Thinking in black and white

I’m grateful to live in a day when thinking in black and white terms is becoming less and less acceptable. Issues are complicated. Life is complicated. People recognize it now more than ever. It seems to me that since 9/11 my fellow citizens and I are more aware, more concerned about how and why things happen the way they do.

I don’t know history well, but I want to learn. I’m reading a 1980 book called The End of Order: Versailles 1919, by Charles Mee Jr. about the Treaty after WWI. What a mess that war and that treaty were! They set the tone for the violent 20th century.

These photographs say a lot.

One is a photo of the Hall of Mirrors at the Versailles palace in color (I visited there as a student back in 1975, but the photo is not mine). Though decadent and gaudy for my taste, it has its own beauty. Prisms bounce around the room from the chandeliers. Rainbows of color.

The second is a black and white shot of the men who signed the Versailles Treaty in 1919 in the same Hall of Mirrors, including our Woodrow Wilson. All men, all black and white. They each had their biases, set ways of looking at the world’s problems, which led to more disaster.


Mee writes:

“By January of 1919, as the delegates gathered in Paris for the Peace Conference, the shallow graves of Verdun were being washed out by the rains; feet stuck out of the ground, and helmets with skulls in them rose up through the mud. In this atmosphere, the diplomats gathered—and, far from restoring order to the world, they took the chaos of the Great War, and, through vengefulness and inadvertence, impotence and design, they sealed it as the permanent condition of our century.”

(original color photo at college.hmco.com/.../ image185_large.html)

L'atelier

When inside the studio, I'm in a different place and time. A creativity exists in this small space that began with chickens laying eggs here in its henhouse days. The seed of life lingers here.

Now, collected stones and lights are laid here instead of eggs. It's a place for stillness, listening, and feeling the sun through the seven windows.

Remembering Bennett

Ten years ago today, my brother Bennett died at age 47. He was eight years my senior.

What I recall about him:

• watching www wrestling on TV
• watching stock car racing on TV
• eating 4 mayonnaise sandwiches after school
• chasing ambulances, literally
• loving to talk politics
• wearing a black arm band at his college graduation in 1971 because of Vietnam
• video taping the family at reunions for hours
• his amazing photographs (that won many awards), which introduced me to the love of faraway places and travel
• the beautiful land he bought in the country with plans to build a log home
• planting 800 trees on that land and watching the deer eat many of them
• watching a meteor shower together with our kids on his property
• taking our parents on day trips around the state
• driving truck or bus for years and years; man, he loved to drive
• his wry sense of humor

Bennett, I miss you.

Naming the Unnamable

a field on my drive to work

In “Ludicrous God Talk,” an article in the current issue of Spirituality & Health, Sam Keen writes about naming God.

“The Emperor of the Cosmos is everywhere present but nowhere to be found.”

About trying to name the Unnamable “Maybe it’s like pushing with your tongue against a tooth that is about to come out. The slight pain is slightly pleasurable.”

morning clouds

“No matter how mundane the medium, the experience of the holy is beyond predication or description. We don’t have the linguistic or conceptual needles with which to knit it.”

Rooftop views

It's beautiful today and in the 40s with sunshine. So I was inspired this morning to click some pics (partly thanks to PG!).

Here are some views of MSU's campus (5,200 acres in all, it's one of the world's largest campuses) taken from the parking ramp across the street.

I love the slate roofs of some of the buildings, such as Berkey Hall in the foreground. Beyond that lies the mission style Old Horticulture building, and beyond that the Agriculture building.

The photograph below shows three buildings from different eras. In the foreground, the red brick and sandstone are Morrill Hall built in 1901, wherein my office in the English department lies. The porta-potty is atop the new parking ramp being constructed on the Grand River Ave side of Morrill.

Beaumont Tower, beyond Morrill on the right, was built in 1928 and its carillon contains 49 bells. The largest bell weighs 5,000 pounds; the smallest weighs 15 pounds. Click here for the MSU fight song! :)

Beyond that you can see the MSU football stadium that was rejuvenated in 2005 with luxury suites, thanks to the Ralph Young Fund.

Looking at these buildings from this height reminds me that sometimes I need a fresh perspective.

Taking it in

Smoke from our wood burning stove

Moving to a farm in the country two years ago coincided with a new way of looking at the world. Part of the change was looking to nature for meaning, beauty, truth. Finding joy in simple, touchable, life-giving, cyclical routines.

I read a poem this morning by A.R. Ammons that says something about how I feel:


WHEN I WAS YOUNG THE SILK

When I was young the silk
of my mind
hard as a peony head
unfurled
and wind bloomed the parachute:

The air-head tugged me
up,
tore my roots loose and drove
high, so high

I want to touch down now
and taste the ground
I want to take in
my silk
and ask where I am
before it is too late to know

Corn crib in February

We've got a cold snap: 9 degrees at 1:47pm. With wind chill it feels like -4. Only a few minutes to take pics before fingers start aching.

These images are the "corn crib," but not used for corn these days. Don stores his tractor and odds and ends in the middle, shown here, between the two enclosed sides. Then in one side, yard tools. The other is for firewood.

For a while, Don's tractor was for kicks, a joint "toy" he owned with his dad. But this winter he began using it to drag downed trees he later sawed for firewood.

All the outbuildings on our little 5 acres are occasionally propped with creative foundation materials, like this molded cement piece.

A Talented Woman

Photo by Lesley

She weaves. She knits. She pounds fibers into felt. She felts wool. She dyes linen with poke berry juice from our farm. She dyes her hair maroon. She silk screens. She creates batik. She designs wall hangings and interior spaces with color, form and texture. By hand (which she prefers to AutoCad) she renders elevations and buildings, rooms and displays. She stays up very, very late working. She watches Japanime while she works. She lives in the moment. She photographs decaying things for inspiration in her spare time. She listens to the Cranes on her iPod. She plays the piano. She designs sets for plays and movies on the side. She leads student organizations. She calls her mother or father almost every day. She writes the only perfect senior thesis in her graduating class. She inserts emotion and spirit into everything she does. She gets chosen as one of three students to go to the Milan furniture trade show in April. She deserves it.

This is my daughter, Lesley.

Her felt wall hanging before she pieced it together; each square she pounded into felt

from strands of wool.

At the office

Hubbub and hullabaloo.

New office furniture was delivered for me and four other staff members in the English department yesterday. It felt odd, because our department is "poor" when it comes to material goods. We all had hand-me-down furniture (like my 1970s Steelcase desk), nothing matched, of course, and we kind of liked it that way here in this 100-year-old university building.

So getting new furniture takes some getting used to, but I love it! I'm surrounded by more flat surfaces than I ever have been! And this allows me to spread out papers when I meet with students; what a luxury.

But my favorite piece in the office is still very old, maybe as old as the building. This photo shows just the right upper side of my huge book cabinet, with the teapots for the English Tea lined up on top. The way my new computer desk sits, I face this view.

I have a Turkish kilim on another wall, one Don bought in our Istanbul days.

This is my little painting , a copy (different colors) of Paul Klee's Senecio.

I love my workplace.

Heart Wood

Saturday Don spent an hour or so cutting wood for our wood burning stove. Most weekends he finds a downed tree or two, or -- more preferably -- a dead tree that’s still standing, because it is already perfectly seasoned.

He strikes up his chain saw, cuts the tree into lengths that just fit into our tiny wood stove, loads up a blue plastic sled, pulls it up to the shed (former corn crib in our farm's true farming days), unloads and stacks it, then pulls the last sled load to the garage for easy armloads during the week. Needless to say, the free energy source right on our property has been very welcome this winter with sky-high heating bills, helping to supplement the gas furnace. We probably have enough dead wood to last a few years.

I was in the house piddling around, and Don came in from cutting wood with this Valentine, a half-inch slice of an elm tree (it really is ONE piece). I love how it resembles a human heart, even with left and right ventricles. Many other images come to mind: owl eyes, ears. What do you see?

Do you see my love for this man?

Meditation on a white amaryllis

I wanted to plant an amaryllis bulb in time to bloom for the holidays. But I bought and planted it late, after Christmas in fact. I watered it faithfully, and after several weeks, last Wednesday my amaryllis bloomed.

It takes patience to wait for blossoms. For weeks you water the bulb in the pot, with no apparent result. The bulb's dry, homely neck and shoulders sit above the soil, and you're convinced nothing will ever come of it. Then, maybe four weeks in, a chartreuse tongue appears at the top of the bulb. Quickly, it seems, the stem grows. In just a few days it reaches eighteen inches. Then for another week or two, four chrysalis-like buds emerge from the very top of the stem and prepare to open. At last, one at a time, each bud flowers, facing east, south, west and north, like blades of a helicopter. The orbit of blooms is worth the long wait.

I would like to propagate a bulb. This requires even more patience. You must pollinate the pistil with the pollen on the stamens, then wait for seeds to form in the ovary. After removing, drying and planting seeds, it takes three years for bulbs that will flower to grow.

This is one of those areas of life where I ask, if someone else didn't do this for me (take care of propagating plants and bulbs so I can just plant them), would I know how to do it? I have one lifetime (maybe?). In this era of technology, what fundamental survival skills do I know? If all the computers crashed, what then? If I couldn't buy groceries, could I grow enough to sustain myself? If no one else repaired our mechanical gadgets, could I?

Though I may never have to depend on myself for some of this know-how, it is gratifying to learn at least a few such life lessons, to be more connected. My Donald, who knows how to do so many things, is patient with me as I grow.

Spring Alliance

Our first spring project (a la Feb. 1 post: Imbolc: First Day of Spring) is revamping our study into a workout room, moving the computer and books upstairs. Our house has limited space, so we have to be creative.

Since we began running last week, we decided to move the treadmill from the barn into the house. (Sorry, bats.) Don's weights and bench, up from the basement, will share the new fitness room with Ms. Alliance Treadmill.

Even though it's work to reorganize and lug books upstairs, it's nice to reconnect with favorite books, find ones that were "missing" and recapture space for our goal of regular exercise.


Thank you, Jane Kenyon, for your sad but brilliant poem rediscovered: "Having it Out With Melancholy."

Oxford and Harry Potter

It’s gloomy outside, and this feels like a good time to reminisce about Oxford.

I just gave a presentation about the English department to a group of Alumni Distinguished Scholars, and I’m feeling cheesily enraptured with ivy-covered university walls. Someday I’ll photograph the hall where I work, one of the oldest buildings on campus.

But for now, Oxford will have to do.

Think Harry Potter (the dining room at Christ College is the model for Hogwarts’ dining hall).



Think broom flying class in the quad. (Yes, those scenes in HP were filmed in Oxford.)



Think black flowing gowns of Oxford dons.



BTW, I apologize for the unsightly red date on my photos. I have not taken the time to photoshop them out. But I have changed the setting on the camera! Too late for these, I'm afraid.

a poem:

Another birthday, as a tourist

How old is old, really?

I mean, I'm not as old as Oxford,
the oldest English-speaking university
in the world, this stone
waterfall by the river.

Yet I am older than
most of its students, in fact
old enough to have parented them,
these little green fish.

I want another past
with Oxford in it, a feast
of books, black robes, steam
of intellect fogging the quad
and my glasses

the glory

of the morning, the glinting fish
swimming through it
before the sun, before
the sun goes down.

It's always this way,
something green and alive
against something old, cracked
and still. 

Ruth M. 2005

Labyrinth

Photo by Sonia Halliday

A photo postcard of the Chartres labyrinth hangs on the wall in my office. Chartres Cathedral, an hour from Paris, dates from the 12th century. For centuries pilgrims have trekked to Chartres as part of a holy pilgrimage and traced the labyrinth, many on their knees, in contemplation and openness.

The purpose of a labyrinth is to take you inside yourself. Following the path that turns and curves in directions you don’t expect, you’re forced to pay attention, to vacate your mind and allow the path to pull you in. Some set an intention, a question or life choice and seek an answer from God or within themselves while tracing the labyrinth.

Something about following the narrow line step after step, and being aware that others are at different points on the path, puts you into contemplation of your own inner journey.

One of our local hospitals has an outdoor healing garden with a Chartres-style labyrinth. My friend and I walked it when she was in breast cancer treatment, which happily was successful.
















You can locate labyrinths around the country and world by typing in the city, state or country at this site:
http://wwll.veriditas.labyrinthsociety.org/

Lucky me, whenever I want to stroll a labyrinth, I can pick up my stylus and trace this tabletop version Inge gave me.

Arabesque

Have you been to www.colorstrology.com? I just went there the other day based on Lesley's recommendation.

My birthday is August 22, and the color for that day is "arabesque": Pantone 16-1441.

How I describe this color: warm, inviting, calm, spiritual. I like that the word "arabesque" comes from the French for "Arabian."

I'd say they got it right for me. Here are some of my favorite possessions, that happen to be "arabesque." I've been looking for the name of this color for a while. Thanks, colorstrology!

Note that these photos also show another definition of "arabesque": ornate design of intertwined floral, foliate, and geometric figures.

The winter scarf I wear most:





My favorite book, The Soul of Rumi; the cover color became my soul color the more I read Rumi's poems translated by Coleman Barks:





The spring/fall scarf my friend Inge gave me (partly because we love the Rumi book and its color!):




What's your color?

Running

Don and I started a running program yesterday. (If I say “running program” it sounds like a commitment, and I need this to be a commitment.)

No matter that the temp was in the 20s with serious wind taking it down into the teens. We were warm enough, and the psychological momentum of finally DOing it had us both geeked.

(Don was a Wisconsin state track star in high school. He still holds his high school record for the 220. So training in winter feels like old times to him.)

We were going to try to run indoors at Jenison Fieldhouse, but the indoor track is used by athletes for training until 6, too late for us. We were glad we started out in Jenison though, because we got to brush shoulders and reap some wind from the MSU tracksters heading for an outdoor run.

Do I want to be 19 again? NO WAY! Do I want to whip this almost-50-year-old body into shape? You bet!



We ran along the Red Cedar River and crossed the footbridge, both pictured here.

BTW, the photo of the woman running at the top, it’s not me! But it looks like it could be, doesn’t it?

Woman running photo in original context: http://www.runnersden.com/newsletters/rdnewsletter3.html

Red Cedar River photo in original context: members.tripod.com/ rorybear/pp2.html

Pedestrian bridge photo courtesy of the MSU Dept. of Chemistry:

Rough Justice

I couldn’t help but notice a contrast between the hands of two men in the media in the last 24 hours.

In the Super Bowl half time show last night, Mick Jagger’s limbs, pelvis, head, mouth – everything – moved in unbelievable possibilities on the Rolling Stones’ giant pack-n-play mouth-n-tongue stage.


AP Photo/Amy Sancetta

Today Abdel Fattah Abdel Razek was shown on the front page of the New York Times online. He’s a Sunni captive in Iraq, being questioned with questionable methods by Iraqi police, even as our own US methods of investigation are being reviewed.

Regardless of what one thinks of American patriotism, the comparison of lifestyles and freedoms is wrenching.

Note: Apparently even Mick Jagger's freedoms are limited, well, at least our freedom to hear what he sang. A few of his sexually explicit lyrics were censored by ABC (remember JJ's "wardrobe malfunction"?).

Original hands photo by Ashley Gilbertson (I cropped it)

Partial Light

Sometimes argument is futile.



We see only in part.



I don’t know all the answers, because I don’t know all the questions.



A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.



When we look at the moon, we’re also seeing the sun – reflected light. Is the moon the sun?



I need to keep opening my eyes wider.


A corner at Oliver St. John Gogarty, Dublin

February 1: First Day of Spring

In the Celtic calendar, February 1 is the first day of Imbolc (pronounced Imm’ulk), the spring quarter when light starts to brighten the world for longer periods again. We modern folks recognize March 21 as the first day of spring, and it sure feels more like it usually. But I like the hope in this still dark, cold month of preparing for cleaning and clearing out, renewal and new birth.



The Celtic perspective on the seasons and calendar came to my attention in Ireland last summer. The historic and prehistoric Celts attended to cycles of planting and harvest and lunar time. For instance, they would not begin an important project (like a wedding) in the time of a waning moon, believing that the cycles of the moon, sun and stars have an impact on our goings and comings. I want to incorporate this perspective into my own.

Why do this? It sounds sort of cultish and superstitious, yes? Isn’t this associated with druids, witches and earth worship?

Don’t worry, I’m not becoming a witch. We are sometimes afraid of what we don't understand and that we might be associating with darkness and evil. Funny thing about our own calendar with months named after Roman gods and emperors: We don't worry too much that if we still follow this calendar, it means we are pagan in our beliefs!



Why incorporate this perspective? For one thing, I have very little awareness of my own ethnic heritage. I’m a “mutt” with English, Swedish and German lineage (at least). We didn%u2