Beltane Mountain Moon
Still fascinated by the eruption of Kilauea. The Leilani Estates, houses bursting into flame, residents standing dazed by their vehicles after evacuating, monster movie scenes like the one below, show humans as do many Song dynasty paintings, small and insignificant next to mountains and rivers.
Listening to residents of the Leilani estates describe the shock is a lesson in reenchantment of the world. There were expressions of grief, of course, and bewilderment. All knew this possibility existed, but, like residents of flood plains and the wildlife-urban interface (us here on Shadow Mountain), hoped they would be spared. The lure is beauty. Always beauty. We take risks to live in beautiful places.
Some said things like, “Well, if madame Pele wants the land…” “Pele goes where she wants.” There was, in these remarks, no irony that I could detect. No wink, wink, you know what I really mean. The native Hawai’ian’s faith in Pele, given witness by the offerings at Halemaʻumaʻu Crater and numerous legends and dances, has, at least partially, reenchanted the Big Island for haoles (non natives). Whether they believe in a real, physical goddess or not, probably not, I sense the feelings of awe and the mysterium tremendum et fascinans that Rudolf Otto associates with the numinous, the essential components of the holy.
What’s happening at Leilani Estates is similar, perhaps the same, as my experience here on Shadow Mountain when I came for the closing on our home. The three mule deer bucks in our backyard, curious and welcoming, were mountain spirits blessing our move. I knew it while standing there with them, present with them in this new, strange place. It is not, in other words, that the numinous has disappeared from our encounters, only that we have unlearned how to know it. The reductive nature of scientism, that attempt to totalize our understanding with numbers and equations and laws, and the restrictive arrogant nature of religions certain that they know truth, has blinded us to the numinous.
Reenchantment has a precursor experience, a moment when we embrace the awe and the mystery, a feeling that we each experience, perhaps even experience often (childbirth, death, sunrise, the greening and flowering of spring, a snowstorm, bitter cold, blazing heat, the vastness of the ocean, love), but a feeling we have allowed others to reframe for us. The laws and beauty of scientific understanding do not explain away, as many assume. They are descriptive, a language of their own about the world in which we live. But they have not stripped out awe and mystery though men like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens insist on it. Empiricists, fed by scientism, want to suggest only through data and analysis can we know the truth.
Or, the experience of the Celts and the Roman Catholic church is instructive here, one faith’s certainty can leave no room for the numinous anywhere but in their dogma, their rituals. Catholics built churches over Celtic holy wells. They deployed words like heretics and blasphemers and pagans to undercut the authority of the old faith. They appropriated Celtic holidays by turning Lugnasa into Lammas, Samain into All Saints. Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism says it well, “It is not the seeking of God that is the problem, it is the certainty of those who believe they have found God that is the problem.”
We can learn from the residents of Leilani Estates. We live in a wild universe, one well beyond our capacity to either control or understand. When we can set aside the certainty of others, the narrow thinking, and open ourselves to awefull and wonder of wilderness home, then we can know the ordinary holy, the secular sacred, the profane faith of those whose revelations no longer come from books or laboratories, but from that wilderness itself. That is reenchantment, that is reconstruction, that is a reimagined faith.
In the month of the Mountain Moon Kilauea has reminded me that my interest in mountains precedes the Rockies. My first mountain driving experience was Haleakala on Maui. I learned there that you don’t have to brake going up, take your foot off the accelerator and the mountain takes care of you.
Hawai’i put vulcanology on my oh this fascinates me list. On a visit to the big island, Hawai’i, we drove the Highway east out of Kona, traversing first Hualalai, which sits just above Kona, then Mauna Loa, the long volcano, and finally, climbing up the eastern flank of Mauna Loa we went past Kilauea. We did not go in that day, driving on to Hilo town. On our way back, later that evening, we drove along the southern flank of Mauna Loa again, the air scented by gardenias and jasmine.
Maps. Kate bought me this wonderful vintage map of the Big Island. It now hangs in a prominent position here in the loft, reminding me of many adventures including our stay at Volcano House. Kilauea is in the yellow portion of the map that extends south to the Pacific and butts up against the large swath of green in the middle. The new eruptions are in the eastern, white segment that extends to the north from the point where Kilauea meets the Pacific. This is Kilauea’s eastern rift zone*. People building there knew about the rift zone, but hoped it wouldn’t affect them, much like we hope our location in the Wildlife Urban Interface, WUI, won’t result in our home burning down. Mother Nature gives no passes for human hopes however. She decides when and where things happen, according to her own laws.
Over years of travel I have purchased maps and annotated them. I did this especially in Hawai’i where we visited often while Kate practiced. It is a popular location for continuing medical education. Each time we visited I would mark where we had gone, the date, sometimes a brief note though the longer explanations were in my notebooks. We spent time on Maui, Hawai’i, and Kaua’i, enjoying all of them in turn. Each has their particular charms.
In 1999 I stood on the rim of Halema
Back in the day, the now further and further away day, I always went to class. I might have missed a few, but it was rare. I enjoyed learning from lectures, getting in the mix of dialogue, thinking out loud. Last night I was the only student in the qabbalah class on Time.
Being human is a daunting task, steeped in misdirection, existential isolation, perception clouded by tradition, by language, even by our body. Qabbalists and taoists and ch’an buddhists have worked, hard, to peel the onion of our awareness. They are subtle, in their own way as subtle as particle physics or genetics or neuroscience, attempts to understand this task, the one none of us can jettison, save through suicide. They differentiate from the narrowing tendency of science by insisting on a full, a comprehensive positioning of this strange creature that we are in the wild.
Thought experiments like taoism, qabbala, ch’an or zen buddhism try to shock us out of our stupor, the life lived without seeing the wilderness for what it is, the life lived within the conventions of a particular time, a particular language, a particular place, a life lived without knowing what life is. Most people find little reason to peak behind the curtain of this emerald city that we think is what is. The apparent life, the one with family and money and the NFL and food and houses and sunlight and night, seems to be all that could be. We do not question, we try to paddle the little barque of our body on this river (life) often using only our hands over the edge of the boat.
And yet there is more, not more in the sense of more layers or more depth, for those layers and depths, the wilderness, always surround us, are the water to which we are the fish, but more in terms of what we can know, what we can access, what we can use to help us become awake. Woke, in the current vernacular, not woke to racism and sexism and oppression in this instance, but woke to the true majesty and wonder of life itself, of this wilderness journey, this most ancient of ancientrails.
Another recovery hallmark. Kate drove yesterday, went out on her own for the first time since March 22nd! The bank, a few groceries, gas. When doing these errands feels routine, they can be mindless or even a nuisance; but, this sort of moment allows us a glimpse into the ordinary miracles that make up what we think of as normal, usual. We can get up from the chair, pick up the keys, start the car, drive to the grocery store, the gas station, the bank.
Mussar Vaad Practice Group last night. Vaad = sharing without comments. Mussar = Jewish ethics focused on developing middah, character traits. This is a group, partly because of its nature, partly because of its members that has become a Woolly Mammoth equivalent for me, a place where I can be transparent, share, look inside, gain from the ancientrails that others walk.