Monthly Archives: January 2013

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, General, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Writing

A Productive Day

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Winter                                                                          Cold Moon

Kate spent the day at a sewing retreat.  All day.  From 9 am to 9 pm.  She came home exhausted, achy and smiling.  “I got a lot of work done.”  That’s Kate for I had a really good day.

Meanwhile I worked upstairs reading the Eddas and editing my presentation for Groveland tomorrow.  The dogs tend to get a bit rowdy if one of us isn’t upstairs with them.  With Kate gone, that needed to be me.

We did our dance together, the dogs and me’ I napped and worked out.  Watched a TV series on Netflix.  A laid back but productive day for me, too.

I have posted a link to Living in Season here.  It’s yet another segment in my continuing work on reimagining faith.  This one focuses on developing a pagan liturgical year.

Weather +Climate

Home Ice

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Winter                                                                               Cold Moon

As I said in the post below this one:

NYT, 1/26/2013

“ST. PAUL — A company at the top of the marketing game, Red Bull insists that ice cross downhill, like the other extreme sports the company has created, is not about selling beverages but rather an obligation to improve the lives of adrenaline junkies worldwide. The participants at the Crashed Ice qualifier at Xcel Energy Center here this week seemed convinced.

(Red-Bull-Crashed-Ice-2012—Kyle-Croxall-wins.  Home Ice.)

Ice cross racers sprint down a steep course studded with moguls. Gravity can help, or hurt.

In ice cross downhill, four skaters at a time race in full hockey gear down a steep, twisting course at speeds reaching 45 miles an hour.

Red Bull officials could have hollered, “This is an expensive marketing ploy to sell more energy drinks,” and the overwhelming response from skaters would have been, “Is it my turn yet?”

Ice cross downhill combines elements of downhill skiing and motocross, and it is performed by four skaters at a time who race in full hockey gear down a steep, twisting, mogul-studded course at speeds reaching 45 miles an hour. Red Bull’s Crashed Ice World Championship consists of five ice cross downhill tournaments, only one of which takes place in the United States. It started here on Thursday and will end on Saturday.”

read the whole story here

Weather +Climate

Cold

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Winter                                                                              Cold Moon

Cold at these intensities reaches up and slaps you, says pay attention!  This cold, this very chilled air now seeping into our house once sat over the Arctic circle, but slumped its ways south, slouching like Yeats’ rough beast, its hour come round at last.

(arctic sea ice)

We’re in the way as it heads away from the pole or, rather, there’s nothing in the way as it descends toward us.  No mountains.  No great lakes.  No cities.  Only forest and tundra and smaller lakes.  We are, our meteorologist of some note, Paul Douglas, says, one of the coldest major metropolitan areas in the world.  And damn proud of it, too.

This cold is life rejecting, bone and tissue freezing, the temperature equivalent of the fallow season.  Nothing can live in it.  For long.  Bears hibernate.  Oh, yes, there are the polar bears, the wolves, the wolverines and fishers and martens, yes, and they hunt the others who struggle.  Rabbit.  Deer.  Moose.  Mice.

But mostly life slows down.  Goes inside the house or den or bar.  Throw a log on the fire, turn the thermostat up, draw the down-filled duvets up close.

There is, too, another side to the cold.  It’s emotional cost.  Having to brace the cold all the time can be exhausting.  It contributes to the desire to run outside naked, screaming aloha, hunting for one of those umbrella drinks, even if you no longer drink.

Like those who live in any extreme weather environments either you make your peace with it or you find a different place to live.  I appreciate the cold’s ascetic qualities, its purity and clarity.  It’s single-minded devotion to being one thing.  It’s not like those variable humid days in summer when the wind can blow cool, then warm.  No, when it’s cold, it either stays cold or get colder.  Then, when it leaves, like pain, it is as if it had never been.

Family, Feelings, Friends, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

A Good Week

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Winter                                                                                     Cold Moon

This has been a good week.  Woollies Monday night at Mark’s.  Good food, intimate conversation with friends of many years.  A solid base to life outside the home.

Tuesday night Kate and I went to see the Hobbit.  Ate dinner at Tanner’s afterward.  Going out together is part of the glue that holds our relationship together.  The movie itself reinforced my writing, excited me.  The movie together puts another memory in the common memory bank.  Like South America, the Aegean, Europe, Hawaii, Mexico, Denver.  All part of our mutuality.

Yesterday dinner with Bill Schmidt, then Sheepshead with Roy, Ed, Bill and Dick.  Another base outside the home.

Then breakfast this morning with Mark Odegard.  He’s reading Missing and offered some very helpful insights.  We talked about life, art, how do we work in this third phase of our lives?

Weave into those social events a few Latin sentences translated, more of the Edda’s read, a bit of thinking about how to continue my love affair with art and the art world.  Steady exercise and a sensible diet.  The dip that showed up early has begun to disappear.

Commentary on Religion, Friends, Myth and Story

The Card Gods Have Not Died

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Winter                                                                             Cold Moon

Tonight was a Sheepshead night.  The cards ran my way all evening, evidence, Bill Schmidt said, “That the card gods have not died.”  I owe them a joss stick or two.  It was a good night for me.  And fun.

(Beham, (Hans) Sebald (1500-1550)  Fortuna . Engraving, Representing Fortune)

Bill and I ate at the St. Clair Broiler before hand.  It’s a joint from the 1940’s and still has that 40’s feel.  A neighborhood place with neon flames on its sign and just plain nice people working there.  Our waitress was sweet, a gentle, caring vibration about her.

We talked about life, about his transition to life without Regina’s physical presence, and he noted that, “We’re all always in transition.”  So true.

Roy Wolf, in whose home we play, said, “I’m 78.  The median age for white men in America.  Half are younger, half are older.”  Amazing.  Heartening to this 65, soon to be 66 year old.

On that front.  I had my brush with a blood glucose level of 112, in the above normal range for the first time.  Tom Davis, my doc, said I needed to watch my intake of sweets and starches.  I have.  I took it one step further and have begun counting carbs.  Not quite as seriously as a diabetic, but pretty seriously.

Result:  blood glucose this morning of 101.  Very reinforcing.  I’ve lost a little weight, too.  Not much, but some.

Politics

Double U o m e n

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Winter                                                                   Cold Moon

Women in combat.  The Israeli’s have had women in combat for a long time.  Though it’s sad, I’m glad to see this extension of the women’s rights movement.  It means that barriers from an age of chivalry are still falling, recognizing women as able in yet another formerly all male realm.

When I started college in 1965, men had to leave women at the dormitory door at 10:00 pm.  No men in the building after hours.  This was the university acting in loco parentis.  An almost invisible part of the Sixties, far overshadowed by civil rights and the anti-war movement, the student’s rights movement had as one of its first targets in loco parentis.  It fell before I graduated in 1969 and I helped it go.  This struggle had many other aspects, among them student evaluation of professors, but in loco parentis was the most visible issue.

When I entered seminary in 1970, there were three women on campus, two in my class and one a year or two ahead of us.  When I graduated in 1976, the seminary student body was half women.  There came a time at some point in the 1980’s when there were no men in the entering class.  Similar movement has come in medicine and law, the other two traditional professions and therefore the most rigid relative to gender inclusion.

The women’s movement has been a powerful engine for change in our culture, a change that is not over yet.  Many barriers remain, especially those in the upper reaches of business management and to a lesser extent in many realms of science.  Nonetheless women have made extraordinary strides since my high school days, 1961-1965.

 

Poetry, Politics

Another Inauguration, Another Time

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Winter                                                                              Cold Moon

 

Whitman struggled to support himself through most of his life. While in Washington, he lived on a clerk’s salary and modest royalties, and spent any excess money, including gifts from friends, to buy supplies for the wounded soldiers he nursed during the Civil War.

Specimen Days [The Inauguration]
by Walt Whitman

March 4th.–The President very quietly rode down to the Capitol in his own carriage, by himself, on a sharp trot, about noon, either because he wish’d to be on hand to sign bills, or to get rid of marching in line with the absurd procession, the muslin temple of liberty and pasteboard monitor. I saw him on his return, at three o’clock, after the performance was over. He was in his plain two-horse barouche, and look’d very much worn and tired; the lines, indeed, of vast responsibilities, intricate questions, and demands of life and death, cut deeper than ever upon his dark brown face; yet all the old goodness, tenderness, sadness, and canny shrewdness, underneath the furrows. (I never see that man without feeling that he is one to become personally attach’d to, for his combination of purest, heartiest tenderness, and native Western form of manliness.) By his side sat his little boy, of ten years. There were no soldiers, only a lot of civilians on horseback, with huge yellow scarfs over their shoulders, riding around the carriage. (At the inauguration four years ago, he rode down and back again surrounded by a dense mass of arm’d cavalrymen eight deep, with drawn sabres; and there were sharpshooters station’d at every corner on the route.) I ought to make mention of the closing levee of Saturday night last. Never before was such a compact jam in front of the White House–all the grounds fill’d, and away out to the spacious sidewalks. I was there, as I took a notion to go–was in the rush inside with the crowd–surged along the passage-ways, the blue and other rooms, and through the great east room. Crowds of country people, some very funny. Fine music from the Marine Band, off in a side place. I saw Mr. Lincoln, drest all in black, with white kid gloves and a claw-hammer coat, receiving, as in duty bound, shaking hands, looking very disconsolate, and as if he would give anything to be somewhere else.
Commentary on the news, GeekWorld, Great Work

There’s No Reason to Worry, Dave

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Winter                                                                     Cold Moon

Here’s an analysis in the January issue of Wired that caught my attention.  I don’t doubt that the numbers they use are right, though I haven’t confirmed them.

“It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields… Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.”  Wired January 2013

The argument here defines technological triumphalism, not only does technology solve all our ills, it always will.  And so it was good.

However.  Let’s go backwards to the time period before the industrial revolution when most folks still lived on farms.  I’m no romantic about subsistence agriculture having owned a farm, The (not so) Peaceable Kingdom, and engaged in intensive permaculture horticulture here at home.  It’s hard work and a bad year can literally kill you.

(Davos, World Economic Forum, A_Lunch_at_the_Belvedere)

Even so.  There’s a price to pay for salvation by the machine.  Think of it, machines take humans off the land and put them in service of making more and smarter machines.  That’s the essential argument this whole article makes.  Yes, it relieved the awful strains of serfdom, tenant farming, subsistence on increasingly smaller plots as inheritance ate up legacy lands.  But.  It created the hells of the looms, the coal age, the coal mine.  Child labor.  A cash economy where no cash spells doom faster even than failed crops.

Then there’s that relationship to the land.  We’ve removed so many people from the land, distanced them further and further to the sources of their own foods and we’ve done it via industrial processes now ruining those sources, those faraway yesterday sources.  That we cannot live without.

Technology has triumphed.  Along with its handmaiden, capitalism.  Neither of them care that they eat not their young, but yours.  Each of them assume an instrumentalist view of natural resources and human labor, seeing them both as infinite and replaceable when in fact they are neither.

I’m no luddite.  I love my computer and I look forward to a robot that can take over weeding our garden.  It’s that price.  Who tallies up the human and ecological cost of this capitalist, techno future?  Who thinks about how to reduce and when possible eliminate it?

Not the authors of articles for technology’s cheer leaders.

Great Work

The Way of the Vegetative Powers

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Winter                                                                  Cold Moon

Here’s an interesting story from our Singapore stringer, Dr. Mary Ellis.  She lives close by the Botanical Gardens where this tree is currently in bloom.

“The flowering Talipot Palms have been the focus of attention for the past few months at Singapore Botanic Gardens. It is a majestic sight and a lifetime treat to see the massive flowering structure.

In August 1920, Talipot seeds were introduced from the Calcutta Botanic Gardens, India. The seedlings were planted in the Palm Valley in 1925 and now after 79 years, two Talipot Palms (Corypha umbraculifera), flowered from October 2004 to January 2005.

This palm flowers only once in its lifetime, producing the biggest inflorescence in the flowering kingdom. The palm grows for 30 to 80 years, storing up energy and strength in its trunk to send out this massive inflorescence. After flowering and fruiting the plant will die. (read more)”