General

And Then Again

Leave a comment

Fall                            Waxing Blood Moon

The phone rang.  Dog outside the fence.  Yes, indeed, Rigel had attacked the vulnerable spot in our defenses, the truck gate.  No electric fence there.  So, once again, I retrieved her and this time toughened up the gate some more.  I’d already had it repaired and chained.

Sierra Club legislative work proceeds apace with issue briefs coming in and the work load beginning to stack up.  Feels good.

This week I have gotten to workout each day.  I need that.  It keeps me mostly sane.

Business meeting today.  Doing fine.

Dogs

Yelp!

1 Comment

Fall                                        Waxing Blood Moon

Yelp!  Ah, what sweet music to my ears.  Here I am, shame on me, celebrating a cry of pain from an animal I love.  It is, however, a liberating sound in this strange regard; if we are not able to contain Rigel–she is the leader of jail breaks–, she’ll have to go back to the breeder;  so to keep her confined is to maintain her in the home she loves and where she is loved.  She doesn’t really runaway.  She follows her nose over the fence and through the woods to whichever neighbor catches her first.  She would come back if left to her own devices, but the realities of suburban living don’t allow her own devices.  Therefore, Yelp!, is a good thing.

This is probably the largest project of a domestic nature I’ve ever attempted.  It took a while because I had to learn something new at every turn of the page, but with the voltage flowing and the dogs contained for now, I can mark it down as successful.  A big deal for me.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Myth and Story

Mabon (Fall) 2009

Leave a comment

Fall                               Waxing Blood Moon

Equinox.  Today is the fall equinox.  In spring we celebrate the shift towards yet more light and warmth as the trend toward lengthened days sees daylight overtaking the night.   Now the shift has a different, more somber direction.  At the Summer Solstice the hours of daylight began to shrink in relation to the hours of darkness.  At this equinox the night begins to predominate, an acceleration that will reach its peak at the Winter Solstice.

Contemporary Wiccans (some at least) call this equinox Mabon and see it as the final harvest festival.  My own understanding and practice sees Mabon as the second of three harvest festivals:  Lughnasa (ended yesterday), Mabon and Samhain (Summer’s End).  Here on the 45th latitude the gardening year does begin to wind down now.

On farms, however, the corn harvest lasts well into October and even in our garden we have carrots, parsnip, garlic and potatoes still in the ground.   In the ancient British Isles the end of summer meant deciding how much livestock you could feed through the winter.   If there was too little food for your herd, a certain number of animals would be slaughtered and their meat prepared to sustain the family over the winter.

In either case though the fall equinox is the moment when the Great Wheel takes a decisive turn toward darkness.  That shift, along with the senescence in the garden and in the trees and fields, makes this an appropriate time for taking stock.  Kate and I are in the midst of preserving through canning, drying and storing the fruits of our summer’s work.  Grain and corn gets driven to the cathedrals of the plains in open trucks filled to the brim with yellow or golden seeds.  The elevators fill up as does our newly built store room.

On a personal level this turn of the Great Wheel offers us a similar opportunity, that is, a time to take stock of the summer, the last year, even the course of our life.   Experience the joy of taking in to yourself the fruits you have harvested as a result of your own hard work.  Yes, money may be a part of that, but it is not the most important.  How have you increased in wisdom?  Have you and a significant other grown in your relationship?  Has a relationship that needed to come to an end done so and allowed you to move into a new phase of life?

This is a wonderful festival for gratitude.  In fact, if you do nothing else to acknowledge this transition, take a moment to make a list of people and things for which you are grateful.  You could take this one step further and make others in your life aware of your gratitude.

Finally, on a life level, the Great Wheel’s turn at Mabon symbolizes the autumn of our lives.  If this is where you are on your ancient trail, Mabon prompts you to consider the gifts and lessons we have embraced along the way.  The Great Wheel turns toward the final harvest, that day when we will be gathered up into the abundance from which we came and to which we return.  Present to us now that the years ahead are fewer than the ones behind this knowledge can enrich these autumnal days.  Life becomes more precious, an experience to be savored, lingered over, greeted with joy hour by hour, day by day.

In the end the Wild Hunt comes for all of us, the just and the unjust.  The Great Wheel teaches us that even after it comes, life will go on and that, in some fashion, we will all be part of it.  Come to think of it, this may be my best answer to the question about the after life.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Woolly Mammoths

Bio-Char and the After-Life

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                             Waxing Blood Moon

The Woolly’s met at the old Cenacle in a new retreat center.  We’ve met there three or four times this year.

The focus was views on the afterlife.  The conversation revealed a surprisingly conservative undertone with several Woollys hedging their metaphysical bets.  Immanuel Swedenborg got a mention as did reincarnation as a proven reality.

Some, like me, took a more existential stance.  “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”  I believe that was Carl Sagan.  The questions death raises have confounded humanity since at least the time of the Neanderthals.  There is something about a void after death, an extinctionist perspective I saw it called recently, that unsettles many people.

It is, as much as anything else, I imagine, such a stark contrast with the vitality and hereness of life.  That this magical adventure, this ancient trail might end in nothingness seems like a cheat.  But by whose perspective?

To me the wonder is this life, this one chance we have to experience whatever we can, to do what we can.  To be who we are.

On another note Mark Odegard had two words for today’s graduates:  bio-char.  New to you?  Me, too.  It’s worth a look though and here’s a website that will help you get up to speed.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work

The Afterlife

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                Waxing Blood Moon

The energizer box, a low impedance model, has a connection to the rope.  There is not enough high capacity underground wire left to do the grounds so I’ll stop by Fleet Farm on my way to Wayzata tonight.  The Woolly meeting convenes on the grounds of the old Cenacle retreat center, now an addiction treatment center.

Tomorrow morning we’ll power up and see if the damn thing works.  My best guess right now is that it will.  Then we wait for word from Rigel that it has begun to serve its intended function.

Warren has posed a question about the afterlife for tonight’s Woolly meeting.  What do we believe about it?

A few years ago I used this  analogy for the question of the afterlife.  It still expresses what I feel.

Think of the universe as a great tapestry woven from the life and death of stars, the solar winds, the orbits of planets and the emergence of life, especially on the planet we know intimately.  Our life, lived as best we can, blinks on at some point in this tapestry and adds color, texture, intensity and vitality to the design.  This tapestry never loses anything and it extends as far as the Great Wall of Reality extends.  Without your life the tapestry would be a poorer, less beautiful creation.

This is my Credo:
From the very stuff of this cosmos we were made.

Each life is a unique, energetic organization of this stuff.

Human life is neither less nor more unique than any other, with one exception (maybe):  consciousness.

Each of us has a Self into which we try to live.  The Self pulls us and prods us to be who we are.

You are a special and important contribution to the story of the Universe, so you must live as who you are.  If you live as you believe others would have you be, then the world loses your unique and precious story.

Economic justice is a means of assuring each persons chance to be who they are.  Therefore, political action in support of economic equity is important to the universal story.

We need the world of plants and animals, oceans and sky far, far more than they need us.  So, work to protect them, and you will protect your loved ones.

The human family and friends we love and support in this life will, in all likelihood, be our primary legacy.

An open heart and an open mind keeps the Self fresh, defeats stagnation, and assures a vital life at any age.

Learning from our gardens, our children, our friends, our spouses or partners, and from the collected wisdom of others connects us to the past and links us to the future.

Art, children, dogs, jazz, and travel have the capacity to jolt us into new perspectives.

Dogs, Our Land and Home, Sport

One More Day

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                    Waxing (Blood) Moon

The fence continues.  Today I strung the rope and checked that none of it touched anything except the yellow plastic insulators.  1,200 + feet of fence now has a yellow insulator every 10 feet and white rope laced with wire.  Tomorrow I’ll do the electrifying.  That means connecting the energizer to the fence itself and sinking two ground rods.  I would have finished today but I realized late in the day that I needed PCV to keep the live wire safe and a different blade for my reciprocating saw.

It will be good to allow the puppies outside again where they bump and run, pounce on each other’s necks teeth bared and hunt each other again around the lilac and the cedar.  They’re big dogs and have a lot of energy; they need the outside to grow.

Projects like this tax my patience.  I never learned even rudimentary fix-it skills, so anything requiring manipulation of the physical world–the inanimate physical world–defies me at every turn.  So far, I’ve figured out most of the problems on this one which leads me to suspect it must be pretty easy.  Even so it has taken four four hour segments which is about as much time as I give to any one outside project.

The Vikings beat the winless Detroit Lions.  Again, they did not come alive until the second half, then they looked good.

Dogs, Our Land and Home

Neighbors

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                  New (Blood) Moon

Good fences make good neighbors.  Sort of.  On the other hand three of our neighbors have stepped up at various points and returned our wayward puppies to us.  As a result, we’ve met folks we didn’t know like our neighbors to the south and to the southeast.  Neighborliness does not have a high value in the ‘burbs, at least in those areas where the lot sizes are 2.5 acres and up.  And it’s a shame.  It takes events to pull cul de sacites into each other’s orbit.

Of course, many are better at it than Kate and I are.  Both introverts by nature we tend to our knitting when at home, filling up our extrovert basket when we work in the non-home world.

Time to get out there now and finish up the fence before the heat of the day.  Yesterday, around noon, the mosquitoes came out and the temperature got to summer levels.  Cool weather is best for this kind of work.  Sweat draws creatures and debris in close.

Dogs

Fencing them in

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                 New (Blood) Moon

I’m in the middle here.  Ready to get started on the fence, but realize I don’t know where to run the wire.  Should I put it 3/4’s up the fence, in the middle, at the very top?  I’ve not seen the dogs clear the fence so I don’t know what will come in contact with them for sure.  Plus the contact has to come while the dog is still touching the ground, that’s how the shock gets administered.

Another problem occurred to me earlier.  The ground stakes are not supposed to be closer than 50 feet to a metal building and we have aluminum siding.  I called John at Fleet Farm.  He in turn called the fence manufacturer.  Seems that’s not a problem.

With my lack of experience on such matters problems occur to me only when I’m about to confront them, rather than earlier.  Makes projects a very steep learning curve.  Steep learning curves frustrate me if I can’t figure out how to the get the information I need.

GeekWorld, Politics

The Internet and Personal Exposure

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                 New Moon

Every once in a while the internet jumps out and bites me.  I lost a potential job because I talked about the process on my blog and the congregation thought I had violated their privacy.  Last year on the Sierra Club blog I posted what I thought was obvious information about how our lobbyists planned to work a committee only to discover that it was supposed to be in house.   Monday I posted about the MEP, the Minnesota Environmental Partnership, meeting I attended.  They found it and called Margaret at the Sierra Club.  There was no problem with what I wrote, they said.  Except, they said there was no problem.  Of course, confidential material (which the lobbyist last year felt I had disclosed) is just that, confidential.  In order to retain trust we agree not to break confidence.

This capacity of people to troll the web for whatever they want, especially things that concern them, is a blessing and a curse.  It’s a blessing when it allows a person or organization to track matters of importance to them.  It’s a curse in that it can have a chilling effect on communication.

Margaret has a legitimate issue.  She wonders if I will be quoted or misquoted from my blog and then identified as a Sierra Club leader.  In that sense there is a persona management concern for the organization.  We’ll talk about it tomorrow.

On a related matter, tomorrow I will install an electric fence, a device for making our dogs respect the boundaries we have established for them.  That’s what all this is about:  boundaries.  Boundaries are fluid, shifting from one person’s perception to another’s.  Respect for boundaries is an important aspect of living in community.

Interestingly, it is at just this juncture that liberalism, with its focus on individualism, can run into problems.  Those of us on the bleeding edge of the liberal boundary can tilt toward too much emphasis on liberty, the negative kind that insists only on the right to do what we want, or, contradictorily, toward restrictions on individual liberty to achieve some other virtue, like justice.  This is also the precise intersection where equality, as fundamental an aspect of liberalism as individualism, can create social tension.

In fact if we decide on economic equality as a necessary part of our political program we may move across the line from liberal to socialist, a communitarian model for economic justice.

Actions for or on behalf of the environment demand human action and these demands often create the perception of curtailed liberty.  Why can’t I hunt whales?  Why can’t I build a dam where the salmon run?  Why can’t I shoot the wolf I believe killed my livestock?  Why can’t I drive my Hummer?

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Memories, Politics

Black Swan

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                            Waning Harvest Moon

“The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.” – Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead captured my inner sense of reality and did it over and over.  I’ve told many times the story of my mystical experience of the unity of all things after having left a philosophy class studying Whitehead’s process metaphysics.  The sensation moved up inside me, breaking free of an inner barrier and releasing itself into my conscious awareness.  It was as if I had touched, heart to heart, the essence of the universe and learned we shared all this, all of it.

That moment still informs my umvelt, my self-world, and has left me at ease with many variations on the theme of human/universe interrelationships.  I suppose it solves the question of life after life in that the kind of literal interweaving that made tactile sense to me in that one moment suggests the enduring nature of all things, in all things, a sort of value-free ongoingness.  How that would feel or what it could mean for, say, consciousness is not clear to me, nor does it need to be.

This reminds me of my Black Swan story.  A man wrote a book, a management/leadership type book that those groupie CEO’s read and absorb, sort of cotton candy for the narcissist in them all.  In this case a Black Swan is any infrequent, unlikely event that, when it happens, changes everything.  The Great Recession has Black Swan notes.  So does the meteor strike that created the Chicxulub crater and wiped out the dinosaurs.  Anyhow, you get the idea.

I had a Black Swan enter my life with a crash in 1963 when my family visited, as we often did, Stratford, Ontario to attend the Shakespeare Festival.  During some non-theater going time, I had the opportunity to strike out on my own and I chose to go to the Black Swan coffee house, a charming little place alongside the Avon River.  The folk music revival was in full voice and a folk musician was on the Black Swan’s tiny stage that afternoon.

During the performance I heard the first critical remarks about the United States and, in particular, the Vietnam war which had just begun to get noticed.  The actual content does not stick with me, instead what does is the electric shock, outrage in fact, at having my  country criticized.  Of course, we were in Canada, somebody else’s country and they were under no obligation to genuflect at the altar of American exceptionalism.  And they didn’t.

This was a transitional moment for me, a moment when for the first time, I realized the US did things that others found repugnant, even abhorrent.  Those were the still young days of the expanding civil rights movement and the first shock waves that would become the movement.  And it happened for me first at the Black Swan.

Here’s an odd note I found looking up the Black Swan:

The 19th Black Swan Revival at Knox Presbyterian Church in Stratford
“The Black Swan Coffee House Revival pays homage to the original Black Swan event of the 60s and the Perth County Conspiracy (does not exist). All proceeds go directly to Stratford/Perth Shelterlink, the organization responsible for the revival and an active member in supporting and fighting for homeless and at risk youth in Perth county.
Good music, good times, and a worthy cause…a night to remember folks!”