Franconia Sculpture Park

Shafer, Minnesota

“Nothing needs to be explained, justified, or even understood, to move beyond it, transformed, wings afoot, chariots aflame, angels on high, sparkles trailing, fuzzy dice on the mirror… ”

Let’s get carried away,
The Universe

 

Head out towards Taylors Falls for a beautiful drive with friends and family and visit  the Franconia Sculpture Park in Shafer MN. Summer Saturdays provide music in the park all day and night. Bring a cooler or buy food and drink once you arrive. They have made great strides in creating a beautiful, relaxing environment to sit and listen to music and  walk among the ever changing sculptures in the park. Spend the day or a few hours–inspiring fun for everyone. http://www.franconia.org/

Central Avenue, NE Minneapolis

A decidedly perfect summer’s day in August. The kind of late summer’s day that brings Minnesotans out to revel in the celebration of summer’s end with music and laughter.  Festivals abound, grills fired up a’blazing and bikes fill the street. One quiet corner, a bus rolls to a stop and roars on. I am left alone to marvel in the magestic light bouncing off an abandoned building and the stillness and warmth of the ending day. These moments are the treasured.

An Early Morning Cafe’

An Early Morning Cafe’

At the summit of the Trade Center
107 stories into urban ether
the Windows of the World Cafe
served pate’ and poached salmon
to diners staring down
into the caverns of Manhattan,
but early in the September morning,
the sommelier and maitre d’
still asleep in their far-away flats,
only the sous-chef and banquet staff
had arrived to peel the shrimp,
trim the artichokes, and wash
the leaves of the escarole.
Simple work in silence with your mates
in an empty early morning cafe’
is a pleasure: jokes, mild complaining,
a hummed tune or two,
sneaking a cigarette in a quiet alcove,
stories of luck in last night’s poker,
when suddenly a berserk machine
decides to murder a building with fire.
Like a badly shot elephant,
the hundred and six stories holding up
your peeling knife and lettuce drier
wobbled and shook for a little while.
Smoke belched out from blown-out eye sockets
but when the flames began melting the bones,
it all tumbled down on top of itself in
a smoking gray heap, the shrimp,
the artichokes, the escarole, fifty thousand
bottles of elegant wine, joining
in a sticky red downpour:
type A, type O, Chateau Lafitte, Rothschild.
Pouilly Fuisse ’79, type AB ’49,
and you yourself unless you leapt
out one of the windows of the world
to try with your imaginary wings
to finish the flight to the city of angels.
Humans so riddled with hate they transmogrified
from men to bombs to smash the girders
under your cafe’, though they’d never met you at all,
to murder you for the glory of God
with your apron still smeared with shrimp guts.
It was always thus. Try killing an abstraction
by murdering a building from the air,
but all you kill is Bob and Edna
and Sallie and Rodrigo and Mei-Mei.
A building is only a set of artificial legs
to hold up human beings in the air,
and an airplane only a sheet of folded paper.
But 50,000 bottles of good wine
and ten gallons of fresh gulf shrimp,
and Bob and Edna and all the rest.
Now that is something real!
If you think you’ve bagged the one truth
and that truth wants final sacrifice,
then you have stepped outside the human race,
and your plane will not land in heaven
wherever you think it might be.
Heaven in an early morning cafe’.
Wherever you are.

Bill Holm Playing the Black Piano
© Milkweed Press, 2004

New Mexico, Acoma Pueblo Valley, Lincoln, El Malpais

Just got back from a week of exploring New Mexico in August—yep AUGUST. I love traveling in off times…less tourists. More open space. But this state doesn’t lack openess! How wonderfully peaceful and beautiful.  Here’s an overview. I’ll post more later.

Acoma Pueblo – Ancient Sky City
Strategically built atop a 357-foot  sandstone mesa for defensive purposes, the Acoma Pueblo is more familiarly known as Sky City. Believed to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the United States, the pueblo is  thought to have been built prior to the 10th century. In ancient  times, the only access to the top of the pueblo was by means of a  hand-cut staircase carved into the sandstone. The name “Acoma” means People of the White Rock in the Puebloan Kersan dialect. The pueblo, covering some 70 acres, is actually comprised of several villages including Acomita, McCartys, Anzac and Sky Line.

For centuries the Acoma people have dry-farmed the valley below the Acoma Pueblo  using irrigation canals in the villages closer to the Rio San Jose  River. For centuries, the  Acoma  people were known to trade, not only with neighboring pueblos, but  also over long distances with the Aztec and Mayan peoples. In 1540, Francisco  Vasquez de Coronado was the first European to lay eyes on the Acoma  Pueblo,  describing it as: “One of the strongest ever seen, because the city was built on a high rock. The ascent was so difficult that we repented  climbing to the top.”

Today, fewer than 50 of the 3,000 Acomans  live at the pueblo, the remaining residents choosing to live in the  nearby villages. This city is known for its amazing pottery and a permanent exhibit,  One Thousand Years of Clay, is housed in the Visitors Center located at the base of the mesa along with native food and crafts shops.

Note: The pueblo is not open to the public on a daily basis and visitors must obtain visitor and camera permits from the Sky City visitor center at the base of the mesa. The view on top of the meas is breathtaking.

The town of Lincoln, New Mexico is the Wild West frozen in time.
A walk down Lincoln, New Mexico’s Main Street is a step back into the Wild Wild West. It was here that such men as Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett left their marks; here, that Indians, Mexican American settlers, gunfighters and corrupt politicians made themselves known;  it was in this small settlement that the violent Lincoln County War erupted, which resulted in the deaths of a number of men and made Billy the Kid a legend. (Sounds like modern Washington D.C.).

President Rutherford B. Hayes called Lincoln’s main street “the most dangerous street in America”

We happened upon Old Lincoln Days, held on the first  full weekend in August, provides living-history demonstrations of  traditional crafts, musical programs, and food booths throughout the  village. An annual folk pageant, The Last Escape of Billy the Kid , presented outdoors since 1949, portrays a highly romanticized version of  the Lincoln County War  during August weekends. Unfortunately we had to leave before this performance to get back to ALBQ before it was too late.

The entire trip was a series of coming upon these great outdoor events. Who knew?! Lucky us. It was an amazing look into a rich history. Many of the original buildings still stand. I grew up watching westerns and was infatuated with the old west. It was an amazing reflection of what had been in my head since I could remember.

All grown up, I align more with the Indian’s spirituality and was enchanted with the peaceful energy of the reservations and open land. I see and feel the magic of these diverse and colorful natives.

El Malpais
El Malpais means the badlands but this volcanic area holds many surprises. Lava flows, cinder cones, pressure ridges and complex lava tubes dominate the landscape. A closer look reveals high desert environments where animals and plants thrive. Prehistoric ruins, ancient cairns, rock structures, and homesteads remind us of past times. Visitors need to be prepared for exploring this rugged place.

El Morrow
A reliable waterhole hidden at the base of a sandstone bluff made El Morro (the headland) a popular campsite. Ancestral Puebloans and Spanish and American travelers carved over 2,000 signatures, dates, messages, and petroglyphs for hundreds of years. It was amazing! We hiked to the top of the bluff—2.5 hours and a bit of a thin air challenge but so worth it.

The Inscription Trail
A must–see! If you only have an hour or less, you will definitely want to take the trail to the pool and past hundreds of Spanish and Anglo inscriptions, as well as pre–historical petroglyphs. It will be easy to see why El Morro was proclaimed a National Monument. This loop trail is paved, 1/2 mile in length, and wheelchair accessible with assistance. If you have at least 1 1/2 hours, and lots of energy, you can continue past the inscriptions and up to the top of the bluff.

The Headland Trail
This 2–mile loop includes the Inscription Trail, and continues to the top of the bluff. There, you will be rewarded with spectacular views of the Zuni Mountains, the volcanic craters of the El Malpais area, and the El Morro valley. A 250 ft. elevation gain and the uneven sandstone surface makes this a slightly strenuous hike. Sturdy walking shoes and water, particularly in the hot summer months, are necessary….the view of the box canyon was amazing.

The payoff:
Atsinna
Another reward for hiking the Headland Trail is the Ancestral Puebloan ruin, Atsinna, or “place of writings on rock”. Between approximately 1275 to 1350 AD, up to 1500 people lived in this 875 room pueblo. The location was strategic—it was near the only water source for many miles and located atop a nearly impenetrable bluff. Atsinna was partially excavated in the 1950s and masons and archeologists continue to work towards its stabilization.

It is estimated that the mesa-top pueblo at El Morro National Monument contained about 875 rooms. However to see it is deceiving—only a small corner of the pueblo was ever excavated.

And on the road:

Paper vs. Plastic. The shopping bag debate.

First, I’ll say–neither! Bring your own reusable bags. But if you have to here’s the skinny. For the full article please go to GREENFEET.net and spread the word.

PAPER?

Paper comes from trees – and lots of them. The logging industry is huge and the process to get that paper bag to the grocery store is long and environmentally taxing. First, the trees are found, marked and felled. Machinery is then used to remove the logs from the forest floor- whether it by logging trucks or, in more remote areas, helicopters.

Machinery requires fossil fuel and roads (which destroys habitat) thereby creating stress on the forests’ inhabitants (Even logging a small area has a large impact on the entire ecological chain in surrounding areas).

Trees must dry at least three years before they can be used. Machinery is used to strip the bark, which is then chipped into one-inch squares and cooked under tremendous heat and pressure. This wood stew is then “digested” with a limestone and sulphurous acid for eight hours. The steam and moisture is vented to the outside atmosphere, and the original wood becomes pulp. It takes approximately three tons of wood chips to make one ton of pulp.

The pulp is then washed and bleached, both stages requiring thousands of gallons of clean water. Coloring is added to more water, and is then combined in a ratio of 1 part pulp to 400 parts water to make paper. The pulp/water mixture is dumped into a web of bronze wires, the water showers through, leaving the pulp, which, in turn, is rolled into paper.

Whew! And that’s just to make the paper. We must include all of the chemicals, electricity, and fossil fuels used in the shipment of this raw material and in the production and shipment of a finished paper bag.

AND PLASTIC? Where does that plastic bag come from?

Plastic is a petroleum product – it comes from oil. As we all know, the oil industry is no small potatoes and is the cause of worldwide financial and political turmoil.

Traps of oil are located around the planet. Once a trap is located, a hole is drilled and a pipe is rammed into the oil deposit. The oil is forced to the top of the surface due to both the pressure inside the chamber and the weight of the earth above. Once a pump is in place, the whole operation is fairly simple and little oil is lost. The pumped oil is either piped or trucked to a refining facility where plastic is made.

Plastic is a by-product of oil refining and accounts for 4% of the worlds total oil production. It is a ‘biogeochemical’ manipulation of certain properties of oil, into polymers. Plastic polymers are manufactured into five main types; plastic bags are made from polyethylene. Polyethylene, as a raw material, can be manipulated into any shape, size, form or color. It is watertight and can be made UV resistant. Anything can be printed on it and it can be reused.

For the most part, the whole process of making plastic bags requires only electricity (minus the large, fuel burning heavy machinery required to acquire the oil). The electricity used in the actual production and manufacturing of plastic bags comes from coal fire power plants, which, it is interesting to note, 50% of that electricity is generated from the burning of old tires (made from rubber which is essentially, plastic).

Where does plastic go when thrown away?

Like paper, plastic bags can end up in two places: the landfill or the recycling center. If a plastic bag ends up in a landfill, it will stay intact for thousands of years. Plastic does not compost. With plastic products in the mix, garbage does not have a chance to break down over time. Landfills are considered airtight, which explains why after 20 years you can find a hot dog that is still fully intact and a newspaper with articles clearly legible.

Plastic is fabulous in that it is recyclable. All you have to do is basically re-melt and re-form. The re-melting process also sterilizes the plastic thus allowing any recycled plastic to be made into hospital grade products. Plastic can be recycled many times before it becomes brittle – then it can be made into something as functional as a mousepad or a doormat. Please note that not all plastic bags can be recycled and many stores that collect them, simply send them to the landfill for lack of another alternative.

Note too that most people DON’t recycle their plastic bags–and shop owners need to be more responsible in teaching their staff to only give bags for one or two items if customers ask. Buying a bottle of water and putting in a plastic bag outrages me! BE CONSCIOUS of actions. I often tell clerks I don’t need a bag-hoping they will think twice next time. Plastic ends up in streets, dumps and oceans where animals and birds swallow or get tangled in them, often suffocating or stangeling themselves.

Read more in-depth information at www.greenfeet.org

Bandelier National Monument, NM

Bandelier National Monument. There is evidence of people being in Bandelier National Monument area that dates back 10,000 years. The Ancestral Pueblo people settled in Frijoles Canyon building the stone dwellings.

Bandelier’s human history extends back for over 10,000 years when nomadic hunter-gatherers followed migrating wildlife across the mesas and canyons. By 1150 CE Ancestral Pueblo people began to build more permanent settlements. Reminders of these past times are still evident in the park as are the strong ties of the modern Pueblo people. By 1550 the Ancestral Pueblo people had moved from their homes here to pueblos along the Rio Grande (Cochiti, San Felipe, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, Santo Domingo).

In the mid-1700’s Spanish settlers with Spanish land grants made their homes in Frijoles Canyon. In 1880 Jose Montoya of Cochiti Pueblo brought Adolph F. A. Bandelier to Frijoles Canyon. Montoya offered to show Bandelier his people’s ancestral homelands.

n 1916 legislation to create Bandelier National Monument was signed by President Woodrow Wilson. In 1925 Evelyn Frey and her husband, George, arrived to take over the Ranch of the 10 Elders that had been built by Judge Abbott in 1907. Between 1934 and 1941 workers from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) worked from a camp constructed in Frijoles Canyon. Among their accomplishments is the road into Frijoles Canyon, the current visitor center, a new lodge, and miles of trails. For several years during World War II the park was closed to the public and the Bandelier lodge was used to house Manhattan Project scientists and military personnel.

The picture above shows a kiva (in the foreground) and the pueblos (the tiny holes in the cliffside).

This picture shows the landscape from Los Alamos:

Climb every mountain

Mount Tamalpais State Park

Just north of San Francisco and the Golden Gate, is Mount Tamalpais State Park. Amazing views and a wonderful breeze tickling my face. My heart sings.

Mount Tamalpais has redwood groves and oak woodlands with a spectacular view from the 2,571-foot peak. We walked up to the top of the peak and the view was absolutely spectacular. You could see the city from the top.

Minnesota’s Beautiful North Shore

North Shore Tofte Minnesota

The Truth About Plastic

photo: Kang Kim for TIME

This week’s time magazine has a very good article about a woman who has taken on an experiment, much like ours, to eradicate plastic from her life. Not an easy task.

This article an interesting and scarey look into how much plastics has become an unavoidable part of our lives. READ THE ARTICLE

I was making coffee this weekend as a guest at a lake cabin. As I pulled out the Folgers from the cabinet, I was sad to see it was now packaged in a large plastic tub. Coffee? The last holdout for tin? The coffee can for gawd’s sake. Now I knew we had no choice. The tital wave of plastic was unstoppable.

I have felt intuitively for many years all these wonderful conveniences of modern chemistry and science would be just the thing to do us in. Any step away from natural is a step towards unknown dangers. Nothing is free. Our wealth giving us access to convenience of modern day products could actually be the war we don’t even know we are losing…or know we are IN for that matter. Plastic leeching into our air and water is something we won’t escape. It touches us all.

It’s hard to keep up all the factors effecting us today—cancer, infertility, obesity, diabetes, depression, attention deficit, autism. The cumulative effect of our products, food processing, chemicals, toxins released everyday into our environment, financial and economic stresses. I feel more and more out of control as I look at the long list of ingredients on the back of labels on overpackaged goods.

One good thing about our BUY NOTHING NEW experiment is that the items we do purchase used or make do not come packaged. Food, cleaning and personal hygine products are another thing entirely. Belonging to a community farm, shopping at farmers markets and making your own cleaning products certainly help.

I think that we are but a drop in the whole of the problem and what comes of the energy we put forth to take this on? We are up against the world. It’s my conscious the drives me. My heart and spirit that has me understanding the whole of it. It is the default of life to sustain itself in harmony with all others—trees, animals, fish, water, each other. IF we actually listened to our soul and not our egos….we would all feel it. We would feel the Truth and we could not harm. We would take only what we need and give back three-fold…..protecting the life that is part of us while we are here.

Silence and voyouerism

Silence is confrontational to the unbalanced mind. It won’t allow you to escape from all the noise…all the voices in your head…all the to do’s, the regrets, the desires, the needs and wants. It won’t let you escape from the “I should of said this” or “I should of done that. It causes me to wince and say things outloud as if I am replaying a line from a bad movie. It’s also the silence that awakens the poet inside of me. Free from the chaos of a man-made life, created dependencies on technologies and economies. Spinning plates in the air, running back and forth to keep them from falling to the ground, shattering in tiny pieces. We fill our time–any moment or sliver of a gap with thing we think are real—facebook, im, texting, twitter. Cell phone conversations on bikes, walking dogs, waiting for the bus, etc.

iPod headphones jammed in our ears, cutting off the sounds of the world around us, we create our own soundtracks to our own movies.

Twitter—-a site you can sign up for where your posts are limited to 140 characters. People–anyone–can be following you. By simply hitting a button and they get your posts and you can get theirs…..a total stranger telling you they are now cutting the lawn, or having a glass of wine, or not doing work. Or said something to so and so last night. We have become the 21st century voyouers and both parties know it. We’ve left our window open for a looksy. Go ahead–have a look. It’s ok. You’re invited and I’m flattered.

I too am a voyouer–but my window is the snippets of conversations I pick up in passing someone on the street or sitting at another table in a resteraunt. I love the chatter of birds as I sit under a tree or walk by. I stop to observe as it becomes a frantic play for territory. Not much different than corporate office environments and cultures. One is left as the other moves on. I love watching and hearing the interactions of nature…and the world I walk through. I love watching interactions between human beings in structures….their perceptions, body language, interactions. I love watching what they see—what lights them up…what they miss. I love the faces of kids-the wonderment and processing that reflects the world in teir little faces. THIS IS MY TWITTER. 140 characters of unspoken language spoken in the subtleties of living.

…and silence……

It’s this same silence I rely on to return myself to me. To listen to my soul and celebrate the wonderment of the uni-verse. The one verse of life that all things are equal and of one another. A dance of interdependencies…life manifest in a spiritual dance of Being. Make the time to quiet yourself. Allow yourself to do nothing but Be. Be in the silence–allow the conversations in your head to arise and move. The only way out is through.