Monthly Archives: October 2013

Politics, Weather +Climate

New Normal

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                     Samhain Moon

Summer.  Fall. Summer. Before this it was.  Winter. Spring. Winter. Spring.   Of course that’s from a last millennia perspective.  Born after 2000 and this is your normal, not weird, just the way things are.  For awhile.  This normal, though, will change faster than ours did.

The first frost is two weeks late.  Or is it?  Hard to say.  The changes.  Just. Keep. Coming.

I’m counting on Obama to hold tight, legislation can’t be held hostage every time the government needs to pay its bills.  Is it a conspiracy if a lot of people colluded to make this stupid event happen, but every one knows about it?  It’s difficult for me to understand wanting to be seen as the lug wrench in the gears of say the CDC as a chicken borne illness begins to accelerate its number of incidents.  (This is happening.) Or, NOAA as a freak blizzard strikes western South Dakota.  Or, our economy.  Or, the world’s economy.

I remember seeing grandson Gabe hanging on to something he wanted then using it to bang his sister over the head.  He was 4.

 

Myth and Story, Writing

More on Loki

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                    Samhain Moon

Loki immersion continues.  I only have Loki in Scandinavian Mythology for three more days so I’ve given it priority in my day.  The book sucks me into matters not relevant to my purpose in reading it.

As folklore scholarship, it intrigues me; especially since I see an exact correlation between the higher criticism of the bible I learned in seminary and the folklore study methodology:  textual criticism, tradition criticism, sitz im leben (what role did the story play in its place of origin), redaction criticism (how have editors and/or compilers influenced the text) and work with the original languages.

(Baldrs-death-killed-by-Hod-helped-Loki)

So, instead of following themes that help me flesh out Loki as a chief character for Loki’s Children, I get seduced by the influence of Orphic tales on the Baldr Myth.  Having a limited time to work with the book helps, it has to go back to the University of Minnesota this Friday, no renewal.  Even so.

Overall though the book has been even more helpful than I imagined.  It was the only text solely to focus on Loki that I could find, the only academic text.  It has made forming a picture of Loki, his skills and his character and his backstory, much easier.

Woolly Mammoths

The Herd

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                      Samhain Moon

Frank B. bought supper last night at Christo’s.  A large crowd:  Stefan, Bill, Scott, Warren, Mark, myself and Taylor Helgeson, fresh from Hollywood and the music scene.  He has an album underway.  I enjoyed speaking with him.  His Montana stories were graphic and interesting.

We spoke of our most ancient and beloved one cell mutual ancestor, learned how artificial inseminators gather bull semen, and what getting musical ideas pushed forward requires in the California of at least one of ours dreams.

Christo’s is a Greek restaurant a block down from 26th and Nicollet.  It’s fare is adequate and Greekish.  Ample quantities.  After the meal we gathered outside for a tusk raising in honor of our guest, Taylor.

Anoka County

Commuter Man

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                         Samhain Moon

Living in the northern burbs there are two main ways to get into the city, 35W or 94.  After years of construction, it is now possible to get on Highway 10 within 3 miles of our home and have no lights, no intersections all the way to the center of Minneapolis on 35W.  Most of the time, however, trips from here take us more toward the west side of the city going to the Walker or the MIA, so 94 is the best route in.

The problem is that between Highway 610 and Highway 94 lies 252.  252 is 7 or 8 miles of at grade intersections, traffic lights and heavy traffic.  And going in tonight it was down to one lane.  Now, I know, that’s part of Minnesota and that’s true:  winter and road construction, but geez.  20 minutes to go 7 miles.  First time I had to put on my commuterman persona this year.  Lean back, breathe deep of those exhaust fumes and enjoy the internal combustion moment.

Garden

Learning Curves

Leave a comment

Fall                                                            Samhain Moon

Gardening has become more straight forward, better results over the last couple of years.  Now, it’s time to turn attention to the orchard.  Here, the trees have just reached their bearing years and began producing multiple fruits.  Up to now, aside from the guild of plants around their base, installed by ecological gardens as a permaculture method for caring for them, I’ve done little except bag the apples.

The permaculture stuff, which has worked well in the vegetable garden, for whatever set of reasons has not worked so well in the orchard.  To get better results I turned this year to International Ag Labs, doing a soil test for the orchard separate from the vegetable garden. I have recommendations.  And today we began the work of implementing.

Only thing is, I had this bright idea last year, lay down landscape cloth, the really good kind, put mulch on top and keep down the grass and weeds that drove Kate nuts over the last couple of years.  Worked great for that purpose.  Turns out though that when I lay down fertilizer and soil drenches for the trees I have to work where their root system extends.  Makes sense, right?

(this graph looks about right to me.  In the orchard I’m at comprehension.)

Tree’s root systems extend out about as far as its canopy is wide.  Javier did not lay landscape cloth on the mounds around each tree, but he did put it down under the canopy proper.  I asked him to do that.  Oops.  Now I have to rake the mulch off, back to the canopy’s edge and figure out a way to suppress weeds and grass while leaving open space for the treatments of the soil that I will do throughout the year.  Sigh.

Still not sure what I’m going to do in that exposed ground, but I have a season to consider it.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Latin

Leave a comment

Fall                                                              Samhain Moon

Back in the SPQR.  Translating Metamorphoses this morning, 6 verses and I didn’t pull my hair out too often.  That’s because, of course, there’s so little left.  The Latin has had me going this way and that.  It’s too much, takes too much time.  Maybe I’ve gotten from it what I want, what I intended.  Then, but I’ve invested 3 + years at it.  Finally, ok, I’ll try it again for a while.

Then, this morning. I had a great time.  Always wise to suspend judgement until some data is at hand.

Family, Garden, Our Land and Home

Samhain for the Vegetable Garden

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                                Samhain Moon

While picking raspberries this afternoon, I looked at the garden beds we cleared this week.potatopatch670 There is the suntrap where we had all those tiny tomatoes and the two plants of huge heirloom Brandywines and Cherokee Purples.  The asparagus bed, the little mound still tufted with the green of asparagus stalks, got over taken this year by the exuberant ground cherries that grew and grew and grew and would still be growing if we hadn’t decided enough and pulled them.

South of the suntrap is the first bed in the vegetable garden, one made of logs, made long enough ago by Jon that I’ve had to replace the logs around it already at least once.  This year it had sugar snap peas, cucumbers, egg plants, broccoli, and hot peppers.  It’s had many crops over the 16 or so years its been in place.

Next to it is a bed that we’d given over to dicentra and bugbane because of the wonderful ash tree we allowed to grow large in the garden.  They’re shade lovers.  This year, with the emerald ash borer coming and a long standing desire to open up more sun in the garden, we had the ash taken down and planted this bed with its first vegetable crop in years:  yellow tomatoes and yellow peppers.  They thrived.

When Jon originally built the raised beds, I asked him to be creative, mix up the shapes and the materials.  The first one he tried was made of tin roofing.  It worked ok, but he preferred working with 2×4’s after that.  Now it’s half daisy.  The other half this year had a productive small tomato plant and couple of so-so pepper plants.  I made one obvious mistake.  I planted a pepper to the west of the tomato plant and it never thrived.

The long bed, the extra large bed, this year had beets and carrots, a couple of crops.  It also has a persistent asian lily crop that comes from the short time I used the beds as cutting gardens.  After treating the lilies as weeds (a plant out of place), they have become confined (mostly) to the extreme south end of the bed.

To the east of the extra large bed are two similar sized beds.  The north one this year hadIMAG0955cropped1000 onions and garlic and the southern bed had beets (didn’t do well) and greens (which did).  The leeks are in the long mound west of the extra large bed, doing well, still growing.

Our raspberry patch is up against the fence and behind the wisteria.  Its growth has shaded out a small bed that this year had only a crop of asian lilies.  North of it is the strawberry bed and north of that the herb spiral.

The beds we cleared are the ones on which I broadcast fertilizer last week and they’re now mulched, extra large and two similar sized ones, or awaiting mulch from this year’s leaf fall.  These beds are brown, bare of plant material for the first time since May.  They look bereft, but they’re not.  In the top six inches of soil small colonies of microbes, bacteria, fungi, worms and insects are busy, working together to create a fertile spot for next year’s garden.  It’ll be the best one ever.

Art and Culture, Humanities, MOOCS, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Enlightenment’s Dark Side

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                                  Samhain Moon

It was wet and chill, but the red and gold fruit warmed me as it slid off.  The raspberry canes grabbed at me as I moved among them as if wanting me to stay awhile longer, to chat or linger.  Once in a while I threw an over ripe berry over the fence to Rigel who watched my progress with head moving up and down, patient, waiting.

Before the berry picking I spent a couple of hours reading 34 pages, the introductory chapter to Adorno and Horkheimer’s, Dialectic of Enlightenment.  As this MOOC moves toward the end, we come closer to the current time and to thinkers with whom I’m familiar not through academics but through the politics of the 1960’s.  Adorno and Horkheimer are part of the Frankfurt School philosophers, most of whom emigrated to the US during WW II.  I was most familiar with the work of their colleague Herbert Marcuse, but I have come to know the work of Jurgen Habermas, too.

This is dense material and the argument is provocative, far from obvious.  In essence Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the enlightenment has become an instrument of oppression.  Some characterize the enlightenment as a movement designed to make the earth a home for humanity.  Instead of moving toward freedom and liberation the focus on repeatable natural laws and the tools of technology enabled control and domination, both of the planet and citizens of nation-states.  I’ll do better with this at another time, but this is heart of it.

 

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, MOOCS, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

God is the zocalo of Western religious life.

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                     Samhain Moon

 

Last night I dreamed of a place where reality could be reconfigured only by imagining.  Though I don’t remember many specifics, I do remember that at the close of the dream I wondered if the same process could put us in different historical eras, not just different places in current time.

This led, after waking, to a continuation of the dream space to the matter of the modern and post-modern, much on my mind these days thanks to the two MOOCs I’m taking. Having read Wittgenstein on language games from his Philosophical Investigations and his attendant critique of the really real as inaccessible at best since words do not hook onto reality, only other words (a paraphrase), somehow the Zocalo came to mind.

Kate and I visited Mexico City in the 1993.  It impressed me then that at the very center of the Federal District, with the National Cathedral on one side and the National Palace on the other was a vast empty space, the zocalo.   The idea of a country with a vast open square at the very heart of its national culture appealed and appeals to me.

Mexicans fill the zocalo often.  On September 15th at 11 pm, the President comes out on a balcony of the National Palace and delivers a grito, a cry that remembers the “grito de Delores” or the cry of Mexican independence first heard in the small town of Delores.  At other times the military parades through the zocalo.  Recently it has been filled with striking teachers trying to turn back education reform.  Each spring equinox Mexico’s ethnic groups, la raza, fill the zocalo with a celebration through which they assert their critical importance to the nation as a whole.

With Wittgenstein in the background and in particular his emphasis that meaning is use, that is, we learn the meaning of our language from the contexts in which we use it, the zocalo and God suddenly merged.  God is the zocalo of Western religious life.

What do I mean?  God is the empty square at the heart of Western religious and political culture.  Over the course of two thousand years various groups from Judaism to Christianity to Muslims and many, many diverse splinters of all these groups have gathered in the square to give their grito.  At the time they fill the square they occupy the center of the culture’s awareness. (Note:  this is not at all, to the contrary in fact, a truth claim about what they say there.)

This same square also receives those who would fill it with alternative metaphysical or anti-metaphysical ideas.  Nietzsche, God is dead.  The square was empty and continues to be empty.  Nature is god.  The pantheists.  Even those who would entertain the world of many gods, contemporary polytheists like Wiccans and Astruans, have to enter the God/zocalo to make their proclamations over against this central Western idea.

This means that God is, for the group occupying the God/zocalo, what they say God is. That is, the way they use the concept of God in the square is what God is to them.  Use gives meaning.  Context gives meaning.

How is this helpful?  It helps me understand that faith, that word I’ve been trying to reimagine over the last couple of years, is not about a transcendental claim at all, but rather is a pledge to walk into the God/zocalo with a particular group and, while there, to abide by their understanding.  Faith is an initiatory passage into culture, not a passageway to the really real.  Said another way faith is agreement with claims about the really real made by a particular group when they inhabit the God/zocalo.

As long as you remain within that group, their language will be useful to you as a shared agreement about what spreads outward from the zocalo.  In Mexico City it is Mexico and Mexicanness.  In the Presbyterian occupation of the zocalo it is the presbyterian form of church government, John Calvin, local presbyteries and congregations, the Book of Order, ordination exams, elders, presbytery meetings, General Assemblies.

 

 

Anoka County, Art and Culture

Ceramics and Wolves

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                   New (Samhain) Moon

Kate said she likes this time, when the gold colors have just begun to appear, because “it seems like Robert Briscoeall of fall is ahead.”  Yeah.  I like it in the rain and mist we had today, an atmosphere that makes me think of falls gone by, the ones I thought of as normal.

(Briscoe’s showroom is the building at the rear.)

We drove up to Stark, Minnesota today to Robert Briscoe‘s home and studio.  He has a fall sale, a 24 year tradition.  It includes other potters.  This year Jo Severson,  Jason Trebs and Matthew Krousey.  His home and studio sit on a high point surrounded by a maple, beech and birch forest.

Long, maybe 20 feet long sawn boards, 2x2x18, placed on metal sawhorses held the pottery.  Some it was under a white tent, but most of it sat out in the rain.  We bought a large vase and I poured two inches of rain water on the ground.

Briscoe is a big bluff former Kansan.  We talked about tornadoes.  He said his dad would gather the kids on the front porch and point out the funnel clouds as they descended from the sky.

All four potters make pottery meant for home use.  We bought bowls and plates, the vase, a small bowl with a top and two cups.  Having handmade items, varied in design and color, makes each meal special.  Too, we get to know the people who made them so the pieces are personal, not anonymous.  Both things appeal to me.  A lot.

After leaving Stark, we headed back down Highway 65 to Anoka County 18.  18 runs through the largest nature reserve in the metro area, Carlos Avery, and on the grounds of Carlos Avery is the Wildlife Science Center.  Today was an event there called the Harvest Howl and sounded very interesting.  Local vendors.  See wolves and other wild animals. Support good work.

The center is just beyond two stone and cement pillars topped with an old worked iron arch that says Carlos Avery Game Farm.  It was better in my head than on the ground.  It was wet, for one thing, which lifted the urine and feces scent from the ground and distributed it.  For another, the center focuses on real science.  That is, they train DNR, Animal Control personnel on how to handle bears, wolves and other critters.  They also train scientists in how to tranquilize and examine various species.  What I’m trying to say is the area is not spiffed up for an afternoon’s stroll on a wet day.

It looks clunky, down at the heels.  It’s a shoe-string operation and it shows.

Worth going to once.  Probably not for a return visit.  Except maybe in dry weather.