Monthly Archives: March 2014

General
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Spring                                                         Bee Hiving Moon

Home again.  Here halfway below ground in my study, at the wide screen monitor, no longer making do with strange chairs and tiny layouts.  Feels good.

Funny thing about coming home.  I’m much more tired now than I was even driving up our driveway, that I can let down feeling.  Life’s reality shared is much less than half the weight of carrying the whole.  It’s better for both of us to be together.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be unpacking the workshop and it’s implications, but for now the road has ended where it began.

 

Travel

Goodbye From Acova, Iowa

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Spring                                           New Bee Hiving Moon

Last report from the road.  Acova, Iowa.  Acova Motor Inn.

Long ago read a travel writer commenting on America.  He said one of our great boons to travelers is cheap, good lodging.  He’s right.  I’m in the Acova Inn, $45 a night.  It’s a clean, independent motel with working heat, internet connection, cable tv, coffee maker, microwave and refrigerator.

And in this he reveals a component of the American character.  We go.  Ever since the days of the pioneers (and, yes, I stipulate the dark side of the frontier, but also recognize the bravery of those folks on foot, horseback or covered wagon.), we have wandered across this great land, sometimes with a purpose:  new job, visit family, find land, get away from crowds, but just as often with a large dash of whimsy, journey for the sake of journey.

In many other parts of the world, for thousands of years, people have been born and died close to their village, often without going very far from home.  Nomads are not an exception because they followed food, either for themselves or their live stock.  Over the last 100 years or so there has been a giant sucking sound as cities hoover up those former villages into themselves, but there the travel, if there is much, is between village and city and back again.

And, yes, I stipulate the deadly effect of the internal combustion engine and the predatory nature of the railroad builders.  It occurred to me often on this trip that our travel urges have burned a lot of gasoline.

Maybe the road is a siren, her beautiful voice luring us to our doom, but I find her a book opening page after page of wonders, a picture book for adults.  There the pump jack bobbing up and down, up and down.  There a jack rabbit with those big heat radiating ears.  A sunset against the saguaro that calls to mind dime novels by Zane Grey.  Pine covered mountains that remind us of the land that will be in a million years.  Waters running from state to state, from ocean to ocean as snowmelt crosses continental divides. Even the highway signs warning of dangerous sand storms, no visibility, pull out of the traffic lane to stop.

Too, there are the depths of Carlsbad Caverns, the tall saguaro gathered in assembly along the valley floor and the abandoned architecture of the Chaco Canyon culture.  The low flat houses of Tucson and the adobe houses of Santa Fe show up as do the octagonal hogans of the dine people and the swallow like residences of the pueblos.

Later in the year thunderheads will build over the plains and splash down water on fields of wheat where the arid west gives way to the humid east.  All this and never leaving the nation.

I will have traveled almost 4,000 miles and missed the whole deep south, the eastern seaboard and the western one.  I will miss most of the midwest, too, only brushing it in Iowa before I enter the upper midwest, my home.  That happens today.

Goodbye from Acova, Iowa where all the motels are above average.

Our Land and Home, Travel

An Attack of the Stupids

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Spring                                                     New Bee Hiving Moon

At around 10 this morning I called home to report a serious attack of the stupids.  Kate immediately said, “You left your pillow behind.”  Smacking the forehead.  Two attacks of the stupids.

Yes, I had left my pillow behind, after all these stops.  But that wasn’t the reason I was calling.  I had set the garmin aside, reasoning that this is a trip I’ve made many, many times.  I knew the way.

So I set off toward the airport on Highway 70.  As I often do when leaving Denver, I watched the mountains recede in the rear view mirror, switched on the cruise control, stuck a new mystery novel in the cd slot and sat back for a mornings drive, headed home.

Well, sort of.  I kept waiting for the road to turn north, for the town where I often stop for lunch coming into Denver, it’s just in Colorado, not long at all after the turn south from Nebraska.

There was the sign ahead, leaving Colorado.  Ah.  Then. Oops.  Because there was the sign, welcome to Kansas. Sigh.  It’s Highway 76 that leads out of Denver toward Highway 80 in Nebraska.  70 goes through Kansas.  Oh.

I pulled out the atlas, thanks again Tom, and scouted a route north and east first through Kansas then a route east in Nebraska as I headed toward a southern dip in Highway 80.  Finally, at Lexington, Nebraska I rejoined the federal highway system.

Part of what occupied my time as I left Colorado, before I turned on the book, was thinking about the difference between the southern and western states through which I’d passed and the level plains on which I would now drive well into Minnesota.  In this thought process I was not navigating but pondering.

The arid lands beginning in Oklahoma, continuing in west Texas and southern New Mexico and into Arizona are areas which offer little in the way of useful habitation for humans.  They’re dry, with vegetation not of much use for food, and water sources distant.  When you get into the mountains of northern Arizona and New Mexico, there is more vegetation, but the soils are poor and the land often sloping and rocky.

These are areas with great natural beauty, but also severe challenges for contemporary living.  The plains, in contrast, have a beauty that is horizon and sky, fertile fields, grain elevators and small towns with white Protestant churches and brick Catholic ones.  In the plains there is a dominant occupation, farming, and, in the not so distant, a larger number of farmers.  Though the number of farmers has declined, farming still dominates the plains economy.

In the arid south and west, whether desert or mountain, there is no dominant occupation, no similar fixed anchors to an economy headed by oil and tourism and the federal government.

This was running through my head as I drove on Highway 70 headed toward Kansas instead of Nebraska.  Then I thought of our home in Andover, in Anoka county.  In the northern part of Anoka County where we live the forests and lakes, the high water table land is the southern reach of the great peat bogs that stretch right up to the beginnings of the boreal forest.

So I realized that I do not live in either the economically and resource poor south and south west, but neither do I live in the agriculturally dominant plains.  Instead I live where a different kind of economically and resource poor region begins.  If you subtract logging and mining from the lands north of us, there is only land not much good for agriculture, but rich, like the northern portions of Arizona and New Mexico in natural beauty.

Yes, I admit it.  That thinking distracted from proper navigation.

Daughter-in-law Jen got my pillow.  So all the consequences of this dreamy episode are now erased.  Do you imagine I can find Minnesota?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Family, Our Land and Home, Travel

On the Way

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Spring                                                New Bee Hiving Moon

Ruth has gone home.  Gabe has gone home.  Jon has gone home.  Jen has gone home.  The last of the trip’s intentions are now over.  All that remains is for me to go home.

Tomorrow morning, breakfast, then in the car for the next to last day.  This Ford Focus is a good car.  It’s set up well for a road trip.  I’ve gotten 35 mpg on average.

Trips have their own rhythms and this one has begun to turn toward home and away from traveling; now it’s a return.  Returns do not have the anticipation of new adventures, new sights, but they do have something better. Returns take us home.  It is only with home in mind that we can set off with confidence into the unknown. Home is the known, the safe place, the refuge.

It’s where Kate is.  Where Vega, Rigel and Gertie are.  Where the gardens and the orchard are.  Where the study is.  Where most of life happens.  I’m ready to get home.

Family, Travel

Magical

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Spring                                       Hare Moon

Several hours with granddaughter Ruth.  She asks questions from her much despised car seat while the car hums on asphalt, these old ears not able to pick up much of the high pitched chatter.  It tests my intelligence to appear to be listening.  I want to, but even the good ear doesn’t allow it.

Once in a while:  “Question.  Grandpop, have you finished your book?”  Yes, I have and its out to agents right now. “Agents.” They try to sell your book for you. “Oh.  Does it have any pictures?” Nope. “I’ve gotten really good at visualizing when I’m reading.  Question. (she actually says, question) How long is it?”  About 100,000 words.  “Is 100, 000 more than a million?”  No, it takes 10 100,000’s to make a million. “Oh.  Well, if I read your book ten times, I would get a million word medal.”

We went to the Colorado History Museum which has changed to visitor friendly exhibits.  Good for kids, a bit disappointing for me. Ruth loves to set the pattern of the dynamite in a mining demonstration, then push the plunger.  The patterns are complex and she remembers them perfectly each time.

Time with grandkids has a magical quality and I think it’s partly because the issue of mortality is so squarely and honestly on the table.  I’ll die long before Ruth and we both know that.  It gives these times together a depth and seriousness that rides below the surface of ice cream cones and bagels.

Her world is bicycles, books and imminent release from her car seat.  Mine is love, legacy and creativity.  Probably not that different in their essence.

And she wore me out.  Time for a nap.

 

 

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Third Phase

Gee. That’s Interesting. Watch Out.

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Spring                                                      Hare Moon

Denver.  Realized I never got back here on the big dream I had.  After working with it in a couple of different ways, here’s the nub of what I got:  In retreating, I advance.  The dream called me to consider the time just before my decision to re-enter the ministry with the UU’s.

It was, in many ways, a poor decision and, as I considered it over the retreat, probably caused me to lose almost a decade by turning my focus away from my real work:  writing, gardening, politics, home life.

It shared a characteristic with my original decision to go into the ministry, also a poor one.  My fascination with the sophisticated and intricate intellectual disciplines of first the Christian church (especially biblical study) and then the emerging movement of liberal religion in the United States entranced me.  I confused my very real intellectual excitement with vocation.  The ministry was not the vocation; the intellectual engagement was.

What this means is that I have to guard myself well when I get intellectually stimulated.  A tendency, no, my pattern, is to seek out institutions that utilize that discipline and try to join them.

Instead, when I retreat from institutional involvement, I advance because I do my own work, on my own time and in my own way. Thus, leaving the ministry let me begin this focus on writing.  Then, leaving Unity and giving up the UU ministry except for the occasional preaching assignment let me get started again on the writing.

But, I picked up the Sierra Club and the MIA. Why?  Because both areas fully engage my intellectual interest.  My passion for the Great Work on the one hand and beauty on the other pushed me into the institutional involvement.

Of course, I’m not saying these were wasted years.  Any of them.  I did real work, engaged difficult political, religious, organizational and educational challenges.  However, what I am saying is that following my intellect toward institutional engagement has been a mistake.  One I no longer have to continue.

Now, in the third phase, I have fully retreated to home and study, to self-directed work.  So, I have advanced at last.

This is why, in part at least, this retreat basically affirmed what I’m already doing.  It has taken me 40 plus years to learn this lesson.  About time, I’d say.

The third phase, then, will be the first period of my life when I will engage life fully as I am.  This retreat marked the end of a transition period that began roughly when Kate retired and which is now over.

Now we can live this new life, Kate as earth mother and quilter, me as, well, I don’t have the image yet, but I’m searching for it.

General

The Road So Far

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Spring                                           Hare Moon

The trip continues to stair step its way north.  I drove the five and a half hours to Denver today.  When I knocked on the door, Ruth, the birthday girl who did not know I was coming, fluttered her hands and got a shy look.  Taken aback and surprised.  Then, glad to see me.

Certain high points were in the trip’s plan:  Carlsbad, Tucson, the Saguaro National Park and Chaco Canyon.  They were, each in their own way, worth the effort it took to get to them.

There have been surprises, too.  The stark beauty of the Chihuahuan desert between Deming, New Mexico and Tucson.  The unexpected abundance of plant life in the Sonoran desert, a plantscape dominated by the tall and somber Saguaro, but dotted with other cacti, trees, shrubs and flowers.  There was, too, the magnificent sky up on the Mogollon Rim, with Orion standing high, a Saguaro of the sky.

The high mesas, the rock formations like Shiprock and Windowrock, the mountains of northern Arizona were also wonderful.  Santa Fe was like visiting a different country.  The adobe, the thick timbers as roof beams, the forearm thick branches used in doors and windows, the pastels enchanted me, as the license plate says.

Then there were the Sangre de Cristos mountains north of Santa Fe and to the west of the freeway.  Following the mountains always on the western horizon from Santa Fe to Denver, made me realize that the leeward side of the mountain ranges were a natural thoroughfare and probably have been for thousands of years.

Those folks down in Tucson and other parts of the southwest and west are recipients of an unexpected bounty, visible from the road: a heavy snowpack in the Rockies.  This means the Colorado should run full and do that in a year when the drought gripping those areas only deepens.

Driving from Tucson, where the Arabic world has contributed the word haboob for the sorts of violent wind storms yellow highway signs warn about, to Denver, where the snowpack in the Rockies 900 miles away will determine the water politics for the next year, illustrates the close linkage natural to these lands, mountains and deserts.  It cannot account for the sudden and disastrous amount of water used in biomes meant for cacti, mesquite, rattlesnakes and gila monsters.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Travel

Land of Enchantment

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Spring                                                      Hare Moon

Santa Fe.  The adobe here catches the eyes, then the scent of pinyon smoke and the art galleries.  Also, the number of thin gray-haired citizens moving around with purpose, as if channeling Georgia O’Keefe.  It’s easy to imagine a chunk of this Latin influenced culture breaking off and taking root in other places.  An emphasis on beauty, use of native products and Latin American diffusion carried by sophisticated Latinos, artists, writers and outdoor enthusiasts.  Maybe as Chaco Canyon was to the pueblo cultures of the 850-1150 period.

By this time in the trip the Garmin, once unwelcome, has made me her bitch.  I hang on her every word, follow her exactly.  I think the voice model they hired might have been a dominatrix at some point.  It does take away the anxiety of navigating, especially in cities and off the main highway systems.  I like that.

When I drove from Holbrook to Gallup at 4 am yesterday, a sickle moon hung in the sky with Venus about 4 degrees away in line with the bottom point of the sickle.  It is an image that I will work with in the journal.  The pueblo people emulate the clouds, building up communities, then dissipating and moving on.  This moon hung in a clear sky and it was not difficult at all to stand with the pueblo people and the dine of the last thousand plus years and see with them the blessing.  The clouds created by the heat of the day would extend this beauty into the blue reaches of a sunlit sky.

Our kiva sees the same moon and planet, sees clouds in the day and the procession of stars at night.  Yes, our seasons are different, but plants grow in both our kivas and so do animals.  We are different, yet we are the same.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture

What Is Your Kiva?

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Spring                                          Hare Moon

Santa Fe.  Staying in a reasonably priced motel right in the heart of adobe filled Santa Fe.  The cathedral featured in Death Comes for the Archbishop is only a block or two away.  I came to Santa Fe after seeing Chaco Canyon.

Due to a weird late night mix up I checked into a motel-cheap-no phone, no wi-fi she said.  I didn’t mind.  She forgot to add no heat.  This in Holbrook, AZ high up just past the Mogollon Rim.  49 when I pulled in. I was too tired to hassle it so I went to sleep.

Fortunately, years of living with Kate have taught me cold sleeping skills.  It was fine until I woke up 4 am. I’d never shifting my bed time from home, nor my rising, so the 6 am Minnesota equivalent had me awake.  I decided to get in the warm car and drive to Chaco Canyon.  Which I did.

This is a haunting place, difficult to get to now as it must have been difficult to get to in the period between 850 a.d and 1150 a.d. when it flourished.  It was, for that time period the ceremonial for the pueblo peoples.  The architecture of Chaco County shows up in many other pueblo peoples sites, though much more modest in scale.

The Chaco folks built big.  And they built stone on stone, with a mud mortar.  The construction technique reminded me of dry stone fences in the East.

The part of each person’s inner life that reaches out to a particular patch of mother earth has created thousands of small kivas, I’ll call them.  The pueblo people go into the below ground circular stone structures called kiva’s as if returning to the womb. Each time they come out, they’re reborn.  So a kiva is a patch of earth where you feel reborn.  For me it’s our gardens and woods and orchard, for the pueblo people its Chaco Canyon and the Four Sacred Mountains.

Each patch of earth needs a kiva that holds it dear and feels responsible for its care.  And who, in turn, are reborn in the giving of that care by the earth.  This is a faith with so many worship sites and the worship is different for each kiva.  What kiva do you belong to?

Faith and Spirituality, Third Phase, Travel, Writing

Mr. Ellis Regrets

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Spring                                           Hare Moon

Just the last few things left in the room.  This “room” by the way has a kitchen and a small living room.  It’s a very comfortable way to live away from home.  I might try Residence Inns again sometime.  Not too expensive either, especially if you stack it up against a mid-priced hotel.

Been googling and looking at the EZY READ atlas Tom got me.  I don’t know why they say large print.  Doesn’t look large to me.  Chaco Canyon may, to my regret, be a road too far.  Gallup is 6 hours from here, not 4 as I figured for some reason.  That meant I could have gotten there by 9 pm MST with just 4 hours driving.  6 hours after a full workshop day is probably too much.

Haven’t decided what to do yet, but I can make Denver by Friday afternoon to surprise the birthday girl in two reasonably easy days if I skip Chaco Canyon.  I’ll still want to catch something, though I’m not sure what.  Not sure what route I’ll take either.  That will have an impact on what I can see, of course.

Anyhow as of this afternoon the trip turns north, back to the land of ice and snow.