Peace and Justice is a theme I’ve been passionate about my entire life, but particularly since September 2001. I began this blog in 2009. The intended focus of this site is Peace, Justice, Environment, Sustainability, Global Cooperation and related issues.
The intent of this site is to publish positive pieces with thoughts about building a better future for our world and everyone in it.
I believe in the value of dialogue. A lifelong mid-westerner, with deep roots in rural North Dakota, I have spent most of my adult life in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. dickDOTbernardATicloudDOTcom
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Windmill
/0 Comments/in Uncategorized /by dickbernardOvernight Tuesday came an e-mail from a friend, commenting on a Frank Lloyd Wright home she know, somewhere.
The reference jogged me to think back to mid-October, 2013, visiting Wright’s Taliesin, Spring Green WI, and seeing a unique windmill there (see photos at end of this post). In turn, that caused me to think of another windmill found at the North Dakota farm around the time of my Uncle’s death in 2015, which I came across in a box a short while ago. It is below, simply a piece of farm art on a scrap piece of wood.
I don’t know who did the above creation, about 7″x12″, likely a photo from a farm magazine glued on a piece of scrap lumber and then varnished to become a piece of home grown decoupage. It was a hobby which I remember seem to have caught on like a prairie wildfire among my elders for a time. If there was a ‘culprit’, I would put my Aunt Florence near ground zero for planting the seed. But it could have been my mom, or any to the other sisters. You know how such things go.
Show this photo to anyone who’s ever had a close call with an old farm, and it will bring forth lots of memories. Windmills were the farm “water works” – a source of hopefully fresh water from a fairly shallow well.
The windmill at Taliesin has its own story, which the internet helpfully searched for me. Here, you can read the short story.
Oct 16, 2013 at Frank Lloyd Wrights Taliesin, Spring Green WI. Photos by Dick Bernard
October 16, 2013. Taliesin
In a way, those windmills are like all of us. In their lives they’ve seen a lot, and done a lot.
Unlike us, they spent their time stuck in place. Most of us are capable of more flexibility, and making more of an impact than we feel we’re stuck with.
We take many things for granted, these days, which folks couldn’t imagine not all that many years ago. Rural electricity replaced wind power on my grandparents farm in 1949. An interesting diary of another North Dakotan adds to that story. You can read the article here.
Now another spring begins. A good time to take another look at how we, as individuals, can positively impact the status quo. And then ‘spring’ into action!