Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Writing

Writing Makes Its Own Space

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66  bar steady 29.79  3mph NNW dew-point 63  Summer night, rainy day

Full Thunder Moon

We had rain and storm, tornado warning and tornado watch.  A full thunder moon day.  The rain poured down, drenching the lily blooms, forming small rivers on the wide leaves of the acorn squash.  While I read the first chapter of the book on the Western Unitarian Conference, the rain drained from the sky and onto the azalea, the begonia, the several amarylis and a bed full of hosta.  Reading a good book while it rains or snows pleases me, makes me feel at home, in place.

Kate harvested beans tonight, a few onions, too.  I used the onions with some beets I bought at Festival, delicious.  We also had a few early sugar snap peas and wax beans.  Some fish.  Some pasta with pesto made from hydroponic basil.  An evening meal.

Kate works this weekend, as she does every other weekend.  Ten days in a row, a long stretch, but she likes the four days off it gives her.  We pretend she’s retired on those days.

The Minnesota UU history piece has begun to take shape, get bones.  When there is a subject matter to master before I write, it usually takes me a while before I get a gestalt, a feel for the whole.  Once I have that I know where I need more information, or that I do not.  At that point I can sit down and write, usually in one setting.  A few days later, after its cold, I go back, reread and edit, revise.  Then I’ll put it away until I need to present it.

This one has been a bit unusual in that history requires a certain precision and accuracy with details, chronological sequence, names and places.  This means the material that I use to illustrate and make my points must get reordered to fit my needs, yet remain accurate and true.   It’s part of what I love about this kind of work.

When I have this kind of work, it pushes out everything else.  The writing work makes its own space in my life, creates openings and time for itself.  Just like this blog.  It happens each day, two to three times a day and often I do not recall having written here.  The breadcrumbs, though, are there, laid down in words and postings.

Art and Culture, Memories, Politics, Writing

Psyche’s Politics

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70  bar steady  29.87  0mph NE  dew-point 62   Summer, cloudy

Full Thunder Moon

In Kavalier and Clay, the book by Michael Chabon I referenced a few days ago, the author often talked about art and artists.  At one point he referred to the “…necessary self-betrayal of the artist.”  This was one of those phrases that slipped right under my mental fingernail and caused some pain.  I knew what he meant.

Writing is of no value if the writer plays it safe, stays inside the lines, never transgresses boundaries.  Coloring in what other people have defined as the picture on the page adds nothing to the human experience.  When our frailties or our biases or our inner logic are on display the skin limits of self get pushed aside and others can get a peek.

I read an interesting definition of art as a person turned inside out.

A flurry of domestic activity yesterday.  Though all of the budget watching, bank going, grocery shopping activities undergird our daily lives, still, they leave me feeling as if little got done.  I’m suspicious of this as male acculturation, that is, the chores do not count as masculine work, but even this suspicion does not cross out the emotional response.  This quote from a few days ago sums it up:

“Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices — just recognize them.” – Edward R. Murrow

The recovering alcoholic never leaves my side.  The recovering racist struggles on a regular basis with instant opinions formed on the basis of skin color or accent.  The let down after a day of domestic work reveals the sexist role divisions imprinted deep in my own psyche.  Kate also points out that I always drive.  Too true.

Recovering may sound like a dodge or an excuse, but it is not.  The often derided politically correct comes from those of us willing to engage in the inner struggle with the cultural assumptions we have inherited.  What recovering admits is that acculturation is forever, just like addiction.  There will, in other words, always be parts of me that diminish cooking, cleaning, balancing the checkbook as unworthy of my time.  This in spite of the many times and the many ways in which I have learned this is not true.  There will always be parts of me that attach secondary characteristics to skin color or age or sex.  There will always be parts of me that trade on the unearned advantage I get from being white, male and American.

My responsibility as a conscious adult lies in owning up to who and what I am, then choosing a different response.  I may not be responsible for the sexist acculturation I received growing up, but I am responsible for the choices I make when it raises its head.

This willingness to throw one’s self into struggle, not for a day or a week, but a lifetime infects the people effected by the creative turmoil of the 60’s and 70’s.   Certainly others of other times, too, but the immersion in those days when the old ways were no longer viable, but the new ways had not yet arrived created a mass of people who came to question their basic assumptions about reality; question assumptions about realities so intimate as the nature of love, the immediate reaction to another, so often unquestioned.  This struggle brought politics to the bedroom as well as the boardroom, to the kitchen counter as well as the lunch counter, to the front room as well as the class room.

There is bravery here, foolishness, too; but, it is the foolishness of the wise fool, willing to risk self for the sake of the other.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Our Land and Home

A Deere John Article

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66  bar rises 29.91 0mph N dew-point 56  Summer night, cooler

Full Thunder Moon

I went out tonight for a bit of moon viewing.  I’ve always thought a moon-watching deck would make a nice addition to the property.   We don’t have one so I stood in the driveway, watching the moon while Lady, the brittany next door, howled at me (instead of the moon).

This moon rides low in the sky, just below the tree tops, so I had to walk almost to the end of our driveway until I could see it free and clear of the treeline.  It is a polished coin of a moon, bright and sparkling in the sky, a moonstone on jeweler’s velvet.  A night out well rewarded.

From tonight’s Washington Post

Deere John: It’s Been Good Knowing You
Lawn Behemoths Are Going Out to Pasture “The riding lawn mower has long been a barometer of the American dream, been a symbol of having arrived in the suburban middle class. It says, “I have so much lawn to mow, I need to sit down.”

It says, I’ve made it, I’ve escaped that funky old rowhouse neighborhood with the asbestos siding and yards like dirt-scabs. My land, my spread, not enough to plow, but way too much to mow the old-fashioned way. It says, I’m Jefferson’s dream of the yeoman farmer. It says, I’m rich enough to not only raise a worthless crop, but to pay money for the privilege. It says, I’m a boy with a boy’s rightful toys; a real American man.

Or that’s what it said back when city dwellers would gather around the riding mowers at the old Hechinger north of Capitol Hill, and dream the dream.

Now it’s saying something else. It may be a measure of the forces lined up against us. The riding mower seems to be on the wrong end of every headline. If economic news — from gas prices to shrinking nest eggs — is like the magnifying glass focused by an 8-year-old to fry a bug with sunlight, riding mowers are the bug.

The news: The riding mower industry “is deeply troubled by the decline in housing starts,” says Kris Kiser, spokesman for the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute in Alexandria. “New home construction is a good barometer for us. But you add foreclosures, decline in housing starts and the decline in housing sales, and you have the trifecta.””

Dehn’s 4 Seasons, the lawn appliance store where we bought our chain saw, our riding mower, our snow blower and super charged weed whacker closed up shop and didn’t alert us at all.  I drove by there one day a few weeks ago and the place was empty.  Capitalism’s creative destruction is at it again.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Writing

Showing Up

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79  bar falls 29.88  0mph NE  dew-point 53   Summer evening

Full Thunder Moon

Next weekend is the Ellis cousin reunion in Mineola, Texas.  Kate and I fly down on Friday, back on Sunday.  A short visit to the really hot weather.  All the folks of my father’s generation on the Ellis side, that is his siblings and their mates, are dead.  This is cousins and their kids and grandkids.

Though I was born in Duncan, Oklahoma I know the Ellis side of the family less well than the Keaton (mom’s side).  We moved from Oklahoma when I was only year and a half or so to Indiana, mom’s home state.  I want to get to know them better.  They are family, after all, a main connection to the past and through it to the future.  Like much in this life family is about showing up.  Otherwise, no family.

Kate had a lot of charts to do today, so I did the errands.  We had lunch, a nap and a business meeting.  We have overshot our travel budget, by a good ways.  If she failed to earn the big bonuses, we would have had to pull in the belt a bit.  We discussed ways to stay on budget.  Important and not always easy for us.

Got in the mail today Freedom Moves West, a whole book on the Western Unitarian Conference. It may contain enough information that I won’t have to go to the Minnesota History Center.  More and more I look at Amazon and on-line shopping as a way to save trips and therefore fuel.  Budgeting trips into the city is something I’ve not done too much.  I just hop in the car and go.  Nowadays though I think.  Try to put two things together.

Next Tuesday I go in to help with a Sierra Club mailing.  That day I’ll visit the museum and head over to the Minnesota History Center if I need to find anything there.  Like that.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends

On What Ground Does Your Faith Stand?

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74  bar rises 29.92 1mph N dew-point 62    Summer, sunny and pleasant

Full Thunder Moon

“Think like a man of action and act like a man of thought.” – Henri Bergson

I’ve not seen this quote before, but I like it.  I do know Bergson, however, a creative philosopher.  He proposed the snapshot theory of time.  Time precedes in discrete chunks, rather than a continuous flow.

After sheepshead last night, Bill Schmidt and I talked outside Roy Wolfe’s house.  The air was warm and a bit stale, mosquitoes homed in on my bald head while we  talked about Chardin.  A new translation of Chardin’s phenomenon is out, Bill said, now called the Human Phenomenon.  Much better.  I said I’d look at it.

We share a spirituality, a sense of our location in the universe, that has its roots in Christian experience, yet has long ago slipped the moorings of that more traditional way.  Both of us now search for ways to articulate this sense of wonder and awe founded not in words, but in lived experience.  Bill spoke of a moment when the trees outside his apartment came to him and he to them, “A moment, maybe.  A tenth of a second.  But I was with them, no boundary.”

In my re-reading of Unitarian history in preparation for my UU history presentation it has become clear to me that the primary struggle in liberal religion, from the beginning down to the current day, is over what gives religion authority.  I could have seen it earlier, because I learned while a Presbyterian that all fights in the Christian community come to that, too.  In their case the issue was either biblical interpretation, the most common authority in the Protestant community, or the Catholic church’s claim that their magesterium grew from its apostolic authority in addition to scripture.

At first, in the Unitarian movement, the new come-outers fought with the orthodox Calvinists over reason applied to Scripture.  The Unitarians said there was no warrant for the trinity in scripture, therefore they did not believe it.  But.  They did believe the scriptures had supernatural authority.  Jesus was still the Christ and miracles like the resurrection were the warrant for reasonable Christians in their faith.

When Emerson, in his Harvard Divinity School Address, said that we should look to our own inspiration, our own revelation rather than that of the fathers what he put forward was, in fact, a new source of religious authority, personal experience.

The  outflow from what then became the Transcendentalist Controversy was the subtle, at first, erosion of belief in the supernatural character of the scriptures, and therefore of Jesus, that proceeded pell mell to questions of the existence of God.

Quelled in part by the accident of the Civil War just as it had begun to gather force, the whole controversy emerged again when, in the West, after the Civil War, the new Unitarian and Universalist communities began to veer away from Boston Unitarian orthodoxy and raise what would become the western controversy, that between theists and those who wanted more latitude.  The Free Religious Association, which carried the burden of those who did not want to be bound by any orthodoxy, gave a brief organizational expression to this movement.

The result of all these questions was the gradual opening of more and more space within liberal religion for a range of perspectives from conservative liberal Christian Unitarianism to those who sought the foundation for their faith in human experience.

This was roughly how things stood at the transition in to the 20th century.  At this point Minneapolis emerged, through the preaching of John Dietrich, as the center of a controversy, this time between the humanist message conveyed by Dietrich to audiences in the thousands and the theists of the liberal Christians.  This humanist-theist debate still resonates in 21st century UU congregations.  The content seems to be the issue, but it is not.

As it has been from the beginning with William Ellery Channing in the early part of the 19th century, the issue is now this:  what authenticates your faith experience?  Is it some external authority:  a creed, a bible, a prelate; or, is it a matter of lived experience?

Now we have come full circle back to Bill and me standing there on the street in St Paul, the mosquitoes buzzing and Roy coming out from his house to toss a can in the blue recycling bin.  We waved to Roy, concluded our talk and got in our cars to head home.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Great Wheel

Imagine Your Soul Traveling on a Lambent Beam

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69  bar rises 29.85  0mph NE dew-point 68  Summer night with a full moon, steamy beautiful

Full Thunder Moon

Five of us sit down every 4 to 5 weeks or so and play sheepshead.  This is a game, as I’ve said before, peculiar to eastern Wisconsin and there among the German community where it is also known as schotskopf.  Sheepshead is the thin glue that gives us an excuse to sit together, laugh and be amused at the spectacle of ourselves.

As I grow older, it is these close gatherings of friends that provide the social cohesion I need.  My needs may be less than most, but they are not non-existent.  These men, all save me variously Catholic, from not anymore to still engaged in the work, have wry, knowing attitudes toward life, attentive to the ridiculous and the tender.  I am more when I return than when I left.

And something to be said for the moon.  A perfect circle, silvered white and suspended in the sky with stars and planets gathered round.  On the nights of the full moon the dark opens its arms to secret pacts, whispered love and the breath of Diana, huntress and defender of the forest.

Take a moment and step outside, stand under the Full Thunder Moon and let it shine on you.  Imagine your soul traveling on a lambent beam to the moon and back, gazing down toward the spinning blue globe as you come home.  This dance of the planets and their satellites around the greater gravity of Sol creates and destroys.  Shiva Nataraja.

Amen.

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

Corn in the Mist

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81  bar steady  29.84  0mph NE  dew-point 66   Summer, hot and muggy

Full Thunder Moon

“Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.” – Thomas Alva Edison

I like Edison here.  He illustrates a fundamental flaw in the planning paradigm.  When we plan, we have a criteria for success.  Most planners see that as the summum bonum of the plan.  I know I did when I worked as an organizational consultant in churches and other organizations.  Time-limited, quantifiable and concrete.  That way you know one when you see one.

The problem here?  Just what Edison says.  The serendipitous.  Think of Roentgen who saw his hand on a photographic sensitive paper while working with radioactive material.  Not the point.  But.  Roentgen saw X-rays.  The North St. Paul 3-M’er who worked on glues and found one that didn’t work so well.  He used it for a while to stick notes in his hmynbooks.  Then.  Oh, Post-It notes.

The problem is deeper yet.  Plans and goals put us into a pass/fail world where our progress or lack of it runs up and down a scale, with our self-image and our sense of self-worth often traveling along for the ride.  In fact, life offers so much to us, whether we write that bestseller or become an academic superstar or get straight A’s or climb the mountain or ski the double black diamond or not, that too often the important parts of life get overlooked in the scramble to meet the plan.

A child’s smile.  A flower opened, beautiful, transient.  A partner’s caress.  A dog’s eager greeting.  The smell of fresh cut hay.  A tomato fresh from the garden.  A shooting star.  A full moon.  None of these come according to plan.  They come only with attentiveness, when we live in the now and notice not the graph headed up the chart, but the beating of our own heart and the breath of our own soul.

Plans.  As Scrooge might say, Bah, Humbug.  Buy that Christmas goose and pass out alms for the poor.  All better than getting the account books done on a holiday.

Here’s a shot I took this morning.  When I take my camera outside on these muggy days, the lens fogs up.  I often clean it, but this time I decided to shoot anyway.  This is corn in the mist.

cornmist500.jpg

Faith and Spirituality, Garden

A Time of Burnt Sacrifice

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85  bar steep fall 29.89  0mph WNW dew-point 68  Summer, warm and sunny

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

We long ago passed the midpoint of summer, June 21, and have begun the fattening, browning, bursting journey to the harvest season.  It begins in earnest as July ends, but some early givers have offered themselves already:  lettuce, beans, beets, carrots, onions and garlic.  We all, at least all of us up north of 45 degrees latitude, await squash, cucumbers, corn, watermelon and the full seasonal abundance of beans and peas and tomatoes.

Even the angle of the sun reached its apogee at the Summer Solstice and has begun steadily declining since then, shortening the day and lengthening the night.  The deepening shadows of afternoon tell the tale, too, as does the now far gone blooming of the daffodils, tulips and scylla.

This partly benighted soul finds a comfort in the change, preferring the winter to the summer solstice, the sweet melancholy of fall to the bursting forth of spring.  When the wind direction swings to the north, and the winds begin to howl, then the weather begins to stir the deep reaches.  The inner cathedral gains in holiness as the need for candles increases.  Walking those corridors, those ancient trails of the interior journey, demand a commensurate gloom, or, at least, welcome it.

Until then, Persephone above ground keeps us focused on food and external pleasures.  We soak in the sun,  till the earth, travel the highways and airways.  This is, too, a time of burnt sacrifice, smoked hecatombs appearing on decks and patios across the land.

General

Clean Teeth, Clean Mind

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80  bar steady  29.97  2mph W dew-point 64   Summer, cloudy with possible storms

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

“Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices — just recognize them.” – Edward R. Murrow

My dental hygienist told me I had an “open contact” between two back teeth.  When I questioned her on this seeming oxymoron she replied with a giggle, “I don’t know.  We just always say that.”

Mesial drift is a term I learned the last time I visited the dentist (over a year ago.  I missed my last appt.  Bad boy.).  It seems as we get older our teeth drift toward the middle of our jaw.  My hunch is that it comes from increasing brain size squeezing the outer jaw further apart, but I might be wrong about that.  When Dr. Mahler, my new dentist since the old dentist decided to hit the links full time, came in he told me it was also because those teeth have nothing to stop them from drifting apart.  Guess where it is not happening?  On the right side where I still have my wisdom teeth.  Get it?

George Carlin would nod and say, see, if he drove along France Avenue.  Before Centennial plaza, where Dr. Mahler grinds on, there used to be a space, then the Dayton’s Home Store.  Many changes later it is now the Macy’s Home Store.  The open contact between Centennial Plaza has a filling.  It is a very large two story store, The Container Store.  If Nicole, the dental hygienist has it right, this is a very large where you can buy stuff in which to store your stuff.  In the First Book of George the Prophet we have his famous dialogue on just this topic.

Before I sign off here, a comment on the Edward Murrow quote.  I fully agree with him and in that agreement recognize my own racism, sexism, classism and agism. I would go further than Murrow though to this:  We must recognize them and choose not to act on them.  Easier said than done, but the great project of any age.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Writing

Hey, Buddy! Wanna Live Forever?

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69  bar rises 29.92 0mph NNW dew-point 57   Summer night, pleasant and clear

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

The gibbous Thunder Moon hangs low in the south, below the tops of the great poplars in our woods.  From our perspective it illuminates downtown Minneapolis.

Some switch got hit and the mosquito population jumped out of the woods.  Now they are out even in the daytime.

A program on the Science Channel discussed the nature of aging and held out the possibility of stopping or even reversing the aging process.  Kate and I discussed whether we would want to live a long time, say a thousand years.

I would.  The number of books to read and write, plays to see, movies to watch, places to go, there are enough for several lifetimes for me.  Gardens and dogs and family would all retain their interest to me.  What we would do with all the people, I don’t know.  Might place a premium on space flight and terraforming Mars.

Tomorrow I have teeth cleaning.  An event I look forward to every six months.  Not.  Still, consider an eight hundred year old set of teeth.  Yikes, if you didn’t take care of them.  Bad news.

The UU history piece has picked up speed.  I’ve gathered enough information now to have a sense of the sweep of Unitarian and Universalist movements west, then on into Minnesota Territory.  Next I have to do some specific research at the Minnesota History Center on the large churches.  Right now I don’t know whether I can answer the question that interested me in the first place, i.e. Why did liberal religion find such fertile ground in the Twin Cities?  I have not given up on that; the information to answer it seems elusive.