• Category Archives Woolly Mammoths

  • What Do the Shang Kuei and the Zhou Kuei Have In Common?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    39  bar falls 30.21 7mph NNE dewpoint 14

               Full Moon of Winds

    Warren Wolfe handed out a sheet at the Woolly retreat, a project development sheet that involves identifying a project or activity that compels us in some way.  I missed his presentation since I left early for Hawai’i, so I have to fill it out now.  The answer that keeps coming up for me is the permaculture work Kate and I plan here. 

    The whole notion of working with our land so that it grows healthier and we gain more foodstuffs from it attracts me, as I’ve said earlier.  With Warren’s notion I can keep this work both before a group who can help me with my accountability and have a built in audience, too.  I’m writing about it here to let those of who read this know.  You can enter my circle of accountability, too, if you wish.

    As the notion becomes clearer, I write here, on the Permaculture page, what exactly we intend to do for this year.  I don’t know enough quite yet to put down objectives, but I imagine they will mostly be preparatory.  There are projects from last year that will get finished anyhow like the firepit and converting most of the raised beds to vegetables.  There are two that will get some work done on them this year, but will probably not finish:  the grandkids playhouse in the woods and the root cellar.  The Permaculture work is in addition to these already planned projects.  

    Still deep in the Shang and Zhou dynasties, trying to decide how to present a large collection of bronze vessels that can be daunting for first-time viewers.  I’ve made a couple of decisions.  We’ll start in the Neolithic ceramics, the 1st case in the ceramics gallery and move to the Bronze Age ceramic case before we head over to the Bronze gallery.  This will place the development of bronze squarely in the material culture roots from which it sprang.  It will also show the mutual interaction between bronze vessel design and ceramics.  Bronze imitates ceramics at first, then, later ceramics imitate bronze. 

    The Shang and the Zhou get equal treatment in my mind so far, but I haven’t selected actual objects.  The Shang kuei and hu, the Pillsbury owl (tsun), the ritual bell, the ting all seem likely to make the cut.  But, we’ll see.  Many more pages to read and objects to see.


    Art and Culture Great Work Our Land and Home Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • Tea Master for a Day

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    46  bar falls 29.96 3mph NNW dewpoint 25

              Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

    Last night the moon of winds cast shadows on our yard, elongated dogwoods, thick oak trunks and thin lines of multiple raspberry canes.  This point in the seasonal change is delicate.  Thin ice forms a lattice over the snow while tiny drops of water gather along the roof line ready to plummet the final distance to the earth.  Snow and grass play encirclement with grass spreading outward from trees and shrubs while the snow holds its own over the lawn, the hills and prairie grass.  Here there daubs of photosynthetic green have begun to appear.  Rosemary beneath the steps.  Tufts of grass up close to the house.  It is a gradual change for the moment, but soon the earth will leap and shout, fly flags of bright colors and clothe itself again in verdant splendor.

    Tour today with students, 6th graders, from a Muslim school in Fridley.  As near as I could tell, the kids were mostly Somalia, all born here, but there parents emigrated.  I had the boys, David Fortney had the girls.  We circled each other for half an hour in the Islamic gallery as these children drank in the physical objects of their cultures, linking themselves to the Seljuk Turks, the Safavid Persians and the Mughals of India.  After half an hour we went into the Weber Collection (Japanese traveling exhibition).  I asked them to become tea masters selecting objects for a tea ceremony for persons unfamiliar with Japanese art.

    We saw Hotei reach for the moon and a Zen monk’s ordination festival.  We learned wabi from the Negoro ware with its faded red lacquer, worn and used; we learned sabi from the tea wares, especially the lumpy and imperfect mizusashi.  I read them a Daoist poem and its conversion into a Buddhist poem by the extraction of only one line, spun downward in a flowing cursive script.  Time went fast and at the end they picked objects for their tea ceremony:  8 Views of Xiao and Xiang, the delicate miniature Song dynasty-like landscape, the Negoro spoon, the tea caddy with a silk cover, Oribe teaware and a few dishes for tea food.  Then we were done.

    Afterward I copied and copied and copied, even to the end of the toner cartridge, material on Chinese bronzes.  I have a tour on Saturday that will focus only on our Chinese bronzes.  I chose them because I wanted to go deeper into the world of early Chinese dynasties like the Shang and the Chou and the Han.


    Art and Culture Great Wheel Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • Up At 5AM and Hard At It

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    33  bar steep fall 30.11  6mph N  windchill 33

        Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

    Boy is my sense of time screwed up.  Got up at 4:30AM for the bathroom.  Went back to bed.  No sleep.  Waited.  Still no sleep.  So at 5AM I got up, went downstairs, opened by John Weber collection catalogue and tried to figure out what to do next.  This was difficult because I had put my notes for the tour in the carrier I take when I go into the museum.  That location didn’t occur to me until ten sleepy minutes had gone by shuffling this paper and that trying to locate the item I needed to finish the tour.  Those notes.

    But I did find them.  As a quiet spring snow began to fall outside in the dark, I entered again the world of the Heian poets, the Shining Prince Genji and the floating world of courtesans, no theatre and elegant costume.  Japan and China are strange and distant cultures for most Westerners so entree into their world does not come without some struggle, some setting aside of preconceived notions. 

    Over the last three years in particular I have worked hard to get a handle on the historical context in both Japan and China.  I’ve worked harder on China, but Japan has had some time from me, too.  As so often happens in the life of the mind, eventually the heart begins to follow and somewhere along the line I went from interested to captivated. 

    It was easy then to begin comparing poems used in the poetry competitions, mythical contests in which cultured Japanese matched poets from different eras, then matched two of their poems that seem to have resonance.  The competition was not between the two poets in question of course, but among the Japanese who created the matches.  It would be like, say, putting Robert Frost’s “Snowy Evening” against one of Emily Dickinson’s darker pieces, Wallace Stevens and Coleridge. 

    So it went for two hours until the dogs began to whine and I let them out of their crates, fed them and began my own breakfast.

    After breakfast I caught another hour and a half or so of sleep, then drove into the Common Roots Cafe where the docent book club gathered to discuss the (apparent) lack of religion/spirituality in contemporary art.  I guided this discussion, but I’m afraid I didn’t conceive a way to do it fruitfully.  We had a lot of conversation, though, and I think we may have gotten greater clarity from it than was immediately obvious. 

    It was Tom Blyfeld’s 80th birthday.  He celebrates his 56th wedding anniversary on Friday.  He mentioned the doctor who delivered two of his children, a man 90 something who has great-great grandchildren. Amazing.  He will celebrate his 65th wedding anniversary.  These are numbers unattainable by most of us in the divorce generation.

    Tonight is the celebration of St. Patrick’s day at Frank Broderick’s.  He bought the meat last Friday.  His table always groans with meat and potatoes and cabbage.  I look forward to it each year.


    Art and Culture Faith and Spirituality Friends Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • Fallen Oak Leaves in the Snow

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    26  71%  24%  1mph EES bar30.02 falls windchill25  Imbolc

              Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    The Superbowl program started at 1pm.  1pm.  Kickoff isn’t until 5:17pm.  Geez.

    Spent late morning putting together my workshop/presentation for the Woolly Retreat.  I plan to read sections from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, talk about it a bit as a fable for our time and a bit about what I call the ur-faith.  The way to name it still is not clear to me.  Maybe that will come as the workshop proceeds.  Sometimes presenting things to others helps flesh them out, identify new angles or flaws in the conception.   The sacrament I posted a few days ago will follow the reading and then we’ll talk. 

    I may use a way to get inside material I learned in seminary.  In this method the audience gets an invitation to take on one of the roles in the reading, to hear the material being read from that person’s perspective.  In SGGK characters include Arthur, Gawain, Guinevere, the Green Knight, the two women in Hautdesert’s castle, and the servant who leads Gawain to the Green Chapel.  Sometimes this cracks open poetry or scripture in a way nothing else can.

    Fallen oak leaves have begun to show through the snow.   The boulders in our boulder walls now peak out from caps of white.  This is an unlovely aspect of snow.  Snow has its most beautiful moments as and just after it falls.  If it remains cold, as it often does after a big snow, the pristine character of the snow can last for days.  Sometimes it does glint and sparkle in the sun.  Hope we get a big whack just before I leave for Dwelling in the Woods.


    Faith and Spirituality Weather +Climate Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • A Retreat, Then An Advance

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    19  82%  21%  omph ENE bar29.90  windchill19  Winter

                 Waning Gibbous Winter Moon

    A DVR.  Hadn’t planned on getting one, but the hdmi connection with the TV demanded it over the HD converter box alone.  Surprise.  I like it.  Already I’ve taped two movies, Cronicas and Killer of Sheep.  When I’m watching a movie, I prefer to start at the beginning and the start times of movies often don’t conform to my schedule.  In the past I would check the replay schedules and try to find a time that worked or I’d skip it.  Now I can press the record button and the DVR records the movie and I can replay when I wish.  Kate’s also used it to tape a TPT series, Jewish Americans.  Guess you never know.

    No more tours until March.  I have ten days before I go to Dwelling in the Woods, days I’ll use to finish the garden planning, edit my sermon for Groveland and produce a 1-page Transcendentalism for Brights, work on my new novel and a short story.  Also, I’ll do the various pre-trip preparations like stopping the newspaper, the mail, reserving a ride on the Airport Shuttle, packing. 

    Also have to plan a one-hour presentation to the brothers, something I want to share with them, a passion or a part of my life right now.  Could be anything.  We switched to this format last year and we liked it.  The way we’d done it before involved a focus on a theme and a common thread in what we presented:  Fathers, Mothers, Death, Myth.  Last year we had a theme, Darkness, but the suggestion was to present the theme in a creative manner.  I chose a ritual of darkness which involved reading poetry excerpts (Dover Beach, The Night by Rilke, Stopping by the Woods on A Snowy Evening that sort) and, in a room lit only with candles, extinguishing a candle with each reading.   This year, don’t know yet.


    GeekWorld Travel Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • Cows With Guns

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    4  65%  20%  0mph SWS bar30.06  steep fall windchll2  winter

                        Full Winter Moon

    Here is a wonderful movie from the BLF, the Bovine Liberation Front:   Cows With Guns.  Thanks to Paul Strickland (and a Golden Plump Warrior Chicken Tip o’ the Hat to the Helgeson’s: Beware of the chickens with choppers.)

    The Woollies met last night.  We discussed our memories of the Civil Rights movement and the time before it which we can remember well.  Paul remembered white’s only drinking fountains, segregated movie theatres and a grandmother who said of a man beating a dog, “I wouldn’t treat a nigger like that.”  Scott Simpson told of two and a half years as a member of an African-American Pentecostal church in north Minneapolis.  When he brought a lady friend home one evening, his mother quietly asked him, “You don’t plan to marry her, do you?”  I recalled the bitter and often painful days when white radicals like myself marched and acted in solidarity with Blacks.  We were all struggling to find our identity and we accomplished some of that in angry confrontations with each other. 

    We debated how far the culture had come since those days.   Some of us thought we’d come a long ways, others (myself, for instance) thought not as far as it seems.  I cited this incident from that went to trial in September of  last year:

    “Al Hixon installed some carpeting for his residential construction business one Saturday morning. Then he took his Jaguar out of winter storage and stopped for some fresh oil at a Sinclair station near his Golden Valley home back on April 2, 2005.

    The next thing he knew, police officers were throwing him face down on the pavement, jumping on his back, handcuffing him, placing a boot on his neck and shooting pepper spray in his eyes and nostrils, according to his testimony at a federal excessive-force trial Friday in St. Paul.”

    Warren told of an African-American friend who found an Eveleth restaurant accepting and a Virginia bar, only a few miles away, hostile and threatening.  It’s the randomness of these experiences, the not knowing when racism will rise up, that makes life still stressful and unpleasant, at the least for most African-Americans.

    Oh, and we set up our calendar for next retreat, decided on a theme for the retreat and the next year:  All Themes Considered.   This is astonishing productivity for a group of usually slow to come to a decision men, but we liked it anyhow.


    Faith and Spirituality Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • The Buddhist After-Life and the Killing Fields

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    25  93%  27%  omph NNW bar 29.77 windchill25  Winter

                      New Moon

    Had a summary of our gathering (Woollies) at the Istanbul Bistro, but lost in a multiple cascading of Internet Explorer browser pages.  Probably a sign I should go back to Firefox.  I used to use it, then I abandoned it, used it again, and abandoned it again.  Just like Darth Vader I keep coming back to the evil empire.

    Mark, Warren, Paul, Tom, Frank, Bill and Stefan showed up.  We spoke of politics and Rome, of Green Knights present and long dead. A brief comment was made about the Istanbul not being a sportsbar, a positive.  It’s quiet and it has a round table around which this latter day collection of Knights Errant can sit.  That does mean knights in error, doesn’t it?

    Mark has a gig in Bangkok designing teen sex exhibitions for Unesco/Thailand.  It’s a campaign to promote safe sex in a nation where AIDS among youngsters has become a problem again.  After that he will return to the US, then go back to Cambodia to construct an exhibit near the killing fields, one dealing with the Buddhist afterlife.  To continue the international theme Paul Strickland will host a trip to Syria in November and his organization will co-host a trip with the Hindu Temple of Maple Grove to Southern India.  Stefan chimed in with the fact that he’s taking his kids to Rome to visit a person he knows who works in the American Embassy there.  Makes for good dinner table conversation.  Those who’d been to Rome all agreed the most memorable moment was the first coffee. 

    We discussed the political scene.  All of us were happy with the real choices represented by the candidates.  Of course, SuperTuesday will eliminate any chance for us to pariticipate in candidate selection and after we will have 7 months of attack ads, but right now it is glorious.  Tom wondered if any of us had supported any candidates financially.  Frank said, yes, he and Mary had sent money to Obama.

    Warren reported good news about his mom and dad.    

     The retreat and a theme came up, but we put it off until Paul’s.  Mark will not attend since he’s got to be in Thailand the first week of February.  I’m leaving early for Hawai’i.  One of those years.

     Forgot to mention here I watched Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast the other night. It’s one of the Janus Films collection I got for my 60th birthday, 50 films from 50 years of their distribution of foreign films in the US.  This movie floats across the mind like a dream, a fairy tale given form and substance.  It’s images have remained with me.  It sat in my DVD player for a long time because I didn’t want to watch it; but, like each one of the films from the collection I’ve watched it had its own unique charm.


    Art and Culture Politics Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • The Byte Master

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Bill Schmidt came over this afternoon and coached me in Word Press.  He did the heavy lifting when it came to shifting my website created in FrontPage to this new vehicle, Word Press.  I’m glad he made the change because I don’t understand what he did.

    Bill and I have spent 20 years plus in the same men’s group.  I’ve gone from from 40 to 60 over that time and Bill from 50 to 70.  That length of time together builds a lot of trust, much like a marriage.  He has the password to my site and continues to fiddle with some of the nuances.  Where did the navigation bars on the old site go, for example.

    He coached me in the original change when I put up AncientTrails for the first time.  I had a couple of months of enforced leisure then, thanks to surgical repair of my ruptured right Achilles tendon.  Thanks to his help then, I’ve picked up Word Press quicker.  Still a lot to learn, but that’s part of the fun of doing this. 

    Hope to see your comments here some time soon.


    Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged