• Tag Archives Aging
  • I Have Not Mentioned Adam

    5  rises 29.92  NWN0  windchill 5  Winter

    Waning Wolf Moon

    A full day Permaculture workshop.  This guy, who takes a nap every day around 1pm, suffers in mid-day at day long events.  In addition, I find that my mind gets overloaded, takes in too much.  It’s not that I can’t absorb and eventually integrate the material, but the pace of absorption has changed over time.  I need space between intake and digestion.  A day’s worth of basically new material wears me out.

    When I came back, Kate asked me what I’d learned and I had troubling with a clear answer.  The exhaustion played a factor, yes, but the tumbling pieces, the changing paragdigms and the altogether novel still raced around inside, had not come down to a place of rest. Tomorrow, next week.  Better.

    Rest tonight.  Then I’ll work on Adam tomorrow.  I haven’t mentioned Adam yet, have I?  He’s taken over my thinking lately. What was it like, I wondered?  What was it like to wake up, come to consciousness, breathe that first breath? What happened in the mind and heart of Adam when God blew into his nostrils?


  • Hey, Buddy! Wanna Live Forever?

    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.


  • Undercurrents and Subtext

    74  bar steady 29.75 3mph W dew-point 49  Summer, sunny and pleasant

    Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

    A party.  Kate and I are not party people.  We both prefer a night at home or the theater or classical music, but we’re headed out tonight because of Paul Strickland’s kids.   Kate Strickland, oldest, heads out in two weeks for Japan.  She’s going to Kyoto prefecture to teach English as part of the JET program, a government sponsored ESL that places applicants in the Japanese school system.

    The backyard party at their 4900 block Colfax Avenue home in Minneapolis had many people we did not know, but Stefan Helgeson and Lonnie were there.  Stefan, Paul and I represented the Woolly Mammoths.

    Such parties have, like family reunions, undercurrents and subtext.  The lines of relationship, for example, the casual observer would assume ran strongest among Paul, Stefan, and me.  Only partly true.  Lonnie and Sarah (Strickland) were friends of mine for a couple of years before their husbands pulled me into the orbit of the Woolly Mammoths.

    There was Kate Strickland’s closing of this chapter in her New York life.  Why?  Unsaid.  There was Lonnie’s recovery, less than a month along, from cancer surgery.  A rare great outcome.  No chemo or radiation needed because they caught the uterine cancer at its earliest stage.  Paul’s work, entangled with his across the alley neighbor, is in uncertain times.  Stefan has had a come to Jesus moment with Lonnie’s cancer surgery, “I find it difficult now to not do the things I want to do.”

    Overhanging the whole is the generational tide sweeping those of us over 60 toward years of a new time while our kids go to Japan, have their own children, become 2d Lts in the Air Force, head off to college, or graduate from college.

    This event was in no way unusual in these subtexts and undercurrents and I’m confident there were more, perhaps darker ones, about which I know nothing.   Any time we human beings gather we bring with us the scent of our current life and the trail on which we have walked to get there.  As social creatures our scents intermingle creating a perfumed community while our paths (ancientrails) intersect and deflect, generating paths of a slightly different direction than the one we were on before.  This is life as we live it, as we must live it.

    Running through my mind today has been a bumper sticker I saw years ago during the controversy over the Boundary Waters.  I was in Ely and noticed a local pickup truck.   Plastered on the gate the bumper sticker read:  Sierra Club, kiss my axe.  That was redolent of a real debate, an actual conflict between parties with drastically different visions.  Politics and its cousin the law are the arenas in which, in a democracy, we slug out conflicts without, hopefully, violence.  I like conflict and the clash of ideas, the taking up of the sword in defense of an ideal, a vision.  Being back on the battlefield brings sparks to my eyes.  Fun.


  • A Vocabulary for This Age

    69  bar steady 30.11 2mph SSE dewpoint 35 Spring

                    Waning Gibbous Moon of Growing

    On the way home from taking Kate to the airport I listened to an NPR interview with choreographer/dancer Patricia Brown.  Her company dances Friday at Northrup and she has some kind of an exhibition at the Walker.

    Here’s the takeaway for me.  She is 72+.  A newspaper announced she was about to retire.  She said, no, I haven’t said that.  Instead, she said she was “…looking for a vocabulary for my body at this age.  When I find it, I will perform again.”  This is a great strategy for aging.  We do not look at our deficits, rather, we assess our capabilities and design a vocabulary that uses them, then we get on with our life.