Ash Wednesday Planting

I’ve held on through this incredibly mild February and resisted the urge to plant any seeds until today, February 22. The guy at Woods Garden and Nursery said it was ok. He sold me some seeds and a whole bunch of those expanding pellets for starting seeds. Also, I like the whole concept of planting with the liturgical calendar.

Around here, the common Catholic wisdom is that the seed potatoes go in the ground on Good Friday. Or maybe “by” Good Friday those years when Easter is late. The thing about Good Friday is that it is almost always a time when the ground is no longer frozen, and it is never before the last frost date, which up here is May 15.

I don’t know of any Ash Wednesday planting traditions, but it was a great day to bring the scent of peat and soil into the house and lay out the trays of seedlings. I planted peppers, cherry tomatoes, huckleberry bushes and leeks. One thing I know is that it’s never too early to plant leeks. They take 120 days to grow to maturity, perhaps longer, and they can sit in the ground awhile when they’re done growing, too. It will be a long time before I see the plants, which look like single blades of grass.

I figure the huckleberry bushes have to grow to 3-4 foot tall bushes before they’ll bear the berries, so it can’t be too soon to get them started. Last year, what I learned about peppers is that they  need warmth as well as light to get started, so I tucked the heating pad under their tray.

It probably is too early for the cherry tomatoes, but I have a new secret weapon that will allow me to put out my tomato plants maybe even in late April, but certainly in early May. Last year I left a note to myself in all caps next to tomatoes: DO NOT PUT OUTSIDE UNTIL JUNE 10! I end up planting and replanting because of the winds that come in just as it’s finally warm enough for the tomatoes to make it through the night. But this year– secret weapon. I’ll let you in on it when it’s time to move the tomatoes outside.

I also planted a little garden box with some radishes, mizuna (an Asian green) and lettuce. Maybe I’ll get some microgreens or something that can count as the earliest plant that I can eat just when the other seeds are going in the ground– which in a month I hope will be “just able to be worked.” Meanwhile, I now have the task of watering and watching, which is certainly a good practice for Lent.

Poetry and Tea at the Fishhouse

MaryJude at the fishhouse

Brother Paul Jasmer has had a fishhouse on Lake Sagatagan at Saint John’s Abbey and University since the mid-1980s. This is the second one, light enough to get on and off the lake and heavy enough not to blow around at night.

There’s never been a fish caught in this fishhouse. In fact, there’s no hole in the floor for putting an auger through and making a hole in the ice. As Brother Paul says, he’s a bit of a snob, and having caught fish at Lake of the Woods in Northern Minnesota, he wouldn’t waste his time on the Sag.

This fishhouse is where Brother Paul invites people to come and read poetry and drink tea. He invited the Queen of England, and a member of her staff wrote a lovely reply with the queen’s regrets. Garrison Keillor was supposed to come, but he didn’t make it in the end. But poets have made it out, and lovers of poetry who bring poems to read.

Brother Paul lays out an elaborate tea. The leaves are packaged especially for him by Upton Tea (he says he’s snobby about the tea as well). He boils the water on a small woodstove and warms the pot, then boils the water again and times the steeping with a pocket watch that, he tells us, is not gold, but was a gift from his parents.

Brother Paul Jasmer

There are candles in holders on small plates. There are china cups and saucers and Delft plates for the food. There are toothpicks for harpooning orange slices, and nuts and cookies. There is milk and sugar, or you can drink your tea continental style.

My friend Maryjude went with me and she brought along three marvelous poems she wrote. I read two of my recent short fiction pieces. Brother Paul had brought along a small icon of the three angels from Genesis. He hung it up as part of the unpacking of the tea supplies. He read a poem by D.H. Lawrence about this Biblical story. It also involved ice and wind and a knocking, and when he read it, there was ice and wind against the walls and he knocked on the wall at the appropriate time.

Tea for Three

He also read two poems by Phebe Hanson about being Lutheran in Sacred Heart, Minnesota, a town we drove through last summer on our way to Sleepy Eye.  The book was called Sacred Hearts.

It’s been a mild winter, but there was a sudden little flurry of a storm this afternoon. It was warm inside the fishhouse, though, and we feasted on cookies and poetry.

Everything is a Story

I googled Jonathan Harris tonight, looking for more information on the founder of http://cowbird.com. What I knew about him from reading his stories on cowbird was that he has quite a following, is prolific in terms of photography and storytelling (557 stories on cowbird alone!), travels a lot and spends time in many different settings.  He knows people all over the world and has somehow brought them together on his site. He describes himself as an “artist, brother, computer scientist, nomad, seeker, storyteller.” Oh, and he seems very young and is very good looking.

It turns out, there’s a video lecture by him on TED.  As I watched it, I was able to fill in more. He’s a conceptual artist, using technology, specifically the internet and programs he writes, to visualize communication on the internet. The several projects he talks about in the lecture explore emotion and the internet. In one project, he develops a program to search and identify sentences posted in blogs that include the words “I feel” or “I am feeling,” grab the sentence containing these words and an image if available, and repost the information on another site, “We Feel Fine.” The site then organizes and displays the data in many ways, including assigning temperatures and colors to the feelings and representing them visually by warm or cool, happy or sad.

It’s impressive in terms of technology and it does make one think. Can we get a picture of the feelings of the world as posted on the internet? Why are all these people publishing their feelings? Is every sentence that includes “I feel” really expressing a feeling? Can the computer really caputre these feelings? Can art of this kind make us feel or convey feeling? What is the relationship between image and word and… feeling?

One thing that resonates with me is the way he considers narrative and image. This is something that I’ve been engaged with as I’ve written and posted to cowbird.com. The posts require and image to be complete. I have a lot of images, but I also find myself wondering if images I’m using are “safe” to use. Do they belong to other people’s stories? Even the archival images– when I attach them to a story, does it affect the people portayed there, the original context?

I have long been interested, also, in visual storytelling. I always think of coming across a bunch of my father’s scorebooks from our girls’ softball days in Park Forest and realizing that they were incredibly detailed visual stories. My father, a statistician to the core, has devised his own complicated systems for coding games, including football and basketball. These softball score books used a fairly standard system, and I sat down and read them. I often thought they would have made for an interesting piece in an exhibit on visual narrative and wish I had gotten a hold of them before they were thrown away.

It was in that spirit, under the spell of Jonathan Harris’s conceptual explorations, that I wrote this story for cowbird:  “My Father’s Book of Stories.”

What visual stories do you know?

Is the Dalai Lama a Sellout or Just Really Enlightened?

One of the documentaries we watched this week was The Sun Behind the Clouds. It chronicles the protests of China’s occupation of Tibet that broke out in 2008 (most noticed here in disruption of the travel of the torch around the world for the Beijing Olympics). It also pays particular attention to the Tibetan government in exile in Dharamsala, Northern India, with extensive interviews with the Dalai Lama.

What comes through is the conflict between those who want to use non-violent resistance to liberate Tibet and the Dalai Lama’s long-held position of “the middle way,” which calls for “autonomy” but not independence for Tibet. In other words, the Dalai Lama has accepted living under Chinese rule, but wants the exiles to be able to return and the culture to be preserved and lived out in Tibet.

During the course of the movie, a group of the non-violent resisters embark on a march to Tibet, more than 2,000 miles across India. This follows some of the most serious protests in Tibet since China occupied it in 1951. The protests in Lhasa, Tibet, show monks on the street being harmed, crying out, taking their case to the media cameras. It reminds me of George Orwell’s story, “Shooting an Elephant,” which I used to teach regularly and in which the local monks spat at the British officials. When the monks hate you, I say, you’re on the wrong side.

And also, when the monks take to the street against you, your days are probably numbered. So it was for the British Empire (yes, I know it was more complicated than that) and also seems to have been for the recent oppressors in Burma.

China crushed the 2008 protests, and things seem to have very much settled down. So we’re left wondering what could have made a difference? I have to say, it drew clear attention to my own worldview that I felt, watching the film, the Dalai Lama could have made a huge difference.

A major tenet of my education has been the power of non-violent resistance, especially when led by a charismatic person of high moral character. Ghandi. Martin Luther King, Jr. There is nothing you can’t do– including bringing down an empire. The Chinese can’t kill the Dalai Lama. They would be in trouble if they arrested him. Nothing would mobilize people more than the Dalai Lama leading a group of non-violent resisters into Tibet. Right?

I suppose they could run tanks right over him and his followers, but it seems unlikely. This action, undertaken with the presence and support of the Dalai Lama, would mobilize millions across the world. And it is a recognized formula: bring attention to the oppression and suffering and mobilize people for change. It’s the founding principle of the Arab Spring. It’s Occupy Wall Street, but with a really clear agenda and a really great leader.

But the Dalai Lama won’t do it. And I’m not being sarcastic when I recognize he won’t do it because he is enlightened. He is post-nationalist in this way. He advocates preserving culture while abdicating self-rule. It is not compromise when he says it so much as transcending the ordinary categories. It is spoken like someone who has lived in community in exile for 60 years.

In May 2011, the Dalai Lama, through complex parliamentary procedures, separated his spiritual role from his political role, and retired as political leader of Tibet’s government in exile. It was, as much as anything, an attempt to protect the spiritual role from the grips of China. China’s government has said it will have to approve any future Dalai Lama after this one dies. If it is not a political role, their claim has much less validity.

Meanwhile, he continues to advocate a “middle way,” although China rejects this position and sees it as a pretense to hide the real aim of political independence. To which I say, “You calling the Dalai Lama a liar?” If so, you are on the wrong side.

Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook

This gallery contains 1 photo.

I became a member of Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) last year in large part to get the Yearbook. I’ve been waiting anxiously for it to arrive, and it came last week. I am not disappointed. The thing is a regular phone book, … Continue reading →

Hope

I published this on cowbird.com, but you can only post one photo with a story there, and I had several chronicling this event. Thanks to free online slideshow tools, I made this little video to accompany the story. Read the story first, then click on the image for a brief video.

Hope

When my husband left, I set up shop at the dining room table. It looked out over the whole apartment and out to the balcony. This was my domain.

He was a vegetarian who ate fish. I let all the fish in the freezer turn into a single block of ice. I ate red meat and spinach, and not much else.

There was a neglected plant hanging on the balcony and the day after he left a pigeon nested there.

One day I locked my car in the garage and couldn’t get it out.

I smashed some expensive pottery he gave me in the alley.

Then one day I looked up and realized it wasn’t a pigeon nesting on my balcony. It was a dove.

Click on image to launch slideshow.

 

It is not just any dove. It is a mourning dove, which adds another dimension to the “hope” concept. This is an old story, newly told. It happened in March 2003. I can’t tell you how much that dove helped me.

 

Here’s one more photo from those days, with Bennie the cat. I don’t think he ever realized that there was a bird right above his head.

 

 

 

At the Movies

Our local theater pre-pizza parlor

First, let me give you a rant warning. Or a crank warning. This post is not about movies so much as the further degradation of the movie viewing experience in my town.

We are lucky here in St. Joseph to have an 18-screen multiplex nearby. That is enough screens that the theater can spare one for occasional art and foreign films. You have to watch closely to catch them as they pass through, and not all of them do, but now and then a quality film comes to town.

January is our favorite time to go to the movies. It’s cold outside and the Oscar nominations have been announced, so a bunch of “best film” options are making the rounds. Last Saturday I checked out Rotten Tomatoes,which told me that The Iron Lady was less risky than Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close (which they described as “treacly,” a definite turn-off), so we decided to go see The Iron Lady. It was a fantastic movie about aging, really powerful and wonderful, not just a great performance by Meryl Streep (and Jim Broadbent) but wonderfully written and directed. I was a little disappointed when I saw it would focus on Margaret Thatcher’s last days, not her prime, but the flashbacks worked wonderfully, and the story fully kept my attention throughout. I think the critics at Rotten Tomatoes didn’t give it near enough credit.

It was especially amazing that it kept my attention because of all the freakin’ distractions in the environment. The local cineplex has recently invested more than $3 million in a renovation. There are lots of shiny screens in the lobby and the layout is more open. Supposedly seats with space-age memory foam are on their way. They’ve also added a pizza place, which I thought at first was a great idea. Just like the Angelika in SoHo, we could have dinner and a movie in one place! Looking at the menu and environment, I was much less impressed, but still wondered if it would be possible to order a pizza ready for take-out when the movie was over. We went to a 4:30 matinee.

What I had in no way anticipated was that my fellow theater-goers would bring sandwiches wrapped in very loud paper and whole pizzas into the theater! I have no problem with jamming a beer into the cupholder, but the whole theater was filled with the scent of pepperoni pizza, thanks to a young couple at the end of the first row. It was 5 p.m. Thank you.

The older couple at the end of our row took their sweet time eating those loud sandwiches and crumpling up the paper when they were done. Then the woman sang along every time that song from The King and I was in the movie.

Also, whoever is in charge of the actual movie didn’t turn the house lights all the way down. I hate that. I suppose it made it easier for the patrons to see their food, but I hope it was an oversight.

And it was freezing. Even with my down jacket draped over me, the back of my legs were penetrated by cold air. Next time I’m wearing long underwear and a hat.

Because, of course, there will be a next time. Much as I am disappointed, I can’t stay away from movie theaters. I had not thought it was possible to degrade the experience from the multiplex with its insanely loud sound and excruciating number of previews, but they found a way. No doubt when I’m old the experience will be worse still. Or I’ll be the one eating a sandwich and singing along.