Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

A Crucifixion Moment…for the garden

September 25, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Fall New (Falling Leaves) Moon

The river birch has begun to shed its golden leaves, small instances of light as matter falling toward the ground. The neighbor’s Norway maple has turned its autumn red, a reliable clue that the seasonal change is well underway.

Senescence becomes the word for gardens, vegetable and flower. Green turns to brown, then withers and falls onto the earth which has held it up so long. Tired, I suppose, from the long fight during the growing season to remain upright.

The water that fills out the cells flees back to the roots or out into the air through transvaporation, so leaves shrivel, stalks collapse. But this is not the field of ruins it appears to be. This is instead gathered nutrients ready to return to the soil following that

most necessary of almost hidden processes, decay.

We have arrived, from one perspective, at our crop’s crucifixion moment, when they give up their bodies on behalf of others. It is only an apparent crucifixion though because the dead will rise again, either from underground chambers where they lie dormant or from seeds. What a wonder. And it happens every year.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Woolly Mammoths

Rising

September 24, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Fall New (Falling Leaves) Moon

The prototype of the evil doer, the mother of all James Bond’s enemies and role model for purist tyrants of all stripes, Adolf Hitler, still shines with a dark light, casting a pall of sickness over the future. Of course, even Hitler represents a distillation of a much deeper human problem, that of denigration based on secondary characteristics: racism, anti-semitism, misogyny, nativism.

In Hitler’s case a centuries old virus, a plague in the soil of Europe, a virulent stream of racism, anti-semitism, found its perfect host. Hitler glorified the notion of racial purity over against its worst violation, blood pollution, and found reason to kill Jews, gays, Gypsies and the mentally disabled.

This is not news. Except it is if you’re Jewish and living in Europe. Or, Jewish and living anywhere in the world, even here in the United States. Here’s a paragraph from a NYT article published today:

“From the immigrant enclaves of the Parisian suburbs to the drizzly bureaucratic city of Brussels to the industrial heartland of Germany, Europe’s old demon returned this summer. “Death to the Jews!” shouted protesters at pro-Palestinian rallies in Belgium and France. “Gas the Jews!” yelled marchers at a similar protest in Germany.”

Though not Jewish myself I count many Jews as my friends. My wife, my daughter-in-law and both grandchildren are Jewish. So, I ask all my fellow goyim to say, along with the Jews, “Never again.”

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Holidays, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Nocturne

September 22, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Equinox New (Falling Leaves) Moon

For those of us who love the night, this is a fulcrum holiday. We enter the long period that starts with the final harvests and does not end completely until the vernal equinox. From today, till then, the night will gain dominance, peaking at the winter solstice, but not relinquishing its grip until the sun hits 0 declination in the east next March.

It’s not that I do not love the light, I do. It is rather that I prefer the dark, the quiet, the solitary. I’m also entranced, quite literally, by what I call Holiseason, that period beginning at Samhain and running through Epiphany. As we move into the dark, we also move into our fears, our paleolithic uneasiness with the reliability of the heavens.

These fears have driven humanity across time and across the globe to create brave holidays that feature the light. Yes, you could say that the emphasis on them really underscores our fears, rather than challenges them, but I choose to go with the perspective that they hit the fear directly. No, night, you cannot have us, not for all the day, never, and surely not for all the year. In the words of Battlestar Galatica, so say we all.

From late October to early January a parade of festivals bring us lights and gifts and warmth and family celebrations. What a delight. Good music, too. And theater.

It all starts tonight.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Third Phase

Mabon 2014 and the Springtime of the Soul

September 22, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Equinox Leaf Change Moon

Today the earth’s celestial equator (the earth’s equator projected into space) passes through the sun’s ecliptic (the sun’s apparent path throughout the year, actually caused by earth’s orbit.) You usually hear this put the other way around; that is, as the sun passing through the earth’s celestial equator, but that represents the stuckness of paleolithic astronomy that assumed the earth was the center of the solar system. From the diagram above you can see the sun’s declination (degree above or below the celestial equator) is 0 on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

This same diagram is very clear about the solstices, too. You can see that when the earth’s orbit tilts the northern latitudes toward the sun, the sun is highest in the sky-the summer solstice. When the sun is lowest in the northern sky-the earth tilts away from the sun and gives us the winter solstice.

Since the summer solstice day time has exceeded night time. In theory the autumnal equinox is the point of equilibrium between light and dark, but at our latitude that day actually occurs on September 25th this year. This is, however, the day the Great Wheel celebrates and it does so because of the sun’s zero declination at earth’s celestial equator.

This week then the victory of the sun, made complete on the summer solstice, begins to wane. The dark god of deep winter gains greater and greater authority as the sun’s rays spread out over a larger area of earth, thus weakening them, and the number of hours that the sun is in our sky, even in its weakened condition relative to the soil, decrease steadily until the night of the winter solstice. Thus comes the fallow, cold time.

It is no accident that the harvest season is now. Over the 475 million years (give or take a hundred million) since plants made it out of the oceans and onto land, plants have adapted themselves to the conditions that work with their particular genetics. Key aspects of a plant’s life include carbon dioxide, soil nutrients, available fresh water, adequate sunlight and temperatures adequate for all these to work with the plant’s life cycle.

Thus, as the earth’s orbit carries it to different relationships with solar strength, temperatures change along with it. At its maximum when the earth tilts toward the sun and the sun is highest in the sky, the sun’s rays fall on a smaller area of land. Here’s an excellent simulation. University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Plants have had the past 475 million years to refine their growing season so that it takes maximum benefit of the sun’s strength. In a very real sense the growing season is a clock, or an astronomical observatory directly correlated to the earth’s orbit around the sun–The Great Wheel.

On a spiritual level, if we follow the ancient calendar of the plants, the season of external growth, flowering and seed making, is waning now. Just as the plant either dies out and anticipates its rejuvenation from scattered seed or goes dormant and waits with stored energy below ground in roots or corms or bulbs, so we might consider this season as the one where we shift inward, away from the external demands upon us and the expectations put on us there.

Now we shift toward the interior life, the Self becomes more of a focus, our spiritual life can deepen. We can see this shift in the human life cycle if we compare the second phase of life with its emphasis on family creation and nurture and career, to the third, with its pulling back from those external expectations. The third phase is a post growing season time of life, not in the sense that growth ends, but that its focus is more down and in rather than up and out. The third phase is the fallow time. Michaelmas on the 29th of this month is known by followers of Rudolf Steiner as the springtime of the soul.

The third phase marks the beginning of the springtime of the soul for the individual.

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Enough

September 21, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa (last day of 2014) College Moon

The raspberry plant. Source of the brambles, an imperial sort of plant that colonizes, then absorbs patches of land. Just realized today what an elegant form of evolutionary engineering it is.

In the spring it shoots up from last year’s cane or from seed. Then it grows up and up toward the sun, its spiny stalk with its thick, bark-like cover strong. During the summer months it spreads out its leaves, increases the size of its stalk, sinks its roots deeper into the soil. As the growing season begins to dwindle, it throws out small blossoms on thin, spindly branches. The resulting fruit at first weighs down the spindly branches just a bit, the whole still upright, able to drink in the sun.

As the fruit matures, however, it gains water weight and the spindly branches begin to bend toward the ground, overwhelmed by the cumulative mass of the maturing fruit. Once a large number of fruits are ripe, the weight of the whole may bend the tip and even the thinner part of the upper stalk toward the ground.

Think of it. At each stage of its presence during the growing season the raspberry has an optimal design. Firm and upright early to catch the sun, to get it above neighboring vegetation. As the fruits turn their soft golds or their beautiful magenta, the raspberry’s fruits gradually lower themselves so the seeds, which they exist to nourish, get closer to the ground. If a bird or animal doesn’t grab them for the taste of the fruit, they simply drop off and fruit and seed start more raspberry plants right there.

Picking raspberries in the cool of a sunny fall afternoon, the air sweet with the scent of snakeroot blooming nearby, the dogs waiting at the fence for fruits thrown over. Enough. That’s all. Enough.

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings

Bored

September 18, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa College Moon

A beautiful day. Odd for me since I woke up early, got some work done early as a result and have time now, since I only workout on MWF, that I really don’t know what to do with. I’m bored. Which is in unusual for me. At least to admit it.

If folks say they’re bored and act as if the world owes them something interesting to do, I lay it down to lack of imagination. So, I loop this smug comment back onto myself.

Boredom, like melancholy, has come to have a place in my life though. And for similar reasons. They are both caesuras, gaps between this action and that one, between that project and this one. Too often I can use a writing project or that gardening chore, or working on this blog, or whatever else is available to fill uncomfortable lapses in time.

When I engage tasks for tasks sake, I learn nothing, I press away whatever might come to me if I go still, become quiet, as I do sometimes at night. Accepted in this way both boredom and melancholy have a purging effect, a cleansing of the anxiety driven task completion mode so common among us Americans. And doubly so among us Americans of northern European ancestry.

You might even see boredom and melancholy as cousins to meditation, a certain stilling of the mind, letting the gears grind more slowly or even go to full stop. I hesitate to assign them a utilitarian purpose because both have their dark elements. Boredom’s I really can’t be bothered accents and melancholy’s self-denigration are negative in themselves. But when either boredom or melancholy helps us step back from our life, examine it, see what might be missing or what’s too abundant, then they serve a real purpose in the psyche’s economy.

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

Powerful, Scary Ideas

September 16, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa College Moon

Reading an important document, a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy essay on authenticity. Kierkegaard, the essay says, defines the self in relational terms: “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself…” A pioneer in the concept of authenticity Kierkegaard defines the purpose of life as “becoming what one is.”

This definition of self and of life’s purpose make sense to me. Heidegger, the inventor of the term authenticity, makes a similar point with his concept of dasein: “…human being is a “relation of being”, a relation that obtains between what one is at any moment (the immediacy of the concrete present as it has evolved) and what one can and will be as the temporally extended unfolding or happening of life into an open realm of possibilities. To say that human being is a relation is to say that, in living out our lives, we always care about who and what we are.” from the same Stanford essay.

What both of these northern European thinkers suggest is that the idea of Self is dynamic and by definition relational, somehow linking our past with our present and our hope or anticipation for the future. This means that our notion of who we are-and therefore who we can hope to become-lies in a web of feelings and thoughts connecting experiences in the external world and our internal understanding of them, with those experiences occurring only in our interior world and their relations with those stimulated by the external world.

Thus, in Heidegger’s terminology, what we are is always at stake. The choices we make and the experiences we have and the past we carry with us are always in vibrant collision, shaping and reshaping our Selves, second by second. I suppose you could see this as daunting, but for me it is exciting, meaning that my Self is not fixed, not bound to the past or to any particular future, and not only not fixed, but malleable. That is, I can make choices now, right now, that affect my Self. I can even alter the past by recalibrating the frames through which I view it.

As we discussed in the Nietzschean conversations below, once we understand this fluid, vital nature of the Self, we cannot help but live dangerously. Why? Because in every action, in every moment of contemplation, even lurking in the past are events, experiences, thoughts that change who we are. And who we can become. Powerful, scary ideas.

Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, US History, Weather +Climate, World History

Cities built on Vesuvius

September 14, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa College Moon

War is a terrible act. It marshals the forces and treasure and precious lives of foes into a bloody knuckle, don’t stop till the last soldier is down fog. Intentions, plans and often nations disappear in that fog and sometimes never re-emerge. Yet Barak Obama, the get-us-out of Iraq and Afghanistan president, is about to have his Woodrow Wilson moment.

My wife is a pacifist, my son a manager of war planes in battle. I’m an anti-Vietnam war era foreign policy realist who recognizes the anarchy existing at the level of nation-states. The always combustible atmosphere of geo-politics is even more flammable in the Middle East where oil and playing with matches has become the third millennial Great Game.

Add to that a world-defining struggle between Enlightenment rationalists and those who inhabit the caves which still project a dead God’s shadow (see post below) and we may be living during a world historical turning point. The irony, of course, is huge. We fight those inflamed by their commitment to a desert storm god not only because they harass us with bombings and public beheadings, but because their god’s realm includes the very fuel we need to continue poisoning the climate in which we all have to live.

This is a struggle between the god-drunk and those who live the dangerous life in which “knowledge (has) finally (stretched) out her hand for that which belongs to her: she means to rule and possess, and you with her!” We are out-numbered and out-flanked as the Chinese dragon grows stronger every day. What could possibly be more dangerous than this life? And, if we follow Nietzsche, “the most fruitful and enjoyable.”

As this blog says in its tagline, Welcome to the journey.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Humanities, Myth and Story

Live Dangerously

September 14, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa College Moon

A friend told me this quote from Nietzsche has been clanging around: “The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and greatest enjoyment is — to live dangerously”. Wondering about context, I located the source, Nietzsche’s book on poetic inspiration, The Gay Science, specifically, section 283.

These lines follow the quote: “Build your cities on the slope of Vesuvius! Send your ships into unexplored seas! Live in war with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and spoilers, you knowing ones, as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors! The time will soon pass when you can be satisfied to live like timorous deer concealed in the forests. Knowledge will finally stretch out her hand for that which belongs to her: she means to rule and possess, and you with her!”

It was in The Gay Science that the following claim appeared for the first time. It would make Nietzsche famous and/or infamous 84 years later when Time magazine ran its cover querying the death of god:

After Buddha was dead, people
showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a
cave,—an immense frightful shadow. God is dead:
but as the human race is constituted, there will
perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which
people will show his shadow.—And we—we have
still to overcome his shadow! —§108

We have lived into that dangerous time which Nietzsche prophesied, when there are those whose knowledge includes the death of the transcendental, but whose lives are under attack by those still living in the caves where the shadow of God persists.

One response to the rising tide of Islamist fundamentalism, of Hindu fundamentalism, to the now receding tide of Christian fundamentalism in the U.S. and to the various nationalisms and xenophobias which mimic them is to follow these folks back into their caves where homosexuality is wrong, where men are right, women subservient and the unbeliever not only heretic but apostate and worthy of death. Where the U.S. is exceptional and for whites only.

But that is not the way to a fruitful and satisfying life. That way lies in continued resistance to the cave dwellers and in continual fealty to knowledge wherever it may take us, no matter how risky, no matter how dangerous.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Music, US History, Writing

Unasked Questions

September 11, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa College Moon

A project, perhaps the smooth beast rising from the deeps, keeps coming at me, jostling me, prodding me to imagine it into being. I’m not ready to go all the way there yet so let me set down a few bars, perhaps really only a jumble of notes not yet ordered by staff and clef.

1. American art. Here would be American works that found their muse in the West as it came to be in the minds of a young country. Here the work of the Hudson River School, the Ash-can School, Wyeth, Homer and Hopper, even Ed Ruscha, artists whose work clawed away at the truth underneath the bones of American life and culture. Warhol and Pollock and Rothko, too. Morris Louis. Photographers like Anself Adams and Walker Evans and Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman and Edward Weston. Seeking the American through our art.

2. American music: jazz, Copland, Gershwin, Ives. Seeking the American in our music. Seeking the sounds that issue from the various rivers that make us an ocean.

3. American thinkers like the American Renaissance, like Dewey and James, Wills and Veblen, DuBois and Douglas. What is our manner of thought, our direction? Our ideas that tear away at the fabric of this country, peaking behind it, looking for its connective tissue.

4. American literature: Melville, Emerson, Hawthorne, Twain, Poe, Lovecraft, not just the luminaries here, but the dark lights, too. Probing, seeking for the through line from the first immigrants to the most recent, how they wove their lives together. Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser.

Poets yes, of course. Whitman, Silliman, Dickinson, Moore, Oliver, Berry, White, Collins…a long, long line of persons using words as scalpels to flense the fat off the American soul and leave it bloody, but bared

These are the source material, the Americanness. And yes, I need more women and yes, I need more variety, but this is a long project, perhaps the last project, one focused on who we say, show, play that we are. Theater is not there in the list. Neither is invention. Nor war. Nor democracy. Nor politicians. Nor sport. Probably should be.

This is too nebulous, too diffuse, too broad. In danger of being too shallow, too thin on the ground to matter. Maybe so. Or, maybe it’s just a search for the roots of my Self, its American roots. Not sure yet, like I said.