Winter New (Seed Catalog) Moon
Not only is it New Year’s day, but it is also a new moon, a propitious beginning to 2014. A cold beginning too, well below zero before today and well below zero for the first few days of the New Year. Appropriate for our state, bordering as we do with Canada, sharing the great inland sea, the Boundary Waters, Lake of the Woods and the Minnesota Angle.
Minnesota as a place nourishes me, the Boreal woods, Lake Superior, having wolves and moose and bear as part of our state fauna. There is, too, the vast stretch of glaciated, watered divots in the earth that give us our 10,000 lakes. The Anishinabe and the Lakota both have ancestral lands here, now much reduced in size by reservation, yet still here and still affecting the culture of us boat people.
The Scandinavian first influence dominates this mostly German state, giving us more of a Norwegian and Swedish and Finnish caste than perhaps we might have had otherwise. We have a large co-op movement, pockets of truly radical politics and an engaged citizenry.
The Twin Cities have a remarkable abundance of cultural offerings: museums, theaters, dance companies, many well-known writers and support systems for novices, a gathering of significant musical institutions like the SPCO and ?the minnesota orchestra? We have as well recording studios for hip hop and rap, Prince’s Paisley Palace and Bob Dylan’s hometown.
The containers for all this, St. Paul and Minneapolis, have great park systems and multiple lakes within the city limits, 22 in Minneapolis alone. In recent years the Twin Cities have become one of the most bike friendly cities in the country with bike lanes, the Grand Round full city bicycle tour and several bridges specifically for bicycles.
Cuisine may not be our shining star, but it’s pretty good. Our downtowns are not in ruin, far from it, in fact both cities have clocked in-migration in the last few years.
Health care in Minnesota stands next to that of Hawai’i as first in the nation and stands up well in international comparisons, too. That’s important to us third-phasers. Educationally we have the University of Minnesota, Carleton, St. Olaf, Gustavus Adolphus, Macalester, St. Thomas and a fine system of technical schools. We also have a dramatic and unfortunate and unnecessary achievement gap between white students and students of color.
Plus we have winter. And it keeps the riff raff out.
