Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Politics

Fall Out?

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Spring                                             Waxing Awakening Moon

The awakening moon has a quarter lit up tonight (though it’s half of the side we always see).  Orion rests below it, sinking down below the horizon earlier and earlier now that spring has come.  He’s a winter time friend, the opposite of a snow bird.  I hope you’ve had a chance to consider the thinks in your life that need a little extra nudge as they grow, parts of you that need encouragement to awaken.  Maybe it’s that painting you’ve always wanted to start.  Buy some canvas.  A garden?  Get a shovel and a seed catalog.  Meditating?  Clear out a comfortable spot and buy a comfortable chair or big pillow.  Whatever it is spring and the awakening moon will push you along.

In my life it’s Latin, the novel, the Sierra Club’s legislative agenda and the new gardening year plus, of course, the bees.

This health care vote will not lose the Democratic party congress or the Whitehouse for the next two generations.  I’ve heard people make comparisons to LBJ’s famous observation about passage of the Civil Rights Act.  He was right.  Passing the Civil Rights Act upended the solid South and kick started the rise of the moral majority.  The result was 40 years of conservative politics from which it will take us a long time to recover.

(The Democrats will not need a fallout shelter.  The party of no will.)

Health care is in no way similar.  The opposition to it is smoke, driven by the disinformation and fear mongering of right wing shock jocks and the little old lady from Stillwater with the big hair and the desire to smooch the Bushmaster.  There is no comparable bloc of votes lost by providing health care to all in the richest country in the world.  Are there mad people, some foaming at the mouth, tea drooling out of every orifice?  Yes, I guess there such people.  They are the party of no we can’t.  Now, at least for this brief shining moment, the Democrats have awakened (see what I mean?) to the principles that used to inform Democratic platforms, principles that demanded a fair shake for the poorest of the poor and made sure that workers got fair wages and decent benefits.

Bees, Garden, Great Wheel

A Warm-Blooded Insect?

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Spring                                         Waxing Awakening Moon

Sunny, but cool though warm weather seems fated to come our way.  Ice out has advanced on Round Lake though there is still rough, weak ice over most of its surface.  Many daffodils have speared their way up through the leaves and other detritus from last falls end of the growing season.  I’ve seen a few hosta roll-ups, too.  I put in my last order of bee stuff yesterday, bringing seven honey supers, 70 super frames and 50 super foundations, a copper hive cover and 75 frame and foundations for the deep hive bodies.

The old machine shed, now to be the honey house needs a thorough cleansing which will be an early task once the weather moves away from soggy and I have some time for outside work.

Today, in just a couple of minutes, I have a call about Matt Entenza’s gubernatorial campaign.  They want my thoughts on environmental issues.  They can have every one of them.  After the call, on to the language of ancient Rome.  Later in the day I may revise Liberal II.  That novel just sits there right now.  Waiting.  Meanwhile my promiscuous creative spirit entertains other guests, a new project, a big project, that will follow After the Hawthorn Wars.

Here’s another jaw dropper that I learned about bees during my bee course.  Over the winter the colony becomes a large cluster with all the bees hanging, literally, together, shivering.  The shivering produces heat and keeps the colony alive during the temperature drops of winter.  This means, said Marla Spivak, that in winter the colony, the whole colony, acts like a warm blooded animal.  The colony is a super-organism that gathers food, births larvae and nurses them, takes diseased and deceased members, defends itself and takes up a lot of time with architecture as well.

Since the cluster happens inside the hive boxes, it is difficult to picture.  I’ve chosen a swarm in the picture here, to show you a cluster, but not like the one I had in my first colony this winter.

Art and Culture, Asia

Awakening in the Dark

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Spring                                              Waxing Awakening Moon

Rolled down the car window–oops, anachronism.  Pushed the button which slid the window down–and the scent of moist earth rolled into the truck.  Peat moss mixed with new plant and freshly unfrozen water carried along by a light spring breeze.  Tonight the awakening moon continues to swell, move toward full, growing in synchronicity with the planet 250,000 miles away; its dance partner in this long running marathon.  We squeeze her, she pulls our waters and squeezes us.  A dancer and her consort.

The world for now, our part of the world, moves in darkness and I find the quiet soothing.  The night calms this exurban area down to peaceful.  Silence does not need to be sought; it comes to us as the hour moves past 9:00 pm or so.  If only for these dark hours, we have a hermetic isolation, nothing visible out the windows except stars and the moon.

The longer I study art history, mix with the objects at the MIA, the more I tend to see much of the world through the lens of art.  It’s not a matter of finding art that fits a moment or an idea; rather, it’s as if paintings or sculpture or movies or prints or masks rise up from the unconscious, suggest themselves as a way, a path into an experience.  Here on the website I often choose, usually choose, literal relationships but in day to day life the moments are more ephemeral, less one to one.

Let me see if I can think of an example.  A train whistle late at night may call to mind Honthorst’s “Denial of St. Peter.”  Perhaps it’s the association of a night scene and a sound transformed by being heard at night.  I don’t know.

This is hard, it doesn’t really happen exactly like that, it’s more suggestive, subliminal.  Evanescent. Like the dying tone of the train as it moves further away into the darkness.

Aging, Politics

OH, Yeah!

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Spring                                    Waxing Awakening Moon

You’re traveling through another dimension — a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s a signpost up ahead: your next stop: deciphering Medicare!  I’m not kidding here.  Kate and I have given this day to determining a post retirement budget and one of the most difficult things to understand is not the cost of medicare, but just what goes with what.  If the explanatory booklet that simplifies Medicare, from a local senior citizen organization, is any indication of what health care reform promises, God help us.

On the other hand this is an exciting time for both of us, investigating life when Kate no longer has work demands, figuring out the wonders of budgeting when such terms as dissaving begin to make sense.  Dissaving is, you guessed it, spending money you’ve saved.  That’s the basic idea in retirement unless you’re stuck behind the counter at Mac and Don’s with a silly hat and the smell of grease in your gray hair.

After a while we gave up and went to lunch.  Then a nap.  Now we’re refreshed and ready to get back at the budget process.

Say, did I mention that I’m proud of the Democrats?  Damn.  Gutsy politics.  The last time we had truly historic reform came under a former senator, Lyndon Baines Johnson who gave us Model Cities and Civil Rights.  Remember the Great Society?  I do.  Except for that pesky war in Vietnam Johnson was a great one.

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on the news, Health, Politics, US History

President Shoots the Moon

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Spring                                                 Waxing Awakening Moon

Moon viewing.  We don’t do it much here, except as a casual thing, a walk outside, look up, oh a nice moon tonight or shine on harvest moon for me and my gal then on to the drive in or what’s on your play list dude? In Japan they take the moon viewing a step further, ok, a whole nighttime stroll longer.  They build moon viewing platforms, have parties, and produce some wonderful art that features the moon.  Tonight the waxing awakening moon hung just above the trees in the west, behind a scrim of clouds, a faint glow surrounding the upturned crescent.  It is a moon to remember.

This crescent awakening moon will now memorialize for me the day the Democratic party got some balls.  Obama wanted to pass health care reform.  I saw a representative, I don’t know his name, with silver hair, looked about my age, get up and say, “Before we were born, reform of the health care system was begun, just waiting for this day.”

This is not a victory for Democrats, however, it is a victory for the American people, a victory for those who have lived their lives in fear of a cough, a broken leg, a child’s fever.  In this country, which can bail out billionaires and support subsidies to bank robbers, that is, banks that rob, to have 32 million people with no health insurance has been a crime of long standing, a crime that has produced serial deaths over and over with no fear of prosecution.

It is my hope that Republicans will understand that many of the folks who swallow the tea party line are the very people who will wake up some time soon with health insurance, health insurance they have never had. If you don’t believe me, just look at the Gallup map below and consider it with an overlay of the Bush and McCain presidential votes.

Obama has won a victory here, a hard fought victory and he should get his props.  He should also get more credit for calming the Great Recession and ushering in a period of up ticking economic news.  I imagine we will see more such substantive wins for him as his presidency continues.

Hurray for the red, white and blue!

Now a moment on partisan politics and post-partisan politics, the so-called third way.  Yes, our politics have become so polarized that it is difficult to recall the times when it wasn’t.  Yes, there is acrimony and ill will and yes, it does make governance more difficult than it needs to be.  Here’s the thing, though.  In the end it is politics.  This clumsy, broken, dysfunctional process is the way we have chosen, and keep choosing, to mediate our substantive differences.  I read a very compelling argument for changing the system of representation in the Senate where 10% of the states have 90% of the population, but have only a tenth of the votes.  The author of the argument went on to say that fixing this dysfunction was not possible and that we needed to work with the system we have.

It’s not ideal, but there is no system for managing the affairs of human societies that is and ours is better than most.  This vote proves it.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

Liberal II

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Spring                                    Waxing Awakening Moon

A writing day.  I put in several hours in a row on Liberal II:  The Present.  I was going to include the future, but in the end it took all I had to finish with the present.  The story, the present, is a difficult one to tell to liberal audiences like Groveland UU because the reality is that liberalism is victorious.  We live in a modern world that has liberal ideas as commonplace beliefs:  individual liberty, equality, the rule of law, government by the people, an openness to change, a market economy.  When I finish editing Liberal II, I’ll post it, but the hard to convey message is that more folks are not Unitarian because the worldview we embrace is widely shared.  Strange, huh?

I also worked a bit on Latin.  During this time Kate got outside and pruned the fruit trees in our young orchard.  She’s in charge of pruning and assembling woodenware, so I went out later in the day and complimented her on her work.  She did Latin in the morning.

I love these kind of days where a focused task gets completed.

After I finish the first draft of Liberal II, I also took on trying to get my networked computer in the study to share a printer with the other computers, like a nice computer should.  It took a while, but I got them all clicking together. Felt like a victory to me.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel

Spring

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Spring                                  Waxing Awakening Moon

Today is the spring equinox.  We’ve made it through another winter.

The bees have already begin to buzz and plant life has pushed light green shoots through the soil.   The days have begun to warm and yesterday I felt the warmth of the sun on my neck.  What a treat!

Spring, more than anything else, presses us into realm of fertility and abundance, the efflorescence of mother earth that feeds us all.  Birds come back from their winter homes.  Gardener’s start plants for their gardens.  Some folks lift their house, an expression I heard first in Minnesota.  It means spring cleaning.  Or spring cleaning means lifting the house.  Whatever.

This is a good day to consider the things that are tender shoots in your life.  Maybe’s its that new package of bees on the way from California, that novel you finally set down to write, that language you finally got started on.  Maybe it’s a redesign of your living space, your occupational space, your own, internal space.  Remember that tender shoots require care, yes, but also remember that those tender shoots have power behind them, power rooted in the part of you that made them surface.  Some of those shoots, most of them, the best thing you can do, let them flourish at their pace.  Don’t force them.

Watch for baby birds, puppies, infants, kittens, new plants.  They are the concrete hope out of which we make not only this world, but the future one, too.  They are reason you exist, to care for them, to provide a nourishing environment for their growth.  Those tenders shoots in your life are the same.  They are the concrete hope out of which you will make these moments in your life and the future ones.  So, be kind to them.  Let’em grow.

Art and Culture, Bees, Woolly Mammoths

Putting the Stuff Together

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Imbolc                                   Waxing Wild Moon

A tour for Academia Caesar Chavez this morning.  Delightful 4th graders with lots of questions and energy.  I think they liked looking over the railing into the fountain court about as much as anything.   The talent level in the docent corps always amazes me.  The two women docents who shared this tour with me were, respectively, a professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary and a retired professor of epidemiology from the Public Health department at the UofM.deep-hive-body

After the tour I had lunch at Keegan’s Pub with Frank Broderick.  He gives me the leftover corned beef after his St. Patrick’s day meal for the Woollies, but he forgot on Monday.  He had a corned beef sandwich for lunch and I had bangers and mash.  The bangers were much smaller than the ones I remember from England.

The first order this season from Mann Lake Bee Supply came yesterday.  It had eleven hive bodies and seven honey supers.  Kate has a hive body and a honey super already put together.  A hive body is deeper than a honey super since it contains frames that house brood, the queen and the nurse bees.  A honey super is about half the size to fit the honey frames.

(pics:  a deep hive body and a honey super with frames)super-frames

We’re buzzing.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Politics

Working In the Head

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Imbolc                                 Waxing Awakening Moon

A day with my head in the books, The Future of Liberalism by Alan Wolfe, for the most part.  I’ve also reviewed notes from my first research for Liberal I:  roots and branches.  My goal in liberal II is to tease out the social and inner context in which liberalism makes a difference, focused this time more on the inner life of the person in the liberal faith tradition and the political liberal in the outside world.  In addition I want to say a few words about the future of the liberal idea as modernity warps and changes, yet remains, in its social dynamics, much the same.

Let me open that up just a bit.  Alan Wolfe makes the point that liberalism has been and is the perfect vehicle for managing modernism, but that modernism itself created the world in which liberal ideas can flourish.  Modernism grew from the enlightenment emphasis on reason pushed into the political arena first by the American and then the French Revolutions.  Their mutual synergy with the Industrial Revolution created a political climate in which different political and social concepts had to sort out their differences.  Liberal democracy, of the sort enshrined in the American constitution and somewhat later changes in Europe and Great Britain, was and is the best vehicle for doing so. Liberal procedural law takes into account differences by its very design.  Consider how an authoritarian regime would handle substantial differences in citizen’s beliefs.

The same holds true for civil societies with multiple strains of religious belief.  In this case, too, the liberal temperament’s willingness to be flexible, to change and adapt has the best hope of creating a culture in which differences breed debate and discussion rather than suppression and violence.

Technological and scientific advances also create turmoil in the culture as does a dominant capitalist economy.  Here again the liberal core values of individual liberty, freedom and equality shave off the roughest edges of this chaotic change so a culture can sustain itself intact.

Bees, Great Work, Travel

Mid-Session, Mid-March

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Imbolc                                           Waxing Awakening Moon

A sunny, bright day, but cooler.  44 right now.  Temps will trend downward over the next week toward more normal March weather.  This week we’ve melted all of our snow away, unusual.

Put in a large order at Mann’s bee supplies for deep hive boxes, honey supers, frames and foundations, hive tools, feeders and pollen patty mix.  Kate’s taken over the woodenware phase of the process, agreeing to put stuff together as it comes.  This is great for me since handling such matters tends toward large amounts of frustration and blue language.

Spent yesterday AM doing travel arrangements for Kate’s trip to Denver (car) and her trip to San Francisco (air), writing our CPA, signing up for a healthy eating class from Brenda Langston and moving money around.  A fussy, businessy day with our business meeting in the AM.

The mid-session for the Sierra Club Legislative Committee finds us fighting defense on the Nuclear Moratorium and the Polymet Mining proposal, pushing a few bills, but, for the most part, working in the trenches.  An old flame of mine, now a tax staffer for the Minnesota Senate used to say “No one’s wallet or rights are safe while the legislature is in session.”  That emphasizes the need for constant surveillance as bills go into committees, especially after Friday, the 2nd deadline which winnows legislation down further.  As bills miss deadlines, authors begin to look for creative ways of pushing their legislation like getting it added to omnibus bills or arranging for amendments once a bill is on the floor of either house.

Today is a day for Liberal II:  Liberalism-the present (and, I think, the future since I have no slot this year to finish a trilogy.)  Research all day.  Writing starting over the weekend perhaps.  So I’d best get to it.  Later.