Daily Archives: May 14, 2013

Art and Culture, Cooking, Great Work, Latin, Third Phase, Writing

Gotta Get Out More

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Beltane                                                                              Early Growth Moon

My docent class is on a 5 day jaunt to Chicago.  Were it not for Kona’s vet visits, I’d be there, too.  This is a full week now since I sent in my resignation to the MIA.  Nada.  Silence.  Nothing.  12 years.  Almost as weird as the weather.  It’s like the Institute has organizational autism.

It’s been a full day with work outside and inside, a quiet evening reading.

Though I can see that the chained mornings and the Latin in the mid-afternoons is very productive, I’m also seeing a desire in myself to get out more.  Kate had to sort of drop kick me into it, but now that she has I realize the path I’ve chosen will increasingly isolate me and us, if we’re not very intentional about getting out.

To that end I signed up us for a fund raiser for CSA Roots, apparently the former Community Design Center with which I did a lot of work in the late 70’s and early 80’s.  This fund-raiser features a hand-crafted, all locally sourced meal at the Heartland Restaurant across from the former site of the St. Paul Farmer’s Market.  Appropriately enough the dinner is on June 21st, the Summer Solstice.

We’re also planning a trip into the American Swedish Institute this week to see the Sami exhibition and eat at the Institutes new restaurant.  Hmmm.  Do most of our activities involve food?  Which by the way is ok since I’ve lost at least 14 pounds on this lower carb diet in addition to increasing the nutrient load of my food consumption and, the point of it, lowering my blood sugar well below levels of concern.

 

 

General

Quotes more quotes

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“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”

— Simone Weil

“In every parting there is an image of death.”

— George Eliot

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

— George Eliot

“What you remember saves you.”

― W. S. Merwin

“We’re neither pure, nor wise, nor good; we do the best we know.”

— Voltaire

“The
Earth would die
If the sun stopped kissing her.”

— Hafiz – The Gif

“At the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy.”

— Federico García Lorca

“Painting is not an aesthetic operation ; it is a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.”

— Pablo Picasso

“Once you awaken, you will have no interest in judging those who sleep.”

— James Blanchard

“If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.”

— Walter Bagehot

“The greatest mystery of all is reality.”

— Beckman

“I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

“There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.”

— Albert Camus – The Myth of Sisyphus

“Reading and sauntering and lounging and dosing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness.”

— David Hume

“Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.”

— Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

“I am an idealist. I do not know where I am going but I am on my way.”

— Carl Sandburg

“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are ‘It might have been.’”

— Kurt Vonnegut – Cat’s Cradle

“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Do not look for a sanctuary in anyone except your self.”

— Siddhārtha Gautama

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but that may well be because we have made fiction to suit ourselves.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

— Ray Bradbury
Garden, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

A Good Day, Even If It Is 95

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Beltane                                                                         Early Growth Moon

Got outside around mid-day and planted chard, kale and carrots.  Need to get a second round of beets in the ground, too.  We’re well under way now, with beets emerging, leeks going well, garlic beginning to curl skyward though a bit behind, onions still a bit pale at the top, but progressing.  No bees today due to the cloudy morning, the best time to check on them, but not when its cloudy and rainy.  So tomorrow.

Using the time, the mornings for Missing, writing and revising in turn, trying to remember all the pieces.  A little difficult.  Like juggling chainsaws, bowling pins, feathers and knives.

Not unlike the afternoon’s translating.   Holding those words and ideas in the air, not committing, or at least not over-committing, to a particular meaning until all the pieces have been considered.  Mentally tired.

Minnesota, Politics, US History

Proud. Again.

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Beltane                                                                        Early Growth Moon

Proud to be a Minnesotan.  Again.  Finally.  It has been a long, long time in the conservative weeds with no new taxes chanted ahead of every policy debate, ruining the things that have made Minnesota the strong, progressive state I loved when I first moved here over 40 years ago.  Now, in one legislative session we have more money going into education instead of raiding our school systems piggy banks while raising property taxes.  And, incredibly and beautifully and thankfully, we have marriage as an institution available to all Minnesotans.

It is not, after all, gay marriage, anymore than it is hetero marriage or African marriage or white marriage.  No, it is a legally sanctioned bonding of two people for the purpose of creating a strong family unit, whether that unit is two people or two plus kids.  Hopefully, in not too many years, we will look back on this debate and shake our heads, “Why was that such a big deal?”

An open civic society, a thriving K-12 system with post-secondary education appropriate for all, a world class health system, diverse cultural life and a commitment to a healthy environment, that’s the Minnesota I love and I can begin to see it emerging again from the compassion drought we’ve suffered under the tax-obsessed Republicans.

As Leonard Cohen sings, Hallelujah!

Garden, Great Work

Soil

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Beltane                                                                            Early Growth Moon

The soil temps have exceeded 50 so I’ve got to get out there with the carrots and chard, hoping the tomatoes and peppers come soon.  They need to get in the ground.  I’m going to look at soil improvement over the next few years.  I’ve always done some amendments, composted manure goes on all my beds at the end of the growing season and I often lay it down as mulch once the temps get hot, then cover it with leaves, but I’ve not done any other fertilizing or soil supplementing, largely because I grow organic and I just don’t understand the organic soil supplement process.

Bill Schmidt hooked me up with some e-mails from an outfit in Farmington, International Ag Labs, and their stuff looks doable, though still somewhat complex for me.  I’ll need to look into it further, but it seems to have a focus that makes sense to me.  The basic thrust? Biosustainability created through soil improvement toward optimum soil health.  When you see the thin layer that is our atmosphere, the post below with the astronaut video, and then when you consider that it is the top six inches or so of soil that make plant life possible, you begin to understand how tiny is our margin of safety.

We can take active steps that ensure a healthy atmosphere and a healthy topsoil, why wouldn’t we do that?