the Sierra Club’s lobbyist and Executive Director.   We discussed evaluating our legislative work this year, wrapping things up and getting ourselves squared away for the 2011-2012 session.  This has been a difficult year and it’s not over.

Came home, ready for my nap.  But.  Vega lay in the kitchen, scrunched up in pain and bloodied from some kind of a fight.  No clue what happened, but we first examined her, then took her over to the vet who sewed her up, gave her antibiotics and pain pills and we brought her home.  She’s resting now, but the vet says she be very sore tomorrow.  She’s such a sweety, she just let them work on her.

Now, I’m sleepy, but can’t get my nap because it would interfere with going to sleep.

Aging, Art and Culture, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

What Get’s You Up In The Morning?

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Beltane                                                         Waxing Last Frost Moon

Several years ago, maybe twenty, I sat down with my friend Lonnie Helgeson at the Walker cafe, a table overlooking downtown Minneapolis and the Sculpture Garden.  Lonnie, I said, I could die now.  I feel good about what I’ve done with my life and would have no regrets.

Lonnie looked at me, thought a moment, then asked, “But Charlie where’s your passion?”

Oh.  Yeah.  A passionate man would not declare he was ready to die, he’d be asking, what’s next!

Now, at 64, I can honestly say, “What’s next!”  Not sure what was going on at that moment in my life, but I think I’d hit a caesura, a pause in the melody of my life, a rest stop on the way.  While there, I mistook the rest stop for a destination, rather than a place to catch my breath, consider what direction my path now lead.

Older now and several caravan serai of the soul moments later, I welcome those times when life ceases to press with urgency, when the TV or  a novel or a long vacation beckons.  These are moments of consolidation, a time perhaps to welcome the god Janus for a good look back and a strong gaze forward.

It feels like one may be coming.  Last night I finished my literal translation of Ovid’s story of Diana and Actaeon.  The legislature ends this session (we think) on May 20th or so.  The touring season begins to loosen as schools close down for the summer.  Then I’m left with the bees and the gardens, the novel, too, of course.

These kind of moments when the pacing changes dramatically often yield breaks.  Often, as I’ve looked back over my life, I’ve responded to these breaks with melancholy, a drifting down, moving into a sense of purposelessness.  What do I do now?  I might die.  That would be ok.

Probably where I was that afternoon long ago having lunch with Lonnie.

The melancholy is ok, too.  It’s an old friend, one I’ve come to appreciate as a gathering in, a time to be with myself, in myself.  The melancholy slows down my appetite for life, forces me to pay attention to subtler, inner things, so when I reemerge, I’m ready for another road on this one-way trip.

So, if you talk to me a month from now and I seem a bit distracted, maybe a little down, you’ll know I’m really just resting, getting ready to come out of my corner.  Again.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Humanities

Love, Sex and Scandal

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Beltane                                                              Waxing Last Frost Moon

Love, sex and scandal tour tonight.  We went from the Venus figurine, made 20,000 years ago, to the erotic work of Balthus, covering, in between nymphs and satyrs, heroes and centaurs, a raped Roman matron, a satirized French actress, a beloved 5th century Chinese singing girl and the Little Girl of Otto Dix.  The basic theme was the enduring nature of love and sex, probably scandal, too, thought that’s hard to read in the archaeological record.

The most controversial pieces were the final two, Little Girl and The Living Room.  The one we decided was not pornographic though it appeared that way, the other was pornographic though it does not appear that way.  The mutable nature of art.  Along the way we spoke of the shadow museum, things we own, but do not display like shunga, the erotic prints from Japan, that our idea of propriety still carries over the Victorian sensibilities of now three centuries and a millennium past.

We spoke openly about these things and, I think, surprised each other.  In a good way.  I enjoyed the group and the tour.

Garden, Great Wheel, Weather +Climate

A Northern Spring

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Beltane                                                              Waxing Last Frost Moon

This northern spring, a season all its own, as is the northern summer, has turned cold and wet.  Again.  The cold weather vegetables have had a near perfect early growing season.  This combination of occasional heat followed by cold and rainy days marks the uncertainty, the ambiguity of our spring, often a time when the weather is neither this nor that, a variety.

Later,  in another three to four weeks at most, we will trend hot and hotter, finding ourselves by mid-summer in heat rivaling our southern states.  As the days heat up, the vegetables and the fruits will flower, become pregnant, then fruit, giving us the food we love:  tomatoes, beans, potatoes, apples, pears, cherries and currant.  Perhaps this year, with the transplanting even the gooseberries will yield.

Then, by mid-to-late August, the evenings will begin to cool, though the days remain warm.  The sky will become an impossible blue, a color found only in the heart and the mind’s eye.  This sky absorbs all earthbound thought and transforms it into the higher concepts of heaven.  This signals the onrush of the harvest season.

Blessed be.

Art and Culture

USA’s Hope

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Beltane                                                     Waxing Last Frost Moon

Tours today of kids from Como Park Elementary School, 6th graders.  This was a diverse group with Somali’s, Chinese, Hmong, African-Americans and the odd Caucasian.  Both groups were sharp, but the second group had a couple of kids that were extra bright.  A young lady, a Somali with a head scarf, talked about the St. Adorno:  “Maybe it’s the guy in the present and in the future (she pointed to St. Adorno), in the present he feels trapped in his house, like it’s a prison, but in the future he’ll be free.”  And so on.  These kids would be fun to teach.  We went to precisely none of the objects I’d prepared.  When I asked this last group if there was anything in particular they wanted to seem, this same young woman said, “Cubism!”

Bees

Bee Diary: May 9, 2011 Wax Moths

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Beltane                                                                       Waxing Last Frost Moon

Minnesota Hobby Bee Keepers last night.  There’s always something at these events.  Last night Gary Reuters, Marla Spivak’s associate and bee wrangler, took general questions on hive management.  He does this every meeting, but he took more time last night.  I learned about wax moths.  Wax moths, which come on the winds of mid-summer, infest hives and ruin the comb.  If all the hive box frames are on colonies by July, this is not a problem because the bees fend them off.  Then, when the season is over, any frames left out of a hive box go into the cold shed and the moth larvae die over the winter.

Here’s the interesting part.  The function of the wax moth is to invade vacated bee colonies and reduce the comb and other residue, like propolis, to a substance more usable by the rest of nature.  In other words the wax moth is another aspect of the intricate dance in which the bees participate, a natural part.  The number of things bees can teach us seems, at this stage in my learning, as numerous as the pollinators themselves.

Art and Culture, Bees, Garden

And Yet More Planting

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Beltane                                                           Waxing Last Frost Moon

Cherokee Trail of Tears.  Hutterite.  Soup beans and green beans.  Vidalia onions from sets grown in Georgia.  Purple passion and white asparagus.  Three varieties of tomatoes.  Golden beets.  Pretty much the last of this year’s non-succession planting.  Mark’s been a big help, letting Kate and I focus on the things we do best.  One or two things remain: cucumber, gourds, but they’re delayed right now.  So Artemis Hives and Gardens has all the bees in their colonies, early and post-frost vegetables plants in the ground and daffodils and tulips and our magnolia providing color.  The fruit tree’s buds have swollen; the currants have fully leafed out; the quince has its bright red flowers; the gooseberry plants are in a new home with more sun and Kate has planted shade lovers in the spots where the gooseberries were.

Left to figure out.  What crop(s) to grow in the hydroponics during the summer.  How to take good care of the fruit trees and their produce.  Succession dates for the rest of the growing season.  Mulching and pruning.  Weeding.

My object list for my Thursday early evening Love, Sex and Scandal tour:  Venus figurine, The Singer Su Hsia0-Hsia0, Theseus Killing the Centaur, Bacchante and Satyr,  Mlle. Lange as Danae, Lucretia, The Little Girl, The Living Room.  This group wanted edgy.  This tour will qualify.

Late to bed last night, a great day today so I planted in the am, but I still need to do Latin.  Not so easy with a fuzzy head.  Probably nap time.

Aging, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Health

That Old Achievement Bugaboo

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Beltane                                                                Waxing Last Frost Moon

Deciding to take a gamble on the weather, with the aid of the forecasters, Kate planted some frost sensitive plants today:  coleus, especially.  She also planted artemisia, Jacob’s Ladder, alyssum and purple wave petunias.  Mark weeded.  Meanwhile I was in St. Paul doing my next to last session with Leslie.

Tonight was Tai Chi.  When I arrived, there was no one else there except the first teacher I encountered and an advanced student.  Nobody else showed up, presumably due to mother’s day.  That meant I had a personal class with two teachers.  It was a revelation.  This teacher, the one I met the first night of class, has a style that connects with me.

She spoke about learning Chinese, listening to the words at night before she went to bed and in the morning before class and recommended, again, since she had done the same thing at the one class she taught, that I practice morning and night.  Just immerse yourself, she said.  We come to these things with such an achievement orientation and we have to jettison it, let go of mistakes, think of them as occurrences, concentrate on the process.

Tai Chi has 13 different moves, a vocabulary of movement, a style of movement rooted in another culture.  I’ve learned 5 of them so far.  Well, sort of learned them.

It was a good class. What I needed at this point.