Yearly Archives: 2013

Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Third Phase

Happy New Year

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Winter                                                               New (Seed Catalog) Moon

Years have come and gone, slipping off into the neurons, their impressions there more and less faint, our only confidence that other years, other days have happened.  We tend to peg our memories by the year Kennedy was shot, or when we landed on the moon, or when Nixon resigned.  The year the Twins won the World Series.  The year Sorsha brought in a woodchuck.  That honeymoon through Europe, following spring north.  The year mom died.

(time is cyclical)

What I mean to say here is that our lives, the years of lives, are re-experienced episodically and briefly.  They have to be.  What would it serve us if our memories were perfect records which required an equivalent amount of time to remember as they did to experience?

But this brings up then the fatal flaw of memory.  It’s not really a memory as in a mental snapshot of an event accurately recorded and recalled when needed. No, memories tend to cluster around emotions, emotions that highlight certain aspects of an event and downplay or suppress others.

What is memory for?  I mean from an evolutionary perspective.  It allows us to recall dangers.  Don’t walk in the bush at night because a predator might get you.  Opportunities. When the snows leave and the air warms, let’s head to that particular valley because the game is plentiful there and we can dig roots.  Others. That’s my mom and dad.  There’s my brother and sister.  Over on the other side of the fire is a person you want to stay away from.

Memories, interestingly, are always in the present, that’s the only time they can be experienced, so the past is only ever real in the present.  And it is present in shards of defective recollections.

Here’s something I’ve not been able to figure out.  Time, at least as we commonly use the term, seems to run in a linear fashion, time’s arrow some folks call it.  It moves, in this understanding, only forward.  Hence the new year and all its possibility and potential. Time has not been there yet, so it’s an open field of action.  We have not  yet committed any acts in 2014.

Yet.  The markers that we use for time, the day and the year in particular, are borne of cyclical time.  The day comes from a revolution of the earth, a repetitive motion that moves neither forward nor backwards.  The year marks a revolution of the earth’s around the sun.  The end of a year and the start of a new year finds us speeding back toward the spots we encountered last year, the Zodiac, for instance.

Yes, it’s true that these times are neither constant nor exactly repeated since the our solar system itself is dynamic and our planet wobbles, but this does not bother the essential point here, that we use for what we insist on calling linear time, cyclical measurements.

In other words it would make just as much sense to say, Happy New Year.  That is, yes, it’s a New Year and that’s the end of it.  The last trip is finished and the next one begun, but there’s no real reason to count them.  We’ve not gotten further along than we did last year, in fact, right now we’re back where we started.

This is just to say that 2014 and January 1st are conventions.  This may not be important at all, but I think the whole linear notion of time makes an afterlife seem significant when it’s not.  I think the whole linear notion of time forces us to imagine an arrow not only to time, but to history, and in so doing seek cause and effect where there is none.  I think the whole linear notion of time makes aging seem like an end when really it’s only part of an ongoing process.

So, what I’ll say is Happy New Year.  Again.

Art and Culture, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Latin, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Translating Metamorphoses

2014 Intentions

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Winter                                                         New (Seed Catalog) Moon
Having presented a prod toward humility and non-attachment here are some of my intentions and hopes for the New Year:

1.  A healthy and joyful family (including the dogs)

2. Sell Missing

3. Have substantial work done on Loki’s Children

4. Translate at least book one and two of Ovid’s Metamorphoses

5. Have a productive garden and orchard, beautiful flowers

6. Host a Beltane and a Samhain bonfire to open and close the growing season

7. Establish a new beeyard and have a decent honey harvest

8. Have a new and consistent way to include art in my life

9. Consider a new blog focused solely on the Great Wheel and the Great Work

10. Feed the autodidact with a few more MOOCs

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel

Non-attachment

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IMAG1311Winter                   New(Seed Catalog) Moon

Seed companies know the gardener’s heart.  After the big push through the major holidays and cold and snow, a gardener’s thoughts turn toward spring and the garden yet to be. The seed folk know and they send their multi-colored catalogs filled with new possibilities and old surety’s.

A new one came the other day from Territorial Seeds in Oregon.  It has an interesting format and varieties I’ve not seen before.  Getting these catalogs has made me think about the New Year since one clear intention (not a resolution) for 2014 involves the garden.  That intention is to give this new garden, a fresh opportunity to learn and practice, the very best care I can.  It includes, too, planning it to fit our anticipated needs, both for eating immediately and for stores in the pantry.

All of which led me to the photograph posted above.  It’s a long distance shot with my cell phone so it’s not the greatest resolution, but can you see the white shape in the distance beyond the Norway pine?  That is an observatory.  I’ve mentioned it before, our neighbor built it to house his Celestron.  A number of us, maybe 20, gathered one evening and under his careful guidance, lifted the movable dome off his garage floor and carried it a hundred feet plus and set it on the rollers of the observatory’s circular base.  A party was held which celebrated the achievement of this amateur architect.

I believe he had one season of use from it.  Then the M.S. came.  This was five or six years ago and that observatory rests out there still, waiting for the man who can no longer come and make it real. The observatory reminds me of a parable in Luke:

“Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. 17 And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ 18 Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19 And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ 20 But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”  Luke 12:16-20

(The Parable of the Rich Fool byRembrandt, 1627)

Both the observatory and the rich man’s barns seem pertinent at New Years.  In the first instance they remind us that our plans can be nullified in an instant.  We know this of course but sometimes it helps to have concrete reminders.

More to the point are two lessons.  The first is to be humble in what you expect.  This does not mean don’t hope for great things, just remember that life may bend otherwise.  The second, very much related to the first, is don’t allow your hopes to ensnare you, to make you captive to them.  If you become ensnared, losing something hoped for can crash your world.  If you hold it lightly, you can continue, change direction or start over.

 

 

Quotes

last quote harvests of the year

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“Loneliness is black coffee and late-night television; solitude is herb tea and soft music. Solitude, quality solitude, is an assertion of self-worth, because only in the stillness can we hear the truth of our own unique voices.”
— Pearl Cleage (via visualcomplex)
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
— Maya Angelou
“Hearts are wild creatures, that’s why our ribs are cages.”
— (via northwolves)
“You know that place between sleeping and awake, that place where you can still remember dreaming? That’s where I’ll always think of you.”
— J.M. Barrie
General
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Winter                                                                         Winter Moon

Minnesota macho is back.  The only consolation from the weather folks is, “It’s been colder.”  Oh, yeah.  We’ve had a real winter this year and I’m glad.  This is the weather I moved here for and if we can have these winters every two or three years, I’ll mute my complaints when it’s hot.  I promise.  Well, don’t hold me to that.  Like many Minnesotans my cold tolerance far exceeds my heat tolerance.

 

Politics, US History

My Hope for the New Year

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Winter                                                                Winter Moon

Ever since Reagan, and with the witting aid of William Clinton, the poor have receded from the public debate.  Oh, yes, you see comments about inequality like the 99% of the short lived Occupy movement and even occasional woe saying from a pundit or two, but otherwise the Appalachias and deep Souths and poor urban cores have gone missing.  But only from the news and from positive policy making.  (Yes, it’s true, they did appear at Farm Bill time as the expensive food stamp item and in the grim socialist nightmares of Tea Party folk asleep in their beds — the spectre of Obamacare, but only in these negative ways.)

We have been and are in a time when the economy and its travails have become the focus of political conversation.  Can we afford that war in Afghanistan?  That war in Iraq?  Social Security?  Medicare?  Medicaid?  Can we afford the deficit?  All these questions trump a larger question, the one of the social compact, the unum in E Pluribus Unum.

In America the question used to be not first about what we can afford, but what we need. Even the most benighted president of recent times, Richard Nixon, proposed the earned income tax credit which would have assured a stable annual income for all Americans.  My wife, a physician, and I have agreed for a long time that single payer health care is the only responsible and just course for America.  Every person should be able to find a job, health care, housing, food and a decent education.

Why?  Because we’re all in this together.  If the argument of simple justice doesn’t persuade you, look at our demographic future:

“…the United States of 2050 will look different from that of today: whites will no longer be in the majority. The U.S. minority population, currently 30 percent, is expected to exceed 50 percent before 2050. No other advanced, populous country will see such diversity.”   the Smithsonian, The Changing Demographics of America.

This means that our doctors, teachers, business leaders, union organizers, federal, state and municipal workers and politicians must come in significant numbers from within the majority population composed of the combined Asian, Latino, Black, and Native American communities.

Think about it.  This means the children of these communities need not just adequate schools, but good ones.  And to learn in those schools those children need to be well fed and healthy.  Too, they need a stable home in which their parents model for them the kind of work habits our complex economy demands.  Their parents can only provide that model if they, too, have jobs.

This is good news.  It means that by shaping an America that knows its self interest lies in the fortunes of all its citizens we can ensure our common future and therefore help lift each other toward a just nation.

It means we cannot afford to have hungry, sick Asian children at their school desks.  It means we cannot afford to have Black adults who lack jobs with decent wages.  It means we cannot afford to have Latino citizens who can’t find housing in which to raise their children.  It means we can no longer allow native reservations to be among the poorest regions of our nation.

It takes no political savant to imagine some of the policy directions that flow from these realizations.  Yes, the particulars may differ among people of good will, but these are the kind of expenditures around which we need to build a national budget, around which we define first what we as a nation need, then look to public policy to help us decide how we can afford it.

 

 

 

Writing

A Method to It

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Winter                                                                Winter Moon

As you might have noticed, I’m doing an end of year summing up by quarters.  The method is to go through the list of posts for the quarter, check out what’s in them and try to come up with a thread, a throughline for that time period.  I’ve not done this before and it’s kind of fun, rolling back the days and months.  In fact, when Ancientrails reaches its 10th birthday on February 5th, 2015, I think I’ll do the decade.  That should be interesting.

The setting of a new year date encourages this sort of retrospective, a sort of see it, acknowledge it, set it in the past where it belongs and face forward moment.  This blog serves several purposes.   It’s an online journal, a weblog.  It’s a form of communication with a wide number of people.  Around 2,000 visits or so a month.  It’s a cultural relic. It also shows one of the many variants on human existence and in so doing allows others to either be affirmed or offended.  Both are important.

Anyhow, I’ll finish up the quarterly posts on Monday.  Then we’ll back to the usual.

 

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Garden, Great Wheel, Minnesota, Our Land and Home, Retirement, Science, Third Phase, Travel

2013: Second Quarter

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Winter                                                            Winter Moon

The first day of the second quarter, April 1st, is Stefan’s birthday and was a gathering of the Woolly’s at the Red Stag.  I made this note: “Here we are seen by each other.  Our deep existence comes with us, no need for the chit-chat and polite conversation of less intimate gatherings.  The who that I am within my own container and the who that I am in the outer world come the closest to congruence at Woolly meetings, a blessed way of being exceeded only in my relationship with Kate.”

The “doing work only I can do” thought kept returning, getting refined: “With writing, Latin and art I have activities that call meaning forward, bringing it into my life on a daily basis, and not only brought forward, but spun into new colors and patterns.” april 2 On the 13th this followed:  “Why is doing work only I can do important to me?  Mortality.  Coming at me now faster than ever.  Within this phase of my whole life for sure.  Individuation.  It’s taken a long time to get clear about who and what I’m for, what I’m good at and not good at.  Now’s the time to concentrate that learning, deepen it.”

The best bee year we’ve had started on April 16th with discovering the death of the colony I thought would survive.  While moving and cleaning the hive boxes, I wrenched back and the pain stayed with me.  That same day the Boston Marathon bombing happened.  In addition to other complicated feelings this simple one popped up:  “The most intense part of my initial reaction came when I realized what those feelings meant, the emptiness and the sadness and the vacuum.  They meant I am an American.  That this event was about us, was done to us.”

Another theme of this quarter would be my shoulder, perhaps a rotator cuff tear, perhaps nerve impingement caused by arthritis in my cervical vertebrae.  Maybe some post-polio misalignment.  But over the course of the quarter with a good physical therapist it healed nicely.

Kate went on a long trip to Denver, driving, at this time, for Gabe and Ruth’s birthdays. While she was out there teaching Ruth to sew, Ruth asked her, “Why did you become a doctor instead of a professional sewer?”  When Kate is gone, the medical intelligence of our house declines precipitously.  That means doggy events can be more serious.

Kona developed a very high fever and I had to take her to the emergency vet.  She had a nodule on her right shoulder which we identified as cancerous.  This meant she had to have it removed.  At this point I was moving her (a light dog at maybe 40 pounds) in and out of the Rav4 with some difficulty because of my back.

This was the low point of the year as Kona’s troubles and my back combined to create a CBE (1)dark inner world.  The day I picked Kona up from the Vet after her surgery was cold and icy, but my bees had come in and I had to go out to Stillwater to get them, then see my analyst, John Desteian.  That day was the nadir.  I was in pain and had to go through a lot of necessary tasks in sloppy slippery weather.  That week Mark Odegard sent me this photograph from a while ago Woolly Retreat.

By the end of the month though Kate was back and April 27th:  “Yes!  Planted under the planting moon…”

For a long time I had wanted to apply my training in exegesis and hermeneutics to art and in this time period I decided to do it.  In the course of researching this idea I found I was about 50 years late since the Frankfurt School philosophers, among them, Gadamer and Adorno, had done just that.  Still, I patted myself on the back for having thought along similar lines.

Over the last year Bill Schmidt, a Woolly, and I have had dinner before we play sheepshead in St. Paul.  His wife, Regina, died a year ago September.  “Bill continues to walk straight in his life after Regina’s death, acknowledging her absence and the profound effect it has had on his life, yet he reports gratitude as his constant companion.”

By April 29th the back had begun to fade as an issue: “Let me describe, before it gets away from me, submerged in the always been, how exciting and uplifting it was to realize I was walking across the floor at Carlson Toyota.  Just walking.”

Kate and I had fun at Jazz Noir, an original radio play performed live over KBEM.

In my Beltane post on May 1st I followed up my two sessions with John Desteian:  “John Desteian has challenged me to probe the essence of the numinous.  That is on my mind.  Here is part of that essence.  The seed in the ground, Beltane’s fiery embrace of the seed, the seed emerging, flourishing, producing its fruit, harvest.  Then, the true transubstantiation, the transformation of the bodies of these plants into the body and blood ourselves.”

Then on May 6th, 5 months into my sabbatical from the MIA:  “The third phase requires pruning.  Leaving a job or a career is an act of pruning.  A move to a smaller home is an act of pruning.  Deciding which volunteer activities promote life and which encumber can proceed an act of pruning.  Last year I set aside my political work with the Sierra Club.  Today I have set aside my work at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.”  That ended 12 years of volunteer work.

“When you recover or discover something that nourishes your soul and brings joy, care enough about yourself to make room for it in your life.”

— Jean Shinoda Bolen 

It was also in May of this year that Minnesota finally passed the Gay marriage bill.  Gave me hope.

May 13 “Sort of like attending my own funeral.   All day today notes have come in from docent classmates responding to my resignation from the program.”  During this legislative session, I again became proud to be a Minnesotan.

As the growing season continued:  “If you want a moment of intense spirituality, go out in the morning, after a big rain, heat just beginning to soak into the soil, smell the odor of sanctity…”

On May 22nd the Woolly’s gathered to celebrate, with our brother Tom, the 35th year of his company, Crane Engineering.  The celebration had something to do with a crystal pyramid.  At least Stefan said so.

A cultural highlight for the year was the Guthrie’s Iliad, a one person bravura performance by veteran actor, Stephen Yoakam.

Friend and Woolly Bill Schmidt introduced me to High Brix gardens.  I decided to follow their program to create sustainable soils and did so over the course of the growing season. I got good results.

Our new acquaintance Javier Celis, who did a lot of gardening work for us over the year, also finished up our firepit and we had our first fire in it on June 7th.  It was not the last.

On June 12th Rigel came in with a small pink abrasion on her nose.  She had found and barked, barked, barked, barked at a snapping turtle.  Kate removed the turtle from our property.  The turtle came back, hunting I believe, for a small lake not far from us in which to lay her eggs.  The next time Rigel and Vega still barked, from a safe distance.

And on Father’s Day: “Is there anything that fills a parent’s heart faster than hearing a child light-hearted, laughing, excited?  Especially when that child is 31.”

During her visit her in late June grand-daughter Ruth went with me on a hive inspection: “She hung in there, saying a couple of times, “Now it’s making me really afraid.” but not moving away.”

My favorite technology story came on June 27th when NASA announced that one of the Voyager spacecrafts would soon leave the heliosphere, the furthest point in space where the gases of the sun influence matter.  This meant it would then be in interstellar space.

And, as Voyager entered the Oort cloud Tom and Roxann made their way Svalbard and the arctic circle.  Thus endeth the second quarter.

 

 

Quotes

Found a new source

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“This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures.”
— Heraclitus (535 BCE – 475 BCE)

 

“The divine will exists and directs the universe with justice and goodness. Though it is not always apparent if you merely look at the surface of things, the universe we inhabit is the best possible universe.”

Epictetus

“The best love is the kind that
awakens the soul
and makes us reach for more;
that plants a fire in our hearts
and brings peace to our minds.”

Walt Whitman

“Many Buddhists understand the round of birth-and-death quite literally as a process of reincarnation, wherein the karma which shapes the individual does so again and again in life after life until, through insight and awakening, it is laid to rest. But in Zen, and in other schools of the Mahayana, it is often taken in a more figurative way, as that the process of rebirth is from moment to moment, so that one is being reborn so long as one identifies himself with a continuing ego which reincarnates itself afresh at each moment of time.”Alan Watts

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

Albert Camus

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
— Albert Einstein
Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

You Are the Fates. You Weave Your Own Destiny.

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Winter                                                                        Winter Moon

Yet another caesura, this between Christmas and New Years.  Often a time of let down, regret, self-flagellation as we drive ourselves toward the New Year, whip in hand.  Again the self/no-self conversation comes to mind.  A good while back I used the image of a jockey riding our day-to-day actions, sometimes encouraging, sometimes holding back, sometimes using the quirt.  It’s this image that gives me pause when thinking about the no-self idea.  How can I have the clear sense of a guide, a jockey at work and maintain a notion of the no-self?

That is, if there is some part of me, no matter how small, that moves me to conform my actions to some roughly consistent standards or ideals or conceptions (whatever they are), at least that part has to be continuous.

We must be some combination of the two ideas.  My jockey is not a super-ego, or at least not only a super-ego.  My jockey loves his steed, has an intimate bond with it and wants only the best for it.  This is a relationship of love, not control, so all of the jockey’s urgings aim to enrich the life of the mount.  The bond between jockey and mount, between crudely put, mind and body, requires some ongoing entity whether that entity be a portion of the mind, a certain kind of body/muscle memory, an unconscious or subconscious cluster of hopes and dreams or whatever.

With the idea of a jockey or guide or a host or a friend of my journey there does come the evanescence of day to day experience, that flood of emotion, experience, thought and action we bathe in constantly.  Constantly here means waking and sleeping for our–jockey, guide, host, friend of my journey–never completely walks away from the task.

OK.  Let me shift metaphors here, maybe to a better one, our weaver (our own personal norns or fates) constantly has weft and warp threads in hand, shuttle rattling noisily back and forth across the loom weaving the tapestry that is our life.  Our weaver does not pluck all the threads (experiences, moments, feelings, thoughts, actions) out of our life to make her art.  No, she picks the threads that seem especially significant, or memorable, or important, somehow worthy of affecting the ongoing design.

The design for the tapestry shifts as it is woven, sometimes future threads wind back and alter scenes long wound up and considered done.  But note, and here is the no-self aspect, so many threads get dropped, no longer part of the thickness.  In this dropping of moments and in the selecting of so few moments to include in the tapestry (think of the total giga-peta-terabytes of information packed into anyone’s lifetime) we discard selves by the millions, the billions and the selves (the you interacting with a particular moment) that the weaver keeps are in a sense so random that the linkages seem not to exist at all.  Therefore, no-self.

However, and here is where I end up honoring the idea of the Self, there is the end a tapestry, a tapestry that gives visual shape to the life we have lived.  That tapestry of course is who you are at this moment.  Which will, following out this metaphor, change as your daily experience changes, sometimes, perhaps often at some points, altering understanding and appreciation of the past and thereby changing the design.  The look of the tapestry is never complete, never finished, always liable to change, even drastic change.  But there is still a weaver, a hand with the shuttle, working quickly and surely to see that our tapestry is a rich one.

A New Year is not a new year, of course, but a moment in time, an arbitrary moment when we pause, pay attention to the weaver.  What’s been added recently?  How does the design look?  Am I proud of it?  Could it use some spiffing up?  Perhaps a new image here and there?  OK.  Let’s see how we can create some new threads.

Let me take this idea one huge step further.  Our tapestry gets woven into the ongoing tapestry of our species and will always be a part of this larger work.  The hominid tapestry joins itself to the ape and the primate tapestries which in turn get knitted together with the mammalian.  You can see how this goes.  I’m not proposing a weaver in the sky, not at all, what I am proposing is an ongoing visual image which future conscious beings will be able to see.  They will marvel at it.

And, they will be, just like we are, the universe collected in a particular moment and looking back over the whole and saying, “It is good.”