Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

The Wollemi Pine–Live From the Carboniferous

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33  bar steep rise 30.06 5mph N dewpoint 22 Spring

                Waning Gibbous Moon of Growing

The workshop I attended today had two co-sponsors, The Institute for Advanced Studies (UofM) and the Arboretum(UofM).  This was the culminating workshop in a two-year long effort by the Institute for Advanced Studies to explore time from many perspectives.  Today we examined time in three different, but related, botanical areas:  phenology, paleobotany and time from the perspective of trees. 

The phenological, by definition, is the chronological study of events in nature.  This strikes me as an odd definition since it seems to impose a human mental construct, linear sequencing, on what is cyclical.  The notion is a good one, though, since it involves paying close attention to changes in the natural world, day by day, and making a record of them.  Phenologists know when the ice goes out lakes, the first robin returns, the dates that various spring ephemerals like the bloodroot, snow trillium and scylla bloom. 

Over several years I’ve tried my hand at phenology.  It is something an amateur can do.  So far, I’ve not had the discipline to continue my observations day after day, year after year.  Perhaps as I get older and slow down a bit this will come to me.  I hope so.  The woman who was our teacher for phenology was a lively Cantonese woman named Shirley Mah Kooyman.  A Smith graduate in Botany she has a direct and engaging teaching style.  Shirley took us outside and showed us the spring ephemeral garden they have planted.  It gave me ideas.  Our field was cut short by blowing winds, snow and cold.  On April 26th.

Over  the long lunch break I wandered the bookstore and picked up books related to aspects of permaculture I want to pursue in more depth:  pond building, fruit and nut trees and landscape design.

In the afternoon Tim started us out with segments of trees so we could tree rings.  This lead into a discussion of the time and stories that a tree knows, sometimes revealed in its growth rings.  He showed an amazing graphic created by an arborist who actually dug up tree roots and followed them, painting them white as he went so he could measure accurately.  He discovered that almost all trees have relatively shallow, but very broad root systems.  I learned, as did Tim, that tree roots stop at the dripline and that what’s below the tree roughly parallels what’s above in size.  Nope.  We measure a double centurion outside the learning center.  You measure at breast height, compute the diameter with everybody’s favorite mathematical constant; in this case it was 52 inches, then multiplied by a factor for white oaks, 5.  This gives a rough estimate of 260 years for the trees age.  Cutting back a bit for optimal growing conditions, experts feel this oak is 225 years old.  That means it was an acorn in 1780!  Whoa.

The last session focused on the evolution of plants.  In some ways this was weakest session, yet in another it astonished me.  Randy Gage, the guy in charge of school groups for the arboretum, took a trip to Australia to investigate the Wollime Pine.  Here are some fast facts from the Wollemi Pine website:

Fast Facts
…………………………

Claim to fame One of the world’s oldest and rarest trees

This is a tree that, prior to its discovery in 1994 was known only in the fossil record.  It was a coelacanth or stromatolite like find.  Remarkable.  But I missed it.  Maybe you didn’t.

The time related stuff here was somewhat cliched with the 24 hour clock and an arm span as metaphors.  The Wollemi Pine story is the stuff of science fiction.

Taking this symposium at the same time I learned about a book, Reinventing the Sacred, which attempts to reinvent spirituality from within a scientific perspective, but one that discards scientistic thinking (reductionism, empiricism) has really set the wheels turning.  So many things clicking.  We’ll see where it all goes.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality

A Vocabulary for This Age

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69  bar steady 30.11 2mph SSE dewpoint 35 Spring

                Waning Gibbous Moon of Growing

On the way home from taking Kate to the airport I listened to an NPR interview with choreographer/dancer Patricia Brown.  Her company dances Friday at Northrup and she has some kind of an exhibition at the Walker.

Here’s the takeaway for me.  She is 72+.  A newspaper announced she was about to retire.  She said, no, I haven’t said that.  Instead, she said she was “…looking for a vocabulary for my body at this age.  When I find it, I will perform again.”  This is a great strategy for aging.  We do not look at our deficits, rather, we assess our capabilities and design a vocabulary that uses them, then we get on with our life.

Faith and Spirituality, Family

A Tradition Thousands of Years Old

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59  bar rises 29.84 1mph NE dewpoint 46 Spring

             Full Moon of Growing

Kate and I observed a tradition thousands of years old tonight.  We got out the Haggadh, put the horseradish, cilantro, haroset, boiled egg and lamb bone (we substituted a chicken leg.) on a Seder plate.  A small egg shaped cup held the salt water, the Elijah cup stood ready for his return.  We had matzoh and we hid the aphikomon for the dogs.  They were, as the passover ritual suggests, children unable to inquire.   We worked together within the limitations of our planning and availability of certain goods to produce a meal, to read the Seder ritual and retell the timeless story of enslavement and liberation, the Exodus.

This Haggadh, the language and shape of the Seder laid out in book form, is hopeless.  It is sexist in the extreme; sexist where no law of faith requires it.  Kate suggested I write one of my own and I just might.

It is a little strange for me, metaphysically speaking, to participate in this ritual with solemnity, which aspects of it requires.  Once I get in the flow of it though the ritual and the language and the songs blend together and become a hymn to the life of a people and their relationship with their highest and best sense of themselves.  It is a story which acknowledges human frailty as well as longing for the divine, bravery as well as fear.  It is their story, but also our story.  Bondage, liberation and the struggle for freedom belong not just to the Jews, but to everyone.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work

Matzo Located In Coon Rapids

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69!  bar steep fall 29.84 3mph ENE dewpoint 49 Spring

                     Full Moon of Growing

Boy.  With the temps in the high 60’s the full moon of growing has matured during the right weather. 

Good news.  There are Jews just across the city line into Coon Rapids.  Both Cub and Rainbow have many shelves with matzo meal, borscht, chicken bullion, matzo soup mix and potato pancake mix.  Bad news.  Manischewitz has back ordered passover approved matzo.  Bummer.  So, we will have to anoint the regular matzo as ok for passover.  It’s ok; I’m a minister, I can do that.  Not really, but what choice do we have?

The world as a whole is miraculous and in its parts, too.  I put more seeds into small plugs of earth, readying them for life under the bright lights until the weather is congenial for their presence in the big show outside.  Each seed I handled, most very tiny, a few bigger, say half the size of a small pencil eraser, had all that was necessary to produce a beet, a morning glory, a cucumber, basil, rosemary.  All these mighty engines need is a bit of help.  Water.  Light.  Some nutrients later on, but in the beginning they carry their own food source, stored away from a plant long ago gone to seed, perhaps compost now, but it lives on in these small parcels.

The imagery was impossible to not notice.  I took a pick-up (Adsons) and deposited the seeds into the crevice in the center of the small prepared plug of earth.  After I dropped in the seed, my role finished.  The rest is up to the seed and the things that nudge it into action.  Later, plants.  Food captured and processed, food made from light thanks to another miracle, photosynthesis.  Think of that:  food from light.  That’s what these living parcels can do.  Something we couldn’t do, ever.  No matter how learned and wise.  If not for photosynthesis, we’d starve to death in the midst of abundant energy.

Faith and Spirituality

This All Sounds a Bit Woo-Woo (OK, Maybe More Than a Bit)

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42  bar rises 29.99 2mph NNE dewpoint 41 Spring

            Full Moon of Growing

“People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.” – Thomas Szasz

I agree with Szasz (the anti-psychiatrist famous for his views about schizophrenia) that the self is not something one finds.  I agree with his critique of the notion of finding one’s self.  I disagree with his conclusion though, that the self is something one creates.  Over time I have developed a personal perspective on this issue, one related most closely to Carl Jung’s work, but a bit different from his, too.

Intuition tells me that the Self of each living thing is unique and much larger (at least in potential, perhaps in size) than the always incomplete self we realize at any one point during life.  The Self is the harmonious and dynamic interaction of all that an individual life can become.  I imagine it as an incorporeal (don’t ask me about the physics) reality, a sort of etheric entity that stands taller and looms larger than I do.  It may, and I suspect it does,  connect us to a metaphysical plane, perhaps a realm of archetypes, where our individual, unique moment in the great stream of looping time feeds from the  purest and best of its manifold possibilities.

This all sounds a bit woo-woo, I know.  I can only tell you that after many years of prayer, meditation and Jungian analysis this is the sense I have of who and what I am and could become.  This same process has led me to conclude that every grass plant, every daffodil, every oak tree, every yew also has a Self toward which it reaches, with more and less realization in a lifetime.  Dogs, lions, crawdads and centipedes, too.  This is why the Japanese indigenous religion of Shinto, an animist faith, and Taoism, a testament to the dynamic, connected and living nature of all there is appeal to me.  

The empirical, western, enlightenment man within me only lets these thoughts surface when I’m alone lest I be perceived either as a lunatic or a throwback to some neo-Platonic dead end of philosophical speculation.  And I may be. 

It is impossible, all the same, to deny what the heart knows to be true.  There is more to this, too.  I also believe in cyclic, not chronological time.  That is, I find the rhythms of the universe, the whole to which we are certainly connected by as intimate a link as the very atoms which constitute our bodies, to be those of repetition, seasonal and episodic.  What goes around comes around.  Whatever will be has been (to rephrase a canard).  This idea I find deeply reassuring since it suggests some reincarnation type possibility, not a one shot and extinct life.  I say this in spite of my almost deepest conviction, borne on an empirical and existentalist raft, that this one life is all we have.  In fact, though I live my life as if that were true, my heart, again, tells me otherwise.

In the spirit though of plan for the worst, hope for the best, I do believe the existentialist, one shot and extinct, approach gives living the most buzz, the most vitality and engenders, too, a deep sense of responsibility for each other.  It is, therefore, to me, an optimal way of being even if we get, as I suspect, second, third and even gazillionth chances to realize our true Selves.

OK.  That’s enough of that for the morning. I have to go buy potatoes, Matzoh and cake meal.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work

No Matzoh In Andover

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47  bar rises 29.95  3mph N dewpoint 40 Spring

                     Full Moon of Growing

No matzoh at Festival in Andover.  No lamb.  The butcher said, “We only carry it for holidays.  Can’t push it any other time.”  Not many Jews in Andover either, apparently.  This is a big one for Jews all over the world, but not big enough to create a market for lamb at the local supermarket.  No matzoh cake meal either.  All this  means a trip to Byerly’s tomorrow.  Plenty of Jews in and around Maple Grove.  It’s all about the market.  Plenty of Hindu’s in Maple Grove, too.

I don’t imagine there are many Parsi here either.  Oh, well.  It’s probably fair to say that I’m one of a handful of the Taoist inclined, too.  May be a few Chinese folks and me.

Just finished the Saturday workout.  This one’s a bugger and my muscles can tell they’ve had hard use.  It’s the only way to make’em grow and the only way to compensate for age related loss of muscle mass.  It’s important, but it doesn’t make it easy.

The world is a strange, big place.  While I did my resistance work, I listened to a program on the evolution of the planet.  The irregular catastrophic punctuations in her history gives me pause.  The Chixilub meteor, fissure eruptions, super volcanoes, snowball earth, a few ice ages here and there and pretty soon, as Evertt Dirksen used to say, you’re talking about real extinction events.  It may be that we have come on the scene in a period of Pax Terra; but, based on our history as a planet, I’d say it won’t last.

Faith and Spirituality

Tell Your Inner Pharaoh: Let My Whole Self Go!

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44  bar rises 29.89 2mph N dewpoint 40  Spring

                Full Moon of Growing

Have a good weekend!  This cheery greeting, usually delivered on Friday to departing co-workers or customers, has a bittersweet undertone.  It might mean, have a good week-end, because how could you have a good work week.  Week-ends in American culture, at least since the 50’s, have been a time of personal autonomy sandwiched in between the days spent workin’ for da man.  We might go up to the cabin or  hop on our John Deere and mow that suburban lawn.  It might be the time for a brew and a game.  Church on Sunday morning.  A picnic.  Play time with the kids.  Whatever.  The essence of weekend is whatever.  Whatever you choose to do.

It is this last that always captures me.  Each day, not just on weekends, we have choices about what to do.  We might perceive our week as so packed with duty, so loaded with responsibilities and obligations that there remains no room for choice, for the exercise of free will.  No escape.

It is not so, however, not ever.  As humans, we have not only the freedom, but the responsibility to scan our lives and decide whether the choices we make match up with our own deepest values.  If they don’t, something needs to give and it might be all those duties and obligations. 

Too hard, you say?  The downsides too great?  I can see how you might say that, but let me reverse those questions.  What is the price of continuing on your present course?  What downside do you face from chewing up your soul each day, then trying to patch it back together at night or, on the weekend?

We celebrate this weekend such a crisis moment for the Jews of Ramses II’s Egypt.  In those days the Jews, according to the Torah, had traded their rescue from starvation for the life of slaves.  They spent their days working in the fields, on construction gangs, making bricks.  It seemed, to any objective observer, that they had no freedom, no choice in the matter.  After all, they were a poor, subject people ruled by the mightiest land in all the known world.  They lived out back in the slave quarters, while the Egyptians lived in the big house.

What could they do? 

Moses, a child of the slaves, had grown up in the pharaoh’s court through circumstances which you know.  God spoke to him.  Tell pharaoh to let my people go.  This frightened Moses and frightened many of the Jews.  Freedom scares us.  Something bad might happen.  Yes, things are bad, but they could be worse.  Just imagine.

God was insistent.  Moses came back from Canaan and confronted Ramses.  He would not let the Jews go.  They were his slaves, why should he?  Let the Jews go.  Ten times Moses insisted, ten time Ramses said no.  After the tenth plague–one followed each of Ramses’ refusals–Ramses’ relented.  The death of the first born proved too much.  The angel of death had been thwarted in the slave quarters by lamb’s blood smeared on door frames, so death passed over the homes of the Jews.  Thus was born this celebration of liberation we know today as Passover.

There is more to the story.  The Jews leave Egypt and set out on the Exodus, one of the great emigration stories of world literature.  What happens along the way?  Many of the Jews don’t like the sudden freedom, the necessity to fend for themselves, the lack of certainty about where they will find next week’s and next month’s food.  Some want to go back to Egypt.  Even Aaron, the brother of Moses, helps the people melt down their gold to create a golden calf, an object toward which they could send their pleas.  There is a lot of backsliding, a desire to return to that old, familiar world where freedom didn’t exist, where choice was not a possibility. A world known. 

Every day we face the same questions the Jews faced in Egypt.  Every day we face the same questions Ramses faced.  Our frightened inner self, fearful of the consequences of autonomy kneels in front of the cultural Ramses we have each inherited as we grew up.  A brave, hopeful aspect of our self, perhaps the dreamer or the rebel or the advocate rises up every now and then against our inner Ramses, but all too often all he has to say is, no.  Think of the cost.  Think of the choices you will have to make on your own.  No, better to not quit your day job.  No, better to not take the risk with the significant people in your life.  No, let’s just leave things as they are.  At least we know what happens.

Some day though, on some great wakin’ up  mornin’, the dreamer within us decides that pharaoh must let his people go.  That no matter what the risks, the desert of an unknown future is better than continued subjugation.  Then, we step off the plantation, turn our back on the south and head north, toward the drinking gourd.

Is life easy then?  No.  Do we build our golden calves, false idols that try to subjugate us once again?  Of course we do. We are, after all, only human.  Yet now we have tasted freedom.  We know how to say no to pharaoh; and that lesson, once learned, cannot be unlearned.  It will always prod us forward, keep our legs moving toward the promised land.

So, over this weekend, this passover weekend, I hope you’ll take a moment in private and consider a confrontation with your inner pharaoh.  Send him ten plagues, hell, send him twenty, but don’t give up.  Tell him he has to let  your whole Self go.

Faith and Spirituality

Neither Noble nor Ignoble

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55  bar falls 29.40 2mph S  dewpoint 38 Spring

           Waxing Gibbous Moon of Growing

“A man may be so much of everything that his is nothing of anything.” – Samuel Johnson

A study of valedictorians I read a while back said that, as a group, they rarely distinguish themselves.  Many get their Ph.D’s, but do not gain prizes or renown.  Why is this, the article asked?  It answered that in order to become a valedictorian you have to spread yourself over several areas.  They just don’t have the intensity of focus on one subject, one area that leads to great breakthroughs.  Johnson’s quote reminds me of that article and of my life.

As a high school valedictorian, I did just what the article suggested.  I worked hard at everything and had no true favorite subject.  I liked Latin and chemistry and English and algebra.  I didn’t much like physics or analytical geometry, but I worked at them anyhow.  Since then, my life has followed the same pattern.  In college I had two majors, anthropology and philosophy, but I had enough credits for a minor in geography, too.  All the while the political movements of the day occupied a great deal of time, as did bridge.  The closest I’ve come to focus was going to seminary and that lead me into more political and organizational work.  The preaching and pastoral care aspects of ministry, the traditional focus for protestants didn’t interest me as much. 

After I moved away from the ministry, I started to write.  Writing let me do a lot of research in various areas that interested me, still does, but again, no focused intensity.  When I became a Unitarian-Universalist, I guess you could say I became a generalist in the field of faith traditions.  Even my current interest in art is at an encyclopedic museum, although I have carved out a niche for myself in Asian art.  Asian art, however, is a vast field in itself.  Chinese art alone is a lifetime’s study and Japanese art is not far behind.  India, too.

When I’m down, I see myself as nothing of anything.  When I feel good, I’m a polymath.  In neither case am I Nobel prize material.  Not even ignoble prize material. 

It has taken many years to accept this almost random curiousity as just who I am.  It feels genetic, or, if not, then it became grafted into my sense of self so early that I can’t find the origin. 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

The Tragic Sense of Life

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51  bar falls 29.82 4mph SSE dewpoint 28 Spring

               Waxing Gibbous Moon of  Growing

“To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.” – Miguel de Unamuno

Unamuno has slipped from awareness, it seems, but this Spanish existentialist, poet and author speaks truth even when it is uneasy and unpleasant.  Here’s some brief information about him:

Spanish philosopher. In Del sentimento trágico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos {at Amazon.com} (The Tragic Sense of Life) (1913) {at Amazon.com}, Unamuno described human existence as torn between the irrational hope for immortality and the rational expectation of death. Since faith can never outweigh reason, Unamuno supposed, the best we can achieve is a life of authentic struggle with the human predicament.

Recommended Reading: Miguel De Unamuno, Three Exemplary Novels, tr. by Angel Flores (Grove, 1987) {at Amazon.com}; Victor Ouimette, Reason Aflame: Unamuno and the Heroic Will (Yale, 1986) {at Amazon.com}; and Gemma Roberts, Unamuno: afinidades y coincidencias kierkegaardianas (Colorado, 1986) {at Amazon.com}.

The house party for the Power 2 Change campaign had three attendees:  Frank Broderick, Bill Sutherland, and Ann, a former school teacher.  Jessica, a Sierra Club worker, attended to explain the campaign.  She fell into a trap the young activist often does, asking too little of her audience.  She kept referring to the things that were easy:  talk to a friend, sign the petition, read the literature, volunteer at the Sierra Club for a phone bank.  George Bush made the same disastrous mistake after 9/11.  He reassured us and asked to go shopping.  That’ll show’em.

People want to sacrifice, to do the difficult thing.  Why?  Because when we sacrifice, or do something that stretches us, we become engaged.  We know in our gut; this is important.  If it’s not important or significant, don’t bother me with it.  If it is important, figure out a way I can take action.  Help me find others, then assist us in getting our handles on the levers of power.  That’s the way change happens. 

As often happens to me, as I write this, especially with Unamuno dangling just above these words, the pointed finger takes on an impossible curve and aims straight at my chest.  I know in my gut that climate change and the energy issues are important, perhaps the important issues of my generation and certainly ones in which we are culpable and therefore responsible.  So, in addition to the work I need to do on other writing projects and at the MIA, I need to pick up this challenge, too, as I agreed to do last September in Iowa.  I’ve done too little and I can do more. 

Kate’s snacks and party layout, on the other hand, were delicious and beautiful.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, General

Masters of the Universe

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42  bar falls 30.14 6mph NNE dewpoint 31 Spring

               Waxing Crescent Moon of Growing

Some of this, some of that.  Reorganized a few books in the study.  Called the folks at NOW fitness to get a repair for the treadmill.  Surprise! It has a lifetime warranty.  Can you beat that?  I bought it 12 years ago and have used it 5-6 times a week since then.  Finished Spiderman III.  It got better at the end, but it was too adolsecent for my tastes in the middle, felt long.  Read about Cristina Sanchez, a late 1990’s matadora.  Looked her up on the Web.  She quit because of the sexism.  Can you imagine sexism in a bull-fighting culture?

Talked to Kate.  Talked to Vanguard folks who won’t accept my lawyers letter with a medallion signature.  They need yet more paper.  Geez.  Sorted through several tour related snafus.  A nap.  Now a workout.

Kate comes home tonight.  She went to the Asia Museum in San Francisco and on the way back (today) she encountered the heavily guarded Olympic torch and had to walk a whole block square to get back to her hotel.

Oh, I also took the treadmill controls apart myself and cleaned them, looked for jammed parts.  The rest of the assembly is electronics and didn’t look accessible to my limited knowledge.  That’s when I called the shop.

Tom Crane has the Woolly meeting in May.  He has asked us to think about mastery.  In particular he wondered if there was any special meaning behind references to Jesus as master.  I looked that up today and found, to my surprise, that each time you read master in the new testament, the word translated is the Greek word for teacher.  There’s a reason for this, but the dogs want to go out now.  Maybe I’ll get back to it later.