Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The Move

Out of place. Then, not.

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Fall                                                                                       Falling Leaves Moon

soil test
soil test

A primary text in my rethinking, reimagining my faith is Becoming Native to This Place by Wes Jackson of the Land Institute. It’s not the content of the book-though it has useful material about new ways of agriculture-but the gerund phrase it has as its title.

Becoming native. What an idea. The very notion of native is that you can’t be native unless you’re born to it. So what can this mean, becoming native? In my understanding it’s about a process, a careful listening and seeing. Casey Reams, a soil scientist, was notable for saying, “See what you’re looking at.” So often we don’t.

We will never be native to a place where we were not born, but we might enter a state of grace with the land, a “becoming native” state, an ongoing increased intimacy and sense of co-creation. When Kate and I landed here in Andover 20 years ago, I was far from what I understood then as my native turf, the streets and inner city neighborhoods of Minneapolis and St. Paul. But, as I wrote here a few days ago, I’ve actually spent most of my life in small and medium sized towns of the midwest, 47 of 67 years. So, I became native, or entered into a state of becoming native to the city.

Becoming native is not achievable from the couch or from books or from yearning. It 07 10 10_ahabegins when, as the New Testament says of Jesus’ disciples, you shake the dust off your sandals and finally leave the other place behind. Whatever it is. Becoming native begins when you commit, often unconsciously, to the new place.

After 19 years in Indiana, where I was raised; I lived in Wisconsin for a year, Appleton, and never felt like I landed. By the time 20 years of residency in Minneapolis/St. Paul came and went, its streets were my streets, its future my future. Becoming native happened gradually and unconsciously.

Here in Andover, where I initially felt out of place (a cliche I use deliberately here), becoming native followed a somewhat more conscious path. We decided to put landscaping work into the mortgage and added terrain features such as boulder walls, a tiered perennial garden and several plantings of trees and perennial flowers and shrubs. Initially, the gardening work was bulbs and annuals, almost exclusively in the tiered bulbs above our brick patio.

There were though, several black locust trees in a grove about 40 feet off our back deck. That area, sort of a backyard, had weeds and these trees. Black locust is a dense wood and one often used for fence posts in the 19th and early 20th century. They also have thick, wicked thorns. It was the work of a couple of years, with chain-saw and step-son, before those trees were gone and the stumps had been ground away.

After the bulbs and the annuals, the felling of the black locust grove, attended by sweat and days of heavy labor, including sessions with a rented industrial quality wood-chipper, began to reel me into this place. The soil and manual labor, outdoors work, gave me an intimacy with the grounds I’d never had anyplace else.

Add in the dogs of those years, the planting of this garden and that, the eventual creation of the raised beds, the orchard, the fire-pit and we began to become one with the land here. The bees provided a collegial work force from the insect world.

The house hosted birthday parties, holiday meals, meetings with the Woolly Mammoths, the Sierra Club and parties for Paul Wellstone’s first campaign. Over time this land became home.

Then, becoming native to this place could truly begin. I would mark the moment of crossing the threshold late one fall night, perhaps in November when I heard a scratching outside the study window. Turning off the light in the room I moved closer to the window and looked out at a bird feeder then set up nearby. There, scratching among the fallen seeds was an adult opossum. This was the first opossum I had ever seen live outside of a zoo. He came back several nights, then disappeared, perhaps eaten, perhaps gone into hibernation.

In thinking about the possibility of hibernation I began to see this property in a new way. According to the Minnesota Extension Service and the DNR, there were likely thousands of animals: chipmunks, voles, opossums among them hibernating here in our woods. An image, a vision really, of our land with many, many lives lying below ground or in tree hollows came to me.

It was that vision that awoke me to the fact that we shared this property with so many others. It was not our property anymore than it was theirs. We were cohabitants. And not only with animals. The jack-in-pulpit, the columbine, the wild grape and wild cucumber, virginia creeper, the lilies and the iris, the tulips and the daffodils, the garlic and the asparagus, they all rested here over the winter waiting springs touch to come out into the sun.

An anthropocentric notion of ownership, amplified by deeds and by the very process we go through now, selling this property, creates an illusion of our habitation here as the only significant one. Many people would, without much thought, identify humans as the only inhabitant of the land. And it is not so.

Here there are whistle pigs, raccoons, squirrels, chipmunks, voles, the occasional wandering muskrat and rat, salamanders great and small, newts, garter snakes, toads and frogs, snapping turtles at certain seasons, pileated woodpeckers, great horned owls, crows and geese. There are millions, probably billions, of microscopic flora and fauna that keep our soil vital and nourishing for the larger plants that live within it.

This is a hectare of land, 2.5 acres. It has oak, ash, poplar, ironwood, elm, cedar, buckthorn (grrr), snowberry, river birch, maple, pine and spruce. There are many native and many domesticated plants and six domesticated animals, four dogs and two humans.

Once this umwelt settled into my conscious and unconscious awareness I knew I was 500P1030676becoming native to this place. I will never be as native to it as the generations of rabbits that have lived and died here. Nor will I be as native as any of the other animals or the native flora. Perhaps I have become as native here as the daffodils in our gardens and the lilies, both flowers that thrive on this land just as Kate and I have.

And now we are selling. What does that mean? Really? A certain sum of money, often transferred from one mortgage bank to another, changes hands. Legal documents get signed. Keys handed over. On some day we see our goods loaded onto a truck, we get in our Rav4 and pull out of the driveway never to return. But our cohabitants will remain, snugged into their tree cavity, their underground burrow, their nests beneath the shed. The major natural character of this place will remain largely intact. Sales are about humans, mostly, unless new “owners” abuse their trust.

We will, I think, go through a process of denativizing in which we gradually let go of the sensibilities shaped by these woods, these plants, these animals, these cohabitants. Even if we visit someday, just to see how the old place is getting on, we will return not as natives but as travelers, historical tourists.

We will, I hope, be becoming native to a new place, one with hard rock and high peaks, faraway vistas and remarkable spring snows. But it will not be easy. We will have to earn our place there, just as we have here. Frankly, it’s the part of this journey that most excites me. Yes, the grandchildren. Of course. Yes, Jon and Jen and Barb. Of course. But as to my life and its daily turn, becoming native to the Rocky Mountains is the big joy ahead of me.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science

Something’s Happening Here

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Fall                                                                                       Falling Leaves Moon

50008 28 10_late summer 2010_0199I’m having these flashes of insight, as if some larger realization lies not far from view, but still below the horizon of awareness.

Raspberries have something to do with it: wading into the thorny brambles, canes curved low with hanging fruit and picking off the sweetness. So do those blue skies and the chill in the air while I engage in the oldest human method of obtaining food-gathering it from plants.  That symbiotic trade between the food value of the fruit and our inadvertent willingness to bear its seeds to a new place places me there, so firmly there. No where else but picking raspberries.

I will say it with caution, because I don’t want to be confused for a transcendentalist, but I do look into the raspberry when I pick it. But, I also look into myself. When I look into the raspberry, I see water siphoned up from the soil, having fallen in rain or come sprinkled in from the aquifer below our property. I see colors, beautiful and rich, each fruit a miniature, reminding me of those Persian paintings. The seed is evident there, encased in a small cell filled with water and nutrients, so that when it hits the ground it will have what’s necessary for a healthy transition from top of the plant to the soil which is its natural home.

The raspberry itself is the Great Wheel, all of it. It comes on the plant after Mabon, after Michaelmas and left on its own will fall to the ground, probably before Samain, where it will lie on or just under the soil through the cold months of Winter and the days of Imbolc. Sometime in Spring it will begin to move, to thrust a small green stalk toward the sky and another, darker filament into the ground, seeking stability and food for its above ground presence. Over the course of Spring and Beltane the stalk will grow and the root deepen and strength its grip on mother earth. In the heat of Summer the stalk will grow into a cane, thorns will pop out and leaves, all moving fast toward the sky, the sun. Then it will reach Lughnasa and the strength of the cane and the roots will be at their optimum, ready to press out on tiny branches, flimsy and delicate, heavy dark-red fruits which will, once Mabon is past, once again droop toward the ground.

And so in the raspberry is millions of years of evolution, an evolutionary path older even than the one we humans have made, an ancientrail indeed. When I see the raspberry, this is what I see. When I look through the raspberry, I do not find revealed another metaphysical layer, a layer transcending the mundane and making it somehow special. No, I find the story of this stuff, these elements, this reality, a story which spans billions of years for this universe (and who is to say how many universes there are?), a story which spans millions of light years of space (and who can say how many miles there are in places we cannot see?).

If I wanted to introduce the religious into this conversation, I would tend toward the Hindu pantheon with Brahma the stretched out space in all its extensions and Shiva as the creator and destroyer of worlds and universes and maybe I would add in Vishnu so that this time in which I exist has an image of stability and permanence, even though such an image is an illusion. For which there is, of course, a wonderful Hindu idea, Maya.

I find Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu only useful as metaphor, as analogy but I do find them valuable in that way-as stand-ins, avatars, for the mystery that is what all this is.

These flashes, just out of sight. Something’s coming. And I’m satisfied to wait on its arrival.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Worthy

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Fall                                                                                  Falling Leaves Moon

 

Finished the article on Why I Hope to Die at 75. The more I read, the more I felt it revealed an uneasiness about worthiness. We are worthy only if we are productive. If we can be remembered as vital and incisive. If we remove ourselves from our children’s lives, quit being their shadow. If we don’t use resources better focused on the young or the demented. If we are not ill. If we are not disabled. If we are not operating at peak power.

This is what Christian theologians call works righteousness. You can only be saved if you do good works and abstain from bad ones. It was Luther who said, no, we are saved by grace alone. We cannot earn worthiness through good works.

Translated to this secular argument, I would say that we are not worthy because of our potential, our health status, our role as parents-no, we are worthy as a result of our humanness, because of our unique and precious life. Worthiness, in other words, is the wrong category to bring to the table. We live and have worth because of our existential situation. No one else, ever, will be the human that you are. No one. In this case I stand by analogy with Luther, we are worthy by the gracious act of our creation and remain so up to and even after our death.

 

None of this is to say that Ezekiel Emanuel can’t decide to refuse therapeutic medicine after 75. Of course, he can. Might be the right thing to do for him. I don’t know. I only know that his worth will not be any less because he’s no longer in the office at U Penn. His worth will not be less to his children and family because he may have a faulty heart. His worth will not be decided by others, nor, in fact, by himself. It was decided at the hour of his birth.

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Friends, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Speaking Against

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Fall                                                                                          Falling Leaves Moon

Psalm 90:10 (RSV)

10 The years of our life are threescore and ten,
    or even by reason of strength fourscore;
yet their span is but toil and trouble;
    they are soon gone, and we fly away.

In the middle of reading this long article by Ezekiel J. Emanuel in the Atlantic, “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” The argument so far has a rationale based on increasing life being linked statistically with a longer period of disability and illness. Why suffer yourself and why suffer the costs to your family and society? Why not just die at 75? The Jews believe 3 score and ten is a full life and anything beyond that is bonus time, so from that perspective 75 is within one metrics range.

How you respond to this article is of interest to me, and I’ll reserve my final opinion until I’ve finished, but here is my first response.

Emanuel has a lot of information about these issues as Professor of Health Care Management and Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy in the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. I’ll stipulate his data. And, I’ll stipulate that all of us will have opinions on this issue whether well-informed or informed by anecdote alone or, more likely, some combination of the two.

What’s unusual, of course, is Emanuel’s bald claim that he has a limit in mind for his lifespan. The exercising, right-dieting, medically attuned crowd (put me squarely here) are what he calls The American Immortals. That is, a group of folks who want to believe in life everlasting, or at least life lasting as long as possible. This clever phrase says a lot about Emanuel, but is not so illuminating for its target group.

Here’s what I think is wrong with Emanuel’s position. He seems to have an instrumental view of human life, spending considerable time showing how creativity, cognition and overall productivity decline after peaking anywhere along a broad bell curve with its flattened top extending between 30 and 60. After 60, unless you are an outlier, (and he says American Immortals believe they are all, or will be, outliers) it’s a long slump toward vagueness and discomfort.

In other words, as I read him, Emanuel doesn’t want to go into the process of decline. He’d rather phase out before that all gets too far underway. He wants to be remembered as vital, productive, keen. So say we all. But. Life is about more than productivity, creativity, thinking.

It is also about loving, about following the journey where it leads, about mystery. The Great Wheel speaks in analogy about this exact matter, the journey from birth to maid to mother to crone, then across the veil. Or, from birth to youth to adulthood and the third phase. I suppose you could say Emanuel is a latter day Stoic. I can see him in his chair, slumped with his toga around, arms dangling, veins open. As for me, I’m following this ancientrail as far as it goes, not for immortality, not for more productivity, but for life itself.

It is, I think, too easy to make shibboleths of work, of peak performance, especially in American culture. What of the supper table around which sit mechanics and waitresses, toll-booth operators and farm hands? What of the holiday meal with its small table for the young ones, their parents and their parents eating together? What about the grandchild who still wants to hold grandpop’s hand, even though he’s infirm? Life is about more than work, more than vitality, even. Life is not individual only; life is also embeddedness in the lives of others.

 

 

Asia, Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Politics, US History, World History

Obey

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Fall                                                                                      Falling Leaves Moon

 

Students in Jefferson County, Colorado and Hong Kong reacted strongly against authoritarian regimes that would limit the teaching of history and studies focused on the homeland. This is no accident. Children and teens are acutely aware of the BS factor in adult pronouncements. They learn some of that at home no doubt, matching parents words with their deeds, but school authorities often say one thing and do another. Kids always notice. Sometimes, like reasonable human beings, they dismiss it, probably saying something like, adults will be adults, but sometimes they notice a danger to their future, perhaps even to the adult’s future.

Especially when governments, the schoolboard in the instance of Jefferson County and Beijing in the instance of Hong Kong, try to shape teaching to conform to their own ends. In Jefferson County the schoolboard wanted a more “patriotic” curriculum that emphasized the values of free enterprise and loyalty. They also wanted a curriculum that downplayed the role of protest and other civil disobedience in the shaping of American history. In Hong Kong the movement led by Joshua Wong wanted public decision making in who would be chief executive of Hong Kong. They also opposed a moral and national educational program* that had critics among Hong Kong teachers, just like Jefferson County.

Children know that their birthright is a world in which they have a voice, in which their decisions and choices matter, in which the information on which they make those choices is as unbiased as possible. In particular they oppose bias by so called “authorities.” Why? Because children instinctively know that authority shapes reality for its own purposes.

As we grow older, we become that authority. If we are wise and can remember our own youth, we will listen to the voice of the young when they say, “I’m calling bullshit on that.”

 

*”The “China Model National Conditions Teaching Manual”, published by the National Education Services Centre under government fundings, was found to be biased towards the Communist Party of China and the so-called “China model“. The teaching manual called the Communist Party an “advanced, selfless and united ruling group” (進步、無私與團結的執政集團), while denouncing Democratic and Republican Parties of the United States as a “fierce inter-party rivalry [that] makes the people suffer”” analysis by teachers, from Wikipedia

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Weather +Climate

A Cold Rain Must Fall

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Fall                                                                                  Falling Leaves Moon

A cold rain must fall. When temperatures drop and a soaking rain comes and leaves lie bloodied in the street, the Great Wheel has advanced another turn, this time toward the dark. That fireplace reasserts itself as the center of a room and evenings seem made for candles and lace.

This is my time of year and it has barely begun, the cold rain putting a seal on its arrival. I’m ready for it.

The cold rains are Demeter’s tears for her daughter Persephone, gone now to rule for half the year in Hades. This is a medieval painting showing Persephone and Hades on their thrones.

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The Move, Travel

Liminal consciousness

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Fall                                                                               Falling Leaves Moon

Carlsbad Entrance from the twilight zone. Beyond this point there is no natural light.
Carlsbad Entrance from the twilight zone. Beyond this point there is no natural light.

Stood tonight, arms on our mantel place, a fire crackling below me, wondering. What will I lean against this time next year? Will I hear wind coming down the mountain, the bugling of elks, the cough of a mountain lion? There might be frost on the plants outside and a chilly night ahead.

This is not I wish I would still be here kind of wondering, nor is it I wish I knew where we’ll be next year. It’s just curiosity, a sort of advance scouting. If all goes well, by this time next year-in the Great Wheel season of Mabon, a bit more than a week after the fall equinox-we should have been in our new place for over half a year. Strange to consider that.

Liminal consciousness. It arises when we know a transition is upon us, a time when we are no longer where we were, nor are we where we’re going. The weeks before a marriage. The summer after graduating from high school. Pregnancy. Interviewing for a new job. Getting ready to move to another place. In the broadest and most ultimate sense of course life is a liminal moment between birth and death. Liminal consciousness arises when we wake up to our condition.

Tonight, on our fire place mantel, I woke up again to the physical sense of moving and of

Angled window close up Chaco Canyon
Angled window close up
Chaco Canyon

having been moved. That awareness gripped me and I lived in it fully, not for long, not in a wistful way, but I was in it. Now that moment is in the past and I’m in Minnesota, with moving tasks and daily life here capturing and holding my attention. As is appropriate.

But stay aware for those moments of liminal consciousness. When they come, they have learnings for you.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Springtime of the Soul

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Fall                                                                               Falling Leaves Moon

A brief interlude of high 70’s and 80’s disappears starting today. It’s 50 and rainy. Better, in my opinion. And more fitting for Michaelmas anyhow. The springtime of the soul.

St. Michael, the Archangel, is God’s general, the militant leader of the warrior angels, chief strategist in the war against the rebel angels and instrumental in ejecting Lucifer, the Morning Star, from heaven. His mass day, today, September 29th, honors him and the other archangels, Gabriel and Raphael, and often, Uriel.

Michaelmas was one of the four English quarter days which celebrated equinox and solstices on set days rather than on their astronomical occurrence. Thus, Michaelmas celebrates the autumnal equinox, which one author called the day of the “darkening.” It is the start of the English university first term and a day when rents were paid for the year, contracts settled and festivals held.

Michaelmas is the springtime of the soul because it presages the coming fallow time. It emphasizes the darkening aspect of the fall equinox when the hours of nighttime begin to exceed those of daylight. When the plant world faces the long dark cold, it turns inward,

goes down into the ground either as seed or as root and gathers its energy, readying itself for emergence in the spring when lightening begins and temperatures warm.

Just so with us. As a cold rain falls here today on Michaelmas in Andover, the joy of sitting inside with a book, or meditating, writing, sewing, quilting comes. Our inner life can begin to blossom, the richness in the soils of our souls feeds projects and dreams and meditations.

This springtime of the soul has only begun today and it will follow, over its time, the fallow season. I welcome you to this nurturing, deep time. Blessed be.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science

The Original Pentecostal

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Fall                                                                                   Falling Leaves Moon

Listen to the languages calling out to you. From the lilac bushes, from the way vehicles move on the freeway, from the body movements of people in a crowd, of the clouds as they scud overhead or stop, gray and wet. Watch dogs as they wag their tales (tails, I meant, but I like this homophonic error) or smile or lean in or bark or whine. Watch their eyes move. Babies reaching, reaching. From the insects as they buzz the late season flowers, the wasps flying in and out of their nests, the birds high in the trees or walking across the road. The turtles when they walk miles to find a proper place to lay their eggs. So many tongues.

Mother earth is the original pentecostal, speaking in so many tongues. She also speaks in the movement of continental plates, the upwelling of magma, the process of evolution, the deep sea vents and their often alien seeming life forms. Or look up. Into the milky way and see the language of origins spread out before you on velvet, the most valuable jewels in all of creation. Each of these languages has a syntax, a grammar, meaning. The speakers of these languages want to reveal their purpose.

But we have to have ears to hear. Listen.

(Pentecost, El Greco, 1596)

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Spinoza and Me

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Fall                                                                                         New (Falling Leaves) Moon

The card gods were good to me tonight. Until I took over and started getting frisky. I tried to make a hand work where the force was not with me. Still, a good night with plenty of good conversation with men I’ve come to know well.

Bill Schmidt and I had dinner at Pad Thai, as we have for many of the evenings before the game. Bill’s reading a book about Spinoza and one by Spinoza. Spinoza’s an interesting guy in many ways. An apostate Jew. A monist, which is a hard position to defend. An optics maker, a lens grinder by trade.

Bill linked Spinoza’s work and mine, generous of him to think of the two of us in anyway linked. But the connection is fair, I think. When I left the Christian faith behind, I left behind a medieval approach to questions of metaphysics. That approach is text based rather than experience based. In the Christian instance experience is viewed first through the lens of scripture, and through the particular interpretative schema you bring to it. So by the time you get to reality, the gap is already pretty wide.

Christians are not the only ones with this inclination: Islam, Judaism, but, too, as the scholar Bill read points out, anyone who reads the texts of another as the first line of inquiry when faced with philosophical or theological or political or ethical questions.

Where Spinoza and I come together is in having rejected that text based, medieval model of scholarly inquiry. We both turn instead to nature, to lived experience, so the mediation is left to the senses rather than texts. This makes for a different sort of thought, with very different evidence for what we believe is the case.

Spinoza takes his inquiry deep into the nature of nature, building his thought systematically. I’ve never been able to hold myself to one line of inquiry long enough to work systematically, but I have had insights recently that seem to follow some of Spinoza’s. For example, in thinking just yesterday and today about the nature of political commitment, I’ve come to realize that ethics and political thought come after our political values, rather than from them deductively.

What I mean is that what you feel is fair, just, equitable, decent, honest, valuable for yourself and your community, comes first, informed by any of a number of inputs from personal history to family imprint to community of identification and place and era of birth. Only later do we seek out socialism or compassionate conservatism or democracy or autocracy as more systematic elaborations of our apriori sensibilities. We may then use them to enhance or inform nuances of our political beliefs, but they do not create them.

I’ll stop here with this thought. This is why political debate does so little to change minds and hearts.