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  • Scattered Images

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                                                 Cold Moon

    Reorganizing my fragmented collection of images.  I have a method, it works, but there are a whole lot of images.  This may take a very long time.  Worth it in the end though because I will have a well organized image resource, collected by me and easily usable.

    Watched Wim Wender’s “The End of Violence” last night.  Kate likes her narrative served straight up with no sides.  This  film had oblique angels and sudden turns.  She wasn’t crazy about it, but I liked it.  It was an early post-modern film.  A film about a film about violence in which the resolution of the film destroys the protagonist’s career and liberates him at the same time.  Clever, beautiful.  Well acted.  Bill Pullman.  Andie MacDowell.  Gabriel Byrne.

    Looks like the critics on Rotten Tomatoes agreed with Kate for the most part.  I write these critiques before I look up the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.  Sort of like translating Latin before checking with an English version.

    I’m in full inside mode at the moment, not moving outside for much though I do plan to visit the grocery store this afternoon.  Cold.  And our furnace is out.  Fortunately I have my own gas stove in the study.  Centerpoint is coming today.  Could be the end for the furnace; it’s 18 years old and their life-span is 15-20 years.  Sigh.

     


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Cinema and Television Our Land and Home 📎and tagged

  • Mi Casa

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain                                     Moon of the Winter Solstice

    Much as I enjoyed the travel, the close time with Kate, the ocean, new cultures and places, I find this computer and my own keyboard, my reference shelf and my library, mementos from past trips, family, collected art like slipping into a pair of comfortable bedroom slippers.  At its best travel allows for renewal, challenge, broadening, but an unexpected and forgotten pleasure, perhaps never noticed before, is this lifting up of home.

    Home as reality and as metaphor carries a special valence for all of us, one way or the other.  I moved so often for the first 40+ years of my life I never had the time, the digging into a place where I could really feel home.  Here in Andover, although the burb itself is nada as place, the home Kate and I have created nourishes both of us.  We have space for our mutual creative work, space for mutual work outside and in, leisure space and fitness space.

    Over the years, as is the case with most family homes, our sons have developed memories here, now grandchildren and in-laws, too.  Animals, both present and past, inhabit the hallways and the woods.  Storms past, challenges met and overcome, Thanksgiving, Hanukah, Christmas, birthdays, honey harvests.  All here.

    Home.  This trip made me appreciate it more than I ever have.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Bees Family Friends Garden Our Land and Home Retirement Travel Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • Welcome Home, Tai Chi

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                   Waning Bloodroot Moon

    Once in a while something comes into my life and it feels like a part of me already, as if a missing piece had come back home.  Meeting Kate was like that for me.  My split-off.  When the Wednesday classes for the two-year docent program began, art history came home.  When I found a Jungian analyst over 25 years ago, my Self began to return.  Last night I attended my first Tai Chi class.  Another wandering aspect of myself has joined the others at the hearthside.

    When my hands floated up last night into the second position, I felt an energy pushing away from my body, just I felt it collecting as I pulled my elbows in and those same hands back toward my body.  A sense of inner peace, momentary, but real, emerged.  My first class, but not my last.

    It may be true as an article in the Star-Tribune this morning claimed, that memory takes longer to cement as we grow older, may be, but for me, I hold out for variability, that some things to take longer to seat, yes; but others, because they’re compelling or because they’re split-offs that have found their back to the homestead, just rejoin as if they’d never left.

    I’m going to confess something here.  There’s a part of me, a looky-loo part, that hopes disasters will go all the way like the earthquake and the tsunami in Japan or the financial crisis or the riots sweeping the Middle East.  A part of me wants to see what a nuclear meltdown would entail.  What if that chief villain of high tech actually happened?  What would the consequences be?  Really?  This is not at all a desire to see more disasters or worse catastrophes, rather it is a sort of morbid curiosity, a curiosity about extremes.  What if a volcano like Mt. Rainier or Mt. Fuji erupt at full force?  What if the sea levels do rise by 2 feet or more?  This is the immoderate part of me, that aspect that wants thing to extend to their logical conclusion.

    I wouldn’t feel embarrassed about this at all if there wasn’t the possibility, the great likelihood, of serious injury and death to people and eco-systems.  So, I feel embarrassed, but still interested.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Art and Culture Asia Faith and Spirituality Family Humanities World History 📎and tagged

  • We Call This Place Home

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    our-woodsSummer                                New (Grandchildren) Moon

    Outside this morning, finishing my tea on the patio, a hummingbird darted in and out of the lilies, gathering the last bits of nectar, passing on final touches of pollen.  Like the possum from yesterday’s adventure the hummingbird shares this patch of land with us, too.  Possum, groundhogs, gophers, chipmunks, squirrels, raccoons, rabbits, deer, hummingbirds, blue jays, goldfinches, red-headed and pileated woodpeckers, a great horned owl, crows, grosbeaks, dogs, mice, skinks, salamanders, garter snakes, garden spiders, wolf spiders, worms, bees, moths, wasps, caterpillars and butterflies and many others, most one-celled or many-celled, I imagine, live here.

    They live here as we do,  making a home, finding and preparing food, eating their meals, raising their young, growing to old age, dying.  Our home takes up more space, yes, and our decisions impact the land in dramatic, sometimes even drastic ways, but that we are only one species among hundreds that live here is beyond question.

    When we leave, either through death or otherwise, the generations yet unborn of these animals and insectshighrise and other life forms will, perhaps, know no difference.  If fact, if the house became abandoned, many of them would find a use for it as shelter, as a place to raise their families, perhaps as a source of food.

    All of us, all of us who live here, are only here for a while.  It is so important that we leave this place a better one for all its inhabitants.  If each of us only took this one objective, a prime objective?, to leave our places better for all those who live in them, wouldn’t the world be safe now and into the future?


    📂This entry was posted in Garden Great Work Our Land and Home permaculture 📎and tagged

  • Home Is Where The Boxes Are

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                          Waxing Flower Moon

    At the recycling place I pushed in flattened box after flattened box, a layered batch of cardboard going back to late November, another step in the home as retailer, receiving goods directly from middle-folk like Levenger, Amazon and Williams-Sonoma.  Another instance of disintermediation these flattened boxes could serve as both metaphor and symbol of an age shifting old patterns of store fronts and even big box stores to the home, ironically moving back to the days of the Sears Catalog and Montgomery Wards catalog stores.

    In many ways the home is now the hub that a business district used to be.  We pick up our mail and some of us our newspapers and magazines off a computer screen.  We watch movies mailed to us by Netflix or streamed directly into our TV’s by wireless routers.  We shop on the internet and have things delivered to our home instead of driving to a store, picking them out and doing self-delivery.  An increasing percentage of us now move from bed to office without the interference of a commute.  In some instances, like vegetable and flower growing, another percentage of the population has started growing their own.  Others keep bees, raise chickens, some have goats.

    The times have changed and they have changed in dramatic ways, but like the fabled frog in the pot of boiling water, the changes have proceeded at such a deliberate pace that we scarcely notice all of them.

    The cell phone, too, has replaced the landline at home, the old familiar location centered phone call having gone the way of crank phones.

    Those of us who are aging will benefit a great deal from most if not all of these changes.  We can look forward, I think, to certain tele-conferenced medical services, perhaps rugs that know when we fall.

    Home has become more like a subsistence farm without the subsistence level life style.  Again, at least for some.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging 📎and tagged

  • Simple, eh?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                    Waning Wild Moon

    Tomorrow Allan, the Grout Doctor, operates on the steam bath.  It’s been in place for 12 years or so and has some missing grout, some iron deposits, some loose tile.  He’ll give it an acid bath.  Sounds like the act of a vandal, but no, we’re going to pay him to do this.  After the acid bath some other folks will come and take out the current door.  Then, Allan will return to remove tiles and fix grout.  The door people will come and replace the door. Allan will come back and seal the entire steam bath.  Then he’ll come back  one more time and seal it a second time.  Hopefully, by this time, the tomatoes will be ripe and we’ll be able to send some home with him.

    Simplicity may exist; it might.  Somewhere.  The world, however, has layers of complexity all the way down and all the way inside and all the way outside.  Think of it.  Our own cells, the cells that constitute our bodies, our very selves, are a minority population, only a 20th of the total cellular life in and on our body, the other 19/20 composed of microbes living in symbiotic relation with us or just living on or in us.  Complexity outside the human body begins with the other 6.8 billion people out there, but includes all the other animals, plants, fungi, rocks, water, air, chemicals everything and then of course we leave the earth and there is the solar system and our local galaxy and our local region and then the rest, all the rest.  In the end though there may be nothing quite as complex as the human mind, consciousness, which consists of a blooming, buzzing confusion (to borrow from William James) of synaptic pulses, stored memories and sensory input.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Humanities 📎and tagged

  • The House That Harvey Built, We Have Made a Home

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                                New (Dark) Moon

    The house that Harvey built ( Harvey Kadlec) as a model house for Kadlec Estates–3122 153rd Ave. NW, Andover, Minnesota–became a home long ago.  The kids have contributed memories and projects.  The land around the house has had many iterations of plants and vegetables.  Kate has sewing materials and tools scattered here and there.  I have books and computers.vegachair

    With Kate off in the hospital this home reverts part way to house.  Without her here part of the spirit of the home dwells elsewhere.

    Houses are inanimate, things of wood and metal, pipes and plastic.  The house, or the apartment, at least in America, will have serial occupants.   Except for those folks who work with architects, their construction and  siting decided by someone else, often a construction company, these sophisticated shells provide shelter from the elements and changing seasons.  Various ports of entry connect a house to electrical service providers, a gas company, a cable or satellite service for TV and broadband internet, water and sewage removal.  Often a patch of earth surrounds the house, a buffer between the house and the outside world.

    A home, now that’s another matter.  A home is a house (or apartment) that has been made real in the Velveteen Rabbit way.  It may have a step or two that jiggle when walked upon.  Maybe one or two windows have their weatherstripping coming loose.  The floors probably have scuff marks and once pristine walls have chips showing the wall board beneath.  At any time there is probably a light bulb out somewhere.  The gas fireplace stopped working two or three years ago.  The water pressure is not what it once was.

    That brand new furniture that looked so good in the show room?  A dog is asleep there now with a young boy.  The cat scratched the chair and though long dead her mark remains.  The beds in the home have bred dreams, consoled sadness and rocked with anticipation on holiday mornings.  Showers have cleansed little boys before t-ball games, girls before prom, mom and dad before anniversary dinners or after funerals.

    Cars have been dissected across the dining room table.  Gardens planned.  Weddings, too.  Thanksgiving dinners and birthday parties.  The oven still has the remnants from a first cake.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Faith and Spirituality Family Garden Our Land and Home 📎and tagged

  • Snow, Snow, Snow

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc        New Moon (Moon of Winds)

    The winds continue to blow, now driving a heavy snow.  The winds come straight out of the north with gusts ranging as high as 16 mph.

    I’m not going to either the MIA (Maya lecture) or the capitol (Clean Cars hearing) in favor of staying home and working on the blog while the snow piles up.  Sometimes the distance and a lack of four wheel drive add up to remaining in place.

    My energy level and my sense of well-being began to increase dramatically at the end of last week, either the end of a mild virus or the hangover from the vertigo/nausea fun of the previous week.  It feels so much better to feel so much better.

    In a bit I’m going to dive into Obama’s first budget message to congress.  I have it on a pdf file.


    📂This entry was posted in General 📎and tagged

  • Home and Heart

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    winter-solstice-08cbe2.jpg1  bar steep rise 30.42  WSW0   windchill 1  Winter

    Waxing Crescent of the Wolf Moon

    Oh, man.  To get the trash out I had to blow the snow.  Underneath the snow is ice.  The snowblower with its knobby tires spun out and the only reason I stayed on my feet was the firm grip I had on the snowblower.  Never before had taking out the trash had a hint of danger to it.  Tonight it did.  After the snowblower and I went slip sliding away, I still had to roll both the trash containers down the long slope of our driveway.  Risky business.  Made it ok.

    In doing research for Homecomer I looked back over many of my sermons for Groveland and noticed that I’ve written several that deal with home as an idea.  Home has a certain poignancy for me, since my estrangement from my father and his subsequent marriage to a woman who made the problem worse.  The town and the house where I grew up seem faraway to me, as if the warm and comfortable feelings associated with home got eaten away by the acids of my family quarrel.

    The rightness or wrongness of it all has long been moot, yet the hollowness with which I’m left when it comes to home and nuclear family must have lead me to consider this theme.  It is a rich concept, one with so many layers and metaphorical possibilities that I have not tired of it.

    Perhaps out of this search of mine for home I’ll  find ideas useful to others.  The current environmental crisis both has its roots in and is made more intractable by our American sense of mobility, of looking over the next horizon for a new frontier.  This makes it hard to learn about the home that greets us each evening.  Well, more on that in Homecomer.

    The cold has come again and that will make the sleeping even better.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Memories Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • The Most Radical Thing You Can Do

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    From the Faraway Nearby
    The Most Radical Thing You Can Do
    Staying home as a necessity and a right
    by Rebecca Solnit
    Published in the November/December 2008 issue of Orion magazine

    LONG AGO the poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder said, “The most radical thing you can do is stay home,” a phrase that has itself stayed with me for the many years since I first heard it. Some or all of its meaning was present then, in the bioregional 1970s, when going back to the land and consuming less was how the task was framed. The task has only become more urgent as climate change in particular underscores that we need to consume a lot less. It’s curious, in the chaos of conversations about what we ought to do to save the world, how seldom sheer modesty comes up—living smaller, staying closer, having less—especially for us in the ranks of the privileged. Not just having a fuel-efficient car, but maybe leaving it parked and taking the bus, or living a lot closer to work in the first place, or not having a car at all. A third of carbon-dioxide emissions nationwide are from the restless movements of goods and people.

    We are going to have to stay home a lot more in the future. Continue reading → Post ID 18257


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Family Great Work permaculture 📎and tagged