Monthly Archives: May 2012

Family, Humanities, Politics, Travel, World History

The Sunnier Side

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Beltane                                         Garlic Moon

OK. I may have tilted toward the darker side in the post below.  It’s here, all right, and dominant in much of what I’ve personally experienced of Romania this week.

However.  If this were a movie, the weather would have started rainy and cool, which it did.  We might say, the Romania I reported on in the post below.  Then, as the week went on, the rain would lift until a pleasant, sunny, mild day ended the visit.

The Romania which I saw, for example, as I took a walk around the hotel’s block.  There apartment buildings of modest heights, 3-6 stories, hide behind vine covered fences, a small pocket park has a shady place for children from the Mikos child care center.  Two backyards (all the backyards) have well-tended plantings and fountains.

A couple sat on their balcony four floors up, smoking, drinking morning coffee.  And, of course, there are homeless people on the streets and under the bridges of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

There is, too, the land, a beautiful land with mountains, picturesque villages, good train service and a friendly population.  And Bucharest has many, many trees and beautiful parks, wide streets and a safe feel so often not present in US cities.

This is a country, I believe, that awaits its vision of itself as a free people.  I can imagine one though.  It roots in millennia of settled history, linking this land to the greatest of early Western civilizations, Greek and Roman and makes the remains of those two a vital aspect of a new future.

The difficult period after the fall of Rome adds great texture to current Romania as Mongols, Magyars, Russian and Turks fought back and forth over this rich land at the nexus of so many ambitions. Those eras, though painful, also enliven a sense of Romania as a place desired by many; many who contributed cultural legacy to the present, like the Saxons around Brasov, the Slavs on the coastal regions of the Black Seas and the Hungarians in northwestern Romania.

The 19th and early 20th century had some stirrings of a free Romania, then world war II came and after that the fall of the iron curtain.

Now there is a country just waking up in its own home, a home with a past, and now one with a future.  I hope this is just the first visit for me.  Nicoleta’s brother and his wife have a baby on the way, naming ceremony in October.

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

I’m So Glad

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Beltane                                     Garlic Moon

Be Glad You Exist, the Greek inscription I mentioned a few posts ago, got me thinking.  A persistent prod in American culture is the I’m not doing that well enough, or fast enough, or soon enough or with the right attitude.  Not studying enough, eating too much, not working enough, not working out enough, not relaxing, not being charitable enough or financially successful enough.

It’s an argument from lack that has as its premise that jockey metaphor I came up with a month or so ago.  In case you forgot, I did until just now, I suggested that many of us take on board, sometime in childhood, a jockey who rides us, rides us hard, always pushing us toward the next, the better, the hoped for, the not yet achieved.

This argument from lack is the jockey’s prod, his quirt that comes out when he senses flagging will or decreasing purpose.

But, what if Be Glad You Exist was the baseline?  Just that.

Then we might start not from a place of lack but from a place of adding, of completing, of maturing, of enriching.  Moving ourselves not with the lash, but with a model more like Maslow’s where the underpinning opens new possibilities, like the emergence of the butterfly, say, from the caterpillar.  A caterpillar is not a lesser butterfly, but its necessay precursor.

Orienting ourselves this way (I realize I’m writing about myself here, but maybe a bit about you, too.) does not require the scorched earth of bad diet, bad language skills, inadequacy of any kind; rather, it could have Be Glad You Exist as the ground of our being.  Sounds like a good thing to me.

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Beltane                                                   Garlic Moon

My crazed body has given up on time.  I wake up at 4 or 4:30 am and can’t go back to sleep.  Then, mid-afternoon I do finally get some sleep, so I’m awake for the evening.  I know this would equilibrate eventually, but I’m out of time one more time because I leave tomorrow.  Just in time, I imagine to start over again in Minnesota.

Been thinking about people like entertainers, military personnel, some business types who stay in this mode for days, weeks, even months at a time.  It’s easy to see  how chemical fixes would seem necessary and, even, how small cyclic changes in mood could become amplified by them, reaching pathologic levels.

Humanities, Latin, Literature, Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Travel

Searching for Ovid

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Beltane                                    Garlic Moon

Ovid on the third phase:  At times it is folly to hasten at other times, to delay. The wise do everything in its proper time.

Searching for Ovid.  Gone now.  2000 years ago.  An unhappy man, yet he went on, did not stop, wrote, lived.

Of course, his statue is here.  He looks suitably serious, dignified, the man some Romanians take as their first national poet.  But what of the man, not bronze?

If I limit myself to the Roman mosaic, the material objects in the museum, the remains of the wall across from Hotel Class, the ruins of the homes and the butcher shop, the promontory views from the high coastline overlooking the Pontus Euxinus, the Marea Negra; if I image Ovid carrying a small oil lamp to light his way and his night, drinking from the glass vessels in the museum, turning a cynical educated Roman eye towards depictions of gods and goddesses; getting water from the clay and lead pipes also on display, walking over those intricate mosaics while looking out at the sea, a slave stigiling off his sweat and dirt with the small curved tool I saw here, then I have begun to see him.

To populate this place in the very early 1st century a.c.e., to get the small things right and the people and the matters under consideration, I wonder how much that would take, how much research?  A lot, I imagine.  Still, it would be worth it, if the time was available.  Why?  Oh, for the same reason, evoking 2012 Bucresti is worth it.  Because we’re strange creatures, but often the same and we can reach across time and space to be with each other.  That’s a gift and it makes us more.

Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Travel

Be Glad to Exist

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Beltane                                         Garlic Moon

A Greek bowl in the alternately wonderful and frustrating Constanta musuem of archaeology and history had this inscription:  Be Glad To Exist.  Those Greeks.  Had it going on so early.  And now?

Be glad to exist and carpe diem amount to a satisfactory life philosophy.    I finished the book Masters of the Planet, an excellent summary of current findings and theories about human evolution.  The author added this to a summation of cognitive theory:  “We are ruled by our reason, until our hormones take over.”  Fits with the Greco-Roman fortune cookie life path.

While on my way to Constanta Tuesday, I returned to Bucresti Nord and ate breakfast there.  As usually happens to me at some point on a trip like this, I do something I never do at home:  eat at McDonald’s.

It felt like being in American terrarium, eating a sausage McMuffin and drinking the still not very good version of coffee.  Inside the terrarium I looked out at a Romanian world:  a board of all the departures and arrivals for Bucresti Nord, a currency exchange shop, Schimb Valutar, Romanians going about their mornings off to work, running, sitting, waiting, flirting.

The cut of the suits, the occasional very Slavic physiognomy: eyebrows, squared off jaws, thick necks, serious all remind me of the latter days of the Soviet Union when apparatchiks still roamed the countryside, conducting the business of a centralized state and a planned economy.

It occurred to me, as it has before and like my hero Scott Nearing proposed, that the middle way would be best, a place between the grim and often inefficient (therefore grim?) Soviet communism and rapacious, winner take all, screw the little guy late stage capitalism now regnant.

In other words, let capitalism have the non-essentials designer cloths, fancy watches, restaurants, but not groceries, hotels but not homes, minute clinics but not personal health care, boutique education but not public education, a gated community or two, but not urban planning.  Give capitalism the margins and let the money enchanted compete and scrabble and become rich there.

The rest of us, whose lives themselves are our focus, those of us glad to exist, could read, write, paint, sculpt, build cars, houses, care for the health of others, teach, grow and distribute healthy food.  We might, probably would, have less material wealth, but we would have life itself.  And think how short that is.

 

 

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Beltane                                                         Garlic Moon

Left the computer during my fanboy trip to Constanta, so I’m two days behind.

(statue of Ovid in Constanta)

Ovid spent 8 bitter years in this Black Sea (Marea Negra) town. Greeks settled it in the 6th century BC and named it Tomis.

I wanted to get a sense of this place, this place of exile.  There are a lot Roman goodies in the archaeology museum that is the building in the background.  More on that when I get home and my pics in the computer.  Forgot to bring my card reader with me.

More on Costanta later.  It was very much a worthwhile trip.

 

 

Family, Travel

La Revedere

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Beltane                                                           Garlic Moon

Checked in for my flight, boarding passes printed out for the journey to Bucharest.  Bit of a bump.  The Delta website said, Visa required.  Have proper documentation.  Whoa.  I thought…  So, I checked again.  Nope.  No visas required.  Romania requires one after 90 days.  But, passport’s good until then.  Geez.  Don’t scare me like that.

Bags are packed, I’m ready to go.  Well, almost.  I haven’t quite finished Pentheus and I want to do that before we leave for the airport.  That’s next.  Last few things go in the pack and in the checked baggage just before I leave.  That sort of thing.

My plan right now is to update from Romania.  Perhaps starting Saturday since I get in at 3:05 pm Bucharest time which is 11:05 pm here.  Updates always depend on finding wi-fi but I anticipate it will not be a problem, at least not too much.  So, if you’re interested, tune in again on Saturday when we’ll be reporting live from the home of the 5th Romance language.

The header is from a small village in rural Romania.   Oh, and la revedere is good-bye in Romanian.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

A Consolation of Philosophy

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Beltane                                                         Garlic Moon

The philosophy department at Ball State resided in a brick building littered with the remains of other days.  Religion was there too.  The chair of the Philosophy department Robert (his last name has fled for the moment), a buzz cut positivist, an ornery, no see it, no believe it kinda guy.  Let’s just say metaphysics were taught under sufferance in this department.

Bob drove me out of philosophy, convincing me that the most pressing questions of the day were what hot meant, or cold.  Couldn’t see it.  Not then, not now.  But then I didn’t explore much more, now I’ve been in the wide world and know there are more things than that dreamt of Bob’s dreary positivistic philosophy.  Much more.

In fact, if I’d listened to my self, I would have known it then, did in fact, but didn’t know I knew.

Many of us disenchanted with postivism found a real ally in Alfred North Whitehead, the creator of process philosophy.  I used to think I understood it, now I’m not so sure; but, I knew this about it, Whitehead said the universe was alive.  And that made sense to me.

Still does.  In some deep place it made a whole lotta sense, because one October morning a chill hit me as I left that brick building, a class in metaphysics just finished.  The next step, the one over the threshold into the quad, never happened, at least not in my consciousness, because my consciousness was otherwise occupied.

My heart filled up, my mind expanded, the whole of myself plugged itself into the throbbing matter of the cosmos.  I was one with the whole and it with me.  A sensation of light and vastness and yet intimacy became my reality.  Just for a moment.  I don’t know how long it lasted and at this remove, some 45 years later, I couldn’t reconstruct that aspect if I had to.

Since that time, if I remember to recall this, I have never felt alone.  The universe can be known through one flower, one bird, one puppy, one rock, one college sophomore, that much I learned for sure that day.  And more.

The universe can not only can be known (or felt); it knows (feels) back!  Now this is not revolutionary nor advance news.  Mystics before and after me have had similar experiences, remarkably similar, in fact.  The positivists and their ilk might explain this away through brain chemicals, but even if that were to turn out to explain this experience, it would only serve to under write its power.

It just occurred to me today that long ago moment on the quad, in the chill of an October morning, might have hints for how to live my third phase.

Garden, Memories

Weeds of Grass

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Beltane                                                       Garlic Moon

Kate and I completely weeded the second perennial tier this morning, but it took both of us to finish it.

Grass.  More grass.  When the gods created grass, they forgot all about gardeners of the future.  Grass grows everywhere, many different kinds and needs little nurture.  In many ways it is the perfect weed.  Tall, it can grow up and out from within clumps of wanted plants.  Tough, it sticks to the soil with tenacity.  Wily, its rhizomes too often remain behind when what looks the whole plant comes out.  Then, in its persistent way, it regenerates and lives to annoy the gardener another day.  So, here’s to grass, a plant wonderful in its manifold powers.

Dragonflies have hatched in abundance.  Which means the mosquitoes have, too.  The dragonfly, with its bi-wing form, has a retro sort of look.  They are beautiful.  Iridescent colors, transparent wings.  Fairy like in their quickness.  Benevolent in their choice of food.  Seeing their forms darting through the air brings the great wheel round another turn.

Today the temperature felt, again, like July, but there was a fine breeze.  A warmer day, a gentle wind and the smell of lilies-of-the-valley transported me right back to grandma and grandpa’s house in Morristown, Indiana.

Family, Friends

Being a Helpmate

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Beltane                                                              New Garlic Moon

Today is a help Kate day.  Working on her schedule and her list to get those things done that will make her life easier while I’m in Romania.  Some weeding, banking, picking up laundry.  Things of that sort.

Tomorrow I want to finish off Pentheus and pack.  Packing always makes me a bit anxious before I leave on a long trip, more so than a short one, so if I get out of the way early, I don’t experience that uptick.

 

A note came today from Woolly Tom Crane who is in the land of the midnight sun, able to work now with the long day in a place where, in January, they had to knock off at 2:30 pm or so due twilight.