Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Travel

So, This Guy Trips and Falls in the Ocean

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7:12PM  Night.  Had the weird experience of seeing Oscar winners announced at 4:30PM. 

Tripped and fell in the ocean.  Got wet. Of course.  Mumbled.  Then, ah, what would one expect when in the ocean.

Have a burgeoning collection of coral, have found few shells here.  

This morning on the way to Hanalei I had just passed the taro field after crossing the one-lane bridge and there in a field was a painted pony with an egret sitting happily on his back.  A few miles further on I noticed a field with horses had several egrets.  Is there something about their relationship? 

It looked like a fable.

The tao continues to make inroads into my thought process.  It’s almost Platonic, in that this feels like stuff I have always known.  My intuitive processes have led me here, in spite of my rational faculties which spent so many years concentrated on Christianity because I wanted to read religion in my own cultural idiom.  It didn’t occur to me that my own personal faith language may speak in a different tongue than the Judaeo-Christian.

Here are a few things.  All things are one.  This means, in simplest terms, that things that may seem separate, light and dark, good and bad, men and women actually compose a whole when we realize each is necessary for the other to exist.  Without light, no dark.  Without women, no men.  Without bad, no good.  Those of us married to the Western logical paradigm which has the law of excluded middle, something is either this OR that, this concept may seem troubling, even scandalous.   As Alan Watts points out in Watercourse Way, our dichotomized thinking has lead to idealism which imagines that good must made bigger and bigger until there is no bad left in the world.

As one whose path has followed that line of thought, it becomes clearer and clearer to me why Christianity surprised me with its intellectually sophisticated approach to reality.  Christianity linked up so well with my leftist politics because leftist politics are based on the linear view of time, a time that runs out and therefore seems to demand an ending; an ending which may be good or bad.  Yikes!  Better work for the good one. 

All over Kauai there are churches with signs: Jesus Is Coming Soon.  If that’s your paradigm, that the big guy is on his way back and watch out, then you have to work on yourself and on your society to make sure that good triumphs over evil.  This is not true only of conservative Christians; it is true of liberals, too.  This thinking made me sick.

How?  I began to see the world in black and white terms, with them over there and us over here.  Taoist thought helps me reintegrate myself, to find some of them here and some of us over there, until, gee, we all look like part of the same world.

My first intuition of this came in high school when I wrote a bad poem, The Test.  In it I questioned the nature of a god who only gives a person 7o years plus or minus to determine how eternity will be spent.  The math didn’t work for me.  Not long after that I knew that if I could describe one flower I can describe the whole universe.  Today I discovered that Lao-Tze said, “If I sit in the house, I have the whole universe available to me.”  Hints of this way of seeing the world.  But I couldn’t put it together.

So, I backed into it all by leaving Christianity, then becoming more and more Celtic.  When I found Unitarian-Universalism, I found Emerson.  His essay Nature demands that we find our own relationship with the gods today, rather than rely on the experience our ancestors.  Emerson and the Celtic embrace of cyclical time lead me further and further away from a progressive view of history, until it began to recede as the dominant view in my thinking.

When I began to start art history, Chinese and Japanese art captivated me.  In studying them, I began to search in the various schools of thought that inspired the aesthetics of these two cultures.  The art that grabbed me had Taoist influences.  Song dynasty landscapes.  Chan Buddhism teaware.  Zen Buddhist prints. Chan Buddhism comes from Buddhism’s collision with Taoism in China. 

As I do, I began to plow backwards, into Confucius and then more seriously into Taoism.  What had long attracted me finally began to occupy more and more of my thinking and, even more important, my heart.  Now I’m diving deep and it just may be I won’t come up at all this time.  At least not as the me I’ve come to know.

Oh, well, if you read this far, it’s your own fault. I’m on a tear here, I know.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Travel

Liminal Zones

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Sunny.  Blue.  Temp perfect.  Relaxed.

Cyber gremlins here, as on Maui.  Not only is this connection expensive, it’s episodic and occasionally slow.  OK.  Done wit dat.

Last night the moon was nearly full and Orion stood high in the sky with her.  The moon was bright, but in the way only the moon can be, nacreous and gentle, not harsh and brilliant like the other great light in the sky.

A large chunk of black lava provided a seat as the ocean pounded in at high tide, wave after wave after wave.  This ceaseless, persistent character of the ocean erodes the land, our habitat to make room for more salt water.  A graphic of the sea mounts and islands in the Hawai’an chain, all the way out to Kure, some 1600 miles from Hawai’i shows them growing smaller and smaller until, after Nihau, most of the former islands are now sea mounts with nothing above the surface.

Liminal zones have always fascinated me and the shore, where ocean and land meet is no exception.  Being a light skinned Northern European the daytime beach holds no interest for me, but the night time beach is ideal.  There I can meditate on the convergence of these two great elements, water and earth, and watch a third, the sky, at the same time.  At night there are few to no people and little heat.  A moment made for me.

This morning we went to Koloa and took Kate to the doctor. She does not like to go to the doctor, go figure.  Anyhow the local guy agreed with her that she has a sinus infection, faxed a prescription to Long’s Pharmacy and off we went to Lihue for the drugs.  We got them and drove back to the Hyatt where I dropped Kate off for her lectures.

Now I’m just kicked back, after getting the server to recognize me again.  Later.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Travel

Liminal Zones

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Sunny.  Blue.  Temp perfect.  Relaxed.

Cyber gremlins here, as on Maui.  Not only is this connection expensive, it’s episodic and occasionally slow.  OK.  Done wit dat.

Last night the moon was nearly full and Orion stood high in the sky with her.  The moon was bright, but in the way only the moon can be, nacreous and gentle, not harsh and brilliant like the other great light in the sky.

A large chunk of black lava provided a seat as the ocean pounded in at high tide, wave after wave after wave.  This ceaseless, persistent character of the ocean erodes the land, our habitat to make room for more salt water.  A graphic of the sea mounts and islands in the Hawai’an chain, all the way out to Kure, some 1600 miles from Hawai’i shows them growing smaller and smaller until, after Nihau, most of the former islands are now sea mounts with nothing above the surface.

Liminal zones have always fascinated me and the shore, where ocean and land meet is no exception.  Being a light skinned Northern European the daytime beach holds no interest for me, but the night time beach is ideal.  There I can meditate on the convergence of these two great elements, water and earth, and watch a third, the sky, at the same time.  At night there are few to no people and little heat.  A moment made for me.

This morning we went to Koloa and took Kate to the doctor. She does not like to go to the doctor, go figure.  Anyhow the local guy agreed with her that she has a sinus infection, faxed a prescription to Long’s Pharmacy and off we went to Lihue for the drugs.  We got them and drove back to the Hyatt where I dropped Kate off for her lectures.

Now I’m just kicked back, after getting the server to recognize me again.  Later.

Faith and Spirituality, Travel

Not Just Another Day, but My Birthday in Paradise

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Highway 61    valentine’s day on Maui

Spaceship earth has come again, for the 61st time, to the spot on its journey that marks the day of my birth.  This time, as at least for two others, I find myself not in the heart of North America, but, rather on the western Pacific shore of Maui.  It is a good place to celebrate a birthday. As Tom Crane pointed out in a recent comment, the ocean is the mother of us all. 

On this day she pounds the northern shores of the Islands with grim fury borne of winter storms in the Alaska/far North Pacific.  The Maui News carries warnings of high surf, dangerous conditions, news to warm the heart of every surfer  here for just these events.

The Islands give me a primal sense of being at home.  My body relaxes and this time my mind has gone along.  The willingness of my Self to sink into the warmth, the moistness, the cheerful sunniness found here give me a feel for what the womb might have been like, a place of floating in security, knowing love as physical, all-embracing.  No better present.

Faith and Spirituality, Travel

Leap Into The Next World

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Sun. Ocean. Blue. Breezes. Palm trees.  Sand.  Molokai in the distance.

Aerobics this am, 7:00AM.  Walked from here at the Westin along Maui’s west shore.  At the end of the walkway headed north is the Maui Sheraton.  They have provided a historical marker, set in bronze and attached to a piece of black lava.  It explains that the lava napali (cliff) just ahead was, in the belief of the Hawai’ian people one of the places where souls jump off for the afterlife. 

The sign reminds me of the observation that developers name their work after what they removed to create it:  Fox Run, Oak Grove Estates.  Those are shameful, but when a hotel sits on land sacred even by the business owners admission, then we have moved into another category of insult.  Call it blasphemy.  Idolatry.  Worship of a false god. Call it what you will, but imagine the feeling.

It made me consider all those Catholic churches built over Celtic holywells and all the Celtic holy days sequestered by church liturgists, then absorbed into an alien creed.  The violence done to the sacred reality of another is, often, not obvious at a historical remove, but for those of us whose ancestors dressed the wells or leapt off the cliff to paradise, we remember.

At the sacred cliff I turned around and headed out on the beach.  Boy, did my heart rate climb while I hiked on wet sand. (I take along my cardio rate gear when I travel.)  The ocean has its way and I forgot that, walking down below the beaches crest.  I thought I could move fast enough to avoid the incoming surf.  Nope.  Sand laden shoes and socks now drying on the lanai.

Faith and Spirituality, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Fallen Oak Leaves in the Snow

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26  71%  24%  1mph EES bar30.02 falls windchill25  Imbolc

          Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

The Superbowl program started at 1pm.  1pm.  Kickoff isn’t until 5:17pm.  Geez.

Spent late morning putting together my workshop/presentation for the Woolly Retreat.  I plan to read sections from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, talk about it a bit as a fable for our time and a bit about what I call the ur-faith.  The way to name it still is not clear to me.  Maybe that will come as the workshop proceeds.  Sometimes presenting things to others helps flesh them out, identify new angles or flaws in the conception.   The sacrament I posted a few days ago will follow the reading and then we’ll talk. 

I may use a way to get inside material I learned in seminary.  In this method the audience gets an invitation to take on one of the roles in the reading, to hear the material being read from that person’s perspective.  In SGGK characters include Arthur, Gawain, Guinevere, the Green Knight, the two women in Hautdesert’s castle, and the servant who leads Gawain to the Green Chapel.  Sometimes this cracks open poetry or scripture in a way nothing else can.

Fallen oak leaves have begun to show through the snow.   The boulders in our boulder walls now peak out from caps of white.  This is an unlovely aspect of snow.  Snow has its most beautiful moments as and just after it falls.  If it remains cold, as it often does after a big snow, the pristine character of the snow can last for days.  Sometimes it does glint and sparkle in the sun.  Hope we get a big whack just before I leave for Dwelling in the Woods.

Faith and Spirituality

A Taoist Druid with a Spading Fork in Hand

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25  86%  28%  ompn SSE bar29.95 rises  windchill25  Imbolc

                Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

The struggle I talked about yesterday is a symptom of a shift in attention in my inner life.  When I pursued meditative and contemplative practices related to Christianity, the experience enriched and deepened me.  When I moved away from Christianity, the only comparable practice left in my life involved Jungian analysis and the Ira Progroff journals.  Those took me further and, I believe, have calmed my mind’s chatter and prepared the soil for a new way, but in themselves they are not a way.

Now I can feel a shift in the inner cathedral, as Progroff called it.  The shift, under way for sometime in various manifestations, involves attunement, even atonement (at-one-ment).  Here are the disparate pieces that float in my inner life: my move away from metaphors of transcendence to ones of deepening, the  Great Wheel, the Celtic Faery Faith, Jungian thought, gardening, keener appreciation of the natural world, climate change, Taoism, Asian art and culture and transcendentalism.  Each one of these has a particular and peculiar role in deepening my inner life.  My hope is that the stirrings I feel mean that this complex has begun to move toward integration.

In a sense I believe all this began, or began to begin, when, in a session with a spiritual director, after discussing my then new admiration for Celtic spirituality, he said, “Well, maybe you are becoming a Druid.”  Maybe so.  Or, more likely, something akin to a Druid, but one with a Taoist bent perhaps.  A taoist Druid with a spading fork. 

We’ll see.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home

A Sacrament From Mother Earth

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35  91%  23%  2mph ESE bar29.06 steady windchill34  Winter

              Last Quarter of the Winter Moon

Something I’ve thought about for a while.

                                                   A Sacrament

water from our well, bread from local grain and cheese from Minnesota, candles

Light candle(s).

Say to all:  See this light, not as symbol, but as energy brought to us by fire from the sky and fire from deep beneath the earth.  By the light of this fire we see this water, this bread, this cheese.

On the table or altar have the pitcher, a cup, a plate with bread not broken and cheese not broken

Water in an earthenware pitcher. Pour into a single cup.

To each person as they take the cup:  take this and drink it, not as symbol, but as substance, the necessary liquid of all life as blood is the necessary liquid in our body.

Break the bread and hand pieces to each person

Say to all:  Eat this bread, not as symbol, but as substance, the marriage of earth and sun which gives birth to grain.

Break the cheese and hand pieces to each person

Eat this cheese as a gift from one mammal to another, food which sustains us.

 Say to all:  This water, this bread, this cheese transforms itself even now into your body, one link in the sacred chain stretching back to the one-celled organism, our common ancestor, and forward to our descendants, who may be as different from us as we are from that one cell.  This is a miracle.

Go now in peace. 

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Our Land and Home

A Sixty Degree Temperature Swing

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24  87%  21%  0mph  SSW  bar29.96  steady  Winter

           Waning Gibbous Winter Moon

As the winter moon wanes, a warm up heads our way.  Tomorrow the temperature will hit 40.  That’s a sixty degree swing within the week.  Not unusual for Minnesota, but impressive anyhow.  I’ve read that we have the most significant temperature and weather type fluctuations of anywhere on earth, though Siberia is similar.  That’s Siberia.  As in the place to which you were exiled as to the lonliest and most inclement place on earth from Moscow.  One of the most inclement places on earth.  So….

On this point Paul Douglas, local weather sage, whose long term eye is better than his short term one, has a website up that is worth a visit, www.climatespot.com. I’ve added it to the blogroll, too.

The sun shines today and small dimples have begun to show up at the base of trees, shrubs and the winter remnants of last year’s flower garden.  As the weather warms, the snow sinks away first at the point where something that can warm up meets the ground.  I hope that this warm up will bring a fresh snowfall, one that will fill in the dimples and freshen up the sagging snow.  It looks, and feels, like early March, deceptive though.  In March I can look out the window, notice the same changes and get the feeling, as I did momentarily this morning, plants have begun to stir underneath, that buds will open on trees and maybe a few early daffodils and the bloodroot will break the ground.  In March that is a fond hope, one with the chance of reality in a month or so, two at most.  In late January, not true.  February can have cold and snow like January.  March often has big snow, but the snow doesn’t last.  That feeling today only leads to dis-ease.  It is not a hope that can sustain itself in the near term future.

I continue my study of Taoism, look for some new additions to the Taoism pages. 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel

A Night of Moon Shadows

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-11 61% 16% 0mph  WSW  bar30.34 windchill-11  Winter

                 Full Winter Moon

It is, again, a night of moon shadows, crisp in outline.  In its reflection of the sun’s light moon as mirror gives us a cool, silvered glow for the dark time.  Stripped of its life giving powers, this light instead comes to us as a pure light, with no other purpose than to illuminate.  It is a deep mystery, the moon.  Its light casts fairy dust on trees and shrubs, rocks and snow drifts, otherwise common in appearance during the day, but in the moonlight, marvelous wonderful.  It also pulls us, drags us a bit on our cosmic journey, sloshes our waters.  The moon’s magic spell cast over millennia of human imagination remains the same, strong.

A couple of days ago I signed up for what is in essence a correspondence course in Taoism.  I have had my second lesson from Teacher Jiahan and he has already clarified some things and created questions about others.  This is a five course package so at the end I should have a decent introduction.  Taoism is an ancient trail, by definition.  The Tao is the Way, but the Way that can be known is not the Way.  Teacher Jiahan says this well-known first line of the Tao Te Ching actually means that the Way is not fixed or rigid, since a central tenet of Taoism is the ever changing nature, of, well, nature.  It is the nature of nature to change. 

The smells of jacaranda, plumeria, gardenia and suntan lotion come to me know.  The smell of moist earth and ozone, leis thrown over newcomers, smiles.  All this plus the memories of heiaus, volcanoes, whales, surfers, fish, meals beside the Pacific, quiet time away from the office.  Not far away now.