• Tag Archives Woollys

  • In Tutelage to My Self

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    41  bar steady  29.41 4mph dewpoint 39 Beltane

               Waning Crescent Moon of Growing

    Wet.  Cold.  Dreary.  An inside day.  I was gonna plant beets and carrots outside, but not today.  Maybe Sunday.

    Lunch with Tom Crane.  We discussed the meeting at his house where I serve as his assistant.  The topic is mastery.  The word poses some problems for me because it is difficult, if not impossible, to extricate it from its linkage to subordination.  The idea that lurks behind it, though, is strong.  Somewhere in the terms Zen master or Taoist sage or master gardener, even master craftsperson lies a life time of practice, the honing of a skill or a life way on the hard stone of experience. 

    We had an interesting conversation about who we had come across in our lives we would consider masters.  I’ll get back to you, but no one leapt to mind.  We also discussed the possibility of naming for others where we see mastery in them.  This gets around the culture bound reticence we upper-middle class Midwesterners have to tooting our own horn.

    I admitted that I had not allowed anyone to mentor me, nor had I been willing to be anyone’s disciple.  This is a weakness, I believe, borne of a need to figure things out for myself, to do things on my own.  Tom had the same experience, but for a different reason.  He was thrust into responsibility and expected to survive.  And he has.

    This is, in part at least, a vulnerability question.  Can I make myself vulnerable enough to another person to become their student, their disciple.  The result of not doing that is, as Tom and I admitted, a sense that we have never quite arrived, not quite done enough.  A niggle of uncertainty that has no reference within us which we can use to dislodge it.

    We also spoke a bit about being in tutelage to the Self.  I said I have been willing to trace my own journey by the vague outlines I feel in that part of me that participates in the greater universe, and which calls me forward to my own destiny.  As a Taoist, I would call that my attunement to the Movement of Heaven, the Tao.  A good lunch on a wet day.


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  • One Psychiatrist Says to Another

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    61 bar steep fall 29.73  6mph WSW dewpoint 33 Spring

                    Last Quarter Moon of Growing

    Some leaf curling and cupping on my lettuce and tomato.  Not sure if it’s a problem or not.  I can’t find any organisms.  No sign of mildew, virus, aphid, biting insects.  Still, it doesn’t look quite right to me.  Time will tell.

    Fed the dogs at 11:00AM and took off for the Walker to talk to Stefan.  He asked me to edit and comment on his poems. 

    I got there early and wandered through the Suburbs exhibit and the Richard Prince exhibit.  I’m not sure about Prince, as I know many others are not, but he has some funny jokes. 

    Two psychiatrists are at a bar together.  One psychiatrist says to the other, “I had dinner with my mother last night and I had a Freudian slip.”  The other psychiatrist raised an eyebrow.  “I said, ‘You ruined my life you fucking bitch!”

    Also, “You know what it means when you come home to a warm, loving embrace?  It means you’re in the wrong house.”

    These are on monochrome backgrounds, sort of pop artish.  Most of the other re-purposed photographs show an interesting angle on American culture.  I can imagine a curatorial meeting where having Richard Prince and the Suburban show together would add irony, creative tension.  I’m not so sure. I found the suburban show more provocative than the Prince.  It has an original take on a widely experienced phenomenon.  Prince recycles material from our magazines, our popular culture, but his work seems more cool, distant.  The suburban exhibition is lively, engaged with the subject either ironically or in a non-judgmental way.

    Stefan and I met in Gallery 8, the first place aside from United Theological Seminary I saw when I first came to the Twin Cities over 38 years ago.  Oddly, I had lunch with Lonnie, his wife, there many times when she and I used to keep up. 

    We talked about his poetry.  I took a slash and burn approach to editing this batch.  “I’m trying to find the line here, Stefan.  Like skiing.  I cut out everything that didn’t get me down the hill fast.”  I told him that was an idiosyncratic method and that he could do whatever he wanted with the feedback.  He gave me a few more so I guess it wasn’t too bad for him.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture 📎and tagged

  • We Stand at the Jabbok Ford Many Times

    Posted on by Charles Comment

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

                         New Moon

    At 2 AM this morning I finished Ken Follett’s, Triple.  Don’t know whether it was Turkish tea, an unusually large meal or envy over the traveling and work related adventures of my fellow Woollys, but I couldn’t get to sleep last night and woke up at 6 AM today.  I hope it’s not envy, the other two I can handle.  Envy is a monster that makes you miserable through a combination of self-flagellation and jealousy.  Each time I feel I’ve wrestled the demon ambition back into the pit from which He springs, it seems instead I’ve wound the crank on a jack in the box.  Or not.

    Could be I’m feeling this way because I’m tired, lost sleep and can’t decide why.  In fact, as I write this, as often happens, the words provide their own catharis.  I’m happy for Mark, Paul and Stefan, not envious.  They make me proud to be a Woolly and their friend.  I’ve chosen a different path for my later life, one with its own benefits and downsides, not a worse one. 

    Just occurred to me the Jacob at the Jabbok ford nature of the demon wrestling metaphor.  We may wrestle demons as well as angels and to equal affect.  If we hold a demon at the ford, we prevent them from crossing over into our spiritual lives; we keep them on their side of the river.  There is no reason to believe, either, that we will only have one match in a lifetime.  If history serves, we will all stand at the Jabbok ford many times in our lives, arms wrapped round one adversary or another, devil or angel. 

    Had a strange dream last night. 

    I was in charge of a storage room in a hospital.  It had shelf after shelf of boxes, equipment, various light bulbs all of which were there when I came to the job.  At some point I left the room, maybe to go home for the day, and returned to find it turned into an employee lounge.  When I asked where all the stuff went, I was led into a small laboratory where one row of three shelves held the pared down contents of the room. 

    Deflated, I asked if I still had a job.

    Oh, yes.

    A tub of silverware appeared in my hands. 

    I carried it through the hospital to the kitchen area, through two automatic doors only to discover when I got to the dishwasher that the tub was empty.  When I tracked back, looking for the silverware, a woman I knew came up to me and said I had dumped it in the wastebasket of a woman’s hospital room.  Sheepish, I went to the room and retrieved the silverware. To make sure I got it all, I flipped on the light and the woman in the hospital bed said, “Can’t you see I’m sick?”

    I turned off the light and got out of the room as quickly as possible.


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  • The Buddhist After-Life and the Killing Fields

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    25  93%  27%  omph NNW bar 29.77 windchill25  Winter

                      New Moon

    Had a summary of our gathering (Woollies) at the Istanbul Bistro, but lost in a multiple cascading of Internet Explorer browser pages.  Probably a sign I should go back to Firefox.  I used to use it, then I abandoned it, used it again, and abandoned it again.  Just like Darth Vader I keep coming back to the evil empire.

    Mark, Warren, Paul, Tom, Frank, Bill and Stefan showed up.  We spoke of politics and Rome, of Green Knights present and long dead. A brief comment was made about the Istanbul not being a sportsbar, a positive.  It’s quiet and it has a round table around which this latter day collection of Knights Errant can sit.  That does mean knights in error, doesn’t it?

    Mark has a gig in Bangkok designing teen sex exhibitions for Unesco/Thailand.  It’s a campaign to promote safe sex in a nation where AIDS among youngsters has become a problem again.  After that he will return to the US, then go back to Cambodia to construct an exhibit near the killing fields, one dealing with the Buddhist afterlife.  To continue the international theme Paul Strickland will host a trip to Syria in November and his organization will co-host a trip with the Hindu Temple of Maple Grove to Southern India.  Stefan chimed in with the fact that he’s taking his kids to Rome to visit a person he knows who works in the American Embassy there.  Makes for good dinner table conversation.  Those who’d been to Rome all agreed the most memorable moment was the first coffee. 

    We discussed the political scene.  All of us were happy with the real choices represented by the candidates.  Of course, SuperTuesday will eliminate any chance for us to pariticipate in candidate selection and after we will have 7 months of attack ads, but right now it is glorious.  Tom wondered if any of us had supported any candidates financially.  Frank said, yes, he and Mary had sent money to Obama.

    Warren reported good news about his mom and dad.    

     The retreat and a theme came up, but we put it off until Paul’s.  Mark will not attend since he’s got to be in Thailand the first week of February.  I’m leaving early for Hawai’i.  One of those years.

     Forgot to mention here I watched Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast the other night. It’s one of the Janus Films collection I got for my 60th birthday, 50 films from 50 years of their distribution of foreign films in the US.  This movie floats across the mind like a dream, a fairy tale given form and substance.  It’s images have remained with me.  It sat in my DVD player for a long time because I didn’t want to watch it; but, like each one of the films from the collection I’ve watched it had its own unique charm.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Politics Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged