January

January, Droid Shots, St.Paul, Minnesota, January 2016, photo © 2016 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

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Blowing Bubbles At -9°F

Vertical Bubbles, Minneapolis, Minnesota, January 2014, photos © 2014 by Liz anne schultz. All rights reserved.

The -22°F drop in air temperature in the Twin Cities this week closed schools and businesses, persuading most of us to stay inside and curl up with a good book. But after seeing the images of photographer Angela Kelly, Liz was inspired to mix up a concoction of soap bubbles, strap her Sony NEX around her neck, and head out into the cold.

I was recruited to blow bubbles, while she chased them around the deck, hoping to grab a quick shot before they flew over the roof and collapsed into tinkling ice crystals. It was -9°F with wind gusts dropping the chill to -30°F below. Liz’s camera even froze up a few times. Yet with everything that was going on around us, she captured a sense of stillness and serenity in these photographs.

Red Dual Bubble, Minneapolis, Minnesota, January 2014, photos © 2014 by Liz anne schultz. All rights reserved.

After we were back inside, warming our bones in front of the heater, we read up on the details of blowing bubbles in freezing temperatures. Here is what we learned:

1) For the best frozen bubbles, add corn syrup to thicken the water base and increase the surface tension. It is surface tension that allows the solution to form a bubble. Use the ratio of ingredients below. Then mix and let cool.

1 part dish soap
1 part corn syrup
6 parts hot water

2) Use a bubble wand, instead of your breath.

A bubble is formed by a layer of water molecules trapped between two fine layers of soap molecules. When it is very cold, and the bubble wand is waved slowly, the water layer freezes before the bubble can burst. By contrast, if you make a bubble by blowing into the wand, the bubble takes more time to set because the air in the bubble has been warmed by your lungs. When this warm air comes into contact with cold air it contracts, and the surface of the bubble sets more slowly.

3) It’s natural for frozen bubbles to collapse into themselves.

The layers of soap freeze, making the walls of the bubble more solid. After a few seconds, the air captured inside the bubble disperses to the exterior, like a balloon deflating, and the wall of ice collapses under its own weight leaving what looks like a broken eggshell.

Green Frost Bubble, Caving Bubble, Minneapolis, Minnesota,
January 2014, photos © 2014 by Liz anne schultz.
All rights reserved.

We are counting on Minnesota to produce another round of sub-zero temperatures (and less wind) so we have a chance to practice more frozen bubble photography before spring.

-posted on red Ravine, Wednesday, January 8th, 2014, with gratitude to Angela Kelly for the inspiration

-Resources:  Science Fun In The Snow – Try This Out – Frozen Bubbles,  Angela Kelly’s website: Kelly Images & Photography: Acclaim for the “Frozen in a Bubble Series”

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Prairie Spring

by Willa Cather

Evening and the flat land,
Rich and sombre and always silent;
The miles of fresh-plowed soil,
Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness;
The growing wheat, the growing weeds,
The toiling horses, the tired men;
The long empty roads,
Sullen fires of sunset, fading,
The eternal, unresponsive sky.
Against all this, Youth,
Flaming like the wild roses,
Singing like the larks over the plowed fields,
Flashing like a star out of the twilight;
Youth with its insupportable sweetness,
Its fierce necessity,
Its sharp desire,
Singing and singing,
Out of the lips of silence,
Out of the earthy dusk.

___________________________________________

“Prairie Spring” is in the public domain and was released by Poem-A-Day from The American Academy of Poets on December 29th, 3013. Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.

Willa Cather was born on December 7, 1873, in Virginia. She grew up in Nebraska and studied at the University of Nebraska, before moving to Pennsylvania, and then to New York. Cather is best remembered for her novels depicting frontier life on the Great Plains. “Prairie Spring” was first published in 1913 as the prologue to Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers! Although Cather received widespread recognition as a novelist, her first published book was April Twilights (1903), a collection of poetry. In 1923, Cather was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, One of Ours (1922). Cather died in 1947 in New York City.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

After our New Year’s book cleaning, I pulled out all of our poetry books and was inspired to read poetry every day. On a frigid winter weekend, when the air temperatures will drop to -27°F in the Twin Cities, it helps to read poems about spring. I felt closest to Willa Cather when I traveled through Nebraska on frequent road trips to New Mexico where she met D. H. Lawrence in 1924. I stayed in the Cather room at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House and wrote about her after one of those trips in Valentine.

-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, January 5th, 2014

-Related to posts: Discovering The Big Read, Midwest Poets & Writers — When Can You Call A Place Home?, The Vitality Of Place — Preserving The Legacy Of “Home”, The World According To Mr. Schminda (et al.)

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Cranes In Winter

I Spy A Crane, February 2010, photo © 2010 by Jim. All rights reserved.

[insert your haiku here]

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Note: Jim took this photo of two cranes in the field near the house. I liked how the photo came out, soft around the edges. One of the cranes is hard to see; it’s behind branches. I wanted to write a haiku but didn’t have time. I invite anyone else out there to write a haiku, or a caption, or anything you want, inspired by the cranes.

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PRACTICE – Wolf Moon – 10min

The January Wolf Moon was wide and full, smeared across the morning sky the way an artist rubs a chalky finger across gray charcoal on paper. It was Liz that pointed it out to me, half asleep in the kitchen making coffee. By the time I got to the window, she was already out the door with her video camera, taking a long shot of the moon. She still had her pajamas on. It was -5.

January in Minnesota has lived up to its name this year. I become reclusive in cold. My dreams frozen and bending back on themselves like the ice folds on the back roof. Last Thursday, there was such a loud pop at the eaves, that it jolted me out of sleep. I woke Liz up and we both went and stared out the window into the black cold. Helpless. Humans have no recourse against the harshness of winter. If your car or furnace breaks down, or your pipes bust open, it is an instant time machine to the way things used to be.

When the roof jumped out of its skin, we did, too. Liz stuffed her hair under her hat, pulled on her boots, and walked out with a flashlight to inspect the roof. It was 3am. The crunch of her feet on top of the snow sounded like she was in the living room, right beside me. Sound travels quickly through frigid, thin air. I stayed behind, looking up ice dams on the Internet. Turns out, all of this creaking is normal for sub-zero temperatures. But, I tell you, it’s hard to fathom that the roof is not going to just cave in around us.

I have felt a lostness, is that a word, a directionless month. Trying to get on my feet, find my ground. I pulled a Medicine Card yesterday and it was Bat – reversed. The reversed cards are about lessons that need to be learned, an unwillingness to embrace the individual power rolling your way. Bat is about Rebirth. In the reversed stage, she is telling me to get going, to move on toward my dreams and goals. The Universe is supporting me. But if I can’t let it lift me, or push against it with resistance, all those dreams will come tumbling down.

At the extreme, the resistance of reversed Bat leads to a lifetime of saying, “I’m going to do that tomorrow” – and then I’m at the end of my life and the things I dreamed of have not been accomplished. If everything is laid out for you, why not take the bait? Usually, for me, it is fear. Or not having a solid practical plan. I am good at dreaming. For follow through, I have to make a structured plan.

I’ve been resisting. Because I know how much work it’s going to take to move forward. I have had the luxury of time to rest the last month and a half. I am deeply grateful for that gift. Now, I need to take action. I feel overwhelmed. I need to remember, day by day, one step at a time. I don’t have to do everything all at once. One step at a time. Never give up on your dreams.

So when the Full Wolf Moon slid a dewdrop of reflected sunlight through the slats in the blind, and Kiev was running around like a maniac last night, I tried to pay attention to my dreams. But I was so tired, all that came was sleep.

In the morning, French Roast helps a little. And thinking about the death of Heath Ledger. So young. It makes no sense. There is nothing like death to wake you up. I just took a swig out of the amber Taos Mountain Outfitters water bottle and thought about walking around Taos. Water and caffeine dehydrate; water and mountain drench. The cells have everything they need to climb. Now – take the next step.

-posted on red Ravine, Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

-related to posts, winter haiku trilogy and What Is Your Totem Animal?

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8 Minutes

Snow Goddess, Minneapolis, Minnesota, taken Christmas Day, December 2007, photo © 2007 by SkyWire Alley. All rights reserved.

Dark when I left work,
then closing my eyes for sleep
the weatherman chimed,

“In the great Midwest
we’ve gained 8 minutes of light
since Winter Solstice.”

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On Eating December Snowflakes

           A Charlie Brown Christmas, snippets on YouTube by FlyingForGlory

Patty:  Try to catch snowflakes on your tongue. It’s fun.
Linus Van Pelt:  Mmm. Needs sugar.
Lucy Van Pelt:  It’s too early. I never eat December snowflakes. I always wait until January.
Linus Van Pelt:  They sure look ripe to me.

I love to watch the snow fall. I’m a huge fan of Winter. I’m also a big Peanuts fan and watch A Charlie Brown Christmas every single year (you can’t beat Vince Guaraldi’s score). The snow theme captures the best of both worlds for me. I’m not apt to take Lucy’s advice though. I love December snowflakes!

There are two other shows I make sure not to miss over the Holidays: Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol and A Christmas Story. I’m sad to say that Bob Clark, the director of 1983’s A Christmas Story, died unexpectedly earlier this year (see Remembrances on NPR). His cult classic will live on.

I’ve also been inspired by a couple of snow posts by fellow bloggers. One is on Joe Felso: Ruminations, 13 Ways Of Looking At Snow, a tribute to Wallace Stevens. And Snow Sculptures at Leslie’s Blog, complete with vintage black and white photographs. You won’t be disappointed.

It’s Christmas Eve. This is my last post for a few days. I’ll be checking in once in a while for comments. But what I really want to say is thanks for writing with us and visiting red Ravine. We are grateful for your presence here. And thanks to my faithful blogging partner, ybonesy, for holding up the other half of the sky.

It’s still and silent outside the window this morning. The storms of yesterday have passed. The day Moon is clear. Liz pointed it out to me off the deck this morning on her way to work. And have I thanked you enough Lizzie for all of your patience and support around my crazy writing life?

Finally, whoever is reading and writing with us, however you celebrate this time of year, I hope your Holidays are sweet.

-posted on red Ravine, Monday, December 24th, 2007

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Solstice Fire In Winter

Solstice Fire In Winter, December 22, 2007, Winter Solstice in Minnesota, photo © 2007 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

We celebrated with friends outside by the pond. It was frosty cold, hovering around 5 degrees. Frozen hands. Sparks fly. A light wind blew from the West. The brilliant sunset was undone only by a circle wreath of blazing fire.

We called in the ancestors, the grandmothers and fathers. We drummed and rattled and slipped paper and wood into the fire – the things we no longer wanted to carry.

Death of the old, let us bring into the light what is new.

Sunday morning it is snowy gray. Though we are socked in by a blizzard, darkness moves into light. Blowing snow howls from the North. But I face West.

I let go of whatever blocks me. I let go of fear. We let go in community. The circle is unbroken.

-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, December 23rd, 2007

-related to post, Winter Solstice – Making Light Of The Dark

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Sitting In Solidarity

Afternoon Meditation, Mabel Dodge Luhan House, Taos, New Mexico, February 2007, photo © 2007 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

In writing practice this morning, ybonesy and I both wrote about sitting in solidarity with our writing friends at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos. Most Decembers, Natalie holds a writing retreat during the period around December 1st through December 8th. In Zen, this time is called Rohatsu Sesshin and marks the enlightenment of the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama.

Rohatsu means in classical Japanese twelve-eight, because December eighth is celebrated in the Far East as the day of the Buddha’s enlightenment. Zoketsu Norman Fisher from Green Gulch Farm (in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki-roshi) explains Rohatsu Sesshin something like this:

Sesshin is about pulling our whole life together — right here into this one body and mind and right here on this little square of black cushion. All of our life, past, present and future, is right here and right now. Our whole life. All our many lives. All of everyone’s life. The life of the planet. The life of the stars. All that we are and all that everyone is and was and wanted to be but couldn’t be. All our successes and failures. All we wanted and didn’t want. All we overlooked and grieved over and lusted over and abandoned. None of that is elsewhere. It’s all right here right now on this cushion.

Of all the sesshins of the year this one is the most intense of all because it’s the one…that imitates the Buddha’s time of sitting under the enlightenment tree. So in a way our whole sesshin is a kind of ceremony of enactment of this event and we are all playing the Buddha under the Buddha’s tree, enacting an event that happened almost two thousand five hundred years ago. Two thousand five hundred is just one of the many ways of saying right now. Right now, actually, Right Now, as you are listening to words that I am speaking, Buddha is sitting under the Bodhi tree making strong effort for awakening. In each and every one of your bodies, in each and every pore of each and every one of your bodies, there are infinite Buddhas — each one, right now as I’m speaking, literally and actually making this kind of effort.

        

                 

Slow Walking (left), Winter Fire (right), Mabel Dodge Luhan House, Taos, New Mexico, February 2007, photo © 2007 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

It’s a time of deep practice, a time where we enter the cave-like darkness of winter and look inwardly to the truth of the existence of our own Buddha Nature, and the awakened nature of all beings.

Mabel’s Lights II, second in series, Mabel Dodge Luhan House, Taos, New Mexico, February 2007, photo © 2007 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

But sitting in Taos is not about Zen. People of all faiths and religions come to study with Natalie. It is about practice. Beginner’s Mind. About repetition and opening. It is about getting out of your own way, vowing to make greater effort, to go the extra mile, and through that effort, trying to requite a debt of gratitude to those, in life and in Spirit, who have helped us along the way.

In Taos, we practice sitting, walking, and writing. We sit like the mountain. We anchor our breath to the bottom of our feet. We chant and sing. We are silent. We write.

The practice of our writing is backed by a 2500 year old tradition of watching the mind. It is powerful. At times, life changing. We are grateful to Natalie for creating writing practice, for the gift of her teachings, for passing them down to us.

Many of our writing friends are sitting in Taos:  sitting, walking, practicing, deepening, learning the true secret of writing. ybonesy and I wanted to hold a place for them. We sit with them in quiet reflection and community. And in doing so, we sit with the world.

Not to be attached to external forms, not to be unsettled within, not to think this and that, not to be cluttered with extraneous things, not to think about gain and loss and whether we are happy or sad. This can be called Zen.
   -Shodo Harada Roshi

If you lose the spirit of repetition, your practice will become quite difficult.
   -Shunryu Suzuki-roshi

Key To Mabel’s (in repetition), Mabel Dodge Luhan House, Taos, New Mexico, July 2007, photo © 2007 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

Mountain is mountain and earth is earth
That’s all.
You shouldn’t say anything extra.
You should not put any fancy decoration.
Mountain is mountain, that’s all.
   -Shunryu Suzuki-roshi

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.
   -Shunryu Suzuki-roshi

-posted on red Ravine, Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

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PRACTICE – What’s In Front Of Me – 20min

A woman in navy gators, old-style webbed snowshoes, laced with sinew, bulky and awkward, tucked up under her armpit, slinging waggling ski poles, wrapped in a red knit ski cap with earflaps. I’m reminded that Natalie has a wool cap like that, a Sherpa cap that looks like someone knitted (no, crocheted?) it for her, especially for her. And now I’m remembering a photograph I took of her with dark shades and that Sherpa cap, gloves, or tan mittens. She’s staring right at me, right into the camera. We are walking the dirt road to the white cross behind Mabel Dodge, the one painted by O’Keeffe.

The sun is pale orange, sinking in a crisp winter sky. Wind whistles, clouds surf along a plume of chimney smoke, sky purples, alternating stripes of gray and red, tapered yellowish tails that blind me when I look into the sun to remember how to describe the light. Light is one of the hardest things to write about. Hard to detail. Like trying to capture the feeling of sucking air through a candy-cane striped straw. The kind in the Wendy’s Frosty I had Friday night. It was late, the storm was coming, Liz stayed two hours later at work. Overtime and a feeling of job well done.

Clingy, tawny oak leaves, sucked into winter’s vortex, hanging on by a single, dead stem. Bobbing ash branches over the Mystic River deck. That’s the name of the color of our deck: Behr Mystic River. And the house will be Pot of Cream next year and the trim will be Cloudberry. The color scheme, does it tell you anything about us? Or describe true color?

What’s in front of me, a long, lonely winter. Not the kind of lonely I am used to. Not the long-suffering alone kind of lonely. But the kind of lonely where I have to make decisions that impact me for a long time to come. There are decisions. And then there are consequences of decisions. Will ever the twain meet? I want to know.

Aluminum blue streaks, striated against brown banana orange. Night falls from the West. There is dusting of powder on the north side of the ash. The tree is 3 pronged and I see the sun through the slingshot V of branch 1 and branch 2. Thing 1 and Thing 2 with their shiny red and white hats. The snowshoe woman looked like Thing 3, though I couldn’t see her face. She walked briskly, head down against the wind. It picks up as the clouds disperse, making way for the frigid air of a clear night.

A midsummer night’s dream is only a distant memory. Orange day lilies and sweet bush clover and pansies and black-eyed susans. I took a lemon bristled broom and a fire handled, snow shovel and took care of the deep, mottled driveway, the newly painted deck, the lean and trim gutters that Gene completed on the eve of Saturday’s storm. He was dressed in Carhart brown and sucked on a Marlboro while he deftly tacked the gutter pipe to the old 50’s Masonite siding. “It’s in good shape,” he said. “Usually, this stuff cracks.”

He looked kind of James Deanish (there I go again) with that cigarette dangling from his winter lips, sideburn edges peeking under a red skull cap, body wrapped in the bulk of winter construction in Minnesota. He was the nicest man and I wanted to tell him how much I appreciated contracting with professionals who do what they say they will do and don’t quit until the job is done.

An elongated scar on the south branch of the closest naked oak. It’s about 50 feet from the window I’m staring out as I write. There were two cardinals (aren’t they bulked up finches?) on the three feeders on Friday, one male, one female. The female was an understated caramel, with her tiniest breast feathers ruffling in juts of wind. I wondered if she was cold.

Then the male flitted by in papal crimson and true black. The female had a little blip of red on her crest. I watched them dance back and forth on the oily, black-seeded feeder. The neighbor plugged in his outdoor Christmas tree, twinkling white, while his kids pulled out over thin air, dangling from a wooden seated rope swing hanging from the same scarred oak.

Plus 6 with the windchill. The night’s sunset is reflected in the shiny screen of Liz’s laptop. She oils her hands with a lavender salve I bought at the Albuquerque Growers Market last summer. I feel glad to be alive.

-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

-related to Topic Post, WRITING TOPIC – ATTENTION TO DETAIL

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