Monthly Archives: June 2014

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Friends, Garden, Great Work, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Right Now

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Summer                                                               Most Heat Moon

My favorite subscription e-mail is brain pickings. The creator and writer, Maria Popova,crane engineering generates it through intense reading and intelligent choice of materials. Last year she wrote an essay outlining 7 things she’s learned in the 7 years of writing brain pickings. You can find the whole essay on her website, but I wanted to focus on one in particular because it reminds me of a lesson I’m learning from my friend, Tom Crane.

Being present, how he shows up in the moment, from moment to moment, is his top priority. I don’t know whether he would counterpoise it to productivity as Popova does here, but his business success in forensic engineering certainly suggests he’s no stranger to productivity. He is clear that he does not want to be measured by his efficiency, earnings or his ability to do this or that. Which is saying something since his company is very well-regarded, growing and prosperous.

Here’s Popova:

  1. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshiping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

And a bit more from an interview with a talented writer/observer:

“I think productivity, as we define it, is flawed to begin with, because it equates a process with a product. So, our purpose is to produce — as opposed to, our purpose is to understand and have the byproduct of that understanding be the “product.” For me, I read, and I hunger to know… I record, around that, my experience of understanding the world and understanding what it means to live a good life, to live a full life. Anything that I write is a byproduct of that — but that’s not the objective. So, even if it may have the appearance of “producing” something on a regular basis, it’s really about taking in, and what I put out is just … the byproduct.”

The moment and our questing in that moment for connection, for understanding, for clear seeing is all we have. Ever. Placing the moment and our immersion in it first swings us out of the past or the future, if we’re tempted to sojourn there, and back to the now.

I like Tom’s insistence on showing up and Popova’s emphasis on understanding as our purpose, and productivity as a byproduct of that process. When at a farmer’s market, it would be understandable to see the fruits and vegetables as a product of gardening, but in fact they are the byproduct of a person in love with the soil, with plants, with the changing seasons and the interplay of wind and rain and sun.

The main dilemmas of our current approach to agriculture can be tied to productivity oriented thinking.  This way sees the fruits and the vegetables and the grains and the meats and dairy as the product of farming rather than its byproduct. What I mean is this, when we love the world in which we live, when we treat it with care and thoughtfulness, when we understand our needs and its needs, the world will produce what is necessary for our existence. That’s been the successful ongoing contract between living beings and the natural world of which they are apart since the first one-celled organism began to wiggle and move. It is no different today.

That’s what I understand right now.

Family, Politics

Domestic Courage

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Summer                                                         Most Heat Moon

Sexism rides through the institutions of our culture: through church and corporation, through the military and onto the athletic field, through higher education and elementary, too. Take medicine for a contemporary example. Since the days of NOW and conscious raising, many, many women have become doctors. According to a recent survey there are approximately 234,000 women physicians compared to 535,000 men. (kaiser fdtn.)

Those 234,000 women are disproportionately in the lower paying medical disciplines though not dominant in any of those either. Pediatrics is the sole exception with women making up 55% of all pediatricians in 2008.  But. They earned 66% what male pediatricians did. (Center for research into gender and the professions.) This link gives more detailed analysis.

Continued activism by feminists (male and female) in the workplace will be necessary for years, perhaps generations, to come.

Personal bravery, I called it domestic courage in a eulogy for Ione, a working woman who raised three daughters on her own, working evenings as a bookkeeper, is necessary though when the political gets personal.  When the issue is culturally determined sex roles, then the political comes home. It has to because there is no social nexus more culturally determined by gender than marriage and family.

Kate is an example of domestic courage and institutional courage. Here are three instances. In high school in Nevada, Iowa during the early 1960’s, Kate did outstanding academic work. This would not surprise anyone who knows her. In time long before advanced placement classes, the International Baccalaureate degree or any other now common place for accelerating advanced students, she asked to graduate in her junior year and then attend nearby Iowa State. Her request, though unusual, was granted. Until it came time to make it happen. Then the school went back on its word.

It’s difficult to imagine in our current educational reality, how much courage it must have taken for a young, beautiful girl to pass up cheer leading and the prom to push for an education that met her intellectual talents. That her attempt failed is neither surprising nor a reflection on the domestic courage it took for her to put herself forward. (I say domestic courage here because of the enmeshed nature of small towns with their elementary and secondary educational systems, an enmeshment I know only too well from my own experiences in Alexandria, Indiana.)

Becoming a physician, after first overcoming sexist objections to her becoming a nurse anesthetist, (a telling picture of her class at Mt. Sinai shows her with seven men), she applied to medical school over the objection of her then husband. The admissions personnel at the medical school told Kate that since she had a physician for a husband what was the point to her ambitions? They slapped a good deal of preliminary work on her, which she did, then accepted her reapplication.

The domestic courage in this instance involved persisting in her own ambitions, in spite of being a young mother and in a demanding marriage. She got through this by studying in the morning, early, before Jon and David got up.

Then, once in medicine, Kate continued her fight against sexist restrictions and organizational assumptions.  The clearest of these was her insistence that low income working women couldn’t afford to take time away during the day for a doctor’s appointment. The Coon Rapids Allina Clinic needed to offer appointments after traditional daytime hours.

When the resistance became obdurate, Kate volunteered to do it herself, which she did for several years until the Clinic decided to open an after hours clinic.

Now, as a grandmother, Kate feels (and I do, too.) a necessity to pass on this kind of consciousness to our grand-daughter Ruth. Sexism will not be eliminated by the time Ruth hits college or the work place. She needs an understanding of her own power and her right to her own path. We can help ensure she gets that.

 

 

 

 

Cinema and Television

Mild Fun

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Summer                                                              Most Heat Moon

While a thunderstorm rattled windows and scared dogs up here in Andover, Kate and I sat in the past, watching Clint Eastwood’s love song to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. If you grew up in the era, it’s a fun movie for the singing of such hits as “Sherry, Baby”, “Walk Like A Man”, “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.”

As a work, it’s downright hagiographic about St. Frankie. Who knows, maybe he was like that, but his feet must have found at least a little clay during his long singing career. He emotes for his daughter, lost to the streets and to drugs. He takes on a large debt because a neighborhood friend, one of the Four Seasons, gets behind on the vig. Through it all he remains impeccably dressed and blessed with a voice a castrata could love.

If you’re not of the era, and all the folks at the Andover Cinema 3:45 pm showing today were, this movie will probably appear a bit cheesy and you’ll wonder what all the fuss is about.

Cinema and Television, GeekWorld

Second Decade of the Third Millennium Television

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Summer                                                                     Most Heat Moon

Kate and I finished the final three episodes of 2014’s run of “Orange is the New Black.” We’ve been saving the last several episodes of “House of Cards” like hoarding candy against a day we can’t make it to the store. We did that by finishing up “New Tricks” and “Single-Handed.”

Now for those of you who still watch TV with the cable tuner and channels into the 400’s this may not be familiar ground for you. “Orange is the New Black” is, like “House of Cards”, a made for Netflix tv series. Both are really more like a novel with 13 chapters available all at once, and right now anyway, once a year. When ready, Netflix puts up all 13 episodes at once, available for streaming. If you wanted, and I imagine some do, you can watch all of them in one session.

Kate and I tend to do it a couple of episodes or one episode at a time. The second decade of the third millennium experience, watching video shows with no advertisements, feels like a luxury, like we’re getting away with something. Yet, I imagine there is a whole audience of kids for whom advertisements would be the odd experience, not their absence.

“New Tricks” and “Single-Handed”, on the other hand, we watch on Huluplus. It collects current tv shows (and all the episodes of older ones) and streams them, albeit with brief advertising, more like the old broadcast experience. There are though the important exceptions of being able to choose when and what to watch and to stop/pause it whenever desired. Huluplus also has movies, including 800 movies from the wonderful Criterion Collection.

We also watch certain other programs on Amazon Prime. Having a Prime membership in Amazon comes not only with “free” two-day shipping, but over a million downloadable songs and many movies and tv series available for “free.” Free in this case means no additional charge.

So that’s our new millennium television experience. No Comcast. No Timeswarner. Only our Roku box and three subscription services whose net cost is $30 a month. It may sound like we watch a lot of TV, but we only watch when we want, what we want. It is, as always, an excellent way to decelerate the mind in the evening.

And best of all, we’re shelling out much less to Comcast. All of this comes in over our broadband link for which, unfortunately, we still have only one choice. Comcast.

Politics

The Boys and Girls of November

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Summer                                                         New (Most Heat) Moon

The boys and girls of November have begun to pick up steam, as have those who swirl around them. Polls get taken, then scrutinized. Messages tested. Mail pieces and literature designed. Voter and district targets identified. Photographs collect in files, ready for use. Ad buys begin to mount up. $300,000, I learned today, will keep a major candidate on TV and radio in the Twin Cities media market. For a week.

Elections, which seem to happen only on election day, are underway all year long. As a person outside the political realm, you may count yourself knowledgeable if you keep up with pundits and tv news. You notice mail pieces and you might talk to a campaign worker, sure, but these seemingly isolated encounters make sense only in light of the day you go to the poll.

Months before the election the professionals and hardy amateurs are already at work. In fact, for some people, the next election starts the day after election day. Or even before.

An example of the not obvious, but crucial strategic and tactical thinking that goes into campaigns is made clear by a look at Minnesota’s 8th district. The 8th seems to the casual observer to be a northern and isolated Congressional district with elections that only matter to the iron range and cities like Duluth, Virginia, Brainerd and Grand Rapids. But elections in one area matter not only to their immediate area, but to others in a complex layering that makes electoral politics very challenging.

The key layering in Minnesota happens in the eighth Congressional district where the iron range and its strong labor constituency tilts Democratic, but often in a way that is not compatible with the politics of state wide candidates like governors and senators. That conflict is strong this year with iron range miners and their families standing behind the Polymet Mining proposal while downstate environmentalists and those environmentalists who live north fight against it.

This is important not just because of the fate of the Polymet mine, but because of its effect on Rick Nolan’s chances in the 8th and its direct impact on Mark Dayton and Al Franken as they run statewide elections. A strong 8th Democratic vote is often necessary to counter the strong southern and suburban gains piled up by Republican candidates. If the 8th splits its tickets, then it can be hard for state wide Democratic candidates to win.

Look for the races to become increasingly evident after July 4th. And, if you’re annoyed by them, the pros would say, good. You’ve probably been reached the golden 7th time it takes for a message to stick.

Colorado, The Move

Apres

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Summer                                                       New (Most Heat) Moon

The day after Sort Toss Pack. Kate’s back in bed and I would be too except for my meeting in St. Paul, America Votes. A weariness after a big push. Feels good though. Trying to get all this done in weeks ahead of a move instead of months would have stressed us both. The result might have been a tainted move. Instead, we’re both feeling accomplished and capable, working on our relocation with adequate time and planning.

We’ve now paid the first bill related to the move and well worth it. We’ll get some of the money back from sales in the Sort Toss Pack consignment shop and Half Price books. We have two nibbles on the lawn tractor and one on the long arm quilter. Next week I’m going to work the phones for the Vectra and the leg press. Getting rid of these big items will free up even more space.

The bedroom feels bare and the workout area, with all six bookcases removed feels generic, like I’ve moved my treadmill and weights to a could-be-anywhere rectangle of sheetrock. Odd to have that sense in our own house.

This is all part of the stripping away process, the peeling back of our Minnesota identity, removing particularity here. That’s necessary in the house as it goes on the market. We want someone else to project their life onto its much emptier spaces, seeing themselves moving through their life with this house as theirs, not ours.

(well, maybe not quite this much, but the feelings are comparable)

Instead of grief at the stuff moved away there is exhilaration. Less stuff. Less need to move stuff. Less need to feel bound to stuff. This is, however, a paring down, not an elimination. There are still objects we want with us, but that number dwindles as we gain the psychic chops necessary to sever connections with belongings.

 

 

Asia, Cinema and Television, Literature

Her and Journey to the West

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Summer                                                          New (Most Heat) Moon

By way of cinema reviews. Saw “Her” last night and “Journey to the West” tonight. Though very different culturally both encourage us to stretch our understanding of reality to include the fantastic, Her through science fiction and Journey to the West through very loose adaptation of Chinese classic literature.

Kate found Her too slow, too odd, too much altogether and declared, “This isn’t holding my interest.” got up and did other things. In spite of the dorky ear plugs that signaled connection to the Operating System (btw: OS seemed like a bad techno-term for Samantha, the artificial person created through use of computers. Not sure why they didn’t go with program, but the oddness of the choice distracted me.) I found the questions raised by the movie intriguing.

What would it be like to be an intelligent, feeling entity with no body? What it would be like to have a non-corporeal lover? What algorithm could cause us to fall in love? What would fidelity mean to such an entity? All these questions get raised. Ironically the main character, Joaquin Phoenix’s job is to write real letters, often love letters, for other people.

Yes, it was a little slow at times, though I felt the time necessary to play with the idea of a computer/human relationship.  Amy Adams and Scarlett Johansson (voice of Samantha) added contemporary female starpower.

Journey to the West was a major disappointment. It combined the sometimes entertaining but very broad comedy sometimes seen in Chinese cinema, think Kung Fu Hustle by the same director, Stephen Chow, with ridiculous set piece scenes and a remarkable lack of fidelity to the Chinese class, Journey to the West. The Monkey King is the key character in Journey to the West as literature, but here he comes in very late in the movie, well into the final third and he comes in as a caricature and not a good one.

The original Monkey King is mischievous and unpredictable, but he also has a noble, courageous side that this movie ignores. The CGI effects were often very good, but used in the service of a juvenile script. China can do better than this with their own literary classics.

Colorado, The Move

Gone

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Summer                                                          New (Most Heat) Moon

Many, many red tape boxes are gone. Six bookshelves are gone. An old entertainment center is gone. The credenza, the armoire, the bedside pieces and the large table sized chin-hua are gone. The white chest of drawers and a bookshelf and another tall, narrow shelving unit is gone. All the old wood from the renovation and the dog stalls are gone. Many fragile, no longer wanted, pieces of crystal, stemware and place settings are gone. An industrial size plastic trash bin full of old papers and travel brochures. Gone.

I’m just up from an hour and a half nap. Kate’s still asleep. At a guess we’ve probably moved out half of the things we don’t want to move. I’ve still got a lot of bookshelves to go through and there will be bookshelves and discarded books to go after I’m done, probably sometime in August. The old electronics, a couple of desks, some garden tools, some bee-keeping stuff, tools will go then, too. We still have a few items to sell: the hydroponic set-up, the lawn tractor and its attachments, the long-arm quilter.

Once those are sold and the remaining decluttering items are out of the house, we’ll begin considering storage for items that will go with us.  Some of the remaining furniture will need to be out of the house when we put it on the market next March.

We’ve also begun contracting for smaller work around the house, handyman type things to make the whole place neater and yard work, pruning and maybe some planting. In the winter we’ll have some rooms repainted and the house professionally cleaned. Then, the photographer will come and we’ll begin process of selling the big item. This house.

Colorado, The Move

In Process

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Summer                                                              New (Most Heat) Moon

It’s been a fruitful but exhausting morning. The dogs are upset. Vega’s barking at the back door non-stop because she wants lunch and, usually, what Vega wants, Vega gets. (although I must say she’s pretty reasonable. Usually her insistence involves either food or going to sleep.) I finished packing up all the books in the six bookcases and moved a very large container of trash up to the recycling.

The Sort Toss Pack folks are here moving boxes, furniture, books and fragile stuff. This is all progress and once it’s over we’ll feel like we’ve made an advance, but right now, it’s a bit stressful. Not in a bad way, but stressful nonetheless.

Glad they’re moving the boxes and not me. Furniture, the same.

Colorado, The Move

Gettin’ Real

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Summer                                                          New (Most Heat) Moon

Excited this morning. The move gets real today. The movers and packers from Sort Toss Pack show up at 10 am. They’ll move the wood from the garage, freeing up space there, then the red tape boxes from the basement and upstairs. After that load, the movers will take all the green tape boxes to the garage. Meanwhile the packers will be at work, getting stuff that is fragile ready for their trip to the consignment shop.

Kate’s gone through the upstairs like a beneficent locust, sweeping everything before her into boxes or onto the kitchen table for packing. In my turn I’ve sorted out six bookshelves full of books and some DVD’s, only six more standing bookshelves and the ikea bookshelves in the study to go. I’ll be done by the end of August if not before.

After they’ve moved all the books and the scrap wood, the movers will come back and take all of our bedroom furniture except the bed, plus the six empty bookshelves, an empty entertainment center, a chest of drawers and some smaller furniture.

Our house will feel much emptier after today and that’s a good thing. We’re not there yet, not by a long ways, but we’ve made a good start. A very good start. Next week we get the third market analysis and then we’ll choose a realtor from the three we have interviewed. The week after that Jon and Ruth come. Jon will build the deck and Kate will ride back with them to Colorado to meet realtors there and get an on the ground feel for the real estate market out there.