Monthly Archives: May 2014

Colorado, Friends, Weather +Climate

And the Winner Is…Bill Schmidt

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Beltane                                                                      Emergence Moon

Fortuna rode in from the western suburbs with Bill Schmidt tonight. He got hand after hand and played them well. Congratulations, Bill.

We’ve had a soaking here tonight. As I drove home around 9:30 after the sheepshead card game in St. Paul, the rain began to achieve downpour proportions.  I turned on Highway 10 headed toward Round Lake Boulevard and had the windshield wipers on full phaser.

Driving through the rain, here in the humid east, a background scene rolled past of future drives at night in the arid west. Will these storms be those of memory once we move to Colorado?

Even though we’ve set ourselves two years to make this move, there is a sense of the last time I’ll… in many things I do, including this drive in the rain. To return to the circus image, the stakes have begun to loosen and the ropes have got some slack even though the tents a long way from coming down.

Politics, US History

Off the Bench. Again.

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Beltane                                                             Emergence Moon

Met Becky Rothmeier Loewen of America Votes at the MIA today. We talked politics, what the Sierra Club wanted of America Votes and what I wanted. It was fun. Both of us shared an occasional desire to set politics aside, but as she said, “When you know you have the power to do something…” Yes, that’s the rub all right. I sit on the sidelines, then, “Oh, come on.” returns to my vocabulary and I find myself pushed and pulled right back.

From a political junkies perspective America Votes is a candy store. Great data about all the races (at least in Minnesota), in depth. People to talk to about the minutiae of segmenting demographics, messaging on mailers, which races can be swayed. Most folks don’t care about these things, but there is a coterie of folks for whom these kind of matters are their Daily Racing News. And I’m one of them.

As I said after attending the last meeting of America Votes, it’s good to see the young guns out there, eager for the next campaign. In a democracy it is apathy and indifference that spell certain defeat no matter what your political perspective. This group of folks are necessary for the full functionality of an often torpid electorate.

At 67 I realize that I’m not likely to stay on the sidelines for long, no matter where I live. It hasn’t happened yet. As I told Becky the first live election returns I recall caring about were the results of Adlai Stevenson versus Dwight Eisenhower. Those my dad and I saw, until 3 in the morning in black and white on a still uncommon consumer product called television. That was 1952.

Aging, Commentary on the news, Family, Great Work, Politics, Science, Sierra Club

The Grandchildren Project

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Beltane                                                       Emergence Moon

A shift in public opinion concerning climate change seems to be accelerating. We may be near a tipping point where acceptance of climate change science corresponds to acceptance of evolution. Yes, there will always be outliers, just like the Texas and Kansas school boards exhibit every once in a while on evolution, but the mass of us will finally hear the very clear science behind many changes impacting us already.

Proof? Jon Huntsman, former governor of Utah and a possible GOP candidate for President in 2016, wrote this remarkable sentence in an op-ed piece for the NYT: “If Republicans can get to a place where science drives our thinking and actions, then we will be able to make progress.”  Paul Douglas, local and national meteorologist and a conservative, too, has long observed the conundrum behind conservatives who refuse to conserve.

It may be that the long game for climate politics is about to bear fruit. For those patiently (and not so patiently) working on climate change related issues the era of solution based debates rather than denial and obfuscation might be coming near. This will be an exciting but also frustrating time as those only recently convinced try to digest the difficult realities ahead of us.  Those of us who’ve wanted to see forward motion will be in danger of refusing to listen to solutions that don’t fit our already existing paradigms.

It will be important to recall that our solutions have largely been developed among those of us who already agree with each other. Gaining political consensus for policy will require including those who don’t share many of our assumptions. Here’s a clear one. Nuclear energy may well be an important component of a transition to a non-carbon based energy regime. We need critical mass for the generation of electricity while renewable sources begin to catch up and storage technologies improve. We simply may not have time to ignore capable non-emitting nuclear power plants.

I’m excited that this push for solutions may happen in my lifetime and that those of us with grandchildren might help create the change. Call it the grandchildren project.

Commentary on the news, Minnesota, News of the Strange

Minnesota Whacko: Addendum

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Beltane                                                                Emergence Moon

OK, I thought John LaDue, Byron White and the corpse containing RV were enough to maintain our international standing, but I’m glad to see that the Zumberge family, all three of them, have jumped into a possible sanity breach. Here’s a quote from today’s Star-Tribune:

“Shoot, shoot, shoot, keep shooting,” Zumberge’s wife allegedly said as he fired a 12-gauge, semiautomatic shotgun at his neighbors.

This was apparently the culmination of a 15 year feud over the Zumberge’s neighbors feeding of deer. The Zumberges didn’t like it.

Son, Jacob, apparently pushed the neighbors at a local VFW, and then promised to “burn down their house and kill them.” According to the Tribune he felt the neighbor, dubbed “Mr. Corn” by the Zumberges in letters of complaint, contributed to his father getting Lyme’s disease.

(one of many shotguns available for purchase at a nearby Walmart.)

After Neal Zumberge emerged from his basement through a window, he emptied his semi-automatic shotgun. In a laconic observation the paper also reported that “four empty 12-gauge shotgun shells were found near (the neighbor’s) front door.”

Friends, GeekWorld, Woolly Mammoths

Leeks In The Ground, Fresh Oil in the Truck

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Beltane                                                              Emergence Moon

I planted leeks this morning and will plant the onions soon. The leeks went in with a IMAG0595sprinkling of Jubilate (microbial inoculant) and a drenching with transplant water, made from OND and water. OND is a fish emulsion.  After closing up the 8″ trenches, I put all the planting paraphernalia back in the honey house, then hopped in the Rav4.

Over to Carlson Toyota for its 35,000 mile oil change and service. While waiting, the Lenovo laptop connected with Perseus and I went over my Latin for Friday’s session with Greg. In the work for him we’re back when Jupiter told his azure brother, Neptune, to let loose the reins that hold back the rivers. Let them flood the earth. The waters cover the fields, the cattle, the human beings and their homes and temples.

On the way to Carlson I had a thought about mentors. I’ve often said that I’ve neglected mentors and have probably suffered because of it. It occurred to me that that’s not exactly true. I have a circle of mentors in the Woolly Mammoths.

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Friends, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

How We Walk

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Beltane                                                                 Emergence Moon

It has always been so, I imagine. That those closest to us teach us life’s important lessons. Over the last couple of years my longtime and good friends in the Woolly Mammoths have taught me many things. This sort of teaching is much closer to apprenticeship than classroom lecture. That is, the lessons are taught by example rather than declamation. When we learn by example, we integrate the lesson into our journey; we learn as it affects us, rather than focusing on getting it right.

Regina_20120926aTwo lessons stand out though there have been many from each Woolly. The first, accepting the death of a spouse has come from Woolly Bill Schmidt whose wife, Regina, died in September of 2012. The grace in his acceptance of her death, his willingness to give voice to his grief and his sense of loss while remaining upright and present to all around him teaches one elegant way to walk the ancientrail occasioned by our mortality. It is not in mimicking him that we will learn his lesson but, in heeding the deeper lesson, that is, to be present to grief in a way that is authentically our own.

The second is the homecoming of Frank Broderick. Frank has been in tremendous pain from spinal degeneration for the last couple of years. To deal with it a back operation, his second, was the only solution. But, Frank has a bad heart. Frank had to choose between a image002life of constant pain (He’s 81.) or an operation with some risk of death. As Frank does, he weighed his options seriously, getting a second opinion at the Mayo Clinic. Satisfied with the level of risk, he decided to go ahead.

He came home yesterday after a grueling 10 days of rehab and faced with several weeks of rehab still ahead. Again, the Frank lesson is not in how to deal with pain or a bad back, though he did both of those well, but how to bring personal courage and intelligent decision making to the often complex health matters we will all deal with as we age.

Both of these men have granted me access to their lives and to the way they live them. When the student was ready, his teachers appeared.

Aging, Colorado, Retirement, Third Phase, Travel

Journey Before Destination

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Beltane                                                                        Emergence Moon

A book I’m reading has these phrases: life before death, journey before destination. An adequate life philosophy and not far from the one I try to represent here at ancientrails. Which, in fact, emphasizes the journey. As does the Malay saying which I got from my sister, “Welcome to the journey.”

Kate and I now have a destination that reaches out from the future and pulls us toward it, yet we must go on the journey first. That journey involves preparation, execution, leave-taking and much more before the destination. I like the emphasis on the journey. Slow travel makes so much sense to me: car, train, ship. Slow by twenty-first century standards.

When the journey is as important as the destination, then a trip becomes whole. It is not a disjointed transportation from one locale to another with no appreciation of the changes along the way. Of course, slow travel is just that, slow, and often times cannot accomplish what our life demands. But, more often than not we can go slower than we think.

I want getting ready to move to Colorado to be as pleasurable as we imagine our life there will be. Journey before destination.  And always, life before death.

Colorado, Garden, Our Land and Home

Colorado Diary: First Steps

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Beltane                                                                 Emergence Moon

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Kate sorts through the first batch of items from the Jon-built shed. Keeps (move) went in the white plastic bucket. Discard was in two piles: trash and donate/sell. It’s a beginning. Just have to keep at it now.

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When we sold the house on Edgcumbe Road in St. Paul, our Realtor told us that our pictures of the property in bloom were instrumental in the sale. The one above and the one below are before pictures for the 2014 vegetable garden.

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This one of the cristata is the first of a sequence of photographs that will show our perennial flowers as they bloom over the season.
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General
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Beltane                                                                     Emergence Moon

Nitrates worked into the leek and onion beds, mulch removed and saved for the heat of summer. And, the first sort, about a third of Jon’s shed. Much stuff pitched, some kept. We’ll have a garden wherever we go. These touch it, think about it actions will get us to Colorado one rubbish bin at a time. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, after we’ve touched and sorted and packed, the move will become real.

 

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Beltane                                                             Emergence Moon

Ah. Four verses of Latin in 50 minutes. Back in the Aeron. Now for the outside.