Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Faith and Spirituality, permaculture, Writing

Not Yet Ready

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Lughnasa                                Waxing Harvest Moon

I wanted to start writing this morning.  But I could not.  The piece was not ready.  I had to do more work, winnowing ideas and quotes, looking for contra arguments.  Now, I’m almost done, should be ready to write sometime after the nap.  This work tires me out as much as working outside.

When my eyes glazed over, I got up and helped Kate a bit in the garage.  She’s boxing up the last of the garage sale stuff or pick-up by the Salvation Army.

While doing that, Paula Westmoreland of Ecological Gardens came.  She’s finalizing plans for some additional work on an edge to our woods.  We’ll be getting plants that attract birds away from the orchard and to themselves.  Plus, the look out the kitchen window will finally have a finished look, except for the small shade garden that we decided to postpone.  Those big clompy feet of the pups would have made its life difficult right now.

We’ll also get some trees in the area where we have prairie grass, a sort of screen for the neighbors.

Up at 6:30 with the dogs, very sleepy.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters

More on Liberalism. Not there yet.

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Lughnasa                              Waxing Harvest Moon

Another day spent happily with my nose in The Contested Enlightenment, parsing out threads of intellectual history that I can then weave together into a new tale, one that clarifies liberalism in the United States today and, also, the place Unitarian-Universalism, a liberal faith, has in that larger context.

Liberalism proceeds from three high-powered engines: reason, liberty and individualism.  It is the individual who is central in liberalism in all its forms and liberty creates the protected space around the person that ensures expression of their individuality.  The source of the break away from the old monarchical, aristocratic, traditional and ecclesiastical authority lay in a newly aroused faith in the ability of human reason as the key to truth.  Logic, evidence, skepticism and radical investigation of such matters as revelation, the divine right of kings, the feudal caste structure, and precedent peeled away their nakedness.  They simply did not make sense.

The enlightenment itself stands for the light of reason casting off the darkness of the ancien regime.   Its roots lay in the new empirical methods of Galileo, Copernicus, Francis Bacon.  These men and their brethren advanced the now commonplace notion that one must gather evidence, data from the world before making a conclusion about scientific fact.  Thus, consulting a theological or scholastic assumption of human priority in the great chain of being and using that conclusion to place the earth in the center of the solar system, indeed, the universe might well be true, but if it is true then data gathered from telescopes and manipulated through mathematical formula should confirm it.   If they don’t, and they didn’t, it is the traditional conclusion that gets shelved among yesterday’s ideas.

Further back in time even than the emergence of early science and the philosophical work of Descartes and Spinoza, however, was critical work, for liberalism at any rate, by Petrarch and his humanist buddies, the development of a nascent individualism, a notion of the worth of the person and their unique qualities.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Health, Memories

Surgery?

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Lughnasa                        Waxing Harvest Moon

This was a doctor day.  Kate and I went to see a spine surgeon she has seen before.  She leans now toward some surgical intervention since the various palliatives:  drugs, nerve root and facet joint blocks, exercise and stoicism no longer provide sufficient relief.   Surgery is the last option and in the case of matters spinal one usually chosen as such.  Her surgeon is positive about the chances for success, success measured as a substantive reduction in pain, though not cessation.

We stopped at Burger Jones for a delayed lunch.  3200 block of West Lake Street.  If you want a trip back to the late 50’s early 60’s, but updated with booze and choices in shakes and burgers you didn’t have back then, Burger Jones is the place.  Fun.

Long nap.  Just now getting roused for the remainder of the day.

Liberalism and the liberal tradition is much on my mind since  have to write a sermon for the 6th of September.  Reading, reading, reading.   Thinking.  Pondering.  Like that.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

A Yucky Day

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Lughnasa                                Waning Green Corn Moon

A funky day.  This morning found me on my hands and knees, on a garden pad plucking weeds from between the bricks on our patio.  The whole back perennial garden has taken last place in the maintenance department as Kate and I have learned how to keep up with the vegetable garden and the orchard.  That means it got a bit overgrown and weedy so I’ve spent a lot of time this week putting it back in shape.  The Woolly meeting is a good spur, but I felt bad about neglecting it anyhow.

While doing this, I  misplaced or lost a Japanese hand held weeder I bought Kate at the Seed Savers Exchange conference.  When I say lost or misplaced, I mean I went upstairs for my cell phone and when I came back down, I could not find the damned thing.  It was as if it grew legs and ran off into the garden or developed roots, turned green and hid itself among the lilies and the clematis.  Very weird.  Felt like I’d lost my mind.   I have no idea what happened to it.

It was hot, too.  I finished that work, fed the dogs and tried to get a nap in but the dogs began whining.  They got me up at 6:30 a.m., about an hour to an hour and a half before I normally get up.  I’ve felt sleep deprived all day, too.

I’ve not gotten as much work done so far as I wanted.  A yucky no good no account day.  On that note, I’ll get some sleep.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

Thoughts of Your Own

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Lughnasa                                Waning Green Corn Moon

“To find yourself, think for yourself. ” – Socrates

Gnothi seauton, written over the door into the temple of Apollo, the home of the Delphic Oracle on Mt. Parnassus, means, Know thyself.  How, you might ask?  Listen to Socrates: to find yourself, think for yourself.  This seems so straightforward, but humanity society pushes more toward thought focused on blending in, getting by.  The need to belong and to have respect is so strong it bends our thoughts, often before we know they have been changed.   We change our values so they conform to the group not because we are weak, but because we are social animals.

Our life in community cuts against the grain of thinking for ourselves.  This is why so many people have trouble with finding themselves.  We seek out meditation, religious dogma, political ideology, even scientific certainty in place of careful examination of evidence for themselves.   It is, at first, so pleasing to quiet the anxiety by replacing your own thought process with ready mades that we do not realize we have begun to censure ourselves.

Yet this much is true:  if you have not weighed and considered a matter using your own reason, your own intuitions, your own feelings then you have moved further away from finding yourself.  To do otherwise  is a harsh discipline, often not pleasant, but it has one saving grace: you know who you are.

As you go through the day today, ask yourself if that thought is your own.  Ask yourself if the value you hold comes from your decision making or the pre-cut cloth of public or group opinion.  Ask yourself if you want to be who you are or who others would shape you to be.

Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Sport

Wish They All Could Be California…Wines

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Lughnasa                                 Waxing Green Corn Moon (99% illuminated)

Kate and I watched Bottle Shock, a movie about the U.S. Bicentennial year taste test between French and American wines.  California’s Napa Valley wines won.  The British oenologist who created the test redid it in 2006 anticipating that the French wines would win.  They did not.  Napa again.

It’s a bit difficult for me to tell whether I don’t get it because I don’t drink alcohol, but the whole veneration of vinculture and its products seems overblown.  Just sayin’.

Tonight the almost full Green Corn Moon is a yellow orb hanging high in the southeast sky.  It makes the evening enchanted.  The Japanese have moon viewing platforms.  Seems like a good idea to me.

More medical visits tomorrow with Kate, trying to track down the elusive next and hopefully better treatment.

Not sure whether I wrote anything about the whole Favre who-ha, but here it is:  thank god it didn’t happen.  Any superbowl won by the Vikings with Brett Favre at the helm would have tainted the experience and us long suffering Viking’s fans deserve a clean win, straight up with no cross state retired quarterback in the mix.  That said, it does not appear to me that either Tavaris Jackson or Rosenfels have the stuff, but I hope I’m wrong.

Aging, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, permaculture, Woolly Mammoths

Becoming Native To This Place

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Summer                        Waxing Green Corn Moon

westorchard709

The next meeting of the Woolly Mammoths will be here in Andover.  That means it’s theme and subject matter time.  The theme will be, Becoming Native to this Place, the title of a book by Wes Jackson of the Land Institute.  The subject matter will focus on the gardens, permaculture and the local food (slow food) movement.

At the Seed Savers Exchange conference held two weekends ago in Decorah, Iowa a commercial grower told of his change to the local foods idea.  A grower of greenhouse foods for various distributors who took his foods far from northern Iowa, he recounted attending a meeting sponsored by folks whose agenda was local foods.  They showed that, due to commodity based agriculture, northern Iowa was a net importer of food.  That astounded him.  He switched his focus then to growing vegetables for local consumers, working on niche markets like institutions, restaurants and grocery stores in the northern Iowa area.

He didn’t mention Michael Pollan by name but the subject matter was similar to Pollan’s recent work, In Defense of Food.  The Woollys have read the Omnivore’s Dilemma and the Botany of Desire.  We’ve also looked at the notion of Homecoming and the Great Work by Thomas Berry.  This August meeting, only 17 days after Lughnasa, the first fruits festival of the Celtic calendar, will celebrate the Woolly’s interests in home, food and continuity.    southgarden709400

Continuity?  Yes.  The Woollys have a 20+ year record of perseverance with each other and, by implication, an interest in this place we have  chosen to call home for those same number of years.

To the Woollys who read this:

Please choose one of the books or websites indicated and take a look.  While looking pick out two things:  what surprised you?  what would you like to know more about?   If you want, also look for something that seems off or misguided to you.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden

They Nourish Us Five Times

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Summer                     New Moon

A.T. cleaned turnips and beets, cut their greens off and prepared them for boiling.  He also prepared kale and collard greens, first washing them, then cutting their rib out and storing them for Kate who will boil and freeze them.

An old folk saying suggests fire wood warms you five times: when you cut it, when you move it, when you split it, when you stack it and when you burn it.  There is a parallel in the seeding, tending, harvesting, preparing and eating of vegetables and fruits.  Each of these plants grew from a tiny seed placed either in soil or in soil block.  They were thinned and mulched.  The soil over and around them has been built up over the years.  When they grew to maturity, the same hands that planted them, took them from the plant and washed them.

When Kate and I eat them, they will have nourished us five times.  As we care for the seedling, we participate again in the miracle of vegetative reproduction.  While we tend them, we pay attention with love to the soil in which they grow, checking them for disease and creating a nurturing place for them.  When we harvest them, we enter into the oldest covenant of humankind, one that even preceded the neolithic revolution, the covenant between humans and domesticated or at least cultivated plants.  When we prepare them for food, we touch not strangers, but friends, allies in the ongoing wonder of nature’s intertwined parts.  As we eat them, we become the plant and the plant becomes us.

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, permaculture, Politics

In the Garden

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Summer                        New Moon

A.T. used the chainsaw this morning.  He cut out a mulberry tree growing in an unwanted (eastern) location.  A.T. feels manly after he uses the chainsaw.

Kate and A.T. harvested peas, greens, beets and turnips, too.  A.T. planted beans as a cover crop among the onions, where the garlic came out.  A.T. plans a much larger garlic crop for next year.  He has 9 or so large bulbs set aside for planting and set in an order for several new varieties.  At the SSE (Seed Saver’s Exchange) conference over the weekend a speaker suggested planting the garlic earlier, even in August.  A.T. asked SSE if he could get his garlic earlier than the September 7-9 ship date.  Nope.  Not to  worry, he’ll plant his own in mid-August and check the crops against each other next June.

This whole gardening process now begins to blur the line between horticulture and agriculture.  With crops meant for immediate consumption, but others for storage:  potatoes, turnips, carrots, squash, beans, garlic, onions, greens and peas, plus the eventual fruit yields, our garden has become a substantial part of our lives.  Substantial in the transubstantiation notion loved by Catholics.  We eat of the body of our garden and our orchard and in our bodies it becomes use, transfigured from plant to human.  A sacred event.  Substantial in the way it requires the use of our bodies to realize its harvest.  Substantial in the political sense since it cuts down trips by car, makes our place better than we found it and keeps us close to our mother.

The bees have added another dimension.  An interdependent, co-creative collaborative effort.

Faith and Spirituality, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

No Ring. Yet.

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Summer                            Sliver of the Waning Summer Moon

Inquiring minds want to know.  No, Antra, no joy yet.  There are still a few possibilities but the weekend trip and a busy day has not left me time to go check.  We have approximately an acre and a half fenced and 2/3rds of that is woods, so we may never find it.

Woolly’s tonight.  We discussed Good and Evil in our own lives.  Tom Crane showed a wonderful documentary about a French region focused on Champion sur Lignon.  The people in this whole region hid Jews during WWII.  In interviews with them after the fact they implied that they just did it.   It was a very moving story.  It hit me especially since they were Huguenots, the group to which John Know belonged.  Their position relative to helping the Jews I recognized from work within the Reformed tradition.  Then, too, clergy played a direct role in the attitudes that led to their extraordinary, yet very ordinary actions.