Faith and Spirituality, Family, Our Land and Home, Travel

A Certain Inner Doldrum

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68  bar steady 29.98 0mph SE  dew-point 56  Sunrise 5:48  Sunset 8:50PM  Summer

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

Thump.  Thump.  Pause.  Thump.  Thump.  Thrudda Thrudda Thump.  Bang.  Thump.  Thump.  Most of the time it is quiet here.  At night the quiet becomes complete, with the exception of tonight.  One of the neighbors must have had left overs from the 4th.  Strange sounds at night make you wanna know what’s going on.  Kate went out back and I went out front.  Saw nothing.  Either of us.  Both of us concluded fireworks.  A suburban July nighttime mystery.

The tone of my last few posts has trended down.  My inner barometer falls, not steeply, but it does fall.  Why?  Midsummer blahs.  The whole weight thing.  A certain inner doldrum.  Maybe a change in my spiritual life.  This is the realm of melancholy, not depression, and it usually precedes a creative period.  As I fall deeper into my interior, it is as if my gifts and energy fall with me, not in a negative sense, but as preliminary to a harvest.  When I pull inward, my outer affect often declines, but the interior feeling is that of gathering my resources, marshaling them into a coherent whole.

The weather in Minneola, Texas has 97 and sunny as a theme for the three days we will be there.  97 is cooler than past reunions.  The last time I headed to Oklahoma for an Ellis reunion it was 107 the whole time I was there.  That’s hot.  We’ve gotten notes about what to bring to help defray the cost of food for 36 adults and a gaggle of kids.  Charles Paul, that’s me, gets a pass, but Kate and I will pick up something once we get there.

It just dawned on me yesterday why my name was Charles Paul or CP on both sides of the family.  My dad’s brother was my Uncle Charles and my grandfather Keaton was Charles Keaton.  A diplomatic choice of names by mom and dad, but it left each side with a need to differentiate between two of us.

Family, Travel

Enchanted

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77 bar falls 29.99  0mph NE dew-point 60   Sunrise 5:48  Sunset 8:50pm  Summer

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

The caterpillar does all the work; the butterfly gets all the publicity.  George Carlin, RIP

On Friday Kate and I take off for Texas.  The idea of flying leaves me cold, though after 2 long trips in June, driving does not seem much better.  At the moment traveling has a lugubrious feel, I want to stay home.  Work on the UU history.  Read about novels.  Write Superior Wolf.  Tend to the garden.

Every since our flight back from Istanbul, long enough ago that I can not recall the dates right now, flying has had a curse on it for me.  9/11 and the subsequent security measures only reinforced the curse.  Partly as a result of the shutdown and general suspicion engendered by 9/11 airlines went through a rough patch financially.  Their attempts to dig themselves out of the hole only made flying that much more unpleasant.  Long flight delays.  Sitting on the tarmac for hours.  No food.  After all that, the price of oil skyrocketed.

Flights, at least once delayed, have disappeared.  Layoffs and mergers.  Money for checked bags, for using frequent flyer miles.

This is a downhill slope that happened to coincide with my disenchantment.  Before Istanbul flying did enchant me.   I loved to fly when I worked for the Presbytery and in the years after with Kate.  Getting to the airport signaled the beginning of something special.  Read, eat, watch the earth slip by below.  It was magical.

Today I dread even a short flight to Texas.

Every once in a while I get into to a travel doldrums.  Like now.  I decide I want to explore Minnesota, maybe Wisconsin and Ontario.  Or Anoka County.  The metro area.  Or just stay home.

Still, family means showing up as I wrote before and it is my turn to show up at the Ellis family reunion.  So, we’ll take a plane ride, riding on a jet plane.  But, I will be back again.

Garden, Our Land and Home

Brute Force

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81  bar falls 30.07  0mph WSW dew-point 60   Summer

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

The stump grinder applies brute force to the problem.  It has carbide tip blades on a rotary cutter that looks like a saw with few, but deep set teeth.  The first time required something of a learning curve, but not too much.  What it required more was strength.  The weight in it sits low to the ground and the tires were soft, so yanking it around the property had aerobic and resistance qualities.

The two yew stumps out front disappeared, though the mugo pine stump remains.  It had too much that required cutting with a chain saw, something to do before the next rental.  Four smaller stumps in the back went under the blade.  The major work though required putting the blade deep in the earth in the area where the fire pit will go.  This was to eliminate a number of roots encountered on the first round of digging on it last fall.

Kate made a nice lunch of encrusted sole with beans from our garden and a salad that contained some items from the garden.   The heirloom tomatoes have begun to change color, perhaps next week we’ll have our first.  These fruits are as big as my fist.

Now, a nap.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Our Land and Home

Belt Up

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69  bar steady 30.10  0mph  E  dew-point 58   Sunrise 8:58  Sunset 7:23   Summer

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

Follow up on the yak dumplings.  More and more my mouth likes things against which my lower digestive system rebels.  Yak meat roiled my stomach.  A familiar feeling these days, days in which I have fallen far from the grace of the nutrisystem weight loss this winter and subsequently have created various insults to my stomach and intestines:  fatty food, not enough fiber, too much food.  Like that.  Makes me feel yucky.

As I said yesterday, I don’t like victim status, but I am increasingly aware that my body is the victim of internecine warfare in my mind.  One part of me, the earthy bodily part, sends a sensation signal to the brain, “Boy, wouldn’t X be good right now?”  Another part of me, sometimes the Superego/father and sometimes Healthy Man, says, “No.  Not right now.  Too much.  Bad for the heart, blood vessels, stomach wall.  No.”  Then, too often, earthy body picks itself up and goes to the refrigerator.

I experience this, sometimes, as an actual dialogue in which one part of my mind shushes the other.  My hunch is that consistent eating habits lie in empowering the Healthy Man, but I need to figure out how to do that.  This feels like an old struggle to me, one I have played out in relation to alcohol and tobacco, but girding my loins for battle has, so far, not proved powerful enough against my appetites.  What is girding the loins anyhow?  What is a gird?

According to  Princeton Word Net,  gird is to put on arms or to put on a girdle.   Girdle meant, one source says, belt originally. OK.  So I put my belt on do battle with weight. Gotta admit that sounds logical.

This whole process literally drives me nuts.  In spite of all the good stuff I do, if I see myself as losing this struggle, I get down on myself.  Not a positive place to be.

On a brighter note Home Depot beckons.  The stump grinder.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

Six Degrees Can Change the World

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66  bar rises 30.07  2mph NNE dew-point 56 Sunset 7:22  Summer night, cool and clear

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

National Geographic Channel had a program called Six Degrees Can Change the World.  Geez was it depressing.  A lot of the early stuff was material I’d heard before, but as it went on from 1 degree to 2 degrees, then to 3 degrees with the Amazonian rain forest becoming a scrub land and the Greenland ice sheet melting down and other very nasty stuff, I began to feel powerless, a victim before the inevitablity of increasing energy consumption which will drive the very worst scenarios into being.

Those of you who know me well know I don’t like victim status.  A passive victim does not act, but allows reality to act on them.  Not my way.  So, once I got over the feeling of powerlessness, I reminded myself that I have made several distinct decisions related to effecting change.   The Sierra Club work.  The optimal suburb/exurb home.  Keeping the red car intact.  Our plan to purchase a hybrid or all electric when Kate retires.  Growing vegetables.  Turning off the computer at night.  Working over the next few years to find even more ways major and minor that we can reduce our carbon footprint and encourage alternative energy.  I am not a victim, nor do I want to be a rich world antagonist of mother earth’s.   The struggle of our time.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Literature, Politics, Writing

Steamed Dumplings Stuffed With Yak

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78  bar steady  30.03  0mph ENE dew-point 56  Summer, warm and sunny

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

A trifecta.  In to Minnehaha.  Back to Andover.  In to Kenwood.  Back to Andover.  In to Sierra Club and the MIA.  Back to Andover.  Geez.  As I said, I gotta check with my scheduler.

Katarina is an intern from east Germany, Jena.  We folded letters and surveys to candidates for Minnesota House races.  She’s a bright young lady whose lucky boyfriend lives here.  They both study political science and enjoy comparing US and German culture/society.  She gave the example of her parents:  “They have never worried.  They have no debt.  They live modestly.”  She said her mother was not allowed to finish high school in the old East German regime because her husband was a mathematics professor.  If you had an intellengentsia in the home, you also had to have a proletarian.  Odd logic, even for Marxists.

After doing the mailing, I called about half a list of candidates who received the survey by e-mail last Friday.  This was just a reminder call.  Margaret Levin cajoled me into making phone calls and I’m glad she did.  It wasn’t so bad.  Of course, these were all friendly folk, too.

Across the street from the Sierra Club is the Himalaya, a Nepalese restaurant.  It was noon, so I stopped in for steamed dumplings stuffed with yak and a tasty sauce.  The next course was a soup with potatoes, black-eyed peas and bamboo shoots.  Nan accompanied this dish.  Hmmm.  I enjoy finding these small ethnic places and sampling cuisine from countries I have not visited.  Food is one of the fastest ways into a culture, even faster, because more immediate, than language.

I discussed purchasing a Nepalese thangka with the owner.  When I said I would like a Yamatanka, he said, “Oh, you like Yama?” He stuck his tongue out and down, Yama’s typical presentation. “Yes,” I said.  “Scary.”  I’ll speak with him about it again when I go in to the Sierra Club political committee meeting next Wednesday.

Before I went to the Sierra Club, I stopped at the Northern Clay Center and picked up a small plate.  It is my intention, over the next few years, to replace our Portmerion with unmatched pieces from many potters.  This is the fifth or sixth acquistion so far.

Each quarter I define a retreat.  It can be brief, three days or so, and it can be long, like the stay in Hawai’i.  I find I need to punctuate my normal routine with these caesuras or I get stale.  This habit began when I was in the ministry and I’ve found it a good carry over, so I’ve continued it.  Here’s my retreat for the fall quarter:

7/22/08   No traveling for this retreat.  I will take two weeks and stop writing, stop using the internet (except for the blog and e-mail) and study books on novel craft.  In this retreat I will create a reading program and a writing program that will guide my work for the next ten years.

Art and Culture, Great Work, Writing

A Novel Realization

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68  bar rises 30.02  2mph NE dew-point 59   Summer, cool and pleasant

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

Again this morning off to the Cities to the Sierra Club for help with a mailing and to make some phone calls, drop by the MIA.  This is three trips in two days and feels like too much.  I scheduled all this myself, too.  Hmmm, gotta speak to the person who keeps my calendar.

After finishing 48 lectures on the history of English literature yesterday, I had an odd realization.  Over the 15 plus years I have been writing, I have spent time in serious, sustained study of astronomy, liberal religion, art history and the classics.   When I say serious, sustained study, I mean time frames of years.  In the case of liberal religion over a decade.  But.  I have not devoted any appreciable and no sustained time to the study of the novel, the very form I have chosen as my own.  Strange.

So, my dream for the next stage of my life entails concentrated study of the novel, its history and craft, as well as reading more novels.  I want to write a serious, literary novel, not my next one and perhaps not the one after that, but soon, one informed by the insights and craft of others.  I might even take a college course in literature.  When in college, I refused to take literature classes, saying I could read on my own.  I have, too.   Now, though, with a different intent, I might well find literature classes instructive.

Gotta sign off and get to the Sierra Club.

Art and Culture, Memories, Woolly Mammoths

Robert Bly

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69  bar steady 29.91  2mph NE dew-point 63  Summer, cooler and cloudy

Full Thunder Moon

Today is a busy day for me.  Two trips in to the cities.  The first to my old workout haunt, Minnehaha Falls.  Every morning rain or shine, winter or summer I did a fast hike through the trails along the Mississippi ending with the stairs going up to the parking lot that abuts the falls themselves.  Today the docent book club planning session.  We’ll see how many folks turn out.

Later, the Woollies at Jim Lenfesty’s house.  Mark and Elizabeth housesit for Jim, at least they have these last two years.  Since it is right across the street from Roberty Bly’s, Mark invited him again.  Last time he came with a cream pie that had three slices out of it.  He’s a bit of a curmudgeon, but then so am I.

Shower.

Family, Our Land and Home, Travel

Vineland Place

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74  bar steady  29.89  4mph NNE dew-point 64   Summer, warmish and stickyish

Full Thunder Moon

Ah, the power of suggestion.  Especially from a spouse.  Spent an hour and a half clearing burdock, nettles, black locust, burrs, climbing wild cucumbers and virginia creeper from the site of the soon to be firepit cum family gathering spot.  An area in which everything has been removed invites the emergence of those plants whose seeds or rhizomes remain in the soil.

Over the last few rainy, hot weeks nettles have taken nourishment from the former compost heap to grow large, reaching for the sun and laden with formic acid to prevent uprooting.   The wild cucumber which climbs, then produces lacy transparent fruit liked the compost as did the virginia creeper.

While yanking on the long above ground runs of vine and pulling out their equally long runs of below the soil surface roots/rhizomes, I decided to change the name of our property from 7 Oaks, named for the 7 Oaks on the hill outside my writing room window, to Vineland Place.  I have no idea why, but our property is the ideal happy home for vines:  wild cucumbers, Virginia creeper and wild grape.  The wild grape in particular grows vines thicker than my upper arm (OK, so I’m not Ahnold, but still).  We have nurtured a wild  grape that has chosen the six foot fence we had put in the front after Celt began climbing the fence to go greet the neighbors on walks by our house.  At 200 pounds Celt, an Irish Wolfhound, was not a pleasant surprise, though in manner gentle and loving.

As the CO2 level rises with global warming, it favors vines.  I do not recall why.  I could not help but recall this piece of trivia as I drove through Alabama, Mississippi and Lousiana where kudzu has a presence akin to an alien invader.  It grows over lower shrubs and covers the entire highway easement up to the drainage ditches on divided highways.  In more than one case I saw old homes, uninhabited (I think), shrouded under the green of this conqueror vine.

Jon did many projects around Vineland Place when he lived here.  One of the early ones was to cut back the large grape vines that had begun to strangle the oak, ironwood, ash, elm, pin cherry and poplar that make up our woods.

Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Writing

Even Though It’s Still July

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71  bar steady 29.87  0mph ENE dew-point 62  Summer, wonderful

Full Thunder Moon

The color:  deep red, pale yellow, pink, mauve, orange, red, virgin white, flame pink with a burnt orange throat,white with a pink throat.  Scents ethereal as they are ephemeral.  The true lilies and the day lilies are in bloom.  A chaos of color.

The true lilies have a bloom architecture clean, sweeping, grand.  They have colors with hues so intense they can make the heart dance.  These are the regnant plants of this garden and this is their time.

Here’s the problem with putting stuff in writing:

“We will also finish creation of a fire-pit, family gathering area begun last fall.  These will be finished by the August date of my meeting.”  from my Woolly project notes.

Kate dug this up yesterday and reminded me of this commitment.  Sigh.  The one aspect of gardening that seems always to drain from consciousness is the July slump.  Not much gardening gets done by me in this month.  It’s too hot, too many bugs and I’ve usually worked way more than I intended in May and June.

In July I begin to need indoor time, book time and writing time.  By August things have become marginally cooler, I’ve satisfied the reading itch though probably not the writing and the bugs become tolerable.  August and September, sometimes in to mid-October can be intense gardening, too.

All this means I sometimes (always) project more completion than I will realize.   Even so, I want to finish the fire-pit, family gathering area, too.  I have not told Kate that I intend to rent the stump grinder this Wednesday, but I do.  That will clear out the roots I found lacing the fire pit hole last fall as I dug.  After some weeding, moving some sand and rock and cutting up a few logs for seats around the fire, the fire pit will be done by August 18th.  That’s the date of my Woolly meeting and Kate’s 64th birthday.

Maybe I’ll go out there right now and start pulling weeds.  Even though it’s still July.