Monthly Archives: August 2016

Family, Jefferson County, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate

Hail and Lightning

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37 this morning and small piles of hail still scattered around look like snow. Two solar panels have a blanket of hail still on them from yesterday afternoon. We had a gully washer with lightning that seemed right over our heads. Gertie and Rigel stayed close, real close. The rain was welcome.

A transmission line went down in the storm and our generator chugged to life, powering us for a couple of hours while IREA worked to get the power back on. Though it took me over a year, I’m glad we persevered and got the generator hooked up and working. No lights is one thing, no water is quite another.

Brother Mark has finished a year’s worth of teaching with one longish break. He has two weeks of training in Jubail, Saudi Arabia, then he’s off until November. As he put it, he’s heading “to the further East” for some r&r.

The grandkids are here today, but just for the day. Afterward, Jon, Kate and I are going into Dazzle Jazz to listen to Roberta Gambarini. We go in around 5:30 or 6:00 since seating is first come, first served for all 7:00 p.m. shows. They have an interesting menu so we eat before the performance. The jazz scene here is vibrant, lots of opportunity to see local and national performers.

 

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Jefferson County, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

A Ploy of the Devil?

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A taste of fall here. 42 degrees right now and cool weather tomorrow, too. A soaking rain yesterday.

Step-son Jon took Kate and me out to Carra Viejta, a Mexican spot just off 285 at Windy Point. Kate’s birthday. Good food and good company. Jon’s in much better spirits these days as the divorce moves closer to resolution.

20160714_143955Kate and I drove over to Congregation Beth Evergreen yesterday for another session of mussar, led by Rabbi Jamie Arnold. Over the last three weeks we’ve been discussing possible texts to use as the basis for study over the next year. One more this next Thursday. The three texts so far are: The Palm Tree of Deborah, the Way of the Tzaddikim and the Way of the Just. These are completely unfamiliar to me, which makes them interesting.

I get surprised occasionally. Jamie said yesterday, “We’ll have to see what our ancestors saw in these texts.” Not my ancestors. It’s interesting to be in but not of the conversation, I like it. Also, when the conversation turns toward G-d, I stop internally. I have to engage in a reconfiguration of the idea. What does G-d mean to the author here? Does the idea bring anything unique to the conversation or does it serve as a placeholder for something like: This is really important; or, take this seriously, dude; or, this is the best we could do in figuring out why should we believe this; or, this idea links us to all those in our 5,000 + year history who have believed this.

Emblem_of_the_Papacy_SE_svgMy impatience with religions of revelation has not waned. Revelation, word and practices with the imprimatur of divinity, has created so much bloodshed, so much cocksure wrongheadedness, so much diminution of the other that it seems like the opposite of what it claims to be. If there were a devil, it would be a clever ploy to create texts reputedly authored by God and spiked with so much absolutism that adherents to the texts would consider themselves an exclusively correct clan.

Outside dogmatic adherence to the idea of revelation most religious traditions have also devoted a lot of thought and practice to the question of the good life. How might we live? What are behaviors that respect all of G-d’s universe? How can we navigate the often muddy waters of our inner life? This is mussar. And kabbalah. And lectio divina. And the Way of the Pilgrim. And meditation. And the four noble truths. And the Tao Te Ching. These approaches to life as we live it here and now are among the great gifts of the world religions. They distill the wisdom of generations of sophisticated and nuanced thinkers, practitioners. It feels good to be learning another one.

 

Family, Holidays

Kate. Happy Birthday.

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Mother's Day

20160814_161327Life has odd turns, none for me odder than renewing my season subscription at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in 1988 and finding my soul mate. As some of you know, we met there, dated for a couple of years, then got married in 1990.

We’ve traveled the world together, starting with Europe in March of 1990 as we followed spring north from Rome, all the way to Inverness, the capital of the Highlands in northern Scotland.

We’ve had three homes together, each one unique in its own way, but common in our commitment to make them places for family and for creativity.

Kate has been a nurse, a nurse anesthetist, a pediatrician and now a seamstress and quilter. She’s bright, obviously, completing the NYT crossword every morning, for example.

In our retirement we share a passion for dogs, gardening and bees, for jazz as well asIMAG0873 classical music. Kate cans, dries and freezes food. She’s a gourmet cook. Her grasp of numbers is impressive.

When Jon got married and had kids, part of our life turned toward the west, toward the mountains, toward Denver. That pull, grandkidtropic, eventually convinced us to leave over 40 years in Minnesota and move out here to Shadow Mountain. Now she’s grandma, enjoying the lives of Ruth and Gabe, teaching them what she knows, loving them.

Kate, the love of my life, the wife I needed but took some time to find, is 72 tomorrow. And living every day. Every day. Even the ones with staggering inertia.

 

 

Aging, Art and Culture, Family, Friends, Jefferson County, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

Acts of Creation

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20160808_151614_001Just to let you know that the Superior Wolf Moon daily reminder has been working. I’m over 17,000 words into this new novel. It feels like some of the best work I’ve done. Of course, I always think that at the beginning of a project.

Kate’s birthday is tomorrow. 72. She works as hard now as she did when I first met her though she may not be able to sustain the work as long as she could. Neither can I. She’s remarkable and I’ll have a birthday post for her later today.

On Friday, buddy Mark Odegard has his “Bridges of the Mississippi” opening. He’s been working for the last year or so on this wonderful print series. It’s a contemporary, jazzy look at these important connectors. We think of crossing the Mississippi every day as a non-event, usually. And that’s because of these bridges that he has memorialized. They’re the often ignored civil engineering projects that make the Twin Cities possible. He’s made a unique contribution to our seeing them, an artist’s true task, sharpening and nuancing our perceptions of the world around us.

On a similar note, Jon Olson, step-son and art teacher, has developed a unique print making style that utilizes found, crushed metal objects. He picks them up from the sides of highways and streets, brings them here or to his art classroom in Aurora, inks them up and runs them through a press. In this way he’s printing directly from the object, like Mark, sharpening and nuancing our perceptions of the world around us.

Family

Staggering Inertia

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20160813_154908Yesterday Kate told me, “I have staggering inertia.” A deft turn of phrase. The grandkids make our house lively, upend our daily routines and give us multiple opportunities to love them in the moment. They also tire out these two third-phasers-set phasers to stunned.

So, on the Monday after we both have staggering inertia. One of the nice aspects of retirement is the ability to take a day, or two, to recover from strenuous intergenerational activity.

Let’s hear it for staggering inertia. A very good thing in my opinion.

Family, Holidays

Ellis Day

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

This is the birthday of Richard Ellis, the first of our Ellis clan to arrive in the U.S. He came as an indentured servant in 1707, arriving in Massachusetts instead of Virginia. He was supposed to become the heir to a relative there. However, ship captains in the time had few scruples and made money as they could, in this case a form of temporary slavery.

Richard worked out his indenture and went on to found the still existing town of Ashfield, Mass.  He also became a captain in the Revolutionary Army. His descendants have spread out across the U.S. now, and into Singapore and Saudi Arabia, too. I’m declaring this a family holiday in his honor.

Politics

Here There Be Dragons

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We’ve veered into strange territory, again, in this election. Now Trump is behind so far that the Republicans are talking about not giving him anymore money. This is the fiscal equivalent of Dump Trump. There’s an article on Politico titled “Why Hasn’t the Republican Party Collapsed?” Trump continues to dominate the news, disproving the adage all press is good press. We’re in an interregnum now, polling wise, where Hillary’s lead appears impregnable, but the conventions are still not far in the rearview and wrapping it up this early seems precipitous. Some say another week of these numbers and you can start collecting Trump pins and hats for that losing Presidential candidate’s exhibit. We will see, we will see.

 

Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain

Cars Should Kill U

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Cars Should Kill U
Cars Should Kill U

There was a bicycle race on Black Mountain Drive Saturday. Race organizers had spray painted encouraging words on the road: Shut up, Legs! You can do it. Not much further now. That sort of thing. This was all in white spray paint.

Another group or individual came out with blue spray paint and added these messages, two of four. I took the photographs this morning on the way home from Evergreen. Obviously, they’re disturbing. But more to the current point, they immediately reminded me of the spirit of Trump rallies where minorities, women, the disabled, immigrants are summarily belittled and mocked. Sometimes, violence ensues.

The cruel and awful thing about the Trump national campaign for the presidency is this; it gives the color of political legitimacy to sentiments like these, encouraging them to go beyond disdain and into violent territory. I don’t know the politics of the blue spray painter(s), but I do know that the sanctioning of hateful rhetoric and physical confrontations makes such attitudes much more dangerous.

die faggots
die faggots shut up
Family, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain

Joy. Fun. Fart Jokes.

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20160815_061917The grandkids have come and gone. Jon gets to see them for a weekend overnight every other weekend and all day Saturday on the other. He also gets a Wednesday dinner every week. These arrangements are temporary and will be changed when the divorce is final, sometime in October, probably.

It was a joyous time with the kiddos this weekend. Lots of laughter, fun, conversations, play. Ruth painted her elephant, Gabe watched two movies up in the loft, part of the time exercising on the elliptical and told fart jokes. (He’s 8.) The dogs love it when the kids are here. More play time. Lots of smiling canine faces.

20160814_161327Kate made BLT’s on Saturday night, spaghetti and meatballs last night. She also made two batches of rice crispy treats. Family stuff with the usual mild chaos, dogs and kids scampering here and there.

Now, though, we have a quiet house again and we like that, too. Our lives here are not solely about family, we each have our own work and we both need solitude. In large quantities.

The path of the divorce, in the often obtuse way of the world, has deepened our relationship with Jon and with Ruth and Gabe. That same path has begun to diverge from the dismal trek we experienced through June, July and much of August. It feels lighter. Jon’s back at work. Some of his legal matters are resolved. Investigative work that has to be done before September 16th, the initial pass at a divorce settlement, has hinted strongly at an outcome much more to his liking than Jen has proposed.

Life for the Denver Olsons, sans Jen, will not be the same, but I’m increasingly convinced that it will be better, for them and for us.

Humor, Science

This Just In

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Scientists Trace Heat Wave To Massive Star At Center Of Solar System

“PASADENA, CA—Groundbreaking new findings announced Monday suggest the record-setting heat wave plaguing much of the United States may be due to radiation emitted from an enormous star located in the center of the solar system.”  read more at Onion.com