Great Work, Our Land and Home

A Root Cellar in Andover

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19  65%  26%  1mph W  bar30.10 rises  windchill19  Winter

                Waxing Crescent of the Winter Moon

I like Sundays.  My workout schedule is 6 days a week and Sunday is a day off.   Much of my life Sunday, especially Sunday morning  was a work day, so to have the day off is a special treat in my world. 

Of course, like most Sundays, I will write today and spend some more time on the garden plan.  Might even watch a play-off game.  How ’bout them Packers?  Winning in the snow.  Northern football.  Brett Favre comes from Mississippi; must have been a shock when he first started in Green Bay.

Yesterday I looked over plans for root cellars.  Kate and I plan to put one in this next growing season.  I’m not sure where quite yet.  One book recommends digging into a hill, which makes sense, and I have a hill right outside the window here.  The problem is, if I dig it by hand, there are difficulties.  First order of business is to kill and remove the poison ivy.  Then, since this hill has seven oaks trees on its crest and a few stubby ash and oak there will be woody roots to remove.  Not to mention the actual digging.  That could be a good workout, though.

None of this is impossible, of course.  The question is whether I’m willing to do all the work by hand.  If we put the root cellar in the back, we could have a backhoe come in and do the heavy lifting, then all we’d have to do is frame it out, make steps and a floor, put in a roof and call it a cellar.  To get to the hill area I’d like to use, any heavy equipment would have to come over lawn and I’m not sure I want to do that.

 Noticed in the paper today that the election has world attention.  As well it might.  Having spent the last presidential election in Singapore, however, I can report that even then taxi drivers gave a damn about whom we elect as President.  Many foreign nationals are eager to see the Bush era come to an end.  I’m with them. 

Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld

BMI 25.1, Blood Sugar 98. Yes!

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22  82%  28%  2mph NNW bar30.06  wincdhill21  Winter

            Waxing Crescent of the Winter Moon

These next three weeks are, on average, the coldest weeks of the year.  I’m glad to see them come.  I love the snug as a bug in a rug feeling of very cold days, work I love and a home place to do it.

Weighed in this morning.  My BMI is now 25.1 and my blood sugar is 98.  I’ll continue on with the nutrisystem at least for the rest of this month, then I’ll have to have a good maintenance plan in place because I will head off for the Dwelling in the Woods, then 3 weeks in Hawai’i.  Hawai’i should be ok because the fish, fruit and vegetable type menu is common there.  It would not be the same if we were headed to, say, England or Austria.  I feel good about this effort so far.  The challenge now will be a healthy long term eating plan, one I strayed from too far for too long.

Still no joy on the sound system.  I had the DVD player sending signals through the five speaker set up, so I know I have them connected and working.  When I exchanged the Toshiba HD DVD player for a Panasonic Blu-Ray player, however, I eliminated the sound success I had made.  Since I won’t get the Blu-Ray until next week, I don’t know yet whether I can convince it to communicate with the speakers.  I know, right now, that the coaxial cable I got to connect the DVR/HD box to the receiver did not produce instant results.  Sigh.  I may have to talk with the folks at Ultimate when I go in to pick up the Blu-Ray.  This is part of the learning curve, less steep now than when I opened the first box, but steep enough to block my vision so far.

Today is more work on the Faery Tale and garden planning.  This is the work I love.t

Faith and Spirituality

Off to Dreamland

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20 88%  27%  0mph WSW bar29.87 windchill20  Winter

             Waxing Crescent of the Winter Moon

Day is done; gone the sun. 

The time before bed has a peculiar poignancy.  We lay down the work of this day, set it aside for a period of sleep.  We give up our apparent agency in the waking world for a sleeping world in which we seem to become passive participants in jagged scenes made up of pieces of daily life intermingled with invented plot lines and sometimes extreme emotion.

The dream world has always fascinated me and I’ve gone through parts of my life where I kept nightly dream journals.  Sometimes I would work with these dreams with a Jungian analyst.  Other times I worked with them on my own in a journal keeping process I learned in workshops designed by Ira Progroff, an American Jungian who believed in self-directed forms of analysis and self-care.

A couple of years ago I participated for a full year in the Jungian Seminar, an intense Saturday long class that runs during the academic year.  It is taught by Jungian analysts for the most part and can serve as part of certification for Jungian analysts in training.  A wonderful, rich time, one I gave up when I took up the docent training program as too much, for me a lot like too much chocolate cake.  We worked on dreams a lot.

In spite of my project manager I try to keep the activities of the day confined to that day.  I’m not always successful, like early this morning, but I try to resolve differences of opinion or strong feeling before bedtime if it is at all possible.  We never have more than this day, this hour, this minute, this moment. Ever.  Hard to keep that up front, but I try.

Good night, and as Edward R. Murrow used to say, good luck.

                                           -30-

Art and Culture

One Month and Three Belt Notches Later

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22  80%  28%  0mph WSW bar29.78  windchill 22  Winter

         Waxing Crescent of the Winter Moon

Fifth graders today from Harambee Community Culture School.  We marveled at Shiva’s four arms, heard a Tibetan monk who happened to be in the gallery explain the Mandala, walked through the Celebration of Bestowed Glory and looked at the four noble professions.  We investigated the scholar’s study and found implements for calligraphy, poetry, painting and music making.  We teased out differences between the Greco-Roman influenced Ghandara Buddha and the Japanese depiction of Amitbha Buddha.  Both groups were fun, responsive.  My questions helped somewhat, but generally I just went with the flow, answering questions, prodding, making linkages.  So my project manager can rest easy about this one.

Of course, there’s that highlights tour and another Asia tour next week…  But, shh.  We won’t tell him just yet.

The second nutrisystem order came. It is a sensible, straight forward weight loss program.  It works.  Don’t know how much I’ve lost but I’ve gone in three belt notches and can wear pants I gave up on long ago.  Tomorrow I plan to weigh in and take my fasting blood sugar.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality

This Is Your Project Manager Speaking!

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22  78%  33%  0mph SSW bar29.74  windchill21  Winter

            Waxing Crescent of the  Winter Moon

(Moon names this year from American Colonists)

Wide awake at 5AM this morning.  Oh, man.  I really love that.

Why?  Three things rolling around.  First, I want to improve my use of the inquiry method, so I’m focusing on the questions I’ve created for the Asia tours today.  At 5AM my inquiring mind wanted to know:  what are they?  Oh, brother.  Then, as these things go, another, bigger task, more fun, but more work trundled itself forward:  What ever happened to the influence of the Judaeo-Christian tradition in modern and contemporary art?  In March I have to present a discussion on this topic to the Docent Book Club.  What will I say, my mind wondered?  As if I could think clearly enough at 5AM to solve this riddle.  As I pushed it down to later in the day, when I can read and take notes, the third item leaped up to be noticed:  Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Transcendent Unitarian.  This is also a for March project, capsulizing transcendentalism, Emerson’s role relative to it and his influence on early Unitarianism.

You might reasonably wonder why these other two projects were on my mind (in my mind?  on top of my mind?) on January 11th, 2008.  On February 6th, I leave for a retreat with my fellow Woolly Mammoths at the Dwelling in the Woods in northern Minnesota.  I leave from there for Hawai’i where I will stay until February 29th.  In my mental world that means I have a choice between finishing the Art and the Emerson projects before I leave for Hawai’i or trying to finish them as I return. 

My mind keeps a project manager running at all times.  Most of the time it works in the background, following my work, assigning priorities and evaluating progress.  Some times it moves into the foreground, like at 5AM on January 11th.

OK. OK.  I sleepily ran through the objects:  Jade Mountain, Shiva Nataraja, Gandhara Buddha, Mandala, Ceremonial Gate, Studio of Gratifying Discourse, Korean bronze Buddha, Amitbha Buddha. What were the questions for each one?  I dutiful recalled them.  When I finished, the project manager let go and slipped beneath the surface again, content to work in the background.  I went back to sleep.

Family, General

Between the Legs

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29  85%  31%  1mph WNW bar29.64 windchill27  Winter

                New Moon

The new grandchild is a boy.  Here’s a poem composed by the proud parents for the occasion.   

What is it?

We went to the doc for the ultrasound
And what we saw was quite profound.
There was the heart, the brain, the spine and all
And between the legs was a penis and balls.

IT’S A BOY!!!!!!!!!

Sheepshead this evening.  If you don’t know what sheepshead is, there’s a link on the right.  Two consecutive times now I  have hit the positive column.  These are a great bunch of guys.  We had a lot of fun tonight.  Jokes, pro-Packer football talk (I listen.), analysis of doing in the Roman Catholic Church and events in each others lives.

GeekWorld

Has Your Light Gone Out Yet?

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32  72% 27% 1mph N bar20.68 steady windchill32  Winter

                    New Moon

Simplicity.  Ah.  About two hours ago I called Comcast to activate the new digital box I got downstairs because the old one, according to Comcast, was a non-responding box.   So, I call this guy.  A disembodied voice that asks me all the usual questions:  phone number, address, name, size of my boxer shorts and my ring finger.  As he talks, he says he’s aboot got my account up. 

I say, so, you’re in Canada.  Yes.  I am.  How did  you know?  An o or two that stayed longer than usual for my ear.  Oh.

We talk about Stratford and his fiance and how they want to go their once.  How Chatham, where he lives, has just had a remodel.  He thinks it will become an art city like Stratford.  Then he sends a jolt to my box from Chatham, Ontario.

It should go out.

It hasn’t.

I’ll send another one, a stronger one.  This from a guy in Chatham, Ontario.  He’s communicating directly with my TV converter box.

Still not out.

Well, wait about 20 minutes. That should do it.  If it doesn’t, just call back.

It’s not out yet–an hour and a half later.  So, I’ll call back. Talk to someone else in Chatham.  Start over.

Faith and Spirituality

What Moves Your Heart?

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34  68%  26%  0mph  bar 29.66  steep fall  windchill33  Winter

                 New Moon

“Let your capital be simplicity and contentment.” – Henry David Thoreau

Yes, it’s a stretch after a week of wires and bytes and high definition, but Thoreau’s got it right.  If we can’t be happy with what we have and content with our life, then we doom ourselves to slavery, handcuffed to the next big thing as sure as if we rode in the middle passage.

Then what?  After my change of mind about the exclusivist claim of Christianity, I floundered for several years. 

There had been a prior change in my spiritual life, of a seemingly subtle nature, but it began to play increasing importance.  At some point on my Christian pilgrimage I began to resist transcendence and the many, many metaphors for it that take us up and away from our Selves, our inner journey.  Heaven, God as a being resident there, the Bible or the Pope or church doctrine as a source of truth.  Remember Bacon on method?  Ascension.  Rapture.  Rooting my ethical decisions in the literature of a long dead people. 

Emerson made a lot of sense to me here:  “Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”  Introduction to Nature

Since I found Emerson in my first church experience after Presbyterianism, I oriented toward liberal religion.  Liberal religion is more a method than a faith, that is, it proposes to apply the Enlightenment to religion:  reason, tolerance and freedom.  At first the literally heady mix of those three allowed me to swing wide the doors of my spirit and just play, considering this possibility and that.  At some point, though, I can’t pinpoint just when, this tradition began to raise in me the same quandry Emerson had seen after only three years in the Unitarian ministry:  it was corpse cold.

Reason, tolerance and freedom are good tools to open up a space for free thought in politics, religion and science.  In the end, however, they are tools, not content.  They can take apart political ideology and scientific speculation, but in themselve they neither decide for or against, say, democracy or socialism or communalism.  Though they also are great aids to understanding the world through scientific investigation, they offer us no clues as to why there is a world investigate, a cosmos to explore.  In religion, again, they are tools handy for dismantling false claims like the inerrancy of scripture, or, even, the universality of a particular religion’s dogmas, but as constructive tools they do not build a faith of the heart.  No, that can only happen when, as John Wesley said, the heart is strangely moved.

More on that which moved my heart later.

GeekWorld, Politics, Weather +Climate

Yes, You’re Right. It’s Hillary, not Hilary.

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12  86%  28%  1mph NNE bar30.09 rises windchill9  Winter

                      New Moon

If I give you a pfennig, you will be one pfennig richer and I’ll be one pfennig poorer. But if I give you an idea, you will have a new idea, but I shall still have it, too.

First, an apology to the Hillary Clinton campaign.  My chief proof reader (Kate) caught me in theft of an l from Hillary’s name.  Sorry about that, Hill.  Her win in New Hampshire should sharpen up her campaign and her campaign presence, just as it will do the same for Obama’s.  Both of them need to move a little more to the left for my tastes (ok, a lot more.), but their eventual campaign against the Republican, whoever it will be, will be stronger for having had to clarify their identities and stances.  This is what the primary season does, when it works properly, and, much to my surprise, it is.

One small step for technology this morning. Kate wants to see a documentary about Jewish Americans broadcast this evening while she’s at work.  I went into the dvr menu, found the how to record stuff, clicked a couple of times and we’re ready.  I’ll believe it when I see it, but, geez, it seemed easy.

The weather has turned cold again and I’m happy.  As if to underscore my let winter be winter and spring be spring attitude, we had a series of January tornadoes that reached as far north as Milwaukee.   This seems to define a world out of joint, whether climate change or bad luck.  Get out that book of Job.  It’s the only way to deal with this kind of random nonsense.

Cinema and Television, GeekWorld, Politics

Coming Down off a Techno High

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30  96%  30%  omph WSW bar 29.85 rises windchill30  Winter

                     New Moon

Watched an HD movie tonight:  An American Haunting. Sissy Spacek, Donald Sutherland and James D’Arcy provided the core of a good ensemble cast.  This movie tells of the Bell Witch, an early 19th century century haunting in Adams, Tennessee. There is a cottage industry of folks who believe, including debunkers of other believers.  A bit like a snake biting its own tale.  The book An American Haunting: The Bell Witch recounts the supposedly true events which ended in 1821 with the death of John Bell.  The movie suggests incest, but fails, at least to my satisfaction, to link it to the strange occurrences at the Bell House.  Here is a website with further information.

Feel like I’m coming down off a techno high, a sort of cyber electric dream occasioned by optical cables, coaxial cables, HDMI cables, speaker wire, subwoofers and high definition televison.  Alice could tumble through an HDMI cable into a virtual wonderland, I have.  This is an enchantment of sorts, and as such it must be encountered with awareness, not naivete.

Hey, how about that Hilary, huh?  Coulda fooled me.  Looked like Obama was a shoe-in in New Hampshire.  Just what this means for the race is anybodies guess right now.  I love it.  Real candidates in a real horse race.  Jockeying for position, fighting over the issues and over how to organize campaigns for types of candidates who’ve never run before in this serious a manner.  This is (to use a much abused phrase) a historic moment for American democracy.  It can be a time when we win back the world’s admiration if we allow ourselves to enter the process without cynicism.  Hard, I admit, but possible and desirable.  Imagine a campaign about real politics and not weirdo ideologies.