Monthly Archives: August 2011

Great Work, Politics

Organize

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Lughnasa                                                                      New Harvest Moon

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” – Gandhi

OK.  Heresy moment.  Being the change you want to see in the world will not change the world.  Paraphrasing Patton’s famous quote:  You don’t change the world by changing yourself, you change the world by getting other poor bastards to change it.  Change is a political as well as a personal process and for any personal change to become larger than one person, you have to engage others.

Additionally, even if you change yourself, the world will not change along with you.  Here’s an example.  Let’s say you desire a greener world.  In order to achieve a greener world you decide to drive a Prius or a Volt, compost your household organic waste, put solar panels on your roof next to the wind turbine and grow your own vegetables.  Maybe even throw in chickens and bees to round things out.  You’ve changed yourself.

Is that a bad thing?  Of course not.  Did it contribute to a greener planet?  Yes, but in a very, very small way.  Are you setting a good example for others?  Yes.

Do people follow good examples?  Not so much.  People follow marketing, neighbor’s status symbols and their own values.  If others don’t voluntarily buy a Volt, compost, create renewable energy and grow their own vegetables, how will we get to a greener world?

By government incentives on solar panels and wind turbines.  Feed in tariffs.  A city or county owned compost pile available to residents.  A government that creates more public transit and fewer roads.  National standards for mpg.  A carbon tax.  Any of several wedges that can create enough change to ratchet down the pace of climate change.

How do we get these things to happen?  How do we get these changes to happen in the world?  Not by changing ourselves (though it won’t hurt), but by becoming strong enough politically to change how government and corporations treat carbon emissions.

Even though Ghandi become the change he wanted to see in the world, he also organized and led a large non-violent resistance movement against the might of the British Empire.  It was the British Empire that changed.  And not because Ghandi changed himself, but because thousands came along with him in a political movement.

To make the change you want to see in the world, organize.

Minnesota, Weather +Climate

Just Like Canada

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Lughnasa                                                                                             Waning Honey Extraction Moon

The nights have grown cooler.  The August moon has begun to fade away, and the September moon will not come for a bit.  Dark nights approach, a time for the occult.

Minnesota, Mark says, feels like Canada and the Twin Cities feel like Canadian cities.  The bright blue August sky, the changed slant of the sun’s rays, the occasional cottony fluff high above us all combine, with cool nights and the gradually decreasing highs to put us in the same northern space as Ontario, our nearest Canadian neighbor.

At our best, we are like Canada.  We believe in health care for all people, a good education and jobs that require education.  Winter helps define us and, hey, hockey is big.  We have an openness to our governance that seems to be true in Canada, too.

We share some totem animals, too:  moose, raven, lynx, wolf.

If Minnesota could be the next province, it would fit right in.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature

Text, Reader, Learning

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Lughnasa                                                                              Waning Honey Extraction Moon

Been feelin’ tired, a bit lowdown.  Got a good nap this afternoon and better.

Latin today was a bit more encouraging than I had anticipated.  My translation was not so far off, I hadn’t pursued sentence and clause construction quite as diligently as would have been good, but I had the right idea, for the most part.  I now see another level to this translation process and that is the one where I set off on my own, with no expectation that a tutor will read it.  Instead, I will rely on my own knowledge and skill.  That day is off a ways, but no where near so far as it was a year ago March when I began this journey.

Greg and I had a conversation today about the classics, about language and books and translation and interpretation.  Exegesis and hermeneutics.  This is turf  I know well from my days in Sem.  I persist in believing that there is a history and an author to which texts refer and are bound.  Surprisingly, this belief is not widely shared among academics in literary fields.  They’ve ridden off on the horse of post-modernism, headed, with speed, down what Francis Bacon would have called the wrong path, a path not unlike the Scholastics, where all knowledge happens within a field of words and all conclusions come from deductive reasoning.

Bacon said traveling down the wrong path will not lead your toward your destination and traveling faster down that path only leads you further and further away.

Faith and Spirituality

A Little Late Night Darkness

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Lughnasa                                                                     Waning Honey Extraction Moon

Well.  5.8 earthquake on the EAST coast.  Hurricane Irene bearing down on a direct line with the eastern seaboard.  Astronomers have seen a black hole swallowing a star.

Coincidence?

Rapture Index 183
 Net Change    -1

A fire and brimstone preacher of the old guard would doubtless see these events as apocalyptic messages sent in God’s Old Testament form.  Doubt it.

Nature continues violent, ruthless and heartless, a force beyond our imagining, a force our understanding cannot diminish and a power our technology cannot dominate.

We came out of the darkness and will return to the darkness.  These are the messages in these events.  Read them and weep.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel

State Fair, Auld Origins

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Lughnasa                                                                            Waning Honey Extraction Moon

The state fair has begun:  corn dogs, cheese curds, church run restaurants, politicians of all stripes, trade unionists, farmers and a few cows, horses, pigs, chickens, llamas and rabbits.  Oh, yeah.  That butter sculpture, too.  You know, Princess Kay of the Milky Way.  Or, Queen of the Tao of Dairy.

State and county fairs, occurring in late summer, are the direct remnants of the Celtic festival of Lughnasa, a first fruits market and holiday week which brought farmers, crafts people, villagers and nobility together.  These festivals had a religious beginning, honoring of some god or goddess whose attributes seemed especially apt, in the case of Lughnasa, the Celtic god, Lugh, a god of many skills, whose foster-mother Tailtiu died after clearing Ireland for agriculture.

At Lughnasa handfast marriages were made, hands stuck through a hole in a stone wall and held fast blessed a couples trial for a year and a day.  Games and feats of skill played a prominent part during the Lughnasa festivals, too.  Winter lodging for those without homes was also contracted for during these festivals.

(Lugh had a spear which sought battle, a sling with which he was expert and a raven by his side.  His name means, in Gaelic, long arm.)

The gathering of such diverse groups as 4-H’ers, beekeepers, dairy folk, farm implement dealers, artists, union workers, political aspirants and hawkers of all kinds makes our contemporary Lughnasa as vibrant and colorful as the originals.

I don’t know how many year and a day marriages get sealed at the State Fair, but I imagine many relationships begin or deepen during its run.

However you style it, the State Fair celebrates the many skills and talents in our state and brings folks together.  Lugh, the god of many talents, must feel at home here, too.

 

 

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Writing

Spiritual Resources for the Humanist

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Lughnasa                                                                Waning Honey Extraction Moon

More butting my head against a language that any 4 year old in ancient Rome could speak and a reasonably intelligent 5 year old could read.  I guess there is a plateau affect here and I’m standing on one right now.  I can see the path I’ve taken to get here, off to my back, but the road ahead lies blocked, beginning at a point somewhere above me, as if I stand before a cliff.

Not complaining, just observing.  I’m here by choice and I know that.

Groveland asked me for a sermon topic, something I’m going to preach on October 9th, exactly a week before our cruise.  A month and a half is a long lead time, so I went back through this blog, hunting for a topic that interested me and one that might interest Grovelanders, too.

Here’s what I sent them:

Spiritual Resources for the Humanist

What resources do we have, those of us no longer in the Christian faith?  Or those of us never in it?  What resources do we have to replenish the spirit and feed the Self?

The Western cultural tradition, a great river of classical literature and fine arts has enough nourishment for several lifetimes.  We’ll explore works like the Bible, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Inferno and how to use them for our personal growth.

I lifted the phrase the great river of the classics from one of my favorite authors, Camille Paglia.  Other eras have used the writings of the Greeks, the Jews, the Romans and the Italians in particular as stimulus for reflection, contemplation, meditation.  I’ll toss in a few later writers like Kafka, Camus, Goethe, Hesse, Tolstoy, Isaac Bashevis Singer, probably Rainer Rilke and Wallace Stevens, too.

Might toss in a few works of art, perhaps Goya, the color field painters, Song dynasty potters and painters, perhaps a Tibetan Buddhist thangka.

I suppose I’ll have to start by considering the nature of resources for spirituality, something I’ve come of late to define as enrichment, expansion, deepening of the Self.  But count on a Latin phrase or two, just because I can.

 

Family, Travel

Pulling Hair

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Lughnasa                                                                 Waning Honey Extraction Moon

Over to Carlson Toyota this morning.  Why?  To have Kate sign over the Tundra to me, as a gift.  The purpose?  Avoid sales tax on the title transfer.  My name alone is on the Rav4, for no particular reason except that’s how we did it that day.  Her’s alone was on the Tundra.  We used the Tundra as a trade-in.  QED.  Right?  Enough to make me pull out my hair and shout.

I’m a little short of equilibrium as we try to get Mark through the visa process for his job in Saudi Arabia.  A routine physical turned up an abnormality.  That means seeing a specialist.  Seeing a specialist means costs and delays.  The visa itself takes time to process and he needs to be over there by September 14th.  Time is getting short.  A lot of juggling here and there.  Kate’s called in favors to move the process along.

At this rate and given my starting point I’ll have no hair left by the first week of September.

Memories, US History

As the 10th Anniversary Comes

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Lughnasa                                                         Waning Honey Extraction Moon

BJ came today.  She’s a New Yorker and has been since she attended Julliard many years ago.  Over lunch today Mark asked her about 9/11.

She told her story and Schecky’s.  She was in New Jersey and saw the burning building across the grasslands.  At first she and her friends thought it was an accident.  Then the news became clear.  Schecky was at home at the Beacon Hotel, 74th and Broadway.  He’d been asleep, woke up, turned on the TV and thought the scenes he saw were a strange disaster movie.  As he clicked the channels, it was the same movie on all of them.  Relatives had left messages on his answering machine, “Are you ok?”  He thought, why wouldn’t I be?

BJ, who had come to New Jersey by train, found a fellow musician with a car and the two of them spent seven hours trying to get her back to Manhattan, eventually driving far to the north to the Tappan Zee bridge and finding a back way into the Bronx.  Her friend lived in Brooklyn and BJ took a subway back.

Over the next six months BJ said folks looked each other in the eyes on the streets and in the subways, trying to connect.  She rode a bike in Central Park, she had begun training for a race, and she said the atmosphere there was extraordinary.  Like the end of the world might be coming and folks needed to be out with other people.

She spoke of playing music at St. Paul’s Chapel, where many of the rescue workers came for rest and food, part of a volunteer effort by the city’s musicians.  She was also angry that no monument was in place and that so little work had been done on the buildings that would replace the Twin Towers.

 

Family, Health, Travel

Drawing Blood

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Lughnasa                                                                           Waning Honey Extraction Moon

Took Mark in for a counseling session at 8 am and then over to Allina for lab work.  He said the phlebotomist kept putting on more tubes to collect blood. “I’m woozy,” he said, as he drank a cup of hot chocolate.  After this, a fasting blood draw, we went to IHOP and had breakfast.

He’s been here a while and I’ve gotten used to having him around, but this job in Saudi Arabia is a strong next step for him, a chance to reassert himself as both a teacher and a world traveler.  His anxiety about it is normal, new job, new town, new people, new culture, but those are also all the things that make this an exciting opportunity.

Easy for me to say, of course, I’ll be home here in Andover.  Still.

 

Aging, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Health

Degree of Difficulty

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Lughnasa                                                                                    Waning Honey Extraction Moon

I have grasped the swallow’s tail, offered a shoulder strike, wielded a single whip, pushed and pulled, brushed the leg, deflected, parried and thrust.  All moves in Tai Chi.  I have made real progress over the last 20 weeks, nearing the real end of the first third of the form.  Once I finish the first third, I can practice it three times in a row and will have a feel for the time it takes to do the entire form.

At some point I will have the entire form under my belt, perhaps in the next year, though I will have a month and a half hiatus while rounding South America.  Then, I can continue the form as a means of meditation, relaxation and conditioning.

With the single exception of some modern dance I did while in college, this has been the most difficult, by far, physical work I’ve ever done.  Not difficult as in strenuous, but difficult in the care and precision needed, the execution of movements which do not come naturally to me.  The degree of difficulty has surprised me, but only because I was so ignorant of Tai Chi.

Mastering a difficult physical project has been satisfying for me, satisfying in direct proportion to its difficulty.  I tried piano for quite a while about ten years ago, but I just didn’t have the skill or the real interest.  This I can and am doing.  New for me.