Yearly Archives: 2014

Family, Travel

Border Towns

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Lughnasa                                                Lughnasa Moon

My brother Mark is the most widely traveled of the three Ellis siblings. So when he makes a statement like this one, “I like border towns and the mixed energy of two nations that swirl around them.” it makes me realize I’ve not got a lot of experience with border towns. Detroit and Windsor. That’s about it.

(bill for an event in the State Farm Arena, Hidalgo, Texas)

Mark’s in Hidalgo, Texas right now as a medical tourist, getting dental work done in Reynosa, Mexico, just across the border. He walks to the border from his motel, pays one U.S. dollar to cross on a pedestrian bridge and bang he’s transnational traveler.

His comment about border towns makes me want to visit a few, just to see what he means. I know he has experience of border towns between Thailand and Cambodia, gained because every three months or so he had to do a visa run while living in Bangkok. Others, I don’t know.

The anthropologist in me says, aha, diffusion. And yes, it would be strongest where two cultures meet, but where they are supported by different political and cultural norms, that is, across national borders. U.S. culture could effect Reynosa and Mexican culture effect Hidalgo, safe within their own cultural envelopes.

(Pinatas in Reynosa, Mexico)

Colorado, The Move, Woolly Mammoths

Leave Taking

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Lughnasa                                                              Lughnasa Moon

Last night was a good example of what I’ll miss. Where will I learn about Flogging Molly? Who will want to play Rodrigo and the first movement of Appalachian Spring so I can appreciate their appreciation of them?

(Rodrigo monument in Aranjuez, Spain)

It was a sweet evening. And it started around a meat loaf, with ketchup squirted on top, ears of corn boiled and slathered with butter, roasted potatoes, a garden salad. This is Midwestern comfort food at its zenith, the ne plus ultra of small town supper tables. Cooked by Ode who said, “I like to cook. Have everything come out at the same time.”

These men. I’ve been with them so long. They know my stories and I know theirs. We want to know what each other listen to. Not to judge it, but to absorb it. It becomes part of our knowledge of each other, broadening our tastes as we deepen our understanding. Sort of like a book club only better.

These meetings are once a month and where once they stretched on to the horizon, now they have a terminus. Each one counts down, moving toward my last, at least my last as a Minnesota resident.

In more settled times, where moving on meant having the carpenter make a pine box, the preacher give a sermon and the gravedigger complete the work, this kind of leave taking most often happened unawares. One moment you were here and then either suddenly or after a brief illness, you were not. Unawares and remarked by rituals of leave taking, the pilgrim gone on ahead.

In this instance though the leave-taking stretches out and even after there will be the right of return. Not final, at least not yet.

Garden, The Move

Time-Shifted

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Lughnasa                                                                 Lughnasa Moon

IMAG0382Went out to the garden this morning after a week plus of packing, focused on the move, head and heart already time-shifted to matters months away. Oops. Lotsa weeds. Lotsa ripe vegetables. I was ashamed to see the shape of our garden. We plugged away at it until the gnats got too ornery. Got most of the beds mostly weeded. All the vegetables that were ready picked. Gotta spend more time out there over the next month or so.

The second planting of beets, some of the first crop of carrots, giant garlic bulbs, more onions flopped over, green beans (some gnawed at by tiny teeth. chipmunks? mice?), cucumbers, tomatoes and basil. The leeks look well ahead of schedule, almost mature now in mid-August where I picked them last year in late September. Lots of chard and collard greens left, too. Some peppers growing large.

The raspberries have just begun to come. Some of the reds have turned red, but not yet the deeper shade closer to maroon or purple that signals ripeness. The goldens have the berries formed, but no color yet. We’re entering the period of rapid maturity, for the vegetables, fruits and the weeds. This is the other burst of activity that the garden requires and it started a week ago without us.

Nature, as I was reminded by a Science Friday program, abhors empty ground. The raw soil in between rows and plants quickly filled up with weedy ground covers, spikes of grass, hopeful elm saplings. This is why no till ag is so important, but also why it’s practiced rarely. No till controls this ground covering tendency by having agriculturally useful plants in place of weeds.

Anyhow, back at it. And just in time, too.

Politics

A Leader? No.

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Lughnasa                                                    Lughnasa Moon

A commentary in the StarTribune today spoke to me. Titled “Do We Have A Leader? No.” this opinion piece makes a clear and important distinction often lost. Civil rights leaders in the mold of the MLK era do not speak for, to, or with the racial underclass. The peaceful protests, the calls for action, the analytics that pillory (with good reason) the policing of a largely black community by a largely white and militarized police force are beside the point for the hustlers, drug dealers, entrepreneurs and long term unemployed.

(pic: answercoalition)

This underclass is the focus of Alice Goffman’s On the Run, the book I mentioned here a week or so ago. Her closely and compassionately observed telling of life in a poor Philadelphia neighborhood reveals the twisted, gnarled relationship between young black men (and the women who love them) with the justice system. Their life resembles that of the citizenry in dystopian movies like Judge Dredd or Blade Runner. The threat of some form of summary judgment lies moments away, day or night, at home or on the street.

 

This split between the underclass which responds with raw rage and the older, more political civil rights leaders creates a dynamic rife with tension and exploitable by the racist public. The youth have no leader. They have only an anarchic energy expressed by rocks through windows, looting, angry confrontations with the police or the national guard or the highway patrol. These are the actions of people with no future, no present. No hope.

As these two streams within the black community flow in different directions, the legacy of enslavement continues to place its foot on the necks of African-Americans. A community with a large complement of its young men who can find no purchase in the civil society will find long term solutions difficult. This rift must be bridged if our nation, now emerging as a racially diverse people, is to fulfill its own promises.

Music, Woolly Mammoths

Woolly Audio

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Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

Got home tonight after listening to Woolly Mammoths play their current audio favs. Looked up in the night sky, around Cassiopeia to the north, and saw a satellite tracking fast against the Milky Way. A moment of foreground/background confusion. Here I am on earth, up there, in space is a human made object. Here. There. Sort of like anticipating the move. Here. There.

(most likely this one, Envisat, a defunct European Space Agency Earth observatory)

Mark Odegard asked us to bring material we’ve been listening to recently. Frank Broderick played Rodrigo (a classical guitar composition), the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s 6th and a recorded version of him singing a Kris Kristofferson song. This was for Mary in case he died during surgery.

Bill Schmidt had a clip from Krista Tippet interviewing Paul Cohelo and a track of Dave Brubeck. Stefan played an Indian music selection and two videos produced and sung by his son Taylor. Warren had Leo Kottke and Flogging Molly, an Irish punk band. Scott played the first movement of Appalachian Spring. Tom played Izzy, the Hawai’ian singer, and Kathleen Madigan. I didn’t catch Mark’s selection, but it was moody guitar music.

(Flogging Molly)

I played Dylan singing It Ain’t Me Babe and Willie Nelson, My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys. Packing music.

Feelings

Fall Is In The Air

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Lughnasa                                                              Lughnasa Moon

There is, among us and within us, a current that pulls toward deep water, toward a cold darkness. It takes the warmer waters of our surface interactions and draws them down into the crevasses of our psyche. There the surface loses its bounce, its vitality and becomes absorbed.

We often make the mistake of assuming that this current’s engine lies within our experience and our personality, in that highly fungible interface between who we believe ourselves to be and the swirling mass of life outside us. But for most the powerful motive force which takes us into the bleakness is both more and less personal.

It is more personal because its constituents are in the stuff which make us, our DNA. It is less personal for the same reason, it is pre-psychological, implanted not in our character but in our chemistry. Yet, it manifests itself, or at least brings its influence to bear through psychology, through the mood shifts and terrible ideas that flash up from below, rising like leviathans.

 

 

The Move

We Cleaned Up

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Lughnasa                                                                    Lughnasa Moon

The bee colony hive boxes and honey supers with their copper roofs are in the orchard IMAG0624now. No bees though. They are a prop to show what can be done here, to add atmosphere. We will, if the buyer wants, leave enough woodenware to get a new beekeeper started.

We’re also going to leave our hydroponics setup and the lawn tractor, all more valuable to us as incentives for a new owner than as items to sell. We would not move these things for various reasons.

While I assembled the bee colonies, Kate cleaned the southwestern corner of the garage. Together we spiffed up the hydroponics and moved them onto the cleaned portion of the floor. This has opened a bay and a half in which we can store boxes, clear out the interior.

After all that, a thunderstorm during our nap. Perfect.

Colorado, Garden, The Move

Way In The Move

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Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

Interesting. I’ve been living in the move. Too much. Pushing to get stuff packed, get the exterior work, house and grounds, underway, looking at movers and thinking about storage. Pushing. Turning on my phone and my jambox, listening to country music, Porgy and Bess, the blues, Coltrane while I fill boxes. Stuffing my life in liquor boxes, slapping on red or green tape, some packing tape, stacking them up. In the move. In it.

So much that this week I’ve done no Latin, little gardening, no writing other than the blog, been to no museums and taken little time to just consider life, be with it, flow toward the future. Except with the move. It’s as if I’ve time-shifted myself to next year, setting aside now for then.

But this is a long walk, not a sprint. And I’ve been sprinting. Time to slow down a bit. IMAG0477Smell the Latin, pick a tomato. Thin the third crop of beets and carrots. Bring in the onions from the shed.

Tomorrow we’re going to work outside and in the garage. A combination of then and now.

This balancing first toward the future, then back to the present, a sort of see-saw of attention and energy seems understandable to me, part of the inner work of leaving while staying. Staying while leaving.

Anoka County, Memories

Nowthen

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Lughnasa                                                                      Lughnasa Moon

Well. While at Osaka, our local sushi joint, Kate noticed a TV featuring nude bowlers. No, I don’t know why, but Kate went on to point the relation between sushi, raw fish, and nude bowlers, human flesh in the raw. There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than can be counted for in your philosophy.

Before this nude experience, we attended, for the second year, the Nowthen Threshing Show. Here are a few photographs:

IMAG0512

Steam engine power take off running a rip saw and a planer at a temporary sawmill.

IMAG0520

An old filling station. Compare to the Edward Hopper below.

gas hopper

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The theme this year was the world of steam.

IMAG0526

 

We watched the engineers bring this five piston diesel engine to life. It has a huge armature just out of the picture to the left.

IMAG0522

 

This was a surprise, but an artful one. Kate and her much admired red glasses.

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, The Move, Writing

Walk In Free

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Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

Letting go. Retiring. Easing up. Yes, the pedal has lifted up from the metal and the car has begun to slow down. And that’s a good thing. Letting go of the expectations, admitting they were not met and saying damn the consequences has lifted a large weight off the shoulder of my psyche. Retiring it. Shrugged off and glad to have it gone.

Does this mean I’ll stop writing? No. Does it mean I’ll stop writing novels? No. It does mean that I no longer have my self’s forward progress attached to the results. And, you might say, about damned time. Maybe so.

Why is all this bubbling up right now? The move. As the stuff of my work gets winnowed, I can see the bones of my ambition more clearly. The skeletal support of my dreams are familial, horticultural, intellectual, classical and creative. The flesh and bones will be grandchildren, sons and daughters-in-law, wife, friends, plants, ideas, translations and more novels.

Failure does not mean stop. Vanish. Extinguished. It does not mean failed. No, it means redirection, recollecting, revisiting. This move has given me the freedom to shrug my shoulders, let the load fall to the way side. I want to walk into Colorado free to live a life given to that place, those people, that time. Now I can.

Going west has always had an element of reinvention, claiming another facet of life. May it be so.