AncienTrails

New Religion, A Poem by Bill Holm

Lughnasa                        Waxing Artemis Moon

Here is a wonderful poem by Bill Holm*, passed along by Woolly Brother Tom Crane.  I put it here because it corresponds to a basic intuition I had long ago about transcendence.  After many years of contemplative prayer, meditation, reading and study in the traditional Christian way, I began to find the transcendence metaphor disturbing.  It reinforced the notion of a three-story universe with good up and bad down.  It reinforced the notion of hierarchy with men up, women down, or white up, black down.  It reinforced the desire to seek solutions out there and up there rather than in here.  Most importantly for me it took my spiritual longing up, out of my body, away from here to the faraway.  This created, for me, a tenuous thread for my spiritual journey.

What was the alternative?  Well, in and down.  That is, interior to my Self and down into the space, the place where my Self connected with the whole, the vasty universe.  It also reinforced the notion of incarnation as opposed to, say, ascension or the disembodied god.   It confounds traditional hierarchy, forced me to look for solutions in here rather than out there and it rooted my spiritual journey here and now, rather than there and then.

(A holy well dedicate to Brigid in Ireland)

At around this time I began research into my Celtic ancestry in search of material for fiction I wanted to write.  On a trip to Wales in pursuit of this material at the source I ran across a small book on Holy Wells.  Holy Wells appear throughout the Celtic world.  A well is a spring, a place where water bubbles up from mother earth herself, fresh and clear.  Down and in.  A well goes down and into the earth seen from our perspective.  The Holy Well then became my new metaphor, an in and down approach to spirituality, one that rooted my journey instead of flinging it Icarus-like toward the sun.

Over the years since, this shift in my spiritual journey has changed my life.  The shift away from a transcendent god and from the hierarchical patterns it undergirded; the shift away from solution seeking out there and up there to down here and in here moved me out of the Christian ministry and into the UU ministry.  The UU journey was a path rather than a destination as things turned out, a place for reweaving the tapestry of how I viewed the world, but not a place to pitch my tent.

I have, rather, gone on to Ge-ology, which certainly includes Poseidon-ology, as Bill Holm suggests here:

*New Religion

by Bill Holm

This morning no sound but the loud
breathing of the sea. Suppose that under
all that salt water lived the god
that humans have spent ten thousand years
trawling the heavens for.
We caught the wrong metaphor.
Real space is wet and underneath,
the church of shark and whale and cod.
The noise of those vast lungs
exhaling: the plain chanting of monkfish choirs.
Heaven’s not up but down, and hell
is to evaporate in air. Salvation,
to drown and breathe
forever with the sea.

Vapors

Summer                                Waning Strawberry Moon

The clouds hugged the ground when I woke up this morning.  I like fog and mist, especially as it rises off the wetlands here in northern Anoka County.  It has romantic allusions, of course, but more than that, it defines a certain kind of place, where water, earth and sky meet, shake hands, walk around together for a while, often in the early morning and around twilight, then part, knowing they will see each other together soon.

Clambering up the Cold Mountain path

Clambering up the Cold Mountain path,
The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:
The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,
The wide creek, the mist-blurred grass.
The moss is slippery, though there’s been no rain
The pine sings, but there’s no wind.
Who can leap the world’s ties
And sit with me among the white clouds?

Han-shan (Cold Mountain)

(730? - 850?) English version by Gary Snyder  Original Language  Chinese

For Emma, Max, and all the rest…

Beltane                                                Waning Planting Moon

From Woolly Brother, Tom Crane with this subject line:  For Emma, Max, and all the rest…

Dharma

by Billy Collins

The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her dog house
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance—
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Ghandi with his staff and his holy diapers?

Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.

If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.
If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.

A Study in Shadows

Beltane                                   Waxing Planting Moon

My poem The World Still Smells of Lilacs will be printed in the upcoming Muse, the newsletter for MIA docents.  They (Bill and Grace) wanted an image to go with it, but one from the MIA collection.  It took a while to find one that worked well with it, at least for me.  This Study in Shadows is the one I chose.

I”m honored they asked me.  Grace wanted to know how many poems I’ve written, “Oh, I don’t know.  Hundreds, I imagine.”  I’ve written poetry since high school, but lost all of my work through my senior year of college when my 1950 Chevy panel truck got stolen.  My poetry became an unwilling hostage, unceremoniously dumped I suppose.

Since then, I’ve written poetry off and on, in this journal or that and I’ve never bothered to collect them.  I have one small booklet I printed on the computer as a holiday gift several years ago, but that’s it.  Pretty uneven work I’d say.  A few good ones here and there, a lot of therapeutic pieces, some just plain rambling.

Another bee and garden weekend, plus chapter 16 of Wheelock, then, later on in the week, another 5 or so verses of Ovid.

The world still smells of lilacs

Beltane                             Waxing Planting Moon

from a difficult time in my life:

The world still smells of lilacs

A star rises from my heart

Into the dark, dark sky.

You and I.

As other celestial objects

Wheel and slowly turn

The star shines.  An urn

Reflects the star light,

It contains the dust

what remains of us.

The star o’er sheep once played

A hope that grew

From a babe into

A savior, a christ,

A man who loved and died.

It watches as we are tried

In the crucible of time

And found wanton.

Left for abandon.

Oh, well.  I loved you once.

The star traverses the sky

Watching, as we die

The death of personal crucifixion

A penalty which seems too harsh.

Yet, a bird sings on the marsh.

The sun rises rosy-fingered,

Eggs are hatching.

Gates are latching.

The world still smells of lilacs

Latin and Contemporary Art

Spring                                                      Awakening Moon

Had our Latin session with Greg at noon today.  I asked him if he thought my trying to translate Ovid now would hurt my learning.  He said, no, go for it.  But.  Get a latin text with a commentary and work out your translation to your satisfaction before you compare it to someone else’s.  So, I went on Amazon and found a 2-volume latin text with commentary.  They are on their way.  I’m excited.  I know I’ve got a long way to go before I’m a competent translator, if I ever make it to that level, but I can punt away at it.  He said to expect frustration.  Oh, I do.

(from the Metamorphosis, Ulysses men turned into swine. 1591)

After that into the Art Institute for the first of two lectures on the upcoming spring show, Until Now.    The lecture was excellent.  Docent training leaves out huge chunks of the world’s artistic tradition with a necessary focus on the art history of objects in the museum’s collection, but the biggest lacuna was contemporary art. I found the guest curator’s lecture very informative, a good background for an aspect of art history in which I feel very weak.

Until Now is contemporary art in a large show and it combines with Art Remix which features museum contemporary works placed at provocative or evocative locations. David Ryan, curator of modern design, said years ago the museum would only purchase works of an artist who was dead.  This was to ensure that whatever work we purchased represented an important and/or mature example.  That policy ended a few years ago and the museum has begun collecting living artists.

We have a new contemporary art curator and her initial job was to figure out how contemporary art fits into the MIA’s mission as an encyclopedic collection.  At the MIA we can place contemporary work in context, the art historical context which informed and informs artists working especially since WWII.  The Art Remix is an attempt to draw on the museum’s historical examples and use them as conversation starters about contemporary art as it has evolved out of the older works and how the older works can be illuminated, seen in a different way when viewed through the lens of later artist’s work.

(a work by Kara Walker, African/American, 1998)

The last hour of the day was a conversation about the Art Remix.  I found Liz Armstrong’s rationale for the Remix strong though I felt this first effort was uneven.  Some of it is very provocative, like the photographic panels in the Korean collection and the TV Buddha, which features a bronze buddha watching television, a television screen filled with a video camera turned on the Buddha statue and especially the Chinese Ming dynasty chair carved from a single block of marble and placed in the Wu family reception hall.  The works put in the Egyptian and African galleries (not the Shonibare, which I love) are not as effective for me.

A day with a lot of learning.

On Not Celebrating St. Patrick

Imbolc                                        Waxing Awakening Moon

St. Patrick’s Day.  I’ve always felt that the Irish celebrating St. Patrick’s day is much like the Dodgers celebrating a Yankee World Series win or maybe more like Native Americans celebrating the coming of Christianity to the New World.

Why?  The snakes St. Patrick drove out of Ireland represented the takeover of the ancient Celtic faith by the invading dogma of Roman Catholicism.  Not only did the R.C.s finish off the auld faith, but they did in a native Celtic version of Christianity that had a close relationship to Mother Earth and who offered to the church, Pelagius, a theologian who believed we were born good.  Augustine, yes, that Augustine, set out to crush Pelagianism and he succeeded.  In fact, Augustine was so successful that Pelagius rarely comes in church history at all.

What I know of Celtic Christian spirituality would salute this poem by e.e. cummings that Scott Simpson quoted at our last Woolly meeting:

O sweet spontaneous

O sweet spontaneous

earth how often have

the

doting

fingers of

prurient philosophers pinched

and

poked

thee

,has the naughty thumb

of science prodded

thy

beauty     how

oftn have religions taken

thee upon their scraggy knees

squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive

gods

(but

true

to the incomparable

couch of death thy

rhythmic

lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

Late Night Philosophy

Samhain                                Waxing Wolf Moon

What is it?  This being human.  Being.  The question has an easy answer.  It is.  It just is.  We are.  We just are.  But, of course, we are not.  We are not just being.  We are also action, becoming.   There are all those famous moments: Abraham

and Isaac, Spartacus, Krishna opening the doors of the prison, Hercules struggling through his labors, moments that take a virtue like faith, obedience, patience, devotion and turn it on its head, a moment when being is no longer enough, when action has to flow, something needs doing and no logic, no dogma, no insight will come.  That’s what we become, the person who lives into those moments of kairos and comes out the other side different.  Changed.  No longer a human being, but a human becoming.

[Birth of Krishna - Vasudeva and Devaki Escaping Prison (By Raja Ravi Verma)]

It’s been on my mind today.  Liberal.  Conservative. What are these things?  Titles.  Labels.  Conceptual fields that suggest exclusion.  Competition.  Either/or.  Yet here I am.  National Health Service?  Tax me for it tomorrow.  Tax credits to the working poor to raise their income?  Again.  Tax me for it tomorrow.  Yet.  I love the classical literature.  The artistic traditions of the great civilizations.  Baroque music.  My family.  My nation.  I am no pacifist and recognize national defense as a responsibility of the state.  Yet.  I reserve the right to critique when we enter unjust wars:  Vietnam, Iraq, Nicaragua, Guatemala.  I’m an economic and political liberal and an aesthetic conservative, a family values supporter of gay marriage and abortion.

Why not?  We are children of Walt Whitman. We are one, We are many.

Angelic Terror

Fall                                 Waxing Blood Moon

“This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love; the more they give, the more they possess.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

The First Elegy

Who, though I cry aloud,
would hear me in the angel orders?
And should my plea ascend,
were I gathered to the glory
of some incandescent heart,
my own faint flame of being
would fail for the glare.
Beauty is as close to terror
as we can well endure.
Angels would not condescend
to damn our meagre souls.
That is why they awe
and why they terrify us so.
Every angel is terrible!

The First Elegy

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?

Blood Moon Risin’

Fall                                Waxing Blood Moon

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Waverly Fitzgerald quoted this poem on her seasonal webpage:  Living In Season. She has a wealth of information and ideas for living in the seasonal moment.  I’ve recommended her before but not since I shifted to Wordpress.

I’ve had a run of days with no particular commitments.  It was a good thing, too, with the electric fence project.  Now I’m no longer working against pressure and can return to the list.  On it right now are the following items:  plant garlic, weed, water shrubs, clean out machine shed, buy a fence tester, buy salt for the water softener, design a process for Groveland UU on burnout, write Liberalism:  the Present, contact the Greek and Latin tutor and move the Gateway computer into the study.  The tour office has given me some time off as I imagine they have all the folks who toured Sin and Salvation.  That’s helped.

At the Woolly’s last night I found myself in an anti-metaphysical, skeptical place.  I found the willed incredulity of some Woollies hard to understand, as if their security depended on illusion, perhaps even self delusion.  An odd position for this former Presbyterian I grant you, but the existentialist in me, the most constant aspect of my personal philosophy over time, sees this life, this journey, our ancient trail as humans as enough, even more than enough.  Why we have to concern ourselves with a veil no one has pierced and about which we have no evidence but speculation unending continues to baffle me.

It’s not that death does not have a numinous quality for me.  It does.  Would I like to know what comes next?  I think so, but only if it meets with my approval.  If not, well…  It’s not that death doesn’t evoke fear.  Of course it does.  It’s unknown.  I don’t walk into large empty buildings with no lights on.  My point is that we have no evidence, we have no way of gaining evidence and the speculation about what happens after death is now and always has been just that, speculation.  I choose to spend that energy on creative work, on political action, on family.

I feel neither bitter nor dismissive of other people’s religious beliefs.  In fact, I find and always have found religious ideas fascinating, poetic, often profound.  Since the realm beyond death is also beyond our scrutiny, it makes sense to me that the conclusions about it would be wide ranging.

When, however, the question comes to me, as it did Monday night, and when the discussion is about those questions, then I want to understand each person’s idea as deeply as possible.  That might mean I will challenge them, express skepticism and doubt, but I would never deny a person a right to their own conclusions.  That does not mean I have to agree with them, nor does it mean I have to keep quiet about my disagreement.