Daily Archives: January 9, 2014

General

Quiet

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Winter                                                                                                                               Seed Catalog Moon

The quiet of a northern winter night has settled here.  The temperature, at 15, is 20 degrees higher than Tuesday night, yet still in the direction of cold.  And cold is the physical equivalent of silence.  There’s less and less molecular movement as the temperature goes down, in fact the temperature going down is decreased molecular and atomic movement.  So here we are, cold and at night when human movement, too, is at a minimum.

The noises come from the computer, small ratcheting noises of a hard disk receiving or transmitting data, my own inner ear–a slight buzzing, my gut–a gurgle, but they are noises that underscore the silence rather than disturb it.

Just to sit alone now is to meditate, the field around me not so different from my inner one, undisturbed and undisturbing.  A blankness, a sense of union, of being part of, not distinct from.  This is why this time draws me, beckons to me to stay.  To linger.

Art and Culture, Asia, Friends, Tea

Back in the MIA

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Winter                                                            Seed Catalog Moon

Went into the MIA today to see the Audacious Eye exhibition.  It contains representative torii-in-snow.jpgtorii-in-snow.jpgobjects from an entire collection, the Clark Collection, acquired in the last year by the MIA.  It was an uneven show with several spectacular pieces and several not-so spectacular ones. Many of the nicest pieces were screens and paintings in the Chinese tradition, a substantial influence on all of Japanese culture.

(detail_of_daruma  Tsuji Kakō, 1870–1931)

Lesson from this.  Go in the first days of a new show so a later visit, more focused, can result in greater depth.  Several of the pieces I would like to see again will, I imagine, be up in the permanent collection over the next few months.

Ran into docent friend Bill Bomash.  We had lunch and talked about the museum and his life.  He went to Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.  His roommate came back one day and said he’d signed up for a year abroad.  Bill thought that sounded good, went to the library and looked at the bulletin board with year abroad brochures.  The Scandinavian Seminar had no prerequisite language requirement.  Aha, he said, that’s for me.

His year focused on Denmark where he discovered an affinity for the Danish language which he spoke with almost no accent.  The director of the Seminar, whom he met by chance while working in Copenhagen mistook him for a Dane, complimenting him on his English.  This proved significant later on when he applied for Ph.D. work at the University of Minnesota.  A letter of recommendation from this same man produced an offer of a teaching position in Danish.  He funded his Ph.D. work teaching Danish.  All because of that brochure on a bulletin board.

After the MIA, I went over to Verdant Tea where I met the general manager, Brandon, purchased two clay tea jars and a new teapot, one Brandon purchased in San Francisco some time ago.  Verdant Tea is a very Seward neighborhood kind of business with latter day hippies and contemporary hipsters sitting around sipping tea and discussing the issues of the day.

Found the exhibit, which was quite large, induced museum fatigue two galleries from the end, so I began to look with only cursory interest.  Still, it was good to be back with the art. Trying to figure out how to get in often enough to satisfy that itch.

Great Wheel, Great Work, MOOCS, Weather +Climate, Writing

And Things Were New

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Winter                                                                  Seed Catalog Moon

So much new.  There’s always a lot of energy at first, Loki’s Children and the Great Wheel, a new workout regimen, getting back on the low carb horse, Climate Change MOOC, then there’s the slog, the keeping at it when the slump hits, a plateau and another push, then more.  Right now I’m mostly in the energy phase, lots of excitement and eagerness.

There will come a time though when the effort seems too much, when the energy has gone from positive to negative, becomes a drain, exhausting.  That’s when past experience helps.

Learning new tools for the Great Wheel.  Diving into the difficulty of reading graphs, percentages, equations, maps, pushing my body in a different way.  Listening to the ideas, the splinters of ideas, the ways forward as research and writing open up a new world.

In it now and glad of it.