Monthly Archives: October 2012

Health, Weather +Climate, Writing

Wednesday Big Event: Flu Shot

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                      Harvest Moon

Worked on revising Missing this am, then went out with my retired spouse to the local CVS, into the minute clinic and we got our flu shots.  A real treat.  I don’t use them for anything else, but for getting a flu shot, the minute clinics are perfect.

Our dwarf lilac (now huge) has dropped all of its leaves though most trees and shrubs continue to hang to at least a few.  The only other with no leaves at all is the ash in the vegetable garden.  It feels like November, or an old-fashioned October.

When we went out today, there scallop shell cirrus high in a blue blue sky, a bright sun and various shades of red and orange all round, reflected back to us from Round Lake.  A northern fall day.  Just right.

 

Dreams

A Stray Bit of Collective Unconscious?

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                   Harvest Moon

Must still be healing.  Slept 9 + hours last night with nary a peep till morning.  Had a dream at the last about finding a job at the city or county level in economic and community development.  A guy who asked questions about it had made a clever three-d map of some area I’ve visited a lot in my dreams.  When asked what one structure was, he said, “Oh, that’s Stirling Bridge*.”  We then spent a while trying to figure out just where it was.  It opened out on Highway 25, just about where I thought.  Where ever that is.

*OK.  This is weird.  I put Stirling Bridge in Google, just to check.  And there it is.  In fact I’ve been across it on our honeymoon while riding the train to Inverness.

The Battle of Stirling Bridge was a battle of the First War of Scottish Independence. On 11 September 1297, the forces of Andrew Moray and William Wallace defeated the combined English forces of John de Warenne, 6th Earl of Surrey and Hugh de Cressingham near Stirling, on the River Forth.

 

Art and Culture

MIA Tension

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                    Harvest Moon

It’s a tough time to be institutionally arty.  Of course, the rarer times are when it’s not tough, but this is one of the tough times.  Declining investment income, donor fatigue, changing audiences, sometimes diminishing audiences.  Orchestras make the news, not for their wonderful sound, but for the latest lockout.  MOMA opens on Monday to bring in more revenue.

(art news)

This means, too, that life inside these institutions, as I said in a previous blog, is under tension.  The Minneapolis Institute of Arts is no outlier.  We’ve had new strategic plans, restructuring, bold new revenue plans and changes in special exhibitions.  We’ve also had, and it’s reflected in a current upcoming dustup, organizational spasms revealed in attempts to discipline volunteers.

No, we’re not talking about Jerry Sandusky or Boy Scout or Roman Catholic kind of issues.  No, these are much worse.  Bullying, badgering, pushy e-mails.  I know.  Pretty scary, right!  Then there’s that pesky issue of evidence, which in this case seems unavailable, contained in secret personnel files.  How J. Edgar Hooverish.

The pushes and pulls inside these necessary organizations have begun to create bulges and cracks, silliness, paranoia.

This particular incident to which I refer has also revealed a process in which there is no appeal and where the body most likely to advocate for the docent was told it had no say.  This is all very peculiar, hamfisted and seems designed to create a furor.  Just why that would be desirable, I don’t know, but I think it’s gonna happen anyhow.

Granted, these are difficult times, but creating more problems on top of them doesn’t seem wise.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Poetry

What He Said

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                Harvest Moon

Hamatreya [excerpt]

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

EARTH-SONG

 

“Mine and yours;
Mine, not yours.
Earth endures;
Stars abide–
Shine down in the old sea;
Old are the shores;
But where are old men?
I who have seen much,
Such have I never seen.

“The lawyer’s ded
Ran sure,
In tail,
To them, and to their heirs
Who shall succeed,
Without fail,
Forevermore.

“Here is the land,
Shaggy with wood,
With its old valley,
Mound and flood.
But the heritors?
Fled like the flood’s foam.
The lawyer, and the laws,
And the kingdom,
Clean swept herefrom.

 

“They called me theirs,
Who so controlled me;
Yet every one
Wished to stay, and is gone,
How am I theirs,
If they cannot hold me,
But I hold them?”

Dogs, Garden

Fighting Drought

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                        Harvest Moon

 

Our irrigation company sends around alarmist circulars declaring potential severe injury or death for our sprinkler outside valve if we don’t have our system shut down early in October.  I’ve ignored this for several years now as the droughts have lingered on into fall and made more moisture deeper into the season a necessity, especially for trees, shrubs and perennials.

Even so, every once in a while, like this morning, I get up, go to the irrigation clock and punch manual start.  That way I can run water through the valve when temps are lowest while reassuring myself that it’s not locked up, frozen.

It’s working.  Yeah.

 

Memories, Weather +Climate

Their Grey Eminence

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                 Harvest Moon

The Vikings looked good today; good, not great, but hey that’s a hell of lot better than last year.

The look and feel of mid-November outside.  The Norwegian maple across the tree has dropped its skirt, flared down around its ankles and now stands almost naked to the elements.  Trees undress before the coldest weather.  The opposite tact taken by Minnesota humans.

James Whitcomb Riley

Our woods take up the west horizon so we don’t see the sunset, but when I walked down to the mailbox this afternoon, there, across Round Lake, the late setting sun added its burnt orange to the maples and oaks.  Cirrus clouds gathered in waves sat watching it all, grey eminences, quiet and unmoving.

This time of year always pushes me back toward Indiana, a Hoosier boyhood.  In the post above this I’m including a poem Indiana’s Poet Laureate, James Whitcomb Riley.  My mother read him to me when I was a small boy and, in fact, he has some relationship to our family, thought just what it is I don’t recall.  I do know that my Uncle Riley and my cousin Richard’s son, Uncle Riley’s grandson, also bears the name.

Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Back

Leave a comment

Fall                                                               Harvest Moon

A morning with Ovid.  Back at it, even though this was a revision of a long sentence I translated a couple of weeks ago.  Greg suggested I redo it with attention to the way the main verb controls the tenses of the subordinate verbs.   This turns out to be trickier and easier than I thought, but it took the morning.

Feels good to have that done.  That means I can move on in Ovid to my next narrative, Jason and Medea.  I also have to translate some more of the Aeneid, too.

Then, back to Missing and the revision, a process that goes well.  At least so I think.

The Vikings have enough going for them for me, the typical fair weather fan, to watch them again, so I’ll take up the remote and assume the position later on today.  Maybe get some bulbs and hosta planted too, though tomorrow looks good as well.

Myth and Story

Gettin’ Ready

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                        Harvest Moon

A week plus past the operation and I feel almost no residual effect.  I’ve been lying low, slowing down and it felt good until yesterday, now I’m beginning to get that itch to put myself back in the harness.

I like that feeling because it means I’m still kickin’.

In particular.  Garden.  Bees. Latin.  Missing.  Week 3 of the Mythology class.

 

There is, too, that tour this week.  An Artist’s Choices tour for 5th graders.  That means, take’em to see whatever you think will keep their attention.  I’ll be glad to be back at the museum.  It’s been awhile and stuff’s been happening.  (john william waterhouse ulysses and the siren)

Feelings, Memories

The Past Is Not Past

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                   Harvest Moon

The internet is forever.  At least for now.  I learn this every so often and right now I’m learning it again in regard to a post of mine from two years ago that has become my most commented upon.  It talks of a difficult time in my life, when my then wife, Judy, and I bought a farm near Nevis, Minnesota, a back to the land moment.

Johnny and Judy, could be a mack the knife sort of tune, left me standing by myself one weekend in September of 1974, standing alone on 80 acres of scrubby land with a house and some outbuildings.  They took off for the Caribbean to spend the winter working boats sailing those waters.  Judy and I were married.

I took a quit claim deed to the farm signed by Judy and an uncontested divorce to the Hubbard County courthouse and legally resolved that episode of my life.  Legal action, of course, is not emotional nor does it shed history, rather it records emotional and historic changes.

As I say in that short piece, written after a day of using the chainsaw on our land here in Andover, I don’t blame Judy.  I don’t.  Three years after this time I acknowledged my alcoholism and started on the long road to recovery.  My behavior toward her in the months and years preceding 1974 would have made me want to run away to the Caribbean.  A bad time in my life that reached its nadir right about then.

Our life, our whole life, remains within us and within the memories of others.  It is not something we can set aside, push out of the way, deny.  We can, with time, place events in our life in context, in the trajectory of a whole life, yet they remain what they were.

I am no longer that young man, just as Judy is no longer that young woman.  We have both aged, gone different ways and had our own futures.  Those were exciting, revolutionary times and much of the revolution happened at the personal level.  Judy, Johnny and I played a part in that change, a small part, yet large in that moment of our lives.