Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Down, In

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Lughnasa                                                                          College Moon

Something I haven’t done since Tucson. Meditate. Thought I would, but, like every other Journal workshop I’ve collected and acted on the insights, then shelved the process.

Got back at it this afternoon for a bit. Had an interesting interior journey. I walked into an ancient building made of stone, maybe a castle, and inside it I found a spiral stair case, stone, that went straight down into the earth. There were no rooms around it. A pit the size of the stair case was dug, then the stair case was built inside it. The stair case went down hundreds of feet and ended in a domed room with a mosaic roof, stone walls and benches around its circular walls.

In the center was a holy well, the water bubbling gently. I knelt before it, why I don’t know. Tilting over my body fell into the well and swam out of the well into the deep ocean.

The deep ocean was the cosmos itself. At one point I feared finding my way back, would I be consumed, depersonalized in this vast oneness. The Brahman, I suppose. No, it came to me, no matter where I was in the wholeness, I could be no other than me.

Sure enough, when I swam back I found the well easily and leaped out of it, drying before I landed on the stone floor. There were others there now, all in capes. We acknowledged each other, then I climbed the stairs, went out of the ancient building into the room where I sat.

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Memories, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The Move, The West

A Milestone

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Lughnasa                                                                                College Moon

Well. A milestone. Every bookshelf except the one beside my computer, stacked with books I use frequently, has been cleared, sorted and boxed. I thought I would be done in late August, early September works, too.

(New Harmony as conceived by Robert Dale Own in 1833)

As I passed these last books from shelf to box, new arrangements for them cropped up, new reading projects and writing projects, too. I have, for example, a collection of historical documents about New Harmony, Indiana. They are records of the Harmonist era 1814-1824 and documents from the Robert Owens era soon after that. There are, too, maps, Indiana Historical Society monographs, photographs and notes of my own journeys there.

(stone labyrinth in current day New Harmony)

New Harmony features in my novel, The Last Druid, and continues to interest me, both as the site of two utopian communities, one very successful, the other a successful failure and as a present day historical site with an emphasis on spirituality. Reading through those would definitely spark something.

There are, too, a collection of books, stacked up on each other, concerning the west and Colorado. These are the first tools I’ll use to get up to speed on our new home and the historical context that made it what it is now.

Now I move to file sorting, magazine culling. After that, objet d’arts.

Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Something Swims Up

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Lughnasa                                                                                   College Moon

Something is swimming in the deep ocean of my Self, circling higher and higher, moving toward the surface. It’s tempting to view it as a condor, swooping in wide circles, riding the thermals, seen by my mind’s eye, but that’s an illusion. In fact what I see with the mind’s eye is only a clue, a reminder to look down, into the interior.

( at the foot of Wu Shi Mountain (Five Lion Mountain), located beneath the spectacular Qiandao Lake)

There in the Holy Well that connects me to the All That Is the waters bubble slowly, often still for moments at a time, then roiled a bit by the artesian pressure the cosmos brings to bear on all its creations. It is in this water that something swims, something big and commanding, I think though I can’t be sure. This is where the novels live, somewhere in the benthic realm. Could be a novel moving around.

Or, it could be, well, I don’t know what. But I can feel it riding the change in the seasons. It’s sensitive to the decreasing daylight and to the increasing weakness of the Sun’s light. Might be melancholy. This is its season.

Whatever it is, it keeps pressing up, sending small waves to jolt the surface of the holy well. I look forward to its arrival.

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

Sounds Pathological, But Feels Blessed

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Lughnasa                                                                              College Moon

Understanding of more than the motives of the moment seem more and more elusive as the third phase of life wraps itself around me. The deep reasons for liking, say, the classics and dogs and reading are lost in the fog of memory darkened by time into near opacity. There was a time when understanding felt more accessible, more relevant, perhaps as a lever with which to change personality, to affect a less tangled future.

Now though the past, my own past, not that long a time by historical reckoning and none at all in the sweep of geological time, not only seems to recede faster than the clock’s ticking, but happily so. It’s as if the meaning of the past, my intimate past that is, has begun to detach itself from my present, floating off like Sandra Bullock in Gravity, untethered and weightless.

This sounds pathological, but it feels blessed. This man that I am now is just who he is, not explainable by his past nor excused by it, but who he is either in spite of it or to the side of the past. Perhaps it is always like this: that the person we are now seems only distantly related to the person we were ten years ago, forty years ago, even an hour ago. That untethered feeling comes with a sense of liberation, of not being bound to the threads, the strings, the ropes, the cable of yesterday; not being bound and free to go where today goes, not captive to yesterday.

Oh, this is not to say that the past does not still have its effects. Of course it does. Just that they are no longer determinative, destiny creating. They are, after all, in the past.

Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Minnesota, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Midwest Lughnasa Festival

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Lughnasa                                                                      College Moon

We’re off to the fair today. The last hurrah as residents of Minnesota. I’ve gone many times over the years, probably a bit more than half of the years I’ve lived here, say 25. As I’ve gotten older, stamina has become a modest issue, but a bigger one is sameness. Even with the amazing number of new food products and the changing line-up in the 4-H buildings and the animal barns there is a regularity, a predictability. On-a-stick! Blue ribbon! Necessary kitchen gadget!

Of course, that very predictability is one of the fair’s charms, too. It will always have that slightly wacky, down-home feel. The Midway will have lights; machinery hill will have tractors and the GOP/DFL booths will have politicians racing their engines for an upcoming election. And, there will be cheese curds.

For a guy trying to figure out how to connect Americans with the land, with what I think of as a kami-faith for this land is our land, the state fair is a huge ritual moment. Too often an opportunity lost to take our head out of the work-a-day cubicle world and go outside, to look down, to see the amazing, miraculous things happening in the soil and among the plants. And cows. pigs. llamas. rabbits. horses. In that sense it’s the ur-moment in the year for effecting change.

 

 

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Harder Choices

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Lughnasa                                                                    New (College) Moon

Listening to outlaw country as I pack boxes full of books on Romanticism, American religious empiricism and Hindu thought. It’s harder in here, in the study where I’ve concentrated the books that have captured part of a long term idea. Wondering, for example, where the threads of the Classics, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Modernism come together. Are there clues there about tomorrow, about critiquing today? About laying bare the bones of this time?

How does religion play against this whole backdrop? Does it have a future, a non-dogmatic, non-institutional future or is it an anachronism with unusual vitality?

Or, on another tangent, how does the environmental movement and its thinkers weave into the Reimagining Faith work I’ve been doing for awhile. Does Jung matter in this or any of these threads? Maybe you can see how having books at my fingertips, books not obtainable outside university libraries, is important to me.

Again, you could rightly ask why I bother. Don’t know. This is just stuff that interests me and has interested me for a long time.

Anoka County, Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Literature, The Move, Third Phase

A Confrontation About Time

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Lughnasa                                                                    New (College) Moon

This week on the calendar I have on Monday through Saturday: pack, Latin. Thursday will be our state fair day. Other than that packing, Latin and work in the garden will occupy us.

Today and until I’m done I will be packing the study in which I work every day. That means the sorting will get harder, green tape boxes outnumbering red tape ones. Probably by a lot. It also means the confrontation between time remaining (in my life) and the projects (intellectual and creative) that keep me excited will come center stage. I’ll try to sort out the ones I feel I can fruitfully engage over the next 20 years from the ones I can’t.

That means I’m considering active intellectual and creative work at least into my late 80’s. That feels like a stretch, maybe, but one I believe my health and potential longevity justifies.

Let me give you an idea of what I have in mind. Complete the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Write at least four more novels. Write essays or a book on Reimagining My Faith. Write and read much more poetry. Write essays or a book on matters related to the Enlightenment, liberal thought, modernism. Write essays or a book on matters related to the Great Work. Include in this work considered attention to Asian literature, art and thought, especially Chinese and Indian. Continue regular art historical research and write essays about aesthetics and particular art/artists.

Why? Because I can. I’ve no evidence so far that my thinking is strikingly original or unusually deep, but my intellectual maturation has taken a longer time than I imagined it would. So the best may yet be ahead. Or so it feels to me. Under any circumstances such work will keep me alert and focused.

As for right now. Where are those empty boxes?

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, The Move, Writing

Walk In Free

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Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

Letting go. Retiring. Easing up. Yes, the pedal has lifted up from the metal and the car has begun to slow down. And that’s a good thing. Letting go of the expectations, admitting they were not met and saying damn the consequences has lifted a large weight off the shoulder of my psyche. Retiring it. Shrugged off and glad to have it gone.

Does this mean I’ll stop writing? No. Does it mean I’ll stop writing novels? No. It does mean that I no longer have my self’s forward progress attached to the results. And, you might say, about damned time. Maybe so.

Why is all this bubbling up right now? The move. As the stuff of my work gets winnowed, I can see the bones of my ambition more clearly. The skeletal support of my dreams are familial, horticultural, intellectual, classical and creative. The flesh and bones will be grandchildren, sons and daughters-in-law, wife, friends, plants, ideas, translations and more novels.

Failure does not mean stop. Vanish. Extinguished. It does not mean failed. No, it means redirection, recollecting, revisiting. This move has given me the freedom to shrug my shoulders, let the load fall to the way side. I want to walk into Colorado free to live a life given to that place, those people, that time. Now I can.

Going west has always had an element of reinvention, claiming another facet of life. May it be so.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Weather +Climate

Wild, Wild Grapes

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Lughnasa                                                                 Lughnasa Moon

500P1030676A cool breeze predicted autumn as I picked wild grapes this morning . These wild grapes have overgrown our amur maples and will get cut back when the lawn restoration work is done later in the fall. That will hardly diminish their presence though because wild grapes grow all over our woods, some branching out from vines thicker than my upper arm. The woods also provides morels in the spring.

Over the years I’ve highlighted the opossum, the great horned owl, wild turkeys, pileated woodpecker, woodchuck, salamander, newt, toads, frogs, dragon flies, deer, rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, bumblebees, raccoons and snapping turtles that live on this property, too. A significant aspect of living in the exurbs is the diversity of wild flaura andIMAG0506 fauna, often on the chunk of land on which you live. This is a melding of the human built and the wild.

The Denver Post recounts encounters with bears, mountain lions and rattle snakes. In Minnesota residents encounter bears and wolves, perhaps the occasional lynx. Most of these encounters occur because human habitation encroaches further and further into formerly wild lands.

These predators are certainly part of the wild eco-system, but the bulk of wild life are prey species, amphibians, reptiles and birds. It’s these we humans encounter most often and which we often discount, as if their small size or lack of tools for killing make them less significant. Yet the woodchuck, or land-beaver, that occupied a tree here for a day, is a wild animal just as much as the wolf or bear. So, too, the opossum and all those others that flee when humans arrive, who try to keep their visibility to a minimum.

We are co-habitants, not owners really, of this land. Though we will sell it to other humans, we are not selling the wild life. Their lives will adapt to the new humans just as they adapted to us, either by leaving or hiding or just going on about their day.

The wild flaura includes not only morels and grapes, but ironwood, jack-in-the-pulpit, oaks white, red and burr, elm, ash, black locust, cedar, nine-bark and rhus radicans, or poison ivy. Barring a clear cut of the woods, which I consider unlikely, they, too, will remain.

Colorado, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, The Move

Memory Train Passing

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Lughnasa                                                                     Lughnasa Moon

The garden study packing, nearly done, came to a halt due to a need for some more packing supplies that won’t arrive until Wednesday. But it’s close to empty. By packing up the garden bookshelf tomorrow, I’ll be able to finish that whole area when the new plastic file holders come.

That means Wednesday the biggest push of the project will get underway. The culling and packing of the study itself. In some ways it may go quicker than the garden study, but there are many more books involved. There will not be though, in here, the picture I found today of my two and half-year old self trying to crawl while my mother and a post-polio rehab specialist looked on. My neck is on the floor, curved up at angle.  I’m looking up at the photographer. Brought a pang of empathy for that little guy, long dissolved into the man, but still present.

Nor will there be the hot picture of Kate taken beside the Siah Armajani bridge between Loring Park and the Walker Sculpture Garden. Or the polariods of Mary and Dad, of our house on E. Monroe Street and the one on Canal. Each of these stopped me and I had to wait for the memory train to pass before I could cross the intersection and get back to work.

Also, I packed in a red tape box, sell, my copies of three volumes of St. John of the Cross. To anyone else they would be have been old books, fat paperbacks that cost $1.65. To me though they were the touching gift of a fellow philosophy student at Wabash College, a senior, who saw something in me and wanted to share his passion. Yet now 40 years removed, even that connection no longer made me want them.

They were not the only decisions like that. Books, for me, often entrain memories in just the same way a photograph or a travel souvenir does. That makes these choices hard sometimes and feelings slow the process down. Taking a year makes a lot of sense.