Dogs, Great Wheel, Holidays

Waiting for Rigel to Come Home

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Lughnasa                       Waning Harvest Moon

Vega returned home.  Kona let all the dogs inside (her major outdoor trick) and Vega walked into our bedroom where I had laid down for a bit.  When I got up to see if Rigel had come home with her, she apparently got up on the bed because I found many burrs and stickers deposited on my side of the bed.

Rigel is still out there, somewhere.

Until she comes home or we decide to try and find her an alternate way, I won’t take Vega out to discover their escape hatch.  I want Rigel to use it to come home.  There’s probably a subtle psychological truth in that, but I’ll leave it to you to discern.

On another note, this is a holiday, a holiday of ending.  Labor Day, aside from its apparent purpose, has acquired a status, at least here in the northern US, as the end of summer.  This comes not only from the meteorological changes, September 1st is the end of meteorological summer, but also the return of kids to school.  Here in Minnesota people go up to their lake cabins to shut them up for the winter and the whole atmosphere becomes one of back to work, time to get serious again.

As a holiday, it has a certain numinosity, a feeling of difference, of quiet, of peaceful.  Today I have a sense of lassitude, a languor.  That’s partly from the intense work of the last week in researching and writing Roots of Liberalism and partly my body’s response to holidayness, perhaps you could call it its holiness, a time set apart, different from all other days.

Waiting for Rigel.

Dogs

On the Lam

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Lughnasa                         Waning Harvest Moon

Vega and Rigel are gone.  In a 45 minute period while I lined up framing for a painting to hang over our fireplace they escaped and were returned and escaped again.

When I got back from the framer, a message blinked on our answering machine.  Pam, the neighbor across the street, had called.  The people who live behind us to the south had caught Rigel and had her on a leash.  Vega slipped her collar.  They were kind enough to bring Rigel home and open the gate and let her in the back (fenced) yard.  Vega snuck back in via their escape route, a route I cannot identify.

I wandered the neighborhood calling their names, met several of the neighbor’s dogs, but neither heard nor saw anything of Rigel and Vega.  I feel helpless, especially since we do not, stupidly, have either a chip in them or tags on them.  If and when we get them back, a chip and tags are going on for sure.

My plan is to wait a while and see if they come on their own.  They like it here and we have lunch for them, so if they’re free, they will return home.  Later, I’ll call animal control, but I’d prefer not to right now since I don’t want to explain the lack of tags.  We keep our dogs fenced and I exert a good deal of energy to keep them contained, so we’ve operated on the (false) assumption that we don’t need to be too prompt with tags or chips.  Wrong.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Writing

After Action Report

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Lughnasa Waning Harvest Moon

Reality meets prejudice and anxiety. I was the only person in the church with a tie on. In fact, the worship leader for the meeting greeted me as I came up the walk, “There’s our speaker. He’s the only one with a tie on on Labor Day Weekend.

At the end of the presentation I got applause and several people wanted to hear part II.

Note to me for part II: expand on Adam Smith and his works impact in our time, also spell out positive/negative liberty and freedom, plus pay more attention to critiques of the enlightenment like Marx, Romanticism and totalitarianism. Also, the congruence among liberalism and its allies: science, liberal education, liberal democracy, human rights work et al.

Writing

Satisfaction

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Lughnasa Waning Harvest Moon

The next morning. Anxiety has subsided as the time approaches, probably no different from or in fact the same as stage fright.

There is some hoary bit about the anxiety being necessary for a good performance. Sounds like rationalization to me. The anxiety hits because we want others to think well of us, to like what we do and appreciate it. Sometimes they do not.

Since I long ago put on the mantle of one cuts across the grain of received wisdom and will voice unpleasant truths and questions, I know this too well. This does not mean I get no satisfaction from my work, not at all, just that sometimes the most satisfaction comes from the preparation, the crafting and presenting rather than the reception.

As for Roots and this morning, well, that now moves in the realm of action. Much better than imagining it.

Faith and Spirituality, Writing

I Wonder

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Lughnasa Full Harvest Moon

“Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” – Greek Proverb

I’m nervous. Not sweat on the palms, head for the door or the tunnel kind of nervous, but nervous anyhow. It has two sources I can identify. One, will I dress well enough to preach in Wayzata? After a life time of playing down the importance of dressing up, I still know when it can hurt. I know this seems hopeless given that I’m 62, not 16, but there it is. These folks (folks I imagine attending a Unitarian-Universalist church in a wealthy burb like Wayzata.) dress better than I do. I imagine. And, they probably do. I only want to come up to minimum standards and I’ll probably make it. What if I don’t?

I’ve shaved and cut my hair, trimmed my nails. I’m not about to buy new clothes because I believe Thoreau was right, “Beware of ventures that require new clothes.” but here’s the problem. I don’t wear sport coats or suits at all any more. This is so true that when I went in the closet to fetch a jacket I might wear I found most of the shoulders covered in dust. I’m not kidding. It’s been that long. Also, I’m no longer the svelte guy I was when I bought all the dress pants I own. Fortunately, I can still fit into a few pair.

The second source of anxiety is also about vanity. I’ve preached around the state in several congregations, but I only get asked back in a couple of places. There’s no need for me to preach at all, financially, but I do have an intellectual stake in being heard and appreciated for the work and original thought. That intellectual stake comes freighted with an emotional stake, too. It’s not like I’ll roll over and quit writing if I don’t get good feed back. I generally do good feedback.

Part of me says it’s the changeable nature of program committees and the changing tastes of even those who remain constant from year to year and I’m sure that explains some of it. Part of it, too, I’m sure, is the non-pastoral nature of my preaching. That is, I don’t write to inspire or to give practical advice; I write to make people think, to get them to act, to consider new ways of seeing old problems or to see possibilities and problems where they never saw them before. I can make people nervous. On purpose. Because I’ve understood that to be my particular calling from day 1 in seminary.

In spite of all those it might just be that people don’t like what I say, the way I say it, or me in particular. Oh, well, if it is this, then what can I do? I’m gonna be who I am anyhow. Still, I’d like to know. I think.

Great Wheel, Poetry, Politics

Machado, The Pathmaker

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Lughnasa                                Full Harvest Moon

At about 8:00/8:30 pm I drove over to Than Do to pick up some take out.  At the end of our cul de sac, a bit above the tree tops, was a golden harvest moon.  It stopped me.  The moon always catches me, draws my breath  up from deep within, a rush of exspiration.  Many of us have it, a mystical connection to the lesser light, its waxing and waning, the crescent moon with venus nearby, the full red moon of a lunar eclipse, the outsized floating golden orb of an October full moon, even the dark sky of the new moon, pregnant.

Many of my friends in the Woolly Mammoths devour poetry books.  I’m not a regular reader of poetry, more episodic, sometimes in binges.  I get onto poets through odd routes, like Antonio Machado whose poem, Pathmaker, now occupies the upper left of this webpage.  Paul Strickland has a mentioned Machado many times.  Machado is one of many non-English language poets Robert Bly has translated.

Machado, whom I had not read, appeared in an article I read about attempts to name the crimes of the Franco era in Spain and the strange reluctance of Spaniards to talk about the Spanish Republic which Franco overthrew, then destroyed with brutal force.

Machado is a poet/saint of the Republicans, buried in exile across the northern Spanish border in France where many of the Republicans fled when Franco defeated them in Spain.  The author of this article, a resident of  Barcelona, wrote of a moving celebration at Machado’s grave, a remembrance for those who fought and died, lost forever to their loved ones by burial in mass graves.

A single woman began chanting this poem, the Pathmaker, and all the others joined in, there at Machado’s tomb.

When I read it, I realized it was the perfect poem for Ancientrails.

Pathmaker, the path is your tracks,
nothing else.

Pathmaker, there in no path,
The path is made by walking.

And turning the gaze back,
Look on the trail that never will be
Walked again.

Pathmaker, there no path,
Only the wake on the sea.

Garden, Great Wheel, Weather +Climate

Night, Cool Night

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Lughnasa                        Full Harvest Moon

Cool nights and perfect days, high 60’s to 70.  Blue sky with puffy clouds.  The occasional cirrus formation, mare’s tails prancing in from the north.    Clear air.   Bright stars and a moon full enough to navigate a country road without headlights.

This is the time of year, in the midst of the harvest, when the growing season pretty much comes to a stop here in the northern central U.S.  Garden clean up lies not far ahead, digging potatoes and pulling carrots, too.  Parsnip and garlic will sleep over the winter in their beds.  A few beets left to pull, a lot of squash still maturing and the beans have a bit more time before the pods dry up.

Life changes with the seasons.  Just how is not always predictable, but cooler weather inspires different activities than the heat of  mid-summer.  Snow and bitter cold different activities again.  You either enjoy these changes or you move somewhere else.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Writing

Il Dolce Far Niente

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Lughnasa                             Waxing Harvest Moon

Kate and I sat out on the deck with the dogs.   Il dolce far niente.   The sweetness of doing nothing was a theme for paintings in the mid-Victorian era.  Apparently the Italians have always been after la dolce vita.

A point where Kate and I meet, where our inner worlds and outer worlds intersect,  is our horror at these moments.  There is something in the northern European blood that suspects doing nothing, finds nothing sweet about it.  Instead it has a bitter taste, something mom may have given  you when you didn’t do your chores.

These later years may be the time to catch up with the Italians, to learn how to kick back and relax.  If they’re not, then we’ll never get it, not in this turn of the wheel.

I wrote several hours in a row yesterday and today, but it was not fun.  Usually writing pleases me, gives me a sensual satisfaction as well a creative one.  Not this time.  It was as if I had tried to stick a large ball into a glass Coke bottle.  There was too little space in the three thousand words, the maybe 15-18 minutes of spoken English, to contain what I wanted to communicate.

Too much truncating, jumping, glossing.  The whole needs more metaphor, a way to condense big ideas into small spaces.  I have two metaphors that work pretty well.  I use Rembrandt’s etching of Faust and Vermeer’s painting of the Astronomer to illustrate the difference between the ancien regime and the Enlightenment.  I also use Petrarch’s letter to posterity to underscore the Italian Renaissance’s influence on our understanding of the individual.  So far, so good.

After that, though, I lean more into short summaries of complex ideas, philosophical vignettes no bigger than fortune cookies.  All this means I’m not done.

Writing

Mind. The Gap

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Lughnasa                                  Full Harvest Moon

I have a first draft of Roots of Liberalism.  I’m not happy with it.  All writers  struggle with the gap between the elegance and concision a work has as it takes form in the mind and the clumsy apparatus, strung together with baling wire and bubble gum that hits the page.  Sometimes the gap is further than I imagined it would be, this is one of those times.

I’ll let it sit for a day or so now, then re-read it and edit.  If necessary, I’ll start all over again.