Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, permaculture

A Flag Hanging From A Tree On The Mississippi

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Beltane                   Waxing Flower Moon

Windows Without Walls.  Microsoft has this new advertising slogan.  I keep wondering if they realize that without walls there are no windows?

2 hours today for my baby plants getting ready to head out to the garden.  They’re done right now and I have to go get them before my treadmill workout.

As I passed over the Mississippi on the way out to the endodontist this morning, I noticed a tree with an American flag attached to a branch, fluttering.  Somehow the artlessness of it reminded me of days gone by, of a world in which there were fewer right angles, fewer stone bridges and no steel and concrete ones, no cars.  This triggered a revery at first between art and artifice which went away almost as quick as it came.  Not the point.

What was the point?  Permaculture has something to do with it.  So does our very American and persistent yearning to return to the land, to become one with nature.  This flag without a flag pole, without dramatic lighting suggested this.  What was there here?

The red car sped along Highway 252 headed toward Highway 100.  The reflections kept coming.  Nature and artifice.  No.  Not nature and artifice.  Nature and the human drive to build and decorate, artifice.  Both natural.  Then, the city, where I feel such energy and hope, and our home with its orchard and vegetable beds, its perennial flowers like the tulips and daffodils up now, where I also feel energy and hope, these two must walk together.  The tight gathering of humans and their shelters is no different from the mud daubed home of the wasps or the cave of the hibernating bear.  Likewise humans earning their food from mother earth is no different from the bass dining on minnows or the moose eating duckweed from a wilderness lake.

Yes, that was it.  The flag on the tree branch reminded me that we humans and, all of what we do, are natural.  This whole earth in the balance rhetoric is wrong; it is not earth that is in the balance, it is rather humankind.  We may live in such a way that we eliminate our own niche.  It has happened before and it will happen again, naturally.

Faith and Spirituality, Family

Projection Is Not Just A Machine In A Movie Theatre

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Beltane                    Waxing Flower Moon

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.” – Herman Hesse

This is a fundamental tenet of Jungian psychology, projection.  I mentioned this acquaintance a while back whom I have begun to despise.  It became clear, as I wrote that, that projection was at work.  There is something about him that I despise in myself, just what I’m not sure.  It may be that I don’t think through things as clearly as I imagine since that’s the main problem I have with him.  It may be that his anger, a strong undercurrent in his approach to life, reflects a similar emotional undercurrent in mine.  As I write about it, that one makes sense to me.

One of the difficulties I’ve noticed in the transition from 60’s political work to the millennial political work I’ve done with the Sierra Club has its roots there.  In the 60’s our anger, our rage against the system fueled a willingness to live on the fringe of society and take the consequences.  Today, though, politics on the left has a quieter, more plodding nature.  I want to build a movement, mount the barricades, define enemies but my new colleagues use reason and persistence.  In part this mirrors the relative failures of the left in the last three decades, we have been weaker.

It has caused me considerable self-examination.

I’m not sure where the underlying anger comes from, but I suspect its origin lies in perceived mistreatment by my father and fate.  When I approach either of these from an older, calmer perspective, I can see both my role in them and their unintentional nature.  Anger and fear have ruled my life at critical junctures.  This may be the point where I finally confront them.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Myth and Story

A Mist of the Otherworld

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Beltane                   Waxing Flower Moon

Beets.  Carrots planted.  Beds all planned.  Kate’s taken off all the wire surrounds for our fruit orchard and begun eliminating quack within the mounds around them; the mounds filled with guild plants to sustain the trees.  This afternoon I will round-up the quack in the areas around the mounds, then plan to seed it next week.

Seeds.  Plants.  Reproduction and renewal.  Resurrection.  Reincarnation.  No wonder the garden has a mist of the Otherworld.  It reeks of life at its most survival oriented and at its most elegant, beautiful.  We see there the possibility of our own resurrection, planted too in the soil, awaiting a springtime for the soul.

Can we draw an analogy from the garden to our Selves?  We can’t help it.  Whether it translates to our experience or not, we intuit that it does.  I’m for the intuitive.  It just make intuitive sense.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Writing

The Titan

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Spring           New Moon (Flower)

Lost sleep night before last, got up early yesterday and had a long day at the museum.  I still feel loggy, not quite focused this morning.   This kind of dulled down makes everything just a bit more difficult like walking and thinking through a bog.

I’m nearing the end of Dreiser’s The Titan, the second book in his trilogy of desire.  I finished the Financier awhile ago.  The book jacket on my copy, a used $.75 paperback from long ago, describes this trilogy as the forerunner of the modern business novel.  That may be so but it’s like saying the Mona Lisa is the forerunner of female portaitature.  Perhaps true, or if not exactly true, then you can see the point, but the point pales in comparison to the work itself, so much more than just a portrait.

These three novels:  The Financier, The Titan and the Stoic give a thick description of life in fin de siecle Philadelphia and Chicago, valuable insights into life itself, not only business, which is merely the fictive vehicle for the life of Frank A. Cowperwood, aka Yerkes.  His life has appetites for money, yes, but more for power, and more than power for beauty and for a particular kind of woman.

Both the Titan and the Financier have eerily familiar scenes developed around financial panics, panics that bear striking resemblance to the one underway right now.  In fact, these books could, at one level, be read as cautionary tales about the dramatic affect personal ambition and animus can have in economic affairs.  In the same vein they give a privileged insight into the mental calculations of a monied set, how it comes to be the case that, “This is only business, nothing personal.”

They show the Faustian bargain successful men (and women) make as they scramble for this rung, Continue reading The Titan →

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Politics

Why We Need Universal Health Care

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Spring            New Moon (Flower)

A word for the ones in silent despair, hiding behind doors and well-kept lawns, all those in trouble.

A while back I mentioned a neighbor whose life turned upside down over a week-end.  He went from  a productive, active guy to a suicidal victim of a progressive form of multiple sclerosis.  After his diagnosis and subsequent treatment brought little relief he tried to end his life, bringing paramedics and the blue and white Allina ambulance to his door.  He did this  while his wife talked with us about our new orchard.

Now, six months or so later, their bank account is empty.  They are putting necessities on credit cards and the “disabilty insurance” they have is not insurance, but a loan, a loan they have to repay.  Their lawn is neat, the flower beds tended and ready for plants.  The small evergreens they planted when they moved in some years back have grown into mid-size trees.  The American flag flutters from their flag-pole, lit with lights.

He built an observatory a few years back, I may have mentioned this.  It now sits there, a white dome with a go-to Celestron telescope, abandoned by its maker.  His MS is advanced stage 2, of which, when I asked Kate about it, she said, “It’s not good.”

Vulnerable people have had their vulnerability magnified by the economic crisis.  That’s what this has driven home to me.  Imagine being in a situation where a medical condition threatens not only your retirement, but your house, your family.  Now imagine all that in a situation where the economic eats up what little cash you already have.

Their situation is an argument, the argument, for universal health care and a safety net for persons with debilitating illness, a safety adequate to maintain gains they have made over ther course of a working career.  I’m not talking here about pleasure boats, expensive vacations and country club memberships; I’m talking about a house, food, health care and family security.

This cries out for justice.

Bees, Cooking, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Hydroponics

A Green Miracle

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Spring              Waning Seed Moon

The bee hives have a new coat of white sealer, a soothing color for them.  The raised bed on which I painted them has some tulips pushing up and the bed across from it have the garlic.  They’ve begun to wake up in force now so we’ll have the pleasure of garlic grown this year from garlic we grew last year.

We had chard for lunch today.  I thought about it a moment.  I took one chard seed and put it in a small rockwool cube late last fall or early winter.  It got water and light from the fluorescent bulb until it sprouted.  After the first tiny roots began to appear outside the confines of the small cube, it went into the clay growing medium, small balls of clay that absorb nutrient solution.

The seedling grew in the nutrient solution for several weeks as the roots spread out.  The nutrient solution comes in a bottle, concentrated and goes 3 tablespoons to two gallons of water.  What those roots and the chard plant leaves have to work with then is that nutrient solution and the light from a full spectrum second sun that glows above the plastic beds in which the liquid circulates.

The wonder in this is the transformation of that small seed, not bigger than the head of a pin, into food with only the inputs of light and some concentrated chemicals diluted in water.  I’m not sure why  you need water into wine when you can turn water into food, better for you anyhow.

Over the next month the outside work begins to grow and take up more time.  In our raised beds and the orchard this same miracle happens, changed only by the addition of soil.  Seeds into food.  Which in turn create more seeds so you can grow more food.  A green miracle.

Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Myth and Story

Hermes, the Psychopomp

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Spring        Waning Seed Moon

As the pace of physical activity picks up, I find my melancholy of a couple of weeks ago beginning to subside.  It triggered a yearning for a return to full time writing and an investigation into agency and its role in my regression, so it gave me a valuable perspective, one I had lost.

James Hillman says we meet the gods in our pathologies.  Hermes has guided me into the psyche of my past and then, Ariadne-like, also led me back to the present.  Now Brigid inspires me–the garden, the writing.  She is my domestic goddess (and not competitive at all with the fleshly one in my Kate).

I’ll light a candle for her at Beltane, not long from now, and dance around an ash, one that grows tall in our vegetable garden.  When the work moves within me and I follow its rhythm, it is Brigid who holds my hand.

Aging, Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics, Writing

This Is The Question I Face Now. One I Have Not Answered.

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Spring            Waning Seed Moon

Agency.  There’s been a lot written in psychology and history about agency.  We have agency when we can affect the flow of events in our own lives or in the world around us. (No, I’m not going to get into the subtle no-free-will arguments floating around.)  A lot of the historical work has concerned how those without agency–say women, slaves, workers–get it or why they don’t have it.  In the case of the individual agency refers to our capacity to direct our own life.

A sense of agency underwrites our sense of self, or our sense of group identity.  Note that our agency or our group’s agency can be positive or negative.  A more negative sense of agency, that is, sensing that others or factors outside your control influence your life or your group, leads to a feeling of diminished capacity or is a feeling of diminished capacity.  A positive sense of agency promotes a feeling of active and successful engagement with the world, the ability to act in ways congruent with your self-interest or your group’s self-interest.

Here’s where I’m going with this.  In my regression back into the ministry after 8 or so years out I made the move because my writing career had not produced the hoped for results.  I had lost a sense of agency in the work area of my life and moved backwards on my psychological journey to retrieve it.  Going backwards to pick up something left behind is a key element of regression.  Its flaw lies in a return to a previous reality no longer relevant.  The ministy was what I had done, a minister what I had been.  The experience of return to the ministry produced missteps and a low level of energy for the actual work.

Now, about ten  years later,  once again I have reached back into my past, this time even further, to retrieve a sense of agency, the ur-agency, for me, the political.  This is the work with the Sierra Club. (hmmm.  just realized I did the same thing two years back when I studied Paul Tillich.  That was a return to life as a student, a potent form of agency for me.)

What the work with the Sierra Club, the study of Tillich and the ministry have in common is an attempt to regain a positive sense of self through a form of agency already well-established and presumably easily recaptured.  None of these activities in themselves is a bad thing, but that is the lure, the  seductive call of regression.

Back there, if only I could go back in time, and become the captain of the football team again.  Prom queen.  College radio jockey.  The actor I became after college.  My successful years as a bond trader or nurse or carpenter.  Back there I was strong, able.  I had a way with the world, a position of respect and self-confidence. Continue reading This Is The Question I Face Now. One I Have Not Answered. →

Faith and Spirituality, Garden

Taking Part In the Process of Creation

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Spring        Waning Seed Moon
Friend Bill Schmidt passed these quotation on, sent to him by a friend.  I like the Hawthorne quote a lot because it captures an elusive feeling I often have when walking the grounds.
bloodrootSpring has returned.  The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
Rainer Maria
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I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation.
It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a row of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Hawthorne captures in the concrete this more abstract idea from Thomas Berry:   “Gardening is an active participation in the deepest mysteries of the universe.”
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As I thought about these quotes, this jumped out:  Want to live like they did 10,000 years ago?  Put in a garden. If it was good enough for the neolithic revolution, it’s good enough for me.
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We humans did not always tend to our gardens.  We stood up on two legs, dropped off body hair,  ran through savannahs, painted in caves and developed our gracile mind long before we realized seeds and plants went together.
Horticulture precedes agriculture and may again.  Latin hortus garden + cultura cultivation

Agriculture:  Middle English, from Middle French, from Latin agricultura, from ager field + cultura cultivation.

We worked small plots, or gardens, before the advent of fields or large scale cultivation.  I have a book in my library that I’ve not read (ok, I have a lot of books in my library I’ve not read), but this one has the title Human Scale.  Horticulture is human scale cultivation; agriculture is large scale cultivation.

As I’ve thought back over my life, I’ve noticed a common thread in many of the things I’ve done and co-operative efforts to which I’ve given energy:  they are an attempt to wrest human scale decision making authority and human scale work back from impersonal bureaucracies or larger scale political and economic entities.  Horticulture fits. Continue reading Taking Part In the Process of Creation →

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Hydroponics

Let Our Revels Now Begin

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Spring         Waning Seed Moon

We are far enough into spring that its first full moon, the Seed Moon, has begun to wane.  The snow is gone and even though the land here is dry bulbs have begun to break the earth with the tips of their small green spears.  The daylilies, those hardy, reproductively agile flowers are already up six inches or so (hmmm, time for the cygon on the irises).

I pulled up stakes but we’re not moving.  Nope, each year these stakes get taken up when the last snows of the season, at least any that will last, are behind us.  They are three feet high, sharpened on end and painted a fluorescent orange on the other.  Put in the ground after Halloween (for obvious, trick related reasons) they guide snow-plowing crews away from the edges of our yard.  This preserves lawn and sprinkler heads.  Out in Rocky Mountain National Park their equivalent is a seven foot or so sapling lashed to mile marker or outside lane marker.

We have our peculiar seasonal rituals.  Next comes the removal of the snow blower to the machine shed and the draining of its gasoline tank.   In its place comes the riding mower, ready for another season of grass beheading.  Somewhere in here the cold weather plants get started outside, tomato plants inside.  Windows get washed and gutters cleaned. We like to give ourselves a fresh face for nature’s season of abundance.  We will put the spiritual asceticism of winter behind us, ready now to revel in green, fresh fruits and vegetables, warm breezes.