Monthly Archives: June 2014

Dreams

Sometimes, I Remember

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Beltane                                                              Summer Moon

Dreams. A couple of nights ago. I had a staff and walked with it. Each time it struck the ground, always at an angle with the head of the staff facing forward, a message from the earth, from the ground of all being came to me. Unfortunately, I don’t remember what they were.

Last night, a very peculiar dream. I lived near an ocean, had just moved there, and the news programs on tv had stories about the red sea. In my little community, a village similar to Conwy, Wales which I visited in 1995, the long time residents laughed. “Red sea. Nah. Red kelp.”

When I went to the ocean to see for myself, the red in the water rippled and flowed in long wet strands of ocean plant life. A bronze colored kelp. When I went back inside a building near the water and climbed some narrow stairs to a room that looked out over the ocean and the swirling kelp, however, I got an ever bigger surprise. There was an eye. The kelp like strands were a body covering for some huge ocean creature. Not a whale. Unknown, but huge, larger than ocean-going cargo carrier and tucked in very close to shore.

Running back downstairs, I moved out on a crumbling concrete path to a large rock that sat by the ocean. Up on it was Sam Eliot, the movie star. He just nodded toward the ocean and I went around the rock’s edge to look out over the water. I couldn’t see water, just the long strains of kelp-like body covering.

Further on, down on a row of shore side businesses, sausage and lemonade stands, curio sellers, I found another vantage point from which to look out on the ocean.  From this angle I could see a head in blue and white, almost neon like, glows, and it was a huge human face, something like the drum major on the Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover.

I got the feeling that these two gigantic creatures, one human, one aquatic, were about to confront each other, though it didn’t feel like a battle. More like an important moment of contact between two modes of being.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities

Light’s Victory, Dark’s Begun

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Beltane                                                                      Summer Moon

We’re close to the Summer Solstice. Those crazy Scandinavians are getting ready to get naked and dance around bonfires. I figure it’s all those long cold dark days in winter. I wouldn’t want to try it here. Imagine all those mosquitoes biting you in places no mosquito had ever found on you before. Still. I admire the abandon, the ecstasy these rites release. Dancing sky clad (as the Wiccans have it) honors the bond between earth and fire, person and sun, light and dark.

The Solstice celebration is an astronomical holiday, not one legislated in the halls of Congress or Parliament or the Diet, nor is it a day celebrated solely for a religious or cultural reason. No, it marks an actual celestial event, one with consequences here on earth. Since the Solstice marks the moment when the sun is at its highest (69 degrees here) and therefore pouring down more energy on a given square yard of earth than at any other time, this is the moment of greatest solar strength throughout the year. Due to a lag in warming, June is the coolest of the summer months, but the increased solar energy will begin to demonstrate itself in July and early August.

I’ll comment more on the Solstice on Saturday, but here I want to note my contrary reaction to it. The signal moment of the Solstice for me is the beginning of the sun’s decline in height, heading toward its nadir on December 21st. Just as the Winter Solstice can be seen as the moment when the light begins to return after long months of increasing dark, so the Summer Solstice can be seen as the moment darkness begins to return after long months of increasing light.

If you’re a child of the dark half of the year, finding the cold and solitude of the winter months, especially on that sacred night, the Winter Solstice, inviting and nourishing to your soul, then you might join me in rejoicing at its return.

 

Aging, Colorado, Friends, Humanities, Politics, Sierra Club, The Move, Third Phase

Young

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Beltane                                                               Summer Moon

How do they get so young? Had my meeting with the organizer for the Franken campaign. She graduated this spring from American University. 20 years old if that. She wanted to know how I got involved in politics. So I told her my story, watching the Stevenson-Eisenhower returns in 1952. She was born in 1994 or 1993. The time difference would be the same for me for an event in 1906/1907. Hmmm.

We chatted for about 45 minutes. She was energetic, hopeful, trying to be realistic and tough, yet still eager. A hard combination to pull off. She’ll get there though, I imagine.

The interaction taught me something. Probably something I’ve learned several times, but I’m learning it again. It was fun and revitalizing to meet someone new, to talk about stuff I care about, to get out of the house in the evening.

One real downside of living up here all these years, with few places where folks just go to hangout (none, really) and with no folks to go hangout with anyhow, is the tendency to get in a rut. Stay home, watch tv in the evening. I love Kate and watching tv, winding down in the evening, is a pleasant and even important part of our time together. Our lives during the day have the garden or sewing or writing or Latin or the dogs, never boring, fulfilling.

But. What I’m reminded of is the need to engage others, new folks, on a regular basis. When we move to Colorado, I’ll see to it. Politics. Art. Gardening. It does highlight a criteria for our new home (a favorite parlor game for us these days. Oh, and it should have…) I came up with a couple of weeks ago. A community where we want to be.

Andover’s not bad, it’s just not much at all. And politically it’s very conservative. Political leanings are not everything, of course not, but they do speak to a wider range of compatibility and I’d like to have at least some of that where we live next.

Colorado, The Move

Realtor Reality Show

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Beltane                                                                    Summer Moon

Third realtor interview today. A guy from Ramsey (another ‘burb connected to us to the northwest) who left large real estate companies to found his own. A thoughtful guy with a sound approach and a 5.5% fee. A possibility. It will be a while before he gets back to us, week after next due to a vacation that starts tomorrow. I’m especially interested in his valuation since he understands this market and has sold real estate for 28 years.

Not sure why but I find this process enervating. It doesn’t feel productive to me, even though it’s very important to the success of our move. Or, maybe, it’s just today. Once we’ve selected a realtor things will start moving, though still at a pace we can maintain since next March remains the date for putting the place on the market.

 

 

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The Move, Third Phase

Between

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Beltane                                                                            Summer Moon

Janus. The two faced god, one face looking to the past, the other toward the future. Hence, January. “…the god of beginnings and transitions,[1] and thereby of gates, doors, passages, endings and time.” Wiki  The door to Janus’ temple stood open during war and closed to indicate peace.

Got to thinking about Janus this morning in light of  Bill Schmidt’s comment about liminal spaces. Janus is presented as the god of liminality, of the time between war and peace, beginning and ending, inside and outside. But. As I thought about the image of Janus, he looks back into the past where lie regrets and failures and loss. At the same time he looks into the future where there is anxiety and hope and maybe despair. The one thing he is not is the god of liminal spaces. No, he’s the god of regret and worry. That thing that he cannot do is see the present, be in the now, for he is eternally fixated on the flow of time past or the onrush of time future.

More. As Bill suggested, to live is to be in liminality, between life and death, yesterday and tomorrow, this project and the next one. We can define, interestingly, liminality as the now since the now we inhabit has a position after a moment and before the next one.

The Celts reserved a special place for the liminal, seeing it as a magical time. So Celtic magic often happened at dawn or as evening fell. But in the understanding I’m presenting we can work our magic in the liminal space we inhabit. Right now. This is not an idle metaphor, but an expression of the magical reality of the now, of inhabiting liminal space always.

Whatever it is, we can bear it for this moment. At least for this moment. We may not have been able to bear it a moment ago and we don’t know whether we will be able to bear it in moment, but, right now, in this fleeting doorway where we stand poised between then and the future, right now, we can marshal our resources and get through the moment. With practice our capacity to live in this space between becomes usual, ordinary and we know in our body that regret is gone, in the past, and that anxiety is of the future, not yet.

As Stewart Brand puts it so nicely, we live in the long now.

 

Colorado, Politics, The Move

Tuesday, Tuesday

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Beltane                                                                           Summer Moon

Last realtor interview today. More packing. Some mulching.

I do have an odd meeting tonight. A young woman (just graduated from American University) working as an organizer up here for Al Franken wants to meet and listen to my story. Translation: she wants money and work from me. I told her though neither were likely since I volunteer with the Sierra Club, that I do support Al.

When I told her that I knew Paul Wellstone, it was as if I’d said I knew Jesus personally. (who come to think of it, was Jewish, too) Oh, my. Well, I’d like to hear about that. And you’ve done organizing, too! So we’re having coffee at a local Caribou.

 

Woolly Mammoths

Changes

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Beltane                                                                                   Summer Moon

Transitions. a :  passage from one state, stage, subject, or place to another :  change  b :  a movement, development, or evolution from one form, stage, or style to another; and, c: an abrupt change in energy state or level

Frank had a Lakota pipe, given to him in a sweat, making him a pipe carrier. It marked, he said, a transition from a crude, aggressive atheist to a man who saw something else, something beyond the material world. Warren had a statue of Don Quixote which had belonged to his father. His life, he said, had been one of transitions related to writing and reading. Books and journalism. I’m not sure he said, but I think he did, that Don Quixote’s idiosyncratic (I’d say Quixotic, but you know…) way in the world felt like his own.

Charlie Haislet presented his body “as the object which had carried him through all of his transitions” including the most recent and not easy one to retirement. He also told a great story of an ascent of Mt. Fuji, a cousin along who experienced angina and treating him with brandy. Then, faced with oncoming darkness they chose a faster route down the mountain than the switchbacks they had come up only to find themselves finally at the bottom, but halfway around the mountain from their car.

Bill had a leather bound volume with entries beginning in 1967, the year he left the Jesuits, and other entries as recent as last year’s retreat on Lake Superior only half a year after Regina’s death.

Tom spoke of opening boxes of his mother’s containing his foot-print as a baby, his receiving blanket and wondering about the transitions he’s gone through since that time, feeling some of them as he found more and more items. Now, he lives in the moment, trying to show up at each momentary transition as his best self.

Scott is decluttering his downstairs to develop an apartment for his stepson, but this has involved moving decades worth of Yin’s fashion designer remnants: clothing, cloth. The big question is what to do with it all.

Mark talked of the transition from the country (Marine) to the city (a block or so from Frank). He lifted up a deer antler that he found in California and spoke of the mystical masculinity of a buck, an antlered buck, especially one in velvet.

Stefan announced his leaving his position at Crane Engineering for a calmer life.

It was a powerful evening on many levels, including the stories of two guests.

 

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Beltane                                                               Summer Moon

Some Latin, some packing, some dog brushing, a nap, a movie. A Sunday.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Science

Nothing Alien To This Neighborhood

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Beltane                                                                      Summer Moon

We have had rain. And then some. And will get still more. The Great Anoka Sand Plain soaks it up and funnels it on down to the aquifers below our land, recharging them, then putting more flow into the streams like Rum River and the lakes like Round Lake.

The Summer Moon watches it all, as it has watched all since it split away from its partner the earth. Like the split aparts of Plato’s lovers the earth and the moon have continued together locked in a long term relationship, a dance in the coldness of space. The moon is our seer, an audience for all that we do, we creatures and rocks and clouds and waters of this spinning planet.

The whole solar system is a dynamic ballet. The sun’s selfless and profligate dispersal of energy feeds those of us closest while it’s gravitational pull keeps even those outer planets in our company.

And we humans, we think of ourselves as different from all this, unique, special but look at us from a solar perspective. We’re the deer and the whale, the paramecium and the volcano, the mammoth and the brontosaur. We are nothing more-and nothing less-than parts of this planet we ride. Yes, parts come alive, come animate, even come conscious, but we are creatures of this earth nonetheless and in the most literal sense and we are given energy in the same way all our solar system is given energy. By hydrogen fusion in the nuclear furnaces of the sun.

Terence, Roy Wolf reminded us at sheepshead last Thursday, said, “Nothing human is alien to me.” I’ll paraphrase: “Nothing human is alien to our sun’s neighborhood.”

Colorado, Family, The Move

Move Proud

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Beltane                                                                               Summer Moon

At our business meeting we look at cash flow, reserves, upcoming expenditures. We check our calendars and discuss mutual work like the garden, the orchard and now the move. We set some time aside next Friday for combing through items to send on to the SortTossPack consignment store. These meetings, first recommended by Ruth, a financial counselor, have become a key part of our marriage, about mutuality and forward thinking.

Kate’s clearing through the upstairs like a horde of locusts, sweeping everything before her. My movement through books and DVD’s has gone at a slower pace, but at a pace that will still see me done sometime this summer. Done, that is, with packing that which will be sold or donated. I will make, too, a good deal of progress on books and files that will be moved. Of course, some of the books will remain on the shelves because they are in current use.

We’re proud of ourselves because we’ve taken the move from idea to living reality in a matter of six weeks or so. A lot has gotten done already. And even more remains to be done. This house will be in the spring market for 2015, probably around March.