Monthly Archives: August 2011

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

Gifts and Talents

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Lughnasa                                                                            Waning Honey Extraction Moon

Kate and I had a conversation the other day about talent.  Two of her sisters make their living playing classical violin.  They have talent.  A lot of it.  BJ went to Julliard and Sarah to Curtis, both academies for topflight talent.  They both graduated and have been able to work using their training.  BJ makes a living as a classical musician in New York City, the hotspot for classical music today in the same way Vienna was at one time in Austria.  Sarah teaches violin and does the occasional solo spot with orchestras of the second tier.

Kate and I had/have above average intelligence and have been able to work making use of  those gifts, Kate in pediatrics and me in various religious, political and artistic positions.

Even so, in all four of our cases, we had enough talent to peer over the transom into the gifted realm, but not enough to participate in it.  This is a ruling contradiction of life, no matter what your level of talent, wealth or status, there is always someone more talented, more gifted, wealthier and higher up the status ladder.  Always.  Even if you’re Itzhak Perlman or Bill Gates or Merrill Streep, you have to contend with Paganini, Andrew Carnegie or Sarah Bernhardt.  History can always serve up an exemplar who achieved more, acted better or accumulated more wealth than thou.

This problem cannot be solved by saying don’t peek, don’t stand on the chair and try to see into the room where the door closed before you.  No, we all peek because we can’t help it.  We imagine, fantasize, try to pull ourselves up a little bit, maybe we can squeeze through, even if it’s only to the room where the jobs pay $15.00.  Or maybe to the room where the cool kids are.  Or the ones with enough food.  Or the Noble Prize.  Or authors with books on the NYT bestseller list.

Here is the one and true solution.  Know thyself.  Work within yourSelf, demanding from that Self the best it has.  Not the best it wishes it had, not the best others seem to have, but the best Self you have.  In this way you offer the world that unique gift, you.

This solution also solves the problem of transom peeking.  You will still wonder, fantasize perhaps, what might have been, but you will not be driven to either envy or despair because you have as much as work as you can handle already.  Being you.

Neither does this mean that you settle for mediocrity, less than the person you have the Self to become.  One of the most negative aspects of envy or despair is the demotivation it produces.  The, if I can’t be like her, or him, then I just won’t bother path.

No, your path, the ancient trail that you must walk is this:  know your Self and follow its lead, only that ancient trail can lead you to the gift only you can offer the rest of us.

Humanity needs all the gifts of the whole species.

We have enormous challenges today.  Climate change.  Hunger.  Religious and racial discrimination.  Wars.  Economic ups and downs.  We cannot afford to leave the talents and vision of even one woman, one ethnicity, one age to waste.

Politics, US History

Michele, My Belle

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My representative.  Michele, my belle, Bachmann.  Even the very low tide of American political consciousness that washes up on our civic beach heads these days has the collective will to turn back Michele.  My instincts have been wrong before, but I cannot imagine an American election where a person with the ideological baggage Michele has wins.  I think the election in recent memory that seems similar is McGovern-Nixon in 1972.  That time, I was a member of the analog to the Tea Party, the anti-war movement, New Left wing of the Democratic Party.

Nixon was not a popular president, but he was lucky.  He ended the Vietnam War and opened a way to China.  The economy was ok, too.  McGovern’s nomination felt like a real victory for the American left.  Finally, a banner carrier in the race.

Oops.  Forgot.  The American electorate votes centrist politics, perhaps center-right a bit.  Think Bill Clinton or Gerald Ford, even George Bush in his first race.  Michele’s power right now comes from her energized base, a cohesive and well-funded movement on the far right of even her own party, the Republican.  To win a national election she has to widen her base beyond the Tea-Party and Libertarian right and I don’t see that happening.

Here’s a cynical thought I’ve had lately, though.  You know the gaffes that keep on coming?  Lexington and Concord in New Hampshire.  Congratulating Elvis on his birthday which turned out to be the date he died.  And most recently her admonishment to watch out for the rise of the Soviet Union.

What if these are a carefully orchestrated attempt to separate her from the “elites”, that is, most of you who read this blog, the college-educated upper middle class and upper class folks who run most of the countries businesses and institutions.  And the reporters, artists, intellectuals and political operatives of the left like union organizers and community organizers.

Here’s how I imagine it goes.  Michelle makes a gaffe.  The elite delights in running articles proving how stupid and unaware she is.  Just like the Bushisms and now Perryisms.  The result is that those Americans who wouldn’t know how to answer the questions either–general knowledge is at an all time low in America–have  a moment of fellow feeling with one of their own, a victim of the elite’s petty insistence on knowing everything.  This fellow feeling gives her a wide margin of error with those folks,  in fact a presumptive imprimatur.

We need to debate her on the substance of her proposals and their impact on middle and working class families, not sit on our degrees and howl with laughter at the rube, my representative, Michele, my belle.

Aging, Bees, Garden, Great Work

Bee Diary: August, 2011

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Checked the honey supers this morning.  On the two package colonies that I do not intend to overwinter, we have approximately four full honey supers.  That is, we have for harvest the amount of honey they would have needed for the winter, close to 200 pounds.  Figure that 40 pounds is not recoverable due to drips, stuck on honey comb even after extraction then that should leave around 16o pounds to harvest.

If we chose to sell it at, say $7 a pound, that would create around a $1,ooo in sales after keeping some back for own use and gifts.  After the bee packages at $60 each and amortizing the honey extractor, supers and hive boxes, syrup, hive tools, smoker, pollen, queen excluders, honey jars, top and bottom boards and telescoping covers, we’d still be in the red for the first three years.  Don’t know what we’ll do with it this year, probably give away a lot again.  It’s good for barter and gifts for sure.

Artemis Hives has produced honey two years in a row now, an artisanal honey created by bees aided by the beekeeper, me, and the bee equipment and harvest partner, Kate.

Looking at the gardening year in total we will have a good, not great honey harvest, a good potato harvest, leeks, beets, chard, beans and possibly a decent tomato crop.  Kate has good success with her zucchinis and the decorative gourds have bloomed but produced no fruit yet.  The gardening and beekeeping year will wind down in September, just in time for us to finish our cruise preparations.  Caring for gardens and bees requires a lot of face time with the plants and hives, visits to nurseries, attendance at Hobby Bee Keeper meetings, not to mention all the work of harvesting and putting food by.

I’m at the point in the year when my enthusiasm has run out a while ago and the only thing that keeps me active now is the need to finish, to harvest.  When it’s done, it’s over for the year.

 

Humanities

In a Deep Hole

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And here I thought things were going well.  My translation this morning was far, far off the mark.  It was, Greg said, a combination of things.  I don’t know the story.  The poetry makes difficult constructions even more difficult to suss out and there were points of grammar here I hadn’t studied.  Still.  I felt like I had been wading at least in the muck, a marsh maybe, but this morning I dropped into a deep Latin hole.

Sigh.  Even though I know the only solution is to swim back to the surface and try to find the muck, at least, it was disheartening.  No wonder I couldn’t find any entries for the commentary.

Of course, I didn’t start down this ancient trail because I thought the journey would be easy.  And, I was right.

Garden

The Late Summer Garden

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Lughnasa                                                          Waning Honey Extraction Moon

Working in the late summer garden.  Those creepy pre-beetle organisms continue to gnaw on my potato plants and I gnaw right back.  So far the invasion has not gained a significant beach head thanks to soapy water and the occasional visit to prune out bugs.  Parts of the garden where harvest has happened need to be weeded and green manure sowed.  That’s a weekend task.  The onions didn’t do too well this year.  I think the bed they’re in just doesn’t get enough sun anymore.

Our tomatoes have matured or are close, but we’ve only had a few ripe ones so far.  Too cool.

Kate planted decorative squash.  I took some time to look at them today.  Their tendrils reach out and grasp other branches, stalks, leaves, curl around them and seal themselves off.  These tendrils though look like springs and function like springs.  They give the squash plant some give as winds and rain put tension on the various connections.  It was easy to see how a clever blacksmith could have looked at this plant and been inspired.

With the vegetable garden in a slow period we returned to the three tiered garden in our patio area.  I worked there for an hour and a half or so this morning and it felt like being with an old friend.  I’ve spent many hours on my hands and knees among these plants, each one of which I put in the ground myself.  Well, not the trees and the dogwood, but everything else excepting Kate’s squash and zucchini.

 

Humanities, Letters, Literature

A Latinate Day

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A Latinate day.  The am found me back in Pentheus, a story in the third book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  I remember the story from the English version, at least in part.  Pentheus gets torn apart by his mother and her fellow Bacchantes while they are in the grip of a Dionysian frenzy.  As I’ve been translating this story, it’s clear that Pentheus is a tragic figure from Ovid’s perspective, a man’s man faced with hordes of soft, sweet smelling boys worshiping a God of irrational behavior.  Romans were not much into ecstasy unless it involved warfare or the circus.

They were orthopraxic in their religious views, at least most Romans were, that is, they believed that right rituals performed at the right time for the appropriate deity trumped everything else.

I have begun, in a modest way, work on the commentary.  I set up some files in Notes but made no entries.  It’s difficult for me, right now, to know what makes sense, but I’ll figure it out.

My next hurdle is to translate the Latin into idiomatic English.  Sometimes I can get there, often not.  To do that I need to have a solid understanding of the grammar–not yet–and a feel for how the Latin makes its meaning, not there either.  At least I’m no longer staring at the words on the page as if they were hieroglyphics.

Aging, Great Wheel

There and Back Again

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A birthday really marks the spot on the earth’s orbit where you were born.  So, it is not necessarily a function of time in a linear sense, but the count of revolutions on the (roughly) same path.  In other words even the years of our lives do not, at least in this sense, refer to the passage of time so much as they do the passage of the earth around the sun.  I like this because it helps me have a concrete understanding of my years.  I have, for example, gone round the sun 64 times and am about halfway through my 65th.

A space-time co-ordinate.  When we add in our linear sense of time, occasioned by the evident aging process that ends in death (entropy at work), our birthday becomes a space-time co-ordinate, fixing our birth in the 4-dimensional reality of space and time, or Minkowski space.   Our birth date locates not only the 3D version of our birth–the physical locus of our birth–but establishes a reference point in some standard measure of linear time.  In the West we tend to measure time in relation to a fixed point occurring around the birth of Jesus, but it could have as easily been the birth of Socrates or Alexander or Cleopatra.

Linear time, as we measure it, has this odd pliability.  We have no fixed point in reality against which to mark its passage, unless you count revolutions around the sun; but, then we end back in the cyclical view of time, the type of time measured by the Great Wheel, because to indicate linear time we still have to agree on which particular revolution starts our series.

How many revolutions ago was Caesar murdered?  How many revolutions ago was Confucius born?  How many revolutions ago did Homo sapiens emerge out of Africa?  We still have to place our tent peg, our starting point somewhere and it will still be in revolutions around the sun.

No matter how hard we try to escape into chronological accounting, our human estimates still return to our revolutionary experience, the root source, which is, and always will be until we leave this planet for the stars, cyclical.

Aging, Family

Happy Birthday, Kate

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“Through the years, a man (sic) peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.” – Jorge Luis Borges

As the sun retreated behind the spinning earth, Kate and I sat outside at Buona Sera, an Italian restaurant in Champlin.  There was an umbrella over our table and pit a pat from time to time fell acorns, the harvest of fall already underway.  Kate’s birthday itself is tomorrow, but she works, so we celebrated today.

This is my 22 birthday celebration with her and I look forward to 22 more.  We met each other at a point where both of us needed some good luck.  We found it.

There is something satisfying about a dinner with a long time friend, especially on an important event like the day of her birth.  She is a long time friend now and my long term love.  There is a sort of patina that gathers with age and repetition, perhaps akin to the wabi-sabi aesthetic of the Japanese.  After long use, an item, say a humble tea scoop or a water ladle, takes on the character of the one who scoops tea or ladles water with it.

Our bodies, and our faces, are the same; so are the relationships most dear to us.  They take on the character of the two who create them, a lustre of careful attention and loving touch.

As the sun set, we listened to the acorns, drank our coffee and enjoyed the patina of our life together.

Humanities, Politics, US History

3 Minute Critique of Libertarianism

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Lughnasa                                                                         Waning Honey Extraction Moon
“Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

Of course, we know where Bonaparte’s style got him.  Elba.  Even so he does cut against the grain of paralysis by analysis, the peculiar disease of intellectuals where worrying the problem like a bone often stands in for actually doing something about it.

Libertarians have a long, yet rather ineffective, track record in American politics.  That’s because most Americans hold libertarian views on social issues like no draft, keep the government out of the bedroom, no censorship, no government issued identity cards at the national level.  Many also agree with their hands off approach to adult drug use and other matters where personal choice collides with well-meaning, or not well-meaning, social engineers.  Think the pro-life movement, the anti-gay folks, the militarists who want everyone to have national service.

In other words this side of the libertarian thought experiment matches up well with a frontier ethos and the spirit of the bill of the rights.

On the other hand libertarians have had little effect on national politics and on state politics, too. Why?  They want to privatize social security, end all government support to individuals, cut government spending by at least 50% (which would mean closing military bases over seas, at least) and shut down corporate welfare.

Most US citizens agree that self-government should apply to social issues (matters of choice in our private lives), but also agree that there is an appropriate role for government in our public life.  A strong defense is a near universal among US citizens considering an appropriate role for government.  Many of us also agree that the promise of equality extends to such areas as health care, income support and affordable housing.  Since Teddy Roosevelt, we have also recognized government’s role as regulator of the economy, a role it engaged to good affect (though not great affect) in the recent financial crisis.  A free market blinder, worn by advocates of neo-liberal economics, blocks view of the wreckage in personal lives occasioned by capitalism’s creative destruction. (Schumpeter)

Scott Nearing, an economist at the New School, advocated a mixed economy.  We already have a mixed economy.   The government funds or controls defense, police and fire service, mail service, education, infrastructure development and maintenance, social security, medicare and various other combinations of services at state and local levels.  The market economy deals with goods and services outside of those sectors though there are overlaps.   When the goods and services are not necessary for human existence, e.g. cars, bicycles, televisions, phones, computers, appliances, insurance, most legal services, then the market does a good job of allocating capital according to the desires of purchasers of goods and services.

When housing, medical care and food, essential to human existence, are up for sale, then the market usually skews access to these away from the poor and toward the wealthier.  Equality, as a matter of simple justice, demands that we consider this bias toward the wealthy a failing of the market approach to these essentials.

Just how we mix our economy will depend on many things, but to my mind, only a cavalier approach to the obvious human costs of unfettered capitalism will demand that the many surrender access to those things essential for existence to those able to pay for them.  Therefore, I am not a libertarian.

General

Latino Demographic Trends

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The following quote comes from the Congressional Research Service, a March, 2011 report:

With the release of the results of the 2000 census, the growing role of Hispanics in the United States became apparent.  Numbering over 35 million at that time—and growing by more than 1.5 annually from both immigration and natural increase—Hispanics are now the nation’s largest minority.69 If current demographic trends continue, the population of Hispanic or Latino origin is projected to steadily increase as a percentage of the total U.S. population through 2050, rising from 12.6% in 2000 (or about one in seven persons) to 30.2% in 2050 (approaching one in every three persons) (see Figure 5).