Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story, permaculture, Weather +Climate

A Time for Thought and Contemplation

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20  bar rises 29.94  3mph  NNE  windchill 13   Samhain

Waxing Gibbous Moon of Long Nights

Snow falling again.  3-4 inches or so by morning the weather folks say.  Winter has come in earnest.

Each year over the last three or four Kate and I have moved further and further from the mainstream Christmas culture. We have little in the way of decoration.  We give small gifts if any to each other.  The kids and kin still get holiday related presents but our home is an oasis.

This pleases me for the most part since my focus at this time of year is on the Winter Solstice and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  I say for the most part because there is still a sentimental side that likes the songs and the lights and the presents under the tree.  Mostly though I find this time of year most conducive to introspection, meditation and creation.

The areas in which we will plant new shrubs, a shade garden and all the bulbs planted this fall are now under mulch, the first two under black plastic and mulch.  Finally done.  Feels good.

Finished the Host.  It’s a strange, thin book with many pages.  I liked it, but the veiled theology and the conceit wore thin as I got further into it.  A lightweight read.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Politics, Weather +Climate

A Magical Effect

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26  bar steep fall 29.56  0mph NE  windchill 26   Samhain

First Quarter Moon of Long Nights       Day  8hr 53m

At last snow has begun to fall.  Already we must have gotten an inch or so and it may well snow through the night.  I have the patio light on so I can watch it fall.  The reindeer, lit with white l.e.d. lights, turns its head back and forth, its wire frame body now sketched in fluffy snow.  The lit holly and berries on the patio table also have snow cover, the lights blinking up through small mounds of white.  We only have lights in the back and few at that.   They do a touch of whimsy to the long winter nights.

A gentle snow has a magical effect on the heart as well as the landscape.  It is one of mother nature’s outright expressions of joy.

Tomorrow I have agreed to go to a workshop on dismantling racism as I wrote earlier.   When I was in seminary, I participated in anti-racism training seminars run by James and Mary Tillman.  I even traveled to Atlanta and went a weekend long seminar with students from Morehouse University, one of the south’s premier black colleges.  With Wilson Yates, a professor of sociology at United Theological Seminary, we created an anti-racism training kit complete with videos for rural congregations.  At one point I worked with a professional program evaluation company, Rainbow, and evaluated the work of the James and Mary Tillman programs in various institutions.

Institutional racism and the unearned advantage of being white and male have been part of my political analysis ever since.  That first round of work was now over thirty years in the past.  It is a testimony to the intransigence and institutional nature of racism that now another generation has taken up the fight.

Part of me does not look forward to a long day on a difficult and unpleasant subject while another part of me is eager to get back to practical, political work on the issue.  We’ll see how it goes.

Kate’s neck bothers her today.  She has improved a lot in the last three weeks, but she has quite a ways to go before she can go back to her full time work schedule.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends

Cyber Apocalypse Averted

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Oh, boy.  Thought I had a cyber apocalypse here.  Opened up AncienTrails and there were no blog entries.  Yikes!

A quick e-mail to my cybermage, Bill Schmidt, apparently frightened the devil in the bytes to flee.  When he turned on AncientTrails, everything was there.  After his e-mail telling me the same, I looked again and there it was.  Whew.

Annual physical today, oh, boy.  Also, prepping for a Renaissance/Reformation European painting tour.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Holidays, permaculture

A Holimonth Filled With Holy Days

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Kate and I will head over to Beisswingers in a few minutes.  The lawn tractor has had a checkup, gotten set up for winter storage and had its blades sharpened.  It will go in the machine shed, the one back on the wood’s edge.

After that, we will start laying the black plastic.  I cleared the area of standing weeds, trees and brush over the last three weeks.  I want to get the plastic down before it snows.

Though by my reckoning we’ve been in Holiseason since Samhain, the pace does pick-up between Thanksgiving and New Years.  A real holimonth filled with Holy Days.  The sacred puts itself before us in so many ways over the next few weeks.

The article I posted yesterday from the magazine Orion points to a key locus of the sacred:  home.  At some point over the weekend I’m going to post some thoughts about home and ge-ology.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work, permaculture

The Most Radical Thing You Can Do

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From the Faraway Nearby
The Most Radical Thing You Can Do
Staying home as a necessity and a right
by Rebecca Solnit
Published in the November/December 2008 issue of Orion magazine

LONG AGO the poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder said, “The most radical thing you can do is stay home,” a phrase that has itself stayed with me for the many years since I first heard it. Some or all of its meaning was present then, in the bioregional 1970s, when going back to the land and consuming less was how the task was framed. The task has only become more urgent as climate change in particular underscores that we need to consume a lot less. It’s curious, in the chaos of conversations about what we ought to do to save the world, how seldom sheer modesty comes up—living smaller, staying closer, having less—especially for us in the ranks of the privileged. Not just having a fuel-efficient car, but maybe leaving it parked and taking the bus, or living a lot closer to work in the first place, or not having a car at all. A third of carbon-dioxide emissions nationwide are from the restless movements of goods and people.

We are going to have to stay home a lot more in the future. Continue reading The Most Radical Thing You Can Do →

Faith and Spirituality

And Again, Thank You

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“If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.” – Meister Eckhart

Here is a Zen koan on thankfulness:

The Giver Should Be Thankful

While Seisetsu was the master of Engaku in Kamakura he required larger quarters, since those in which he was teaching were overcrowded. Umezu Seibei, a merchant of Edo, decided to donate five hundred pieces of gold called ryo toward the construction of a more commodious school. This money he brought to the teacher.

Seisetsu said: “All right. I will take it.”

Umezu gave Seisetsu the sack of gold, but he was dissatisfied with the attitude of the teacher. One might live a whole year on three ryo, and the merchant had not even been thanked for five hundred.

“In that sack are five hundred ryo,” hinted Umezu.

“You told me that before,” replied Seisetsu.

“Even if I am a wealthy merchant, five hundred ryo is a lot of money,” said Umezu.

“Do you want me to thank you for it?” asked Seisetsu.

“You ought to,” replied Uzemu.

Why should I?” inquired Seisetsu. “The giver should be thankful.”

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Holidays

The Ancient Trail of Gratitude

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quick note:  Boy, the pace of life accelerated with the coming of autumn.  This last week it felt like I’d gone back to full-time employment.  I’m glad the week-end is here.

Mine is a small life, no encyclopedia entries or feistschrifts, no monuments.  Ordinary.  I’ve been lucky so far.  The major stumbles I made got turned around by mid-life.  Kate came along and made the journey forward companionable.  There are few friends, but good ones.  The things I do, I love.  Dig.  Plant.  Harvest.  Write.  Preach.  Tour.  Spend time with the kids and their kids.  Read.

Thanksgiving is not a one-day holiday, but, rather, a life way, the ancient trail of gratitude.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, permaculture

Senescence

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60  bar rises 30.07  2mph N  dew-point 59  sunrise 7:06  set 7:00  Autumn

Waning Crescent of the Harvest Moon  rise 5:12  set 6:05

Today and tomorrow will be full gardening days.  There are bulbs to plant: daffodils, hyacinths, snow drops, many tulips and garlic.  Sprinkler heads need coaxing.  Mulch sits over at the Anoka County Landfill.  Some of it has to come here in the trailer.

orchard-installation-day-3decay.jpg

While documenting the orchard installation, I also took some shots of the vegetable garden in late September.  This photograph has our heirloom Cherokee Purple tomatoes in their senescence.  The asiatic lilies with the tall tan stems of wilted leaves look much the same in terms of their life cycle, but in fact are different.

As annuals, the Cherokee Purples put all their effort into fruit, then the plant dies.  As a result, we have had a bumper crop of tomatoes, all raised from four seeds planted in April of this year under the lights of the hydroponic system.  Continue reading Senescence →

Faith and Spirituality, permaculture

Oh, Man.

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Today I have had many opportunities to learn about melding with the movement of the universe.  I missed the first lesson when the dumptruck driver put the load of compost in the middle of the truck gate.  I could have accepted it and began to work around it, but it made me mad.

When the site prep guy broke the irrigation main, I knew I had failed to figure the irrigation stuff out before hand, so I accepted my responsibility and felt calm.

Seemed like I had it down.  Then, Kate called at 10:10 PM tonight.  “I blew a tire on the trailer.”  Oh.  Well, another opportunity to flow with the movement of the universe.  After a call to a specialty tire service–not cheap–, the guy came, an hour + after I initiated contact.  “Hmmm.  The wheels no good.”  This at 11:45 PM.  Swell.

What could I do?  You can’t get a wheel at 11:45 pm.  So, I called the Sheriff’s office.  They’re closed.  I had to call 911.  The Sheriff’s message told me to call them.  I reported the trailer as not going to get fixed until the morning.  Kicked it off the trailer hitch and drove home.

Where I am now.  Hungry.  Gonna have something to eat, then go to bed.