Samain Long Nights Moon
When Hanukkah ends tonight, it will only be two days to the Winter Solstice. I long ago kicked transcendence out of my religious toolkit, believing it encourages authoritarianism, the patriarchy, and body negativity. How, you might ask? If we find our source of authority outside of ourselves, either up in heaven or with a divine father figure or anywhere outside of our body, we give away our own deepest connection to divinity, the sacred that lies within us. BTW: locating revelation in written texts does the same.
You could argue that cavalierly jettisoning a millennia old religious idea, celebrated and loved by millions, is anathema. Yes, may well be. OK with me. You could say if transcendence is real, then denying it is misguided or just plain wrong. Yes, you could say that. But if the downside of accepting transcendence includes self-oppressing, self-negating ideas, then it’s functionally bad, whether it’s true or not. So out with it.
If not up and out, then what is the direction for spiritual enlightenment? In and down. In your body/mind, and down into the depths of your soul. You say soul links us to the transcendent. Yes, you might say that. I’m more in the metaphysical world of Jungian thought though, where the soul connects us to collective unconscious, a deep stream of reality to which we belong and which belongs to us. Or, another way to think about it, the soul is our direct link to the nature of reality. It is the part of us that is eternal, that is divine and to know eternity, to know the divine, we only need know ourselves, as the Delphic Oracle said long ago.
All this to say that the Winter Solstice is my high holiday (or, low holiday) because it encourages us to go inside, to sit in the darkness, to be part of the Gaian womb from which life emerged. As we head toward it, I’m considering my eternal soul, that divine spark within which makes me holy. And you, too.
The holy scripture I choose to read starts at my fingertips, but extends into the reality around me. When I look at the lodgepole pine and its elegant means of sloughing off snow, or at Maxwell Creek as it slowly carries Shadow Mountain toward the sea, or the lenticular clouds over Black Mountain, my sense of wonder and awe increases. These close by things and I share the same building blocks, the stuff, the things that burst out so long ago in the great expansion. Just after the tzimtzum, the great contraction. There is no transcendence here, only interpenetration, the universe and its evolutionary marvels.
Down we go, into the longest night. A darkness profound enough to reshape our lives, to help us see.
Got a TV for the kid’s room. A Hanukkah present. Maybe not the most mind nourishing gift, but one they’ll really like. I spent a couple of hours setting it up yesterday, which seems like a lot until you factor in the passwords and fiddling with other settings.
Right now we’re in a major cultural transition, trying to learn how these tools can be most useful for human life. They will become integrated and less shiny, less compelling as we move on to the next transition, probably to a sustainable human presence on this planet. All civilizational artifacts have ripple effects, often of unsuspected power. Think of the plow. Language. Writing. The printing press. Governance. Bow and arrow. Ships and boats. Ceramics. All had their initial years of adoption, then a clumsy time when their utility seemed swamped by the problems they created. Finally, though, they became part of human life. How did we get across the lake before we invented the boat and paddles? Or the boat and a sail? Speaking our language means we can understand each other better, no more grunting and pointing. Books contain and retain ideas over time and space. How cool is that?
Maybe I’m a starry eyed optimist, probably am, but I believe we can handle this transition and that it will not save us, nor will it enslave us. A hundred years from now, maybe two hundred, we’ll see the full arc of this change, in an undoubtedly hotter and stormier future. It will have become an ancientrail, one still affording advantage, but no longer scary, at least not in the way it seems to be now.
Full day yesterday. Up at 4:45 though Kep had nudged Kate awake earlier and she’d already fed the dogs. Wrote, ate breakfast, came back to the loft and filed all my open tabs in Evernote. That took a while since I’m still fiddling with Firefox Quantum, too, changing zoom levels, color preferences, customizing the tool bar. Got to the new workout from On the Move Fitness about 9:30. Finished, after icing my knee, at 11:00.
So I asked the technician. Turns out the specific tests at drive through testing facilities like the one I visited yesterday use a very specific algorithm, putting the car on rollers and then simulating different traffic conditions. The VW scam depended on the very specific, and standard, testing algorithm. They taught their cars to blow clean during the exact kind of testing done at state and county testing facilities.
Nap-ish. Kate made a pasta dish with chard, yummy, for the Beth Evergreen potluck. A Hanukkah shabbat service. We all brought our family menorahs with four candles, put them on one table and lit them. Rabbi Jamie lit the much larger Synagogue menorah. We sang songs, including dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, I made it out of clay and others unfamiliar to me. There were tables in the sanctuary and we ate the meal there.
I also recalled yesterday that I’ve had this end of year let down often. When I worked for the Presbytery, I noticed that no congregation wanted a church executive around during the run up to Christmas and the week after, through New Year’s. This may have been a post-school rationalization to give myself a winter break. Whatever it was I think the pattern is probably there, triggered this time by the end of kabbalah.
After writing the post below, about slowing down, I realized I need a vacation. Time off. A break. A pause. I need to vacate the life I love for just a bit, to clear out the schmuz in my pistons. Confess I don’t know how to do that right now. Money. Visitors. Holidays. I’m considering how to do it.
Afterward, kabbalah. Three presentations. One on the idea of the holy of holies. The temple looms large in Jewish thought, in many, many ways. One on the link between the ten sefirot and a Japanese inspired version of Chinese medicine, acupressure. One on the surprisingly pervasive influence of the kabbalists in the shabbat service. All were, in their own way, interesting. Having to come up with a presentation did cement the learning for each of us, that was clear. And, they led to interesting speculations.
