Monthly Archives: August 2018

Travel

Home Again, Home Again

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Lughnasa                                                                        Monsoon Moon

Traveling is such sweet sorrow, to paraphrase Shakespeare. Yes, it involves parting and parting and parting, but it contains within its partings a going to and a coming from. We cannot travel without a departure point, a destination, and, for most us anyhow, a place to return. I say most because I know my brother Mark and I’m sure there are more of his tribe, who depart, arrive, then depart and arrive again, only to be ready to leave again, perhaps never to return. I know he broadly considers the U.S. home and so does come back here from time to time, but that’s different from having a house, three dogs and a wife.

When I go, I leave the familiarity of the daily routine, the comforts of, especially, my own bed, the easy knowledge of local destinations and short drives for hours, sometimes days on the road, for strange pillows and bathrooms, for a place, even a familiar one like the Twin Cities metro, changed in unexpected ways. I’ve only recently learned that for some travel and the strangeness it brings is unpleasant.

My family of origin traveled some, a lot for an average income 1950’s family, including several trips to the then very exotic land of Canada. My brother and sister have seen a lot of the world and I’ve seen my share though less than them. It is the strangeness that attracts me. The language I can’t read. The foods I don’t know. The countries filled with citizens of another loyalty than my own. The places where history’s long arc has unfolded, often over spans of time much longer than that of the United States. Art that can only be seen in particular museums like the Uffizi, the British, the Louvre. Buildings and ruins of buildings. Somehow in that strangeness my own particularity becomes highlighted, more clear.

I suppose you can travel only to assure yourself that your place is best, finding the aspects of another land less than your own. If you do, then the real opportunity of the traveler is lost. It is the other, the literally billions of others, living their lives, loving and hating and hoping and dreaming, in places distant from our own in miles and cultural assumptions that offer us humility, new ways of considering old ways. What can you eat? How can you prepare it? What’s beautiful? What’s important? How does design affect daily life? How can you get from here to there? The great lesson of travel is that the other is not really other, only a different expression of the same creature, of the same species.

Travel could, I would even say should, erode if not eliminate our sense of superiority, of uniqueness, of being better than, say, Mexicans or Bolivians or Taiwanese or Koreans. These are all just folks trying to get through the day, figure out some purpose to existence, loving their families, making mistakes. Different, perhaps, in clothing, language, music, food, but at bottom, human. Like you and me.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Judaism, Memories, Minnesota, Travel

Last Day on the road

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Lughnasa                                                    Monsoon Moon

On the road until 7:15 pm last night. Got misdirected (by myself) making the turn south toward Hot Springs. This time, even with maps and a phone that was still charged, I ended up further west than intended. No matter. I drove down 385 on the west side of Paha Sapa, seeing the gigantic Crazy Horse carving on the east side of the road.

Drove through Wind Cave National Park. I took the tour there long ago. There were buffalo right by the roadside and a huge field of prairie dogs. They stood up, looked alert, scampered away on prairie dog business.

I passed into the mountain time zone outside Rapid City, regaining the hour given away on the trip east. At some point I also passed the 100th meridian, too. Until climate change began inching the line eastward the 100th was the point marking the change from the humid east to the arid west. West of the 100th precipitation averages less than 20 inches a year. That’s often not enough for agriculture.

Passing the 100th means a return to my home region, no longer the northland I had just left, but the American West, land of corporate mining, ranching, water wars, and well-armed citizens.

In a few minutes I’ll hit the road again, this time heading out through South Dakota, then Wyoming on blue highways. Along these particular blue highways there will be, off the road aways, small rectangular patches of land protected by high fencing, motion sensors and cameras. Within the fencing lies a missile silo. This land is the contemporary field of dragon’s teeth sown by the ancient king Cadmus. Up from them will emerge mechanical warriors, tipped with nuclear bombs and already targeted for some enemy or the other. I don’t find them reassuring.

There is a freedom to the road, a disaffected and depersonalized freedom though, one populated by unfamiliar landscapes, unknown people and the slight sense (at least in the U.S.) of being far away from help. In this cone of the strange (to us) we carry with us the intimate familiarity of our body and our mind, the memories and quirks that make us who we are.

Been thinking about an article on personalism offered by Tom Bugby, new Woolly whom I met Sunday at the Black Forest. Written by David Brooks, it positions personalism as a middle way between radical individualism (the enlightenment) and collectivism (evil socialists and communists).

It occurred to me that each of these positions commits what Whitehead called a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. That is, each would claim to be the way things are. We are radically individual, unknown to others and knowing others only through their persona, darkly. We are in relationship, cannot know ourselves outside of relationships. We are simply one of the many, important, yes, but the many takes precedence.

No. We are, in turns, a radical individual, highlighted right now for me while I’m on the road, a person in relationship, intimate ones, friendship, casual acquaintances, and, a member of a town, a religious community, a state, a nation. We move along this continuum every day, this activity emphasizing the individual, this one relationships, and this one the larger communities to which we belong.

Totalizing perspectives, we are only individuals or we are only in relationship or we are only part of a broader group, are really finger pointing, blaming this point on the continuum for the problems we face. In fact life is complicated, made up of diverse moments when this facet of ourselves or that one gets to shine.

OK. So I had a long time to think about this.

 

General

the point

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Lughnasa                                               Monsoon Moon

Got to the point of the trip yesterday. At a rainy 10 am in St. Paul, on Summit Avenue across from Macalester. About 30 people gathered to celebrate Groveland’s acceptance as a covenanting community by the Unitarian-Universalist Association. Old friends Martha Anderson, Ceile Hartlieb, Larry Herbison, and Lois Hamilton were there.

The presentation I wrote out below got delivered extemporaneously, so a somewhat different version without the long Emerson quote. The other night at Jazz Central I told David Fortney about going around taking photographs of my various homes in the Twin Cities area. “Closure?” he asked. Made me go, huh? Then, by god, he’s right.

The Groveland moment was about closure, too. I was there, I was a part of that community. Just as I was part of the Stevens Square community, the Loring Park community, and, in a real and active sense, a part of the Twin Cities metro community. But, no longer. Now 900 miles separates me from these places I loved, cared about, in which, to paraphrase a theological idea, I moved and lived and had my being.

It’s different, being back here this time. I’m from away, this is my former home. This time I’m here as a guest, a welcomed guest, one filled with memories of people and moments, but no longer native to this place.

Often when I travel, at least in the past, I would go through a, I could live here phase, while in a new place. Strangely, I don’t feel that way about Minnesota any more. I have lived here. Minnesota is the past now in the same way Indiana is the past. No longer where I am, yet filled with the irreplaceable. No longer where I want to be.

The West and the mountains have me. I’ve changed regional allegiances; not casting aside the Midwest, but finding myself now part of something else. The change is invigorating, life affirming. Then, so is being back here temporarily, confirming memories, revisiting friends, seeing achievements.

I expect the air to be dry, elevations much higher, the buildings younger, the past filled with iconic stories about pioneers and ranchers and miners, cowboys and indians. Mountains now dominate my daily experience, not grain elevators and deciduous trees.

 

Art and Culture, Friends, Memories, Minnesota, Woolly Mammoths

Hoaxer

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Lughnasa                                                    Monsoon Moon

Another interesting day. Wrote in the morning, then out to Lake Minnetonka for a few hours on the lake riding Falcor, Tom’s lucky dragon. It’s a Sundancer 280, capable of giving Tom a reminder of his youthful boat building days. He built his first boat at 10. He and Bill and I went from his slip over to Lord Fletcher’s, a restaurant that caters to the boating crowd. We all had walleye.

A truly Minnesota experience. A boat. Friends. A lake. And, walleye.

Coming back to the hotel, I took a nap, then went to the club lounge for appetizers. Enough for dinner.

Later, Jazz Central where I heard docent friend Grace Goggin’s son, Peter, play the sax in his band, Hoaxer. He’s good, really good, and Hoaxer is the real deal. They play a hard driving, innovative, energetic, even funny brand of jazz. They were, by turns, raw and sweet and passionate. If you get a chance, listen to them.

I stayed there until 10:30, way past my bedtime, then, for some reason, went back to my hotel and watched tv. Vacation mind, I guess. A little sleepy this morning. In an hour I leave for St. Paul, for the Groveland celebration, inside now due to thunderstorms.

Faith and Spirituality, Memories, Minnesota, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Seeking God Is Not The Problem

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Lughnasa                                                     Monsoon Moon

Liberal religion. An odd term. Maybe oxymoronic? I mean, what is more conservative than our human wonderings about death and about how to live? What is older than those questions?

And the variety of answers are endless. Taoism, Buddhism, Southern Baptists, Mithraism, Santa Muerte, Hinduism, Catholicism, Judaism and many, many others. Bahai, Druze, Islam. And, no, they don’t all have the same message, hardly.

Back in 1992 or so, I’d given up on one of those answers, Christianity. My reasons were emotional, the rationale came later. Mostly, I’d begun to find my spirituality in a very different locale, in my interior life and in the soil, in plants, in animals. Didn’t work so well in the pulpit.

I needed a place where I could be who I had become. I found a group of folks meeting in a round room over a library. A library. Worshipping in one of my favorite institutions, artifacts of human searching arrayed below us. This was the early Groveland. 25 years later here we are, celebrating your persistence, celebrating the spot you’ve carved out of humanity’s endless quest for knowing how things are with ourselves, with our planet, with time itself.

“The problem lies not with seeking God, but with those who think they’ve found God.” Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism. In an odd twist to my own seeking, Kate and I have become members of Congregation Beth Evergreen in Evergreen, Colorado, close to our home on Shadow Mountain. It’s a Reconstructionist congregation. No, I’ve not converted. They’re fine with me being what I call, for simplicity’s sake, a pagan.

“The past gets a vote, but not a veto.” Kaplan again. By this he means, quite heretically within traditional Judaism, that Judaism itself is always changing, always reconstructing itself and that literally nothing is sacred. He was not, for example, a supernaturalist.

I tell people that I’m not a Jew, but I am a reconstructionist. And, I am. Here’s the interesting part. According to Rabbi Jamie Arnold, Kaplan got his approach from, drum roll… Emerson. I don’t know that this quote is the exact place, but it’s sentiment is clearly Kaplan’s and current reconstructionist:

“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”

I offer this brief excursion into Judaism as a way of underscoring the liberal religious pilgrimage. It is one that says, yes the questions of religion are important because they are deeply human questions, so important in fact that we should hold all of the answers loosely, hold them as clues, as trail markers, not as destinations. That we should remain open to new clues, new trails, new ways of approaching this ancient probing of what matters most.

When we do, as Emerson did, as you here at Groveland do, we can never tell the impact of it. We might transform that Muslim cleric, that Hindu priest, or, that Conservative Rabbi, Mordecai Kaplan.

“It is not the seeking of God that is the problem.” No, as Kaplan says, the problem is with those who calcify the pilgrimage, enshrine the past, stop up their ears, their eyes, close their minds. You, Groveland, are caravan serai on the oldest ancientrail of all. And, a necessary one. Necessary for what? Unclear. And that’s the point.

Art and Culture, Feelings, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The Move, Travel, Woolly Mammoths

Unexpected

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Lughnasa                                                        Monsoon Moon

70+ miles I drove yesterday morning. First over to Oak Grove, close to here, then to Stevens Square where I photographed the first Community Involvement Programs building, then the second one. I lived in both. Forgot the place on 1st Avenue, but I’ll get that. Over the course of the morning I visited streets and neighborhoods I’d come to know intimately, St. Paul, New Brighton, Andover, Minneapolis. More on the feelings from this homecoming later

The biggest surprise of the day came at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. I got there about 2:30 or 3:00. Picking up my badge was long in the past, but my body remembered. Passed the guard desk by. The lobby area is completely, well, almost completely different. Tables, a big coffee shop, redone gift store. Pleasant.

I walked all the way back toward the rocks shaped in Lake Tai. Called scholar’s rocks their strange forms, curves, sharp edges, diversity reminded Chinese literati of the mountains, their power and mystery, but most importantly, of the Tao.

Up the first flight of stairs and I was in the Asian arts wing. It holds an extensive collection of Chinese and Japanese art as well as more modest exhibits of Indian, Tibetan, Vietnamese and Thai art. A collection I came to know very well. There were various Buddhas, some calling the earth to witness enlightenment, others with the mudras of reassurance, of wish granting.

A favorite part of the collection for me is the large hall containing Chinese paintings, just off the Buddhas display. Moving from one depiction of mountains to another, often scrolls longer than I am tall, there were the fantastical shapes towering up, up, up, with some small human, usually a lone scholar, sitting watching a waterfall, gazing up at the clouds. The closer I looked, and I examine these painting very carefully, the more an unexpected feeling crept me over me. Grief.

It was subtle at first, felt like simple nostalgia, a sort of sadness mixed with the wonder I’ve always felt among these objects. Slowly though, as I saw the Fergana stallions, the famed blood sweating horses from the area of the ‘stans, and noticed the upcurled lip of the copper sculpture, a rare, fine piece of work, and realized I’d never taken in his mouth before, the feeling became clear. I missed this place so much. It was an ache, a hole in my heart. Unexpected. Very.

The feeling stayed with me as I looked at a long scroll depicting a festival along a river, the Wu family reception hall, the new arrangement of the Japanese collection. It came most into focus when I looked at the tea implements, the tea house.

As I left the Asian collection and went into the excellent rearrangement of the African collection, the feeling dissipated. It did not return while I visited the Native American and Latin American galleries. Nor did it return when I saw a couple of my favorite paintings, Goya’s Dr. Arrieta and the MIA’s Kandinsky. I don’t recall its title. In theses collections I was merely a museum goer, a knowledgeable one, yes, one familiar with the art, deeply familiar in some instances, but no longer experiencing that hole in my heart.

I’m not sure what to make of it, but it was strong, very strong and it has a significance I’ve not yet sorted out.

From the MIA I went over to the Red Stag, sight of many Woolly meals over the years. Tom and Bill were already there. Ode, a colonoscopy prep victim on Monday, got good drugs at the procedure, enough to make him lose a whole day. He forgot. When reminded by Tom’s call, he came down.

It was a good visit, normal in its way. A place we’d been before, together. We’d been together many times, this was one more. Yet it was also abnormal since 900 miles separates me from this normal moment. These are life-long friends and life isn’t over yet.

Judaism, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The Move, The West, Travel, Weather +Climate

Teshuva

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Lughnasa                                                       Monsoon Moon

With gray skies, moisture in the air, lakes not far from any spot in the metro, far horizons, deciduous trees in abundance, no mountain peaks close by or in the distance, I know I’m back in the Midwest. The need to memorialize the coming of the monsoon rains would be pointless here. Lucky here.

Oddly, the club level of this hotel, which I am unintentionally on, has breakfast and substantial enough hors d’oeuvres to eat for a meal in the evening. Last night, over mushrooms stuffed with sausage, honey dew and salami, caesar salad, and a small club sandwich, I engaged one of aging’s priceless treasures. I turned off my hearing aid so the millennial buzz would soften. Ah.

Easing into the week here. Slept in until 7:30 (6:30 at home). Leisurely breakfast overlooking the convention center and Central Lutheran. Gonna get in the car in a bit and take photos of as many of the places I’ve lived in the Twin Cities that still exist. It will take a while. I moved a lot. Later on I’ll see Tom, Mark, and Bill at the Red Stag. Old friends in an old haunt.

Is it a pilgrimage when you return rather than when you seek a far destination? In Judaism the term for repentance is teshuva, return. Is this teshuva to the Twin Cities a form of repentance? It may be because it has the character, this time, of reliving, re-membering. Perhaps the pilgrimage to home literally re-members us, reclaims those pieces important to us that we left there, long ago.

When you make a move, as Kate and I did, to a new, very different place after 40 years, it involves, among much else, severing the physical cues to memory. They are out of sight, perhaps not out of mind, not entirely, but they are not refreshed. Coming back means seeing Central Lutheran and the convention center remind me of the visit of the Dali Lama, the time the Presbyterian General Assembly was here. I helped move a baptismal font, heavy marble, on a small wheeled dolly from Westminster to the convention center, served communion to a thousands. 40 years is a long time in human years.

So this is a voyage, a teshuva to mySelf, my soul, as well as a visit. The whole, at least in biological terms, is more than the sum of the parts, but it is also not less than its parts. I have parts remaining here and I want to return them to their vital place in my soul.

 

 

GeekWorld, Memories, Minnesota, Travel

in the gopher state

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Lughnasa                                            Monsoon Moon

Computer keyboard problems this am in Chamberlain, South Dakota. No joy when I tried to write this morning. Now, I’m able at least to use the laptop keyboard. The ergonomic keyboard crashes all entry methods. Sigh.

Appropriately for Lughnasa I drove through country with corn, beans, and wheat. The contract combines are out scything their way through early Nebraska, South Dakota and Minnesota wheat. Outside Ainsworth, Nebraska I had a rural moment when I started onto Ne. Hwy 49 and it was filled, both lanes, with a combine.

Right now I’m in the very opposite environment, on the 12th floor of the Millennium Hotel on Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis. I’d have to encounter a big street sweeper or an escaped Zamboni to have a similar experience.

I’m tired. The drive was long. Though I’ve done it many times, my body doesn’t seem to put up with the effort as easily. That’s ok, though. I’m back in Scandinavian inflected country, a place where the plight of each of us counts for something. The architecture here is more familiar. But, I didn’t feel that frisson of oh, I’m back home this time. Instead, I drove into the Welcome Center on I-90 just past the state line and felt like a tourist.

Here there are memories, so many memories. They tumble over each other. The old Chestnut Tree restaurant a couple of blocks from here. The 25 year plan for the year 2000 that I helped guide into existence-in 1975. The IDS which I watched emerge from the ground when I lived in the Mauna Loa apartment buildings across from the old Northwestern Hospital, now gone. Westminster Church and its associations with my work for the Presbytery. Getting married there to Raeone to Handel’s Water Music. And that’s all just in a few blocks from where I sit now, high above my past.

I’ve decided on my brief speech for Groveland. I’ll write out here before I give it.

Gonna go to bed tonight, then get out and start roaming around tomorrow. Probably over to Loring Park, the Sculpture Garden, eat lunch at the Walker. Like old times.

No pics for right now. I forgot to bring the cord that connects my phone to the computer. When I get back.