Summer Most Heat Moon
Well.
Remember me as you pass by,
As you are now so once was I.
As I am now, so you must be.
Prepare yourself to follow me.
Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality
The Demi-Monde
Summer Most Heat Moon
Yesterday I did an experiment in sleep deprivation. Not intentionally, of course. As I gained back an hour to an hour and a half at a time over the day-necessary because of the sleep lost that night-my mind began to lose track of the sleeping/waking distinction. I would wake up, still clinging to the dream state and still tired enough to be only partially awake. Then, tiredness would take over and push me back to bed, the waking state only partially realized while I was up.
Sundowning. In a strange place like a hospital, how the elderly could enter a state like the one I experienced yesterday, the disoriented state called sundowning, became obvious to me, sleep disrupted and coming in uneven increments over a 24 hour period. Once untethered from the usual clear demarcation between awake and asleep it could be very difficult to find your way back to it.
It was not unpleasant, at least for me, but if the outside world, the world outside my dreamy/semi-awake state, had demanded normal attention, I could easily have become agitated, unable to understand the expectations. Then, others would have become concerned about me. They would have wanted to “help” me return to the usual way of experiencing day and night. The harder they pressed, the more difficult it would become. At least I can see how that might happen.
Remembering my father-in-law Merton as he neared death, he seemed to float in an idiosyncratic demi-monde most of the time. Near the end he reported angels descending, coming for him. This may well have been his reality, rather than a dreamy experience. Once in this place epistemology becomes untethered too and our ways of knowing enter a different metaphysical realm. In other words our reality becomes different from that of the consensus, though we don’t know that. At that moment we have passed through a portal, not to the Otherworld, but to an Otherworld.
It could be that death comes to us, probably does come to many of us, in a demi-monde of our own. It might come, in that case, in the cliched form of a beloved parent or other relative. Or, angels. Or, depending on your inner compass, a demon from the depths of your own hell. Me, I’m hoping for a slow stroll into Arcadian fields where, bounding toward me, are all the dogs I’ve ever loved.
Right Now
Summer Most Heat Moon
My favorite subscription e-mail is brain pickings. The creator and writer, Maria Popova,
generates it through intense reading and intelligent choice of materials. Last year she wrote an essay outlining 7 things she’s learned in the 7 years of writing brain pickings. You can find the whole essay on her website, but I wanted to focus on one in particular because it reminds me of a lesson I’m learning from my friend, Tom Crane.
Being present, how he shows up in the moment, from moment to moment, is his top priority. I don’t know whether he would counterpoise it to productivity as Popova does here, but his business success in forensic engineering certainly suggests he’s no stranger to productivity. He is clear that he does not want to be measured by his efficiency, earnings or his ability to do this or that. Which is saying something since his company is very well-regarded, growing and prosperous.
Here’s Popova:
- Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshiping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
And a bit more from an interview with a talented writer/observer:
“I think productivity, as we define it, is flawed to begin with, because it equates a process with a product. So, our purpose is to produce — as opposed to, our purpose is to understand and have the byproduct of that understanding be the “product.” For me, I read, and I hunger to know… I record, around that, my experience of understanding the world and understanding what it means to live a good life, to live a full life. Anything that I write is a byproduct of that — but that’s not the objective. So, even if it may have the appearance of “producing” something on a regular basis, it’s really about taking in, and what I put out is just … the byproduct.”
The moment and our questing in that moment for connection, for understanding, for clear seeing is all we have. Ever. Placing the moment and our immersion in it first swings us out of the past or the future, if we’re tempted to sojourn there, and back to the now.
I like Tom’s insistence on showing up and Popova’s emphasis on understanding as our purpose, and productivity as a byproduct of that process. When at a farmer’s market, it would be understandable to see the fruits and vegetables as a product of gardening, but in fact they are the byproduct of a person in love with the soil, with plants, with the changing seasons and the interplay of wind and rain and sun.
The main dilemmas of our current approach to agriculture can be tied to productivity oriented thinking. This way sees the fruits and the vegetables and the grains and the meats and dairy as the product of farming rather than its byproduct. What I mean is this, when we love the world in which we live, when we treat it with care and thoughtfulness, when we understand our needs and its needs, the world will produce what is necessary for our existence. That’s been the successful ongoing contract between living beings and the natural world of which they are apart since the first one-celled organism began to wiggle and move. It is no different today.
That’s what I understand right now.
Summer Solstice 2014
Summer Solstice Summer Moon
At 5:51 am the sun reached its full height in the sky, full, that is, for the 45th latitude, 69 degrees above the horizon. That means more solar energy per square foot on the ground and rising temperatures to follow in July and August. It also means the rain soaked plants here in Minnesota will finally begin to get the attention they need to grow tall and produce big fruit. Yes, today is the summer solstice.
This day, like the winter solstice, is an ancient holiday, born of fear and hope, awe and wonder, the basic ingredients, according to Rudolf Otto, of the holy. At the summer solstice the hope was for warmth to heal bones chilled by winter’s cold and sunlight to ensure a good harvest, whether food was gathered or grown. The fear, the opposite of that at the winter solstice when many feared the sun might never return, leaving the world to freeze, with food gone, was that the sun would come too close, stay high too long and burn the earth, scorch it with an intensity neither plant nor animal could survive.
In this way these two markers of the solar system’s formative years, when the orbits of the planets stabilized around their mother and father, Sol, could be seen as an early form of output produced by a very basic, but nonetheless real, computer, movement in the heavens. As this difference engine brought new information into the night sky, humans and other animals, too, sighted it and changed their lives according to its data.
If the holidays of Beltane and Samhain mark the human focused seasons, the growing 
season and the harvest season followed by the long fallow time, then the solstices mark the astronomical seasons, the season of heat and the season of cold. Together these four constitute the liturgical calendar of an earthly religion, one which honors the earth and its treasures, and a solar religion, one which honors the nuclear fusion roaring in the furnace of our star, a basic source of energy which makes the earth’s treasures accessible to our bodies.
The calendar shown here hangs on my wall, the solstices made evident by the yellow yolk displaying the hours of sunlight on a given day. The point where the yolk lies closest to the inner circle is today, the summer solstice, and the one furthest away, its polar opposite, near the top, the winter solstice.
This is a day to celebrate the majesty and wonder of photosynthesis, that essential transubstantiation which converts the love of the sun into foods that our bodies can consume. When you look outside today and see green, the color not absorbed by plant leaves and so left over for our eyes as a signal of the miracle, bless them. Bless the leaves and their photosynthetic work, bless the sun which powers it and the plants themselves which mediate between that work and our life. Their work is the sine qua non of our existence. And worthy of our thanks and our praise.
Light’s Victory, Dark’s Begun
Beltane Summer Moon
We’re close to the Summer Solstice. Those crazy Scandinavians are getting ready to get naked and dance around bonfires. I figure it’s all those long cold dark days in winter. I wouldn’t want to try it here. Imagine all those mosquitoes biting you in places no mosquito had ever found on you before. Still. I admire the abandon, the ecstasy these rites release. Dancing sky clad (as the Wiccans have it) honors the bond between earth and fire, person and sun, light and dark.
The Solstice celebration is an astronomical holiday, not one legislated in the halls of Congress or Parliament or the Diet, nor is it a day celebrated solely for a religious or cultural reason. No, it marks an actual celestial event, one with consequences here on earth. Since the Solstice marks the moment when the sun is at its highest (69 degrees here) and therefore pouring down more energy on a given square yard of earth than at any other time, this is the moment of greatest solar strength throughout the year. Due to a lag in warming, June is the coolest of the summer months, but the increased solar energy will begin to demonstrate itself in July and early August.
I’ll comment more on the Solstice on Saturday, but here I want to note my contrary reaction to it. The signal moment of the Solstice for me is the beginning of the sun’s decline in height, heading toward its nadir on December 21st. Just as the Winter Solstice can be seen as the moment when the light begins to return after long months of increasing dark, so the Summer Solstice can be seen as the moment darkness begins to return after long months of increasing light.
If you’re a child of the dark half of the year, finding the cold and solitude of the winter months, especially on that sacred night, the Winter Solstice, inviting and nourishing to your soul, then you might join me in rejoicing at its return.
Between
Beltane Summer Moon
Janus. The two faced god, one face looking to the past, the other toward the future. Hence, January. “…the god of beginnings and transitions,[1] and thereby of gates, doors, passages, endings and time.” Wiki The door to Janus’ temple stood open during war and closed to indicate peace.
Got to thinking about Janus this morning in light of Bill Schmidt’s comment about liminal spaces. Janus is presented as the god of liminality, of the time between war and peace, beginning and ending, inside and outside. But. As I thought about the image of Janus, he looks back into the past where lie regrets and failures and loss. At the same time he looks into the future where there is anxiety and hope and maybe despair. The one thing he is not is the god of liminal spaces. No, he’s the god of regret and worry. That thing that he cannot do is see the present, be in the now, for he is eternally fixated on the flow of time past or the onrush of time future.
More. As Bill suggested, to live is to be in liminality, between life and death, yesterday and tomorrow, this project and the next one. We can define, interestingly, liminality as the now since the now we inhabit has a position after a moment and before the next one.
The Celts reserved a special place for the liminal, seeing it as a magical time. So Celtic magic often happened at dawn or as evening fell. But in the understanding I’m presenting we can work our magic in the liminal space we inhabit. Right now. This is not an idle metaphor, but an expression of the magical reality of the now, of inhabiting liminal space always.
Whatever it is, we can bear it for this moment. At least for this moment. We may not have been able to bear it a moment ago and we don’t know whether we will be able to bear it in moment, but, right now, in this fleeting doorway where we stand poised between then and the future, right now, we can marshal our resources and get through the moment. With practice our capacity to live in this space between becomes usual, ordinary and we know in our body that regret is gone, in the past, and that anxiety is of the future, not yet.
As Stewart Brand puts it so nicely, we live in the long now.
Nothing Alien To This Neighborhood
Beltane Summer Moon
We have had rain. And then some. And will get still more. The Great Anoka Sand Plain soaks it up and funnels it on down to the aquifers below our land, recharging them, then putting more flow into the streams like Rum River and the lakes like Round Lake.
The Summer Moon watches it all, as it has watched all since it split away from its partner the earth. Like the split aparts of Plato’s lovers the earth and the moon have continued together locked in a long term relationship, a dance in the coldness of space. The moon is our seer, an audience for all that we do, we creatures and rocks and clouds and waters of this spinning planet.
The whole solar system is a dynamic ballet. The sun’s selfless and profligate dispersal of energy feeds those of us closest while it’s gravitational pull keeps even those outer planets in our company.
And we humans, we think of ourselves as different from all this, unique, special but look at us from a solar perspective. We’re the deer and the whale, the paramecium and the volcano, the mammoth and the brontosaur. We are nothing more-and nothing less-than parts of this planet we ride. Yes, parts come alive, come animate, even come conscious, but we are creatures of this earth nonetheless and in the most literal sense and we are given energy in the same way all our solar system is given energy. By hydrogen fusion in the nuclear furnaces of the sun.
Terence, Roy Wolf reminded us at sheepshead last Thursday, said, “Nothing human is alien to me.” I’ll paraphrase: “Nothing human is alien to our sun’s neighborhood.”
He did that on purpose
Beltane Summer Moon
Another word for your third phase consideration: purpose. People who have purpose do much better than those who don’t, especially in the third phase and in several senses.
“It’s a very robust predictor of health and wellness in old age,” said Patricia Boyle, a neuropsychologist at the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center in Chicago. NYT, Living on Purpose.
Lower rates of Alzheimer’s and mild cognitive impairment (by significant amounts, JAMA article) as well as lower rates of mortality were noticed in people with high purpose scores. Too, the protective powers of purpose seem unrelated to age. (SAGE publication on Purpose and Mortality.)
Purpose covers a wide range of matters. I looked it up in my favorite, the OED. Here’s a germane definition or two: 1. That which one sets before oneself as a thing to be obtained or done; the object which one has in view. And 3. The object for which anything is done or made, or for which it exists; the result or effect intended or sought; end, aim
When this article crossed my horizon, Frank Broderick and his mitzvahs came to mind. 81 years old, bad hip pain from lower back, Frank braved the surgery at some risk so he could keep on helping people. “I’d rather wear out than rust out.”
Among certain folks helping people defines life’s purpose. And it certainly can, Frank being a strong example of the type. But helping others is far from the only purpose that can invigorate the third phase. A friend makes art. They are books, visual memoirs. I don’t know if he would define them as a purpose for his life, but they seem to be. Another friend has built a company well-known for excellence. The work no longer stimulates him (and hasn’t for a long time), but helping the company make a graceful transition to a time after his leadership, that does. That’s a clear purpose. Another has organized a group to focus on maintaining a healthy sea shore in Maine. Yet another freely shares his expertise with the computer, with building websites while another continues a life-long passion for drumming. If I understand this literature correctly, each of these have a real and solid guard against the onset of dementia and the likelihood of a longer life.
Made me wonder about myself. What is my purpose? Well, you’re reading part of it. Yes, the written trail I’m leaving behind is part of what gets me up in the morning. So does working with the land and with plants. Working for a sustainable human path on this planet. Being a good husband, father, grandparent, friend. A reliable partner for the animals in my life. There’s that Latin work I’m doing, too. Art and art history are a passion. Novels, too. So, I feel like I have a reasonable seawall against dementia and at least a shot at a longer life. And that’s on purpose.
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Climate
Beltane Emergence Moon
A word about religious language. Though rooted in a metaphysics with which I no longer agree, much of the language developed by Christian theologians has earthly application.
Here are some examples. Atonement describes the process of reconciliation between one estranged and the one from whom they are estranged. Atonement is just what we need for a species estranged from its home, no longer aware of the rich and intimate love only footsteps away from most doors.
(Antonio Palomino. Saint Michael Vanquishing the Devil, 1700-14)
It is, I suppose you could say, the story of the prodigal son, the wastrel who fled parental care and set out wandering far from home. Only atonement, the return of the prodigal to his home, can overcome the estrangement.
But, before atonement comes repentance. That is, the estranged must come awake to the hamartia* that creates their current condition. Most of us know only vaguely (we see through a glass darkly) of our implication in the reduction in Arctic sea ice, the acidification of the oceans, the gradual warming of the temperate latitudes. We are even mostly ignorant of the web of decisions we make daily to draw more oil from the sands of Arabia or the fracking fields of North Dakotas, decisions that also push the coal trains out of the Powder River Coal Fields in Wyoming, snaking like a plague along our nations railroads.
(Peasant family returns home paint by the Belgian artist Eugène Laermans (1864-1940) – Boekarest:National Museum of Art of Romania (Romania)
Hamartia, in its classical understanding, results in tragedy. It is often related to hubris, that overweening pride that causes blindness. There is little doubt that our estrangement from mother earth is reinforced by our hubris and that the result of that hubris is humanity’s fatal flaw. The end will be not a triumphant Christ hurling sinners into hell but the sinners themselves creating hell above ground as temperatures and sea levels and extreme weather events rise.
The Great Work for our generation, as Thomas Berry describes it, is to create a sustainable path for humans on this planet. In religious language this means we must guide each other back home, to a home where we will be received by a loving mother and father (the earth and the sun). We prodigals must prostrate ourselves before our parents and end our estrangement. And, of course, the curious, paradoxical truth is that in doing so we will save ourselves, not the planet.
*Hamartia is a concept used by Aristotle to describe tragedy. Hamartia leads to the fall of a noble man caused by some excess or mistake in behavior, not because of a willful violation of the gods’ laws. Hamartia is related to hubris, which was also more an action than attitude.
Taking the Past to Anchor the Present
Beltane Emergence Moon
Ah, an irony. Bringing myself into the now is as simple as clicking on Perseus, opening up Book I of the Metamorphoses and starting to translate. There is no room for the past or the future (except of course the reality of the past present in Ovid’s Latin, thus the irony) when I have to consider the muddy earth, heated by the sun in the high heavens, bringing forth countless forms, some from before the flood, but also some new monsters. This is ancient science which understand the moist earth as a creative force.
(Eugene Delacroix, Apollos slays the python, 1851, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France)
As long I stay with the act of translation, I’m in the moment. That tether, established by the hour or so spent with four verses, continues to anchor me even after I’m done.
Now, considering the move is not enough to draw me away from the present once my tether has been fixed. In the moment I can identify tasks related to the move that I can handle now. And do them with no propulsion into the future. Ah.