Monthly Archives: April 2012

Aging, Family, Retirement, Third Phase, Travel

Go or Stay?

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Spring                                                     Bee Hiving Moon

“Each of us must confront our own fears, must come face to face with them. How we handle our fears will determine where we go with the rest of our lives. To experience adventure or to be limited by the fear of it.”   Judy Blume, Tiger Eyes

I have a friend, he knows who he is, who loves to pack up and go.  Stay a good while.  Then come back.  He has tales to tell, too.  That time in the Caribbean when he thought he was going to die in a bad storm.  Selling art in the Greek Islands to make money.  Learning Fiji and Hindi while in the Peace Corps.  Tai Chi while living in Shanghai.  Creating an exhibit on safe sex for Thai kids.  Tango in Buenos Aires.  Gunplay in Mexico.

I don’t know about fear, but he sure loves change.  “Change is good,” he said, “I look forward to it.”

Since he began the pick up and go live in a foreign city idea a few years back, I’ve often compared my life choices to his.  It goes like this.  Am I too timid?  Stuck in one place?

I try to answer this question honestly because the answer matters to me.  Travel is part of my soul, too, and I love foreign travel most of all.  His choices seem to maximize the experience of being in another culture, being there long enough to sink into the culture, be part of it.  At least for a while, not just as wanderer from one place to another.

My answer to these questions goes like this.  I moved so much after I left home at 17.  Off to college, to a different college, back home for a quarter, then out for good.   Continue reading Go or Stay? →

Feelings, Garden

Not All Who Wander Are Lost

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Spring                                                Bee Hiving Moon

Feeling directionless.  Not down, just aside from forward motion.

Spent the weekend hands in the garden, planting beets, leeks, shallots, green onions, yellow onions, moving plant matter pruned or dug up by Kate.  That all feels good, the growing season again, seeds again, the sun again, the sky and the clouds again.  Pressing the beet seeds into the ground, placing the leek transplants tenderly against the trenches side, pushing the yellow onion sets into the sides of our side trap, like cloves in an orange.  All good.

Still.  The book.  Not done.  The Sierra Club.  Not finished.  Tours disappointing.  Reimagining faith on a furlow after the push to get the Groveland presentation done.  Work with photoshop and inDesign still potential.

Summer’s come and gone already.  Now it’s fall.  Hard freeze tonight.  Maybe spring will return next week and summer come the week after that but right now the weather seems directionless, too.

Thought I had another two weeks before the bees came, but now the word is that they’ll be here on Saturday.  That means work during the week that I’d planned to do on the weekend.  That sort of thing.

A sort of malaise.

Maybe it’s that damn jockey trying to reclaim his seat.

 

Aging, Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, Writing

Creating Self

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Spring                                                              Bee Hiving Moon

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” by George Bernard Shaw

Later today, beets blood, bull and golden and carrots, Nantes and one lone blueberry to replace a dead plant.  I think about it, this planting and nourishing, watching and waiting, then harvesting and preserving and eating, and I feel a part of my life being created.  This part gets its hands dirty, relishes the seasons and their graces, their vagaries.  This part looks at shades of green, knows this most important color as a friend and ally.

Another part, this one quiet and inward, wanders the halls of art museums, galleries, image collections on the internet and in books. Looking.  Seeing.  No dirty hands here.  Visual contact.  Delight in a curve, a color, an image, a remaking of tradition, new ways of perceiving.  This one knows the spread of art from Chauvet Caves to MOMA and delights in each creative moment.

Then the father.  And husband.  The family guy.  Cousins, aunts, uncles.  Grandpop.  One in a line.  A link between that great one-celled ancestor and the transformation of our species that is yet to come.  Love not abstract but concrete and timeless.  Walking with children and their children, walking on toward some unknown future.  Together.  That’s a part.

A noisy chunk, this one involved in struggle, voicing the cries of the poor, the victims, Continue reading Creating Self →

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Narratives With Depth and Power

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Spring                                                           Bee Hiving Moon

Here is why I think the ironically evangelical atheists have it wrong.

Today is Good Friday (though I’m not clear how it ever got that name), the day Christians commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth.  It’s also, this year, the first night of pesach, the night Jews celebrate the angel of death passing over the first born of Jewish households enslaved in Egypt.

No matter the metaphysics you claim, no matter the beliefs you hold, no matter the faith you embrace these are powerful, heart deep and deeper stories.  They are narratives you can build a life upon.  And millions, hundreds of millions have.

Take a working class man, a man who earns his living with his hands, let’s say a Toyota mechanic.  Imagine him struck dumb one night with the power of love.  So struck that he leaves the garage behind and goes forth into the countryside and into the cities claiming that before anything else we have to love one another.

Imagine, further, that he gets a following, a few at first, maybe 12, then a few more, Continue reading Narratives With Depth and Power →

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, Great Wheel

A Force of Nature

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Spring                                                              Bee Hiving Moon

In these months, when I go to bed, the full moon shines in our bedroom window.  It keeps me awake sometimes, gazing at it, feeling it, absorbing the ancient wisdom it offers.  All those prayers and hopes and wishes flung its way over the millennia.

The last two nights the full bee hiving moon has lit up the magnolia.  Its white blossoms have begun to droop and fall away but in the glow of the moon its fire blazes up again, a quiet torch illuminating the dark.

It’s cherry blossom time too.  One of our cherries blossomed yesterday afternoon,

Kate has been pruning, weeding, clearing away debris as I visited the eye doc, did tours and today worked on Latin.  She’s a full gardener now with her own expertise tied to her energy, her wonderful work.  She gets a lot done.  A lot.  And always comes inside with a sense of having left it all in the orchard or the vegetable garden or among the perennials.

Meanwhile I’ve kept glaucoma in check, showed objects related to communication and swept through 14 verses of Metamorphoses, Book III.  Work in its way, of course, but I can’t say I prosecute it with the same vigor as Kate.  She’s a force of nature, out in nature.

Mickman’s comes on Monday to start up our irrigation system.  We need the water to support the veggies that we plant.  Especially in this drought.  On Wednesday when I went to the eye doc I stopped by Mother Earth Gardens, across from the Riverview Theatre.

We now have four six packs of leeks, one of shallots, one of green onions and pots of rosemary, cilantro and basil.  The last couple of years I’ve started these myself, but not this year.  They won’t go in the ground until Sunday or Monday, so they can get watered right from the start.

Lots of tasks now:  clean the air conditioner, clean out the bee hives, install our new fire pit, cut down a few trees that impinge on other activities.  Some of them involve the chainsaw, so I’m happy.

 

Art and Culture

A Better Tour

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Spring                                                      Bee Hiving Moon

Downer tour last week with Augsburg students and a professor.  My fault, still a downer.  But.  Leave it to elementary kids to brighten a day.  Today I had two tours with third graders.  Fun.  Honest.  Talkative.

(Ashurnarsipal II, King of Assyria and builder of the palace at Nimrud. Image courtesy of the British Museum)

Including a brief span of time when 8 members of the group and I got separated from the chaperons.  That left me with 8 9-year olds suddenly free of known adult supervision and in a brand new space!  Oh, boy.  Good thing I’m a dad.  We had fun though it was a little chaotic.  Then we were found and things were easier again.

This is an age where kids raise their hands, open their mouths, hesitate and say, “Oh, I forgot.”

One 9-year old girl took out her hair band and practiced throwing her hair around in front of the Nocturne Radio, basically a large circular blue mirror in Art Moderne.  Her name was Emma.  I would say watch out for Emma.  Probably starting right now.

Had two hours between tours which makes for a long day.  Had lunch and worked for 45 minutes on the Great Scanning Project.  Slow and steady.

Aging, Health

Trust Your Senses?

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Spring                                                  Bee Hiving Moon

I’ve reached the age when hearing that I have mild cataracts counts as a good thing.  Eye exam today.  Playing space invaders (visual field), still good in both eyes in spite of the glaucoma (eye drops).

My ophthalmologist of 20+ years retired last year so this is only my second time with Dr. Brown.  She’s about 5 feet tall.  That’s with platforms.  She’s bright. “I see a stable eye today,”  she said.  A stable eye.  A good thing at any age.

Every time I to go the ophthalmologist (which I cannot spell) my thoughts turn to epistemology.  Today I got to thinking about medical specialties that focus on senses.  ENT.  Dermatology. (sort of) Ophthalmology.

Dr. Brown said to me today, “This visual field test tells me that your optic nerve is in good health.” A lot of ink has been spilled in philosophy over the degree to which we can trust our senses–since they stand between us and the world out there–but it occurred to me today that we never consider less than optimal senses.  What kind of information does an unhealthy optical nerve give me?  Does the degradation of visual stimuli correspond to a diminished or corrupted reality for me?  Ditto for olfactory, taste, touch, hearing.

I know my world is different from yours acoustically.  With only one ear bringing in sound data I cannot easily find the source of sound.  My aural world is less rich than yours.   I don’t know that it’s less real, but it’s different.  In some critical instances, very different.

Two examples.

Emergency vehicles.  When I hear a siren while I’m driving, I can’t tell where it is.  That’s different than the experience of a person who hears normally.

Vehicles approaching in a manner other than customary.  In England where they drive on the left I had to constantly remind myself to pay very close attention.  From the left is where I don’t hear.

Anyhow, I’m curious about sensory data.  And what it can and can’t tell us.

 

Bees, Great Wheel

On Our Land

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Spring                                                             Bee Hiving Moon

Well.  Those bees I saw earlier.  That got me excited about a successful overwintering.  They were scavengers.  Robbing the honey left over.  So, now I will have two hives, as I imagined I would.  Moving them them to the orchard. The bees will be closer to the house.

Also, a rite of spring today.  I walked the fence line, about 2000 feet, looking for trees fallen on the fence (2, but not bad), holes dug under the fence (none) and anything else that compromises our dog security barrier.  Nothing that can’t be fixed with a chain saw.

A cedar split a live, large branch.  It hangs now, a fresh wound in the tree about 8 feet up.  I can’t figure it.  Healthy.  Not really in the path of the winds.  Yet there it is, a finish to half the tree.

Bright green grass, translucent in the near noon sun.  Tiny shoots also bright green carry leaves still bound toward their date with the light.  All round the forest has begun to wake up.

One of our apple trees will blossom this week, two cherries seem ready to burst into bloom, too.  All over our property the land has shaken off the winter, mild though it was, and changed out its somber browns for productive green.