Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Faith and Spirituality, Weather +Climate, Writing

Beard Experiment Tells Tale

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-3  steep rise 29.99  W0 wchill -3  Winter

Waxing Gibbous Wolf Moon

The wind last night drove our bedroom windown open wider and the chilly night air blew on us early this morning.  We always sleep with the window at least partway open, but this larger portal made even the down comforters inadequate.  So we both woke up about 30 minutes or so earlier than usual.

Kate said last night, “You must be happy with what  you’re doing.”   I said, “Yeah, the political stuff is work I know.  I understand it in some depth.  Besides, a guy needs some validation now and then.”   Later, I asked her why she made that remark, “Oh.  You shaved your beard.  Not so much that fact, but that you were experimenting with it.” I was and I made it so peculiar that the only remaining option was to cut it all off, all the way off.  “When you’re not happy,” she went on, “You’re more controlled.  When you’re happier, you’re looser, more willing to try things.  That’s how I knew.”  Oh.  The clues we leave behind.

Homecomer is now done, but I have to edit it.  That’s today. Seed database underway, but far from done.  Business meeting today, too.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Sport, Weather +Climate

An Existential Cry?

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-8  falls 30.32  SW0 wchill-8 Winter

First Quarter of the Wolf Moon

The Great Horned Owl who lives in our woods calls tonight, right now as I write.  Whether he, or she, speaks to a lost love or wayward children I do not know.  On a night this cold it could be the existential cry of the world, proclaiming the season at its depths.  I often imagine this owl whose wingspan extends longer than my body and whose talons can lift a small dog or a young child with ease; I imagine this owl perched on a top limb of our tallest poplar.  The gaze of this fierce predator, the apex predator of our woods, rakes the Wolf Moon, perhaps blinded by the light, but looking just the same.  Because, like us, the moon attracts the eye.

The Vikings lost to the Eagles.  I don’t feel as let down as I have when the Vikings have lost other playoff games.  Not sure why.  Maybe because they did not come into this game a prohibitive favorite, then give it away.  Perhaps because they played with heart and made some young team mistakes.  I don’t know.  But I’ll watch again.  Peculiar, eh?

Writing Homecomer took up the writing juice today.  Little left over for this blog.  I’ll let it sit a day or two, then read it with a red pen in hand. Go back to the computer and revise it.  Then let it be.

Now, back to The Given Day by Dennis Lehane.  If you have not read it, and enjoy period pieces with rich characters and real historical drama as I do, then you’ll find this a treat.

Faith and Spirituality, Memories, Weather +Climate

Home and Heart

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winter-solstice-08cbe2.jpg1  bar steep rise 30.42  WSW0   windchill 1  Winter

Waxing Crescent of the Wolf Moon

Oh, man.  To get the trash out I had to blow the snow.  Underneath the snow is ice.  The snowblower with its knobby tires spun out and the only reason I stayed on my feet was the firm grip I had on the snowblower.  Never before had taking out the trash had a hint of danger to it.  Tonight it did.  After the snowblower and I went slip sliding away, I still had to roll both the trash containers down the long slope of our driveway.  Risky business.  Made it ok.

In doing research for Homecomer I looked back over many of my sermons for Groveland and noticed that I’ve written several that deal with home as an idea.  Home has a certain poignancy for me, since my estrangement from my father and his subsequent marriage to a woman who made the problem worse.  The town and the house where I grew up seem faraway to me, as if the warm and comfortable feelings associated with home got eaten away by the acids of my family quarrel.

The rightness or wrongness of it all has long been moot, yet the hollowness with which I’m left when it comes to home and nuclear family must have lead me to consider this theme.  It is a rich concept, one with so many layers and metaphorical possibilities that I have not tired of it.

Perhaps out of this search of mine for home I’ll  find ideas useful to others.  The current environmental crisis both has its roots in and is made more intractable by our American sense of mobility, of looking over the next horizon for a new frontier.  This makes it hard to learn about the home that greets us each evening.  Well, more on that in Homecomer.

The cold has come again and that will make the sleeping even better.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work

Emergence

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11  bar falls 30.22  2mph NE  windchill 7   Samhain

Last Quarter Moon of Long Nights

Here is a new term (new to me) that has become important in my thinking:  emergence.  It comes from a discipline that fascinates me, but about which I know very little:  complexity theory.  Emergence describes those characteristics of life forms, human history and human economics that arise from the fact of life itself.   Emergent realities like value, meaning and history, according to this line of thought, do not break the laws of physics, but cannot be predicted by application of those same laws.

Inability to predict the next action of a man or woman, the working of the markets or the next events in  human history creates a peculiar circumstance.  It means that though they break no natural laws these emergent realities do not conform to either.   Again, according to this line of thought, this lack of predictability has two sources:  agency and creativity.

Agency is the ability to act.  Combined with consciousness in human beings this leads to creativity.  Creativity and agency make for the rich, diverse reality that is human life.

I’m not going to go too far with this right now because I’m just beginning to absorb it. I want to understand how it relates to my work on a Ge-ology and read a critique or two before I get overly excited, but it seems like an important idea to me.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work

Falling Deeper Into Darkness

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12  bar steady 30.27  0mph  ENE  windchill 12   Samhain

Last Quarter of the Moon of Long Nights

As you can tell by the temperature, we have a heat wave in progress.  12 degrees!  Break out the shorts and t-shirts and sandals.  This is a good old-fashioned Minnesota winter so far and I’m liking it.

I spent this afternoon reading material for part III of Heresy Moves West.  This one will explore what I sense is an emerging new faith, one rooted in the soil of the Midwest and given space by our skies.  It is not unique to us, nor is our embrace of it unique.  What is unique is our location, a place from which this new faith can take wings and begin to test the air of this 3rd millennia after the West focused on Jerusalem.  With 2,000 years of Christianity and 500 or so of reason, we need a new way to view our situation in the universe.

Those of us who live among the wheat fields, corn fields and dairy farms of the Midwest have grown up with this faith attached to our Selves.  The very factors which make the bi-coastal crowd smirk as they fly over over our green land are the ones which give us a birthright understanding of ourSelves as part of, rather than apart from, the natural world.

As we fall deeper into darkness, heading toward the Winter Solstice now only three nights away, our time underground, Persephone-like, reaches it deepest point.  This is a time for meditation and contemplation.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Politics

Star Filled and Wonder Saturated

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-4  bar steady 30.28   0mph SW  windchill -4   Samhain

Waning Gibbous Moon of Long Nights

I have a run of almost 3 weeks with no outside obligations.  This is a time of the year, even when I worked for the Presbytery, that I would stay home, take up a research project or a book I’d wanted to really absorb.  This habit probably started during the Presbytery time because no congregational folk wanted to talk to judicatory people during the Christmas holidays and immediately afterward.  Which was fine with me.

Right now it’s quiet.  It has been dark since about 4:30 PM.  The long nights have begun to swell and take over the rhythm of the day.  This means more silence, more time to enjoy the darkness of mid-winter.  This is a time of year and a natural cycle that draws us all inward.  This inward pull pushes some of us to string up lights, go to multiple parties, perhaps drink to excess, spend money beyond our means.   We’ll wake up sometime in the new year, ought 9 in this case, with a hangover wondering how the season got so out of hand.

The season can be filled with holy nights, silent nights.  Starred filled and wonder saturated nights.  It matters how we come to the season.

Instead of driving in to the Sierra Club meeting tonight I chose to participate by phone, as did all but two of the other legislative committee members.  By the time I got done with my workout and shower, a lassitude crept over me, borne of the tensions and aches of the last couple of days.  If I had driven in, as it turned out, my trip would have taken twice the time of the meeting.  Not very efficient.

My original reason for driving in, to match peoples faces with names, would have been thwarted, too.

As it was, I was on the phone for 45 minutes, took notes, then hung up and went upstairs to read the Story of Edgar Sawtelle.  Without the long drive it felt like I’d cheated.

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Memories, Myth and Story

At 50, What Next?

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3  bar steep drop 30.16  0mph  NE  windchill 3  Samhain

Waning Gibbous Moon of Long Nights

My brother Mark asked me my thoughts on turning 50.  This April 11th he has his 50th.  By then it will be, as it always is, twelve years since I had that birthday.

Twelve years ago is a long time and when I first started to answer Carl Jung came up.  He should have, but not in the positive way I had in mind.  I began that piece by reflecting on Jung’s notion of life’s  two halves:  an external, career and family half followed by an interior, reflective and calmer half.  Hmmm.  But that was the upbeat spin.

How Jung came into my turning 50 is less philosophical.  In 1996 I shifted my credentials from the Presybterian church to the Unitarian-Universalist.  In 1997, my 50th year, I had to take an internship to qualify for recognition.  I did.  Unity Church Unitarian (no relation to the Unity movement) in St. Paul and First Unitarian in Minneapolis both offered me internships.

It felt good to be wanted in a professional capacity again.  I had given myself 5 years to make it as a writer (with no real idea what making it meant) and I failed.  No sales.  Not even any bites.  Instead of the romantic I’ll stick with it no matter what I decided to go back to the trade I had learned.  I felt a need to earn money and to have recognition as a skilled and valuable person.

This whole episode was a mistake and a big one.  I crowned it with accepting a position as minister of development at Unity, essentially a fund-raising position.  I hate fund-raising and everything associated with it.  But I said yes because I was asked.  Pretty desparate.

That was how Jung came in.  Early on I could see I’d made a mistake but I needed to understand why.  What did it mean?  My long time analyst John Desteian, a Jungian, and I worked on it.  In the end we decided I had regressed, rather than moved forward.  I had regressed by returning to safe territory.  John said that most regressions occur because we have to go back and pick up something we needed.  In this case I needed to be reminded how much I’d wanted out of the ministry six years before and why full time ministry was a bad fit for me.

It felt wonderful to leave after the fund-raising goal had been met, an increase of 10% over the prior year.  I did it, but I did not want to do it again.

I came home and save for one brief relapse when we needed money I learned my lesson.

What was the lesson?  That the world of work and achievement had come and gone in my life.  Now I needed to pursue life itself.  That did include writing, whether I sold anything or not.  I have not.  It meant I needed to face life as myself, not as a role or job holder.

So, Mark, turning 50 for me meant a need to go back and relearn a lesson I had not grasped completely the first time around.  I don’t know what turning 50 will mean for you.  Perhaps reflecting on the expat life?  Perhaps following some abandoned or long cherised dream?  Maybe you’ll tell the story of South East Asia as only someone of your particular experience can.  Who knows?  I can tell you this.  Pay attention to what happens around this time because it has deep meaning for the rest of your life.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, permaculture

Make Meadows, Not Lawns

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38  bar steep fall 29.49  2mph N  windchill 36   Samhain

Full Moon of Long Nights

Another TED video worth watching:  Where Have All the Bee’s Gone?  In it apiarist Dennis vanEnglesdorp gives a brief overview of the honeybee disappearances in the U.S.  We have lost about 1/3 of the total hives each year for at least the last two years.  Beekeepers have prevented this from reducing our total bee population by splitting hives and buying queens, but the price of doing this year after year will become prohibitive.

Just this year I saw some honeybees in our garden for the first time since we’ve lived here.  They surprised me.

At the end of the video he diagnoses the primary problem behind the bee disappearances as NDD:  Nature Deficit Disorder.  We have become, he says, too distanced from the natural world and no longer pay attention to how our lives influence the rest of the nature.  His solution?  Replace lawns with meadows.  Works for me.

This is an example of the followers of the old faith.  Each beekeeper, amateur or professional, is in the community of the saints, necessary in large, large numbers for this old faith to survive.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Myth and Story

An Old Faith Taking on New Raiment

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18  bar steep fall  1mph  SSW  windchill 18   Samhain

Full Moon of Long Nights

How do you stretch out the creative muscle, let the reins loose on the resources hidden somewhere beyond or under the rational wall?  When the Pegasus of new thought tries to rise from its tether inside the amygdala, the fear raiser of the brain, what can be done to smooth its way?  To calm the nakedness of the soul?

There is, I am sure of it, an old faith taking on new raiment.  It says nothing new; it proclaims nothing that is not obvious; it offers no new wisdom.  It cares not for written texts, for prayers or priests, for churches or temples.  It does not require protection under the first amendment or any amendment of any laws of humankind, for its law is writ in the language of the stars.

It has holy places.  Places we know by their Torii or their thick ropes.  Places we know by worn paths that lead us through forests, along rivers, up mountainsides, into the garden.  Places we know by the trembling sense of wonder they evoke in us.  A crashing waterfall.  An erupting volcano.  An opening tulip.  The birth of a howler monkey among the ruins of ancient Angkor.  Places we know by the care others have taken: paintings, poems, cairns and prayer ties.

These holy places were not decreed in some council or by a guru or selected by a committee.  No, they were decreed by the hand of Pangea, sculpted by the artisans wind and water. They were discovered, not made.

This old faith has so many followers, so many who take its truths with them into the fields, onto the lakes and oceans, alongside them in struggle, carried in wicker baskets into the flower and vegetable gardens.  So many followers.

There is no common book, save the verdant field.  There is no common book, save the flowing stream.  There is no common book, save the vasty deeps.  There is no common book, save the azure sky.  There is no common book, save the dark night sky filled with stars.  And these are more than enough.

If you are a member of this faith, you know it.  You need no congregation, you require no chant or hymn.  You need only a quiet moment beside a brook or a butterfly.

Faith and Spirituality

Happiness is …

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-1  bar falls 30.19  0mph  NW  windchill -1   Samhain

Full Moon of Long Nights     Day 8hr 46m

“Take anything and everything seriously except yourselves.” – Rudyard Kipling

As I get ready for two tours today, Kipling strikes a note I need to hear more often.  With all the news about happy people spreading the love out three degrees of separation I wondered about those of us who go through life somewhere in the muddle.  Yes, muddle.

Happiness comes to me only rarely, then for brief moments.  I’m not usually gloomy, but I’m not usually sunny either.  I come from a family with manic-depression, so a tendency toward the melancholy probably came with the helix.  Melancholy is an old friend, in fact, some of my best writing ideas and creative work comes when he pays a visit.

In fact, I distrust happy people to some extent.  It always seems to me that they willfully ignore a large part of what goes on the world.  Spoken, I know, like a guy who takes himself and his world too seriously.

I am one, I am many.  Whitman and I have our melancholy, but we also have our quiet joys, raucous moments, times of abandon.

Well, this is a bit of a downer, but I’m gonna leave it in anyhow.  How I felt this morning.