Samhain Winter Moon
Monthly Archives: December 2013
Loki
Samhain Winter Moon
After a time devoted first to getting Missing ready for the copy editor and a time after that focused on my new translating method, I have returned again to Loki’s Children. Still in the research phase, still learning and organizing material. Ready to use Dramatica to start the run-up to actual writing.
(Loki strikes Þjazi with a rod in this picture from an 18th-century Icelandic manuscript)
Right now I’m trying to grasp the Loki figure, his ambiguous, malevolent character; his leading role in the things to come. How to present him. Then, how he drags the other characters, already established, into his field, challenging them with the world’s destruction.
The weather and the season are conducive to time focused on the inner world, just right for this phase of work.
Halfway to the Pole; Halfway to the Equator.
Samhain Winter Moon
As the nights grow longer and the temperature drops further, the silence here becomes holy. The weather of the arctic brings with it the isolation of the pole. Andover sits halfway between the equator and the pole, on the 45th degree of latitude. In the winter months we lean toward the pole; in the summer months we lean toward the equator.
Also, our position in the rough center of the North American land mass means that our weather has no direct oceanic modification; our weather comes to us raw and at no time is it rawer than during meteorological winter, December 1st to March 1st.
That’s why the winter solstice is such an important holiday for me. It is the moment when our polar relationship comes into play with the earth’s orbit around the sun. Our position relative to the sun created by our tilted axis and our position relative to the sun created by our orbit reinforce each other to create a dramatic time of cold darkness, silence and wonder both unmediated. It is a pure moment in the year, a suspension in night dominated by the arctic.
Switching Rails
Samhain Winter Moon
In late January when this kind of cold usually comes a few days of it can bring on an intense desire to be outside, be anywhere other than inside. This is the condition often called cabin fever.
Having this deep, long cold spell come up front in winter, though, has not produced the same kind of grousing and low murmurs as a January dip. This is still bracing. Or, well, what do you expect? We live here, don’t we? Ruth, our financial advisor, said a mutual friend, Larry Schmidt, the late investigative reporter for WCCO, told her winter cut gang activity out for a season which he said, “Gives us an edge over L.A. and Detroit.”
This kind of seasonal change switches rails in the roundhouse of the mind. No doubting now that the growing season is far behind us and the earth’s orbit has swung us into different astronomical territory. We can concentrate on activities like snowshoeing, bird feeding, igloo building, cross-country skiing, ice-fishing, dog-sledding. There’s even the few, the hardy who have sails rigged on “boats” with ice-skate like runners. Others will go winter camping, hiking in the boreal forest. And, yes, there will be snowmobilers, too.
Some will concentrate on feasting, reading, indoor games. This is the concert and theater and dance season, too. And all those holidays with their bright lights and festive music and gift giving and family and friend get togethers.
And the cold says winter. Time for all that winter offers.
Monday, Monday
Samhain Winter Moon
It’s so cold ice doesn’t work on our highways and streets. It has to be 10 above at least and we’re not predicted to reach that mark until Saturday.
Finished designing a new workout schedule. You have to mix it up once in a while otherwise a rut. Going back to a lighter workout on Tuesday and Thursday, some cardio and core and sticking with the high intensity cardio on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. That’s when I do the regular resistance work, in between high intensity bursts lasting around 2 minutes in the anaerobic range.
Kate and I are going into St. Paul to see a financial advisor. We see her 2 to 3 times a year. She helps us keep our cash flow working. Ruth dug us out of a big hole about 10 years ago and we’ve flourished since then. She’s a great reality check.
A Soul in Ruins
Samhain Winter Moon
It was nine years ago the first of November that I left for Southeast Asia, visiting Mary when George Bush again won the presidency. Mary and I went to the American Club for brunch around 8 a.m. to watch the polls close and night-time punditry begin.
Later a Singapore taxi-driver, Chinese, explained how much he disliked Bush and how much an American election, 12 time zones and 12,500 miles away, affected him. It was, he said, a strange and not a good feeling to have so much of your future tied up with a foreign land and its peculiar decision making about leadership.
Singapore has a distinctly pro-Western bent for all its declaiming about Asian values; it is capitalist and materialist to its fingernails. Mary and I experienced Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, saw firewalking in a Hindu temple and broke the Ramadan fast in Arabtown.
Bangkok came next, a $60 introductory rate flight by Tiger Air, a cut-rate airline beginning to service Southeast Asia. Bangkok’s ChinaTown, my home base for the two weeks I spent there had sidewalk fold-up restaurants at night, vendors during the day and always people, lots of people and cars streaming by on Yaowarat. The neon lights gave the after dark old main street of Bangkok a garish look, but also made it enticing. Exotic.
After some time in Bangkok, I got on a Bangkok Air flight for Siem Reap, Cambodia. We landed next to a plane from the Republic of Vietnam. On the flight from Bangkok bomb craters had been easy to pick out in the fields below. Taxiing up to a spot beside that plane, in Cambodia, brought back anti-war memories from the 60’s.
The highlight of this trip was still ahead. Angkor. Most people identify this complex with
the name Angkor Wat although all that means is Angkor Temple and there are many, many temples. The temple widely known as Angkor Wat is closest to the small Cambodian city of Siem Reap. It is huge and well preserved. I spent a full morning climbing its ritual and mythic architecture, it recapitulates a sacred landscape, and took most of my time at the object that made me travel all this way: the churning of the sea of milk.
(This bas relief, carved intricately at all points, runs round the bottom most walls of the temple, roughly 1/4 of a mile. The panels are maybe 12 feet high.)
This sentence from the Unesco world heritage website will give you an idea of why Angkor Wat is just a taste of what’s in the area. “(Angkor) extends over approximately 400 square kilometres and consists of scores of temples, hydraulic structures (basins, dykes, reservoirs, canals) as well as communication routes.”
This is not a week’s journey, not even a month’s. Three months would be a good start, especially since early morning and late afternoon are the only times you can really visit since the temperatures are so intense in midday. I had four days.
All my photographs are on an old hard drive and I haven’t retrieved them yet, a project ahead of me. There are a lot of photos: Bantay Serai, Ta Phrom, Bayon, Preah Khan.
Morning and night for four days I explored, dodging scorpions, nodding to saffron robed monks, amazed by the kapok tree roots reclaiming these 9th through 14th century sites.
A memory that stands out came on evening the third day. I had clambered around the temple mountain of Bayon, the temple with the four-faced stone monuments you’ve probably seen in pictures. Incense drifted over from a contemporary Buddhist temple across the dirt road, following the smoke was music from cymbals and gongs.
Sitting on tumbled down stones near Bayon’s west entrance, a reverie overcame me and I drifted back, back, back in time to the days of the Khmer and the god-kings who built these monuments to politics and divinity. To a time when the Khmer carved living rock from quarries far-away and floated the carved rock down river to these sites, using an elaborate system of canals.
(Bayon’s west side.)
This was when I realized a strong part of me was a soul in ruins, captured by the past, most alive while picking my way through Ephesus, Angkor, the Forum, Delphi, Delos. Through ancient texts like the Metamorphoses and the Odyssey and the Iliad. Learning the ancient Roman language. That realization has shaped much of my work since then.
Please Help Stop This Mine
Samhain Winter Moon
Today’s Star-Tribune has an excellent article by Lee Schafer, business columnist: PolyMet mine report has a giant hole in it.
An excerpt:
“Late last week, the voluminous environmental impact report for the first project in what could be a major expansion of mining in Minnesota, PolyMet Mining’s proposed copper-nickel mining operation near Hoyt Lakes, was released, but without much that was meaningful about financial assurance.
(William Ervin)
It’s baffling that over a decade into the project’s evolution, the public still knows next to nothing about the financial assurance provision. It’s hardly trivial, given that the proposed mining and processing operation could require the treatment of water for more than 500 years.
The idea behind requiring financial assurance to make sure there’s money to contain and clean up polluted sites is really pretty simple. A mine is operated by a corporation that could go bankrupt, or fold up like a circus and leave town once the money has all been made and the mine is played out…
It takes up a little over three pages in a report so big that just the glossary alone is nearly five times bigger. It has a one-line table, showing estimates of cost if the mine were to close at the end of year one, at the end of year 11, or at the end of year 20. The high end of the cost-estimate range is $200 million….
If operating a water treatment facility costs $1 million a year, the financial assurance for PolyMet should be easily manageable, he said. “But if that operating cost got up to $10 million a year, that is pushing $1 billion to pay for that. That’s why at PolyMet it becomes an issue.””
Financial assurance connects directly to the question of tailings runoff. PolyMet will claim that its estimates are correct because their new, never-before-proven technology will create safer tailings and tailing’s ponds. No sulfide mine ever, anywhere has created a safe tailing’s situation.
The basic problem is simple. The overburden and the rock not containing copper, nickel and other valuable metals contains sulfur. When rain and snow and sleet fall, melting water runs through the massive hills of tailings. The water which runs off the tailings creates a sulfuric acid load. But, it’s water, too. So it flows into the watershed around the Hoyt Lake’s plant.
“That sulfates can kill manoomin is evidenced by the Wild Rice Dead Zone – a stretch that begins where the Bine-ziibi (Partridge River) enters into Gichigamiwi-ziibi (St. Louis River) and extends 140 miles to the Anishinaabeg-Gichigami Maamawijiwan (Lake Superior Basin). The Wild Rice Dead Zone is the result of extremely high concentrations of sulfate released by U.S. Steel’s Keetac and Minntac taconite mines. Sulfide mining will add yet more sulfates into rivers and lakes thereby affecting the food that grows on water.” (IC Magazine, Supporting Indigenous People)
A bonus feature of this area is that a confluence of continental divides makes some water head down the Mississippi to the dead zones of the Gulf, some water heads into Lake Superior on ies way to the Atlantic, while other water drains out of the tailings ponds into streams headed for Hudson Bay. That way one mine can pollute three different large bodies of water and streams and rivers along the way.
Thus, to prevent acid drainage over the potentially 500 year long exposure to toxic runoff either requires a lot of money or excellent unproven technology. Or, ideally, both.
As Schafer points out in a video discussion, Shakespeare was writing 500 years ago. 500 years is a long time. The iron range gets 20 years of jobs against centuries of ruinous pollution. Public policy must weigh the balancing benefits.
Bunny Lives Close By
Samhain Winter Moon
That bunny buddy lives under the boulder wall just to the west of my north facing 
window. He came out this morning, stopped to look in the window a couple of times, stared at me, then proceeded on down the bunny trail. This not so ancientrail takes him along the north side of the house and out to a part of the front which slopes up to seven oaks. At least I imagine that’s where he’s headed since there are dogwoods, spirea and new ash saplings on the hillside. Good rabbit food.
This entire week stays cold, then we hit some mid-twenties next Saturday. Plus new snow today. This could be another old-fashioned Minnesota winter. I hope so. It shaves off some of the pain of global warming.
Our Time
Samhain Winter Moon
A sickle moon, 7 inches of snow, still fresh, -11 on the weather system’s display. Yes. There is a purity in a northern winter, a clarity and a straight-forwardness that I sought out when I moved 44 years ago to Appleton, Wisconsin. Indiana winters could never decide on cold or chill, snow or slush, rain or ice. Walking in January with wet feet through a crunchy mush of water. Well, that was the nadir.
That first winter, 1969, we had several feet of snow and the temperature got down to -20 and stayed there. That was what I wanted, a season not afraid to declare its intentions, to arrive and stay present until time to give way to spring. Since then I’ve lived through many notable winters and I’ve enjoyed all of them.
The motor vehicle has been my only source of displeasure. Streets too narrow, snow and ice too built up, wheels spinning, starters whining and clicking. Speeds well beyond what physics says makes sense. Snowshoes. Yes. Sorels. Yes. Cross-country skis. Yes. Engines and tires and heavy metal. No.
Other than that. What can beat a several day snowstorm with flakes drifting, then coming in on the slant, drifting again. Building up, caressing the landscape until it changes into something altogether new. A newness with curves and sweeps and slopes and fewer barriers and boundaries. And blizzards with the snow coming across the desert expanses like the fabled sand storms of the Sahara.
Even the danger of it. It’s possible to lose your way here in a serious storm, wander off into a field, say, while only 50 feet from home. It happens, not every winter, but often. People leave their cars, try to make it to safety. The cold can kill. -11, which it is right now, is far below survivability for the human body. Trips have a somber side to them, a reasonable caution is necessary.
This is the human animal outside its geographic bounds. We’re not polar bears or even bunnies like I photographed the other afternoon. We’re creatures of the warmer regions where our hairless bodies can thrive with no clothing. None at all. Imagine being a bushman faced with a Minnesota winter night. Or a native American or a pioneer for that matter.
Winter is why we don’t have to keep Minnesota for Minnesotans. In Colorado there are license plates that read Colorado native. I’m sure they’re not, really, but I understand. They don’t want to share. Hawai’i doesn’t encourage immigration either and Portland has a don’t move here campaign.
Our quality of life meets and exceeds all three places but we have this northern temperate climate winter and if you don’t want to live here, it weeds you out. Sends you packing for sunnier places. And that’s ok. Makes sure if you’re here, for the most part, you’re here because you want to be.
the written word perseveres
“Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.”
| — | Herman Melville |
“A smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities.”
| — | Herman Melville |
“An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.”
| — | Herman Melville |
“Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.”
| — | Winston Churchill |
“Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.”
| — | Honoré de Balzac |
“Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.”
| — | Honoré de Balzac |
“Music appeals to the heart, whereas writing is addressed to the intellect; it communicates ideas directly, like perfume.”
| — | Honoré de Balzac |
“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
| — | James Joyce |
“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to create life out of life.”
| — | James Joyce |
“This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By epiphany — a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or gesture, or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that the themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.”
| — | James Joyce |
“Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.”
| — | Confucius |
“Learn as though you would never be able to master it: Hold it as though you would be in fear if loosing it.”
| — | Confucius |
“It is only the wisest and the very stupidest who cannot change.”
| — | Confucius |
“The soul can become a reality again only when each of us has the courage to take it as the first reality in our own lives, to stand for it and not just “believe” in it.”
| — | James Hillman |
“The transfiguration of matter occurs through wonder.”
| — | James Hillman |
“Happiness ain’t a thing in itself — it’s only a contrast with something that ain’t pleasant…. And so, as soon as the novelty is over and the force of the contrast dulled, it ain’t happiness any longer, and you have to get something fresh.”
| — | Mark Twain |
“Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this it the ideal life.”
| — | Mark Twain |
“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”
| — | Kurt Vonnegut |
“We’re not too young for love, just too young for about everything there is that goes with love.”
| — | Kurt Vonnegut |
“We are all what we pretend to be, so, we had better be very careful what we pretend.”
| — | Kurt Vonnegut |
“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music – the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”
| — | Henry Miller |