Turning Points*
Gregg Krech in his newsletter from last year:
Every 5 to 10 years, Linda and I design a 24 to 48-hour retreat. We go somewhere different, conducive to stepping back from our lives. We bring plenty of papers, pads, sticky notes, pens, markers, and spiritual readings. The purpose of this event is to consider how we should move forward in our lives.
This pause for reflection generally has no predictable outcomes. It may lead to us adopting a child (we did that), writing a book (we did that), or decluttering and getting rid of 90% of our stuff (uh . . . we’re working on that one).
For the past 35 years I’ve been practicing and teaching a Japanese method of self-reflection called Naikan. Naikan is based on a reflective practice that involves questions which you contemplate. Over time I’ve become a big fan of questions. Questions, when considered sincerely, open up possibilities. Often, we move through life without pausing, reflecting or considering possibilities. We may find ourselves stuck in the same pattern of living and doing. Questions offer the possibilities of new paths.
Here’s a few of the questions on our list, so far:
- What are the most important and meaningful things for us to do while we still have reasonably good health?
- How do we make sure our work with the ToDo Institute and Japanese Psychology will continue after we are gone?
- If we both die soon, what arrangements do we need to make for Betty’s care? (our puppy)
- If either of us die soon, how and where would the other person live?
- What are the biggest threats to our quality of life and how do we minimize them?
- How do we sustain close relationships with the people in our lives whom we cherish?
Building Food Security*
"Building Real Food Security: A Look at Healthy Food at All" by Joe Minglo, Founder of Healthy Food for all. From the Willy Street Co-op Reader - March 2025. website link
we maintain a Retail Gleaners Network of volunteers who collect surplus from groceries and other retail outlets from Dane County.... Partners with Madison Area Food Pantry Gardens and the Geezer Gleaners... We distribute many tons of produce as part of the Purpose Grown Project led by Crossroads Community Farm and Troy Farm.... also Gorman Community Farm and Promega Farm.
New initiative: BOFAN - Buy One For a Neighborbord... buy an extra bag or bunch of something and immediately donate it to us... Shoppers love the project because they can buy something they like and share it with a neighbor. It's a real immediate way to help, which makes people happy to do it. The farmers love it because it's a whole new stream of revenue we refer to as "sales for donations." ... Shoppers get to do some good, farmers sell more, and people get access to healhty food, so it's a triple bonus situation...
[they need] local food system infrastructure like storage and istribution facilities or shared processing and canning kitches
We have a community of smart, compassionate, motivated neighbors who can make most anything happen once we set our minds to it.
There's an easy way to sign up to volunteer at hffadane.org. If you've got a strong back, we need help hauling and distributin nature's (sometimes overwhelming) boundty especially at the height of the growing season. If you've got a pickup truck or SUV, come help schlep a mountain of sweet corn or the thousands and thousands of lovely tomatoees that all come ripe at once!
There's no better way to feel joy in these troubled times than to serve others and the community and see the real concrete fruits of your labor.
Bach 1014-1019*
When we were in Madison at the end of May. We went to Frank Lloyd Wright's First Unitarian Church to see some of Bach's Sonata's for Violin & Harpsichord, performed by Kangwon Lee Kim and Jay J Moy. I've been listened to Glenn Gould play the same pieces (recorded as "violin sonatas"). From the program notes, I learned some interesting things. Bach son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, referred to them as "six Clavier Trios" - adn that's appropirate because these works involve three independent musical lines - the harpsichord's left hand, right hand, and the violin. Here's my favorite line "Comprising 25 stylistically distinct movements, these Six Sonatas provided fertile ground for Bach to indulge his compositional creativity. The liner notes go on to note BWV 107's opening movement that is vocally derived, BWV 1015, where Bach sets up an ingenious canon between two melody parts, with the haprsichord palying the exact same notes as the violin, but delayed by one full measure. In BWV 1014, the violinist must resort to finger contorting double-stops to play choreds with ulti-voice textures that are far more idiomatic for the harpsichordist.
Finally, they say that Bach loved these sonatas because he kept them with him until he died... and "this is remarkable considering how much of Bach's chamber music was either written for one-time use or simply disposed of whenever he and his family ahdt o pack up and move to another city over the course of his long career." Wow.
On This Day (07/12):
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