Daily Archives: April 6, 2014

Anoka County, Art and Culture

Crawling

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Spring                                                        Bee Hiving Moon

What a day.  Sunshine, blue skies, warm temperature.  A perfect day to take in the North Studio Crawl.  Or so you’d think.  Kate and I went to a garden art studio, a metal worker, a glass blower with jewelry, a potters and woodworker with jewelry and finally a blacksmith. We made the final three stops last year, but the first two were new for us.

We bought something at each place: gifts for the grandkids, a ceramic container for tea, a greenman in concrete, an interesting toad stool, a metal turtle, a necklace and a metal treble clef that functions as a dinner bell.  Not a high aesthetic piece among them, but pleasing to us and we support local artists.

The most gratifying part of the day is seeing actively creative people who live here in Anoka County.  Down many streets and roads and lanes there are folks working with glass, clay, wood, metal, photography, paints, even concrete in interesting ways.  And these are just the ones who sign up to be part of the two day event.  Who knows how many others are here?  Kate and I are.  She in her sewing room, me at the computer.  Lydia, our neighbor across the street makes shirts, bustiers and angel wings which she sells largely on the Renaissance Fair circuit.  We discussed being a stop next year.  There were no textile artists this year and I’m thinking about making chapbooks.

I said so you’d think because some of the artists said traffic had been slower this year.  In spite of, or because of, the beautiful day.

 

Commentary on Religion, Family, Memories, Sport

A Secular Sabbath

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Spring                                                                Bee Hiving Moon

Sundays have a certain slowness to them, as if time itself moves languidly, the urgency of the workweek drained out.  Of course, that’s an inversion of the real phenomena which happens not on Sunday but in the mind when it finds itself in a Sunday way.

Back when I was a small town boy, Sunday meant shining my father’s shoes in the morning before church.  While complaining about it.  I mean, thirty-five cents for dipping my hands in black shoe polish?  Then, off to Sunday School with one teacher or another followed by the Sunday service sitting in the family pew (not reserved, but held for us anyhow by long tradition) under the watchful eye of Jesus praying, his hands on a large boulder, in the Garden of Gethsemane.  This was stage right from the pulpit on the west side of the sanctuary.

Afterward, at least for a long time, we would often get in the family sedan, Mary and I in the back, mom and dad up front, and drive over to Elwood (our most bitter athletic rivals, but that didn’t matter to mom and dad) and go to Mangas’ cafeteria.  It had those tubular rails with an upraised one at the back to hold your formica tray as you passed by the offerings in small dishes.  I remember most the swiss steak, which I loved, and mashed potatoes with butter pooling yellow in the middle.

We would eat, then go home where the rest of the day disappears from memory.

Later, as a city rat, church was a work related experience since my city time is almost exactly coterminous with seminary and my career as a minister.  So, I would head off to work on Sunday morning, usually in this church or that since I worked for the Presbytery (a geographical jurisdiction) and when I finished, again Sunday afternoon sort of disappears from memory.

As an exurbanite, I fell into the Sunday afternoon NFL maw for several years, but as of late the Viking’s have cured me of that experience.  That means now Sundays have neither church nor the cafeteria nor football and what is left is the residue of passivity Sunday represented in its small town and football eras.  No wonder my inner world moves more slowly on Sundays.

It’s my secular sabbath.  And I think that’s a good thing.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, Travel, US History

A Firefly Lit Lane

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Spring                                                         Bee Hiving Moon

Down the well this morning, tapping into the underground stream.  Still searching for an image.  Something to coalesce the third lifetime, the third phase of this body/mind’s adventure here on earth.

One came to me.  Suddenly.  But it feels apt.  I’ll have to let it set for awhile.  Work with it itself in the imagery extension section of the workbook, but it feels pretty good.

The image is of a lane headed back into a woods where the lane continues but with tree branches creating a leafy roof over it.  The time is late twilight, the season late summer.  The air is cool but humid.  And the lane, where it enters the woods, is lit by thousands of fireflies, blinking on and off, shifting locations, providing a weak but real luminescence so I can follow the path into the woods.  Because the fireflies are spread out along the path’s length, they also give the lane a feel of depth, as if it proceeds quite a long way into the woods.

This is not a mind birthed image, but a memory.  I saw this lane and these fireflies several years ago during a trip to New Harmony, Indiana.  I’ve written here about New Harmony before, but just as a reminder, it was founded by the Rappites who created a very successful religious community there in the mid-19th century.  Much of New Harmony’s built environment has its roots it that era.

When they moved to Old Economy Village in Pennsylvania, the Welsh industrialist Robert Owen bought the whole town for his utopian community, a quasi-socialist endeavor.  He brought with him from Britain a number of scientists and engineers committed to his scheme on a ship dubbed the Boatload of Knowledge.  The community didn’t last long, but the U.S. Geological Survey among other things grew out of the efforts of the people who came to New Harmony.

Since that time, New Harmony has continued to have a religious and intellectual bent.  In fact, as I looked down the lane into the firefly lit woods, on my left was an open air Episcopal Church designed by famed architect, Philip Johnson and on my right was a small garden marked by tiny drumlins planted with firs and dotted with boulders carved with quotes by Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian, whose tomb lies there, too, in Paul Tillich Park.

In fact, this aerial photograph shows the spot where I stood between the open air church on the left and Paul Tillich Park on the right, looking north down the lane into what at night was a tree lined bower over an ancientrail leading into an infinite distance.  This feels like a perfect third phase image.