Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Weather +Climate

Fencing Off Spring

April 19, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring (Ostara) Bee Hiving Moon

Friend Bill Schmidt found a helpful exposition on Ostara, an early fertility goddess, and her regular appearance in Christian households (among others) at this time of year. Here’s a link to this short, but well-researched piece. After reading it, an odd thought occurred to me, perhaps because I also read this NYT piece this morning: Saving Minds, Along With Souls.

The odd thought is this. The church captured the renewal and invigorating power of spring as a metaphor for the resurrection, then demonized (quite literally) and punished pagan observances of the season, like those related in the linked piece Bill found. The effect was to put a theological fence around the power of spring in Western culture, confining it within the garden of Christian orthodoxy.

By making church membership and belief a prerequisite for experience its power-through the Easter holiday-the natural celebration of a Great Wheel holiday, a real and joyous one, became dangerous, sanctioned as blasphemy. The church accomplished this in fact through the burning of witches and the intentional extinguishing of earth focused traditions wherever it spread its missionary power. It accomplished it in theory through making spring only a metaphor for the resurrection.

Enough of that. A temperate latitude Spring is a wonder, a life renewing, hopeful time when the earth shows that life comes again, and triumphs over the fallow time. And more. In doing so it assures life for the human race and all the animal kingdom that absolutely depends on its gentle, but unyielding power. It is an animal’s birthright to gambol when the grass greens and the trees leave out. The joy is innate.

Business cycles come and go. History rises and falls. Nations become great and then wither. Religions prosper and die away. Note this, though. If even one spring failed to happen, it would cause a worldwide catastrophe more damaging than the failure of any of these. If two springs failed to happen in a row, there would be no need for business cycles or nations and history would record a near apocalypse. Three springs? Well, just imagine.

(A Vision of Spring – Thomas Millie Dow)

So give me a bunny rabbit and some colored eggs. Let’s take off our shoes and walk barefoot on the soil as it warms the seeds. I’ll dance with you as the shoots come up and starvation is banished once again.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

What Do You Choose?

April 13, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Despair. It’s easy to find among those who follow climate science and climate change. Or, immigration. Or, poverty. Or, war. Or, availability of medical services in the U.S. even with Obamacare. Or, agriculture as usual. And no wonder.

Climate science shows that we have 3.6 degrees of warming baked-in with the current carbon dioxide load in the atmosphere and that if things don’t change drastically by 2050 that number could increase between 2 and 6 times, or just to be brutal, between 7.2 degrees and 21.6 degrees! And, current measurement shows co2 emissions increasing, not decreasing.

That’s due in part to fighting poverty in the world’s two largest countries, India and China. Their growing economies have coal burning or wood burning energy use at their heart, plus as their middle-classes grow they all want cars.

The American way of agriculture, so productive and revered throughout the world, depends on two unsustainable practices: the constant injection of chemicals and herbicides into and onto depleted soil and irrigation using aquifers with very slow recharge rates.

You understand these issues, I’m sure you do, and you probably find them as far from solution as I do. So why don’t we just go on that final road trip? In an electric car of course.

We won’t go on that final road trip because the last thing to escape Pandora’s box was hope. And, yes, hope is an anodyne or can be, I know that. But the long read of history suggests it is the doomsayers whose predictions prove overblown. On our way in to see Mountaintop yesterday we drove past the local 7th Day Adventist church. In their denominational history is an American story of the end predicted, and re-predicted, then re-predicted again. Here’s a line from the Wikipedia piece on Millerism: “October 22, 1844, the day Jesus was expected to return, ended like any other day ^[28] to the disappointment of the Millerites. Both Millerite leaders and followers were left generally bewildered and disillusioned.”

Malthusian estimates of the final carrying capacity of the earth have been overturned time and time again. Even the mad doctrine of mutually assured destruction lived up to its policy promise rather than its often contemplated nuclear holocaust. The War to End All Wars. Well, we know how that turned out.

We’re very good at despair because we project potential disastrous scenarios into the future as if the most extreme occurrences are the most likely. In fact, the opposite is true. The most extreme occurrences are just that, most extreme. They are the black swans of human culture. Yes, black swans happen, as the book of the same name shows, but they are rarely the black swans we have predicted.

Who, for example, would have predicted that one man, Thomas Midgley, would produce two chemicals that threatened millions of people, unintentionally? Midgley is the man responsible for lead in gasoline as a successful anti-knock agent. He also invented Freon, non-toxic itself, but in combination with chemicals in the upper atmosphere it creates an ozone eater. It produced the well-known ozone hole. BTW: “He contracted polio when he was 51. As he lost the use of his legs, he invented a harness to get himself out of bed. On Nov. 2, 1944, he tangled in the gadget. It strangled him.” Engines of Our Ingenuity, #684.

Our current Thomas Midgley is laboring away somewhere right now, solving some problem with a lethal solution. Only he or she doesn’t know it.

But back to despair. It is the emotional equivalent of Midgley’s harness. It begins as an assessment of possibilities, moves to an acceptance of a certain gloomy situation, and ends as a tangle in which some of us, like Midgley, end up strangled.

(Pandora, Rossetti)

Here is the nub of hope, anodyne or not. What is most disastrous has not happened. Today we can choose to live differently, live toward the possible solution rather than wrap ourselves in seemingly inevitable defeat. No amount of despair will move us toward a better tomorrow. Just a bit of hope can. This is not pollyanna thinking, it recognizes life has crushing defeats and sorrows. The question is one of choice. Do you choose to live toward the bleakness or toward the sunrise. As for me, I’m turning toward the east.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden

A Wound

April 9, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

There. Got out and did my first garden task of the new season. Cut down all the raspberry canes. That means no harvest mid-summer, but a more bountiful one in the early fall. Getting out there, just standing in the garden, healed a part of me that gets wounded in early winter. It’s the part of me that’s glad the garden is done for the season.

And that’s true. I am glad when the last berry is frozen and the last tomato is canned. At the same time the finish of the garden closes up a part of my soul, starves it for nourishment and that becomes a wound, often unnoticed until its healing can be accomplished. With the least good garden pruners, an early brand purchased before I discovered Felco, I cut into the canes, cut them all down to the ground. Now that wound has suddenly healed and I am again the Greenman.

Next I’ll plant those cool season crops before we leave for Denver.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Weather +Climate

Solar Lighting

April 7, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

The days are getting longer. The large calendar I have with the yellow egg-yolk like mass in the center and the months around it in a circle grows closer to the calendar’s inner circle day-by-day. The yellow mass represents hours of sunlight, thicker and closer to the calendar as we grow close to the summer solstice, then gently beginning to pull away until a large gap exists by December 21st, the winter solstice. It’s a clever way to visualize a prime seasonal driver, hours of sunlight per day.

My order for nitrogen is on the way and I’m hoping the soil will at least be workable enough to plant the cool season crops before we leave for Denver. Kate and I look forward to the gardening time, though we’re also glad for the break during the winter.

I moved further into Book I of the Metamorphoses today. Deucalion, the son of Epithemus, the sole male survivor of the deluge, says, “Earth is the great mother (and)…the bones in the earth’s body are stones.” He and Pyrrha, daughter of Prometheus, and the sole remaining female after the flood, will repopulate the earth by throwing stones behind themselves as they walk and the stones will become humans.

[Deucalion and Pyrrha Repeople the World by Throwing Stones Behind Them, c.1636 (oil on canvas) by Rubens, Peter Paul (1577-1640)]

Her bones are still turning into people today.

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

A Firefly Lit Lane

April 6, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Down the well this morning, tapping into the underground stream. Still searching for an image. Something to coalesce the third lifetime, the third phase of this body/mind’s adventure here on earth.

One came to me. Suddenly. But it feels apt. I’ll have to let it set for awhile. Work with it itself in the imagery extension section of the workbook, but it feels pretty good.

The image is of a lane headed back into a woods where the lane continues but with tree branches creating a leafy roof over it. The time is late twilight, the season late summer. The air is cool but humid. And the lane, where it enters the woods, is lit by thousands of fireflies, blinking on and off, shifting locations, providing a weak but real luminescence so I can follow the path into the woods. Because the fireflies are spread out along the path’s length, they also give the lane a feel of depth, as if it proceeds quite a long way into the woods.

This is not a mind birthed image, but a memory. I saw this lane and these fireflies several years ago during a trip to New Harmony, Indiana. I’ve written here about New Harmony before, but just as a reminder, it was founded by the Rappites who created a very successful religious community there in the mid-19th century. Much of New Harmony’s built environment has its roots it that era.

When they moved to Old Economy Village in Pennsylvania, the Welsh industrialist Robert Owen bought the whole town for his utopian community, a quasi-socialist endeavor. He brought with him from Britain a number of scientists and engineers committed to his scheme on a ship dubbed the Boatload of Knowledge. The community didn’t last long, but the U.S. Geological Survey among other things grew out of the efforts of the people who came to New Harmony.

Since that time, New Harmony has continued to have a religious and intellectual bent. In fact, as I looked down the lane into the firefly lit woods, on my left was an open air Episcopal Church designed by famed architect, Philip Johnson and on my right was a small garden marked by tiny drumlins planted with firs and dotted with boulders carved with quotes by Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian, whose tomb lies there, too, in Paul Tillich Park.

In fact, this aerial photograph shows the spot where I stood between the open air church on the left and Paul Tillich Park on the right, looking north down the lane into what at night was a tree lined bower over an ancientrail leading into an infinite distance. This feels like a perfect third phase image.

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

Increase the Flow of the Water

April 2, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

A major reason for doing the Intensive Journal Workshop was to restart my meditative practice and I’ve done that, now meditating in the morning and before bed. In its emphasis on integrating inner and outer work the journal itself is a spiritual method fit for a humanist to practice though it is agnostic in its essence.

In the workshops I’ve attended many attendees have been Catholic and I can see why. This is a way that puts a premium on regular introspection and openness to the movement of the underground stream. And, it insists on bringing that work into daily life. This would feel familiar to someone who knows the monastic spiritualities.

It also has a distinctively Quaker feel with its emphasis on being led by the inner life (what Quaker’s call the inner light) and working in silence. Though I never became a Quaker I’ve always felt close to their way.

Perhaps the point of closest connection between my own philosophical position and Progoff’s comes through Lao Tse. A parable Progoff often uses sounds Taoist to me. When we come to an obstacle, imagine a large boulder, in the stream of our life, we have several options. We can try to go around it. We can climb out of the stream and attempt a portage. We can probe for a way under the obstacle. Or, we can remain stuck behind it.

Progoff offers an unusual strategy. Increase the flow of water in the stream. Then, we can simply ride over the rock, carried by the extra water. How do we do this in our life? By identifying the things that are working and emphasizing them. As we increase our activity in the things that are working, we increase the positive flow in our life and any obstacles diminish, in fact, we may be able to float right over them.

Progoff offers this approach as an alternative to the problem oriented strategy of most therapy. I like this idea, which is essentially the goal of Jungian analysis, too. In my troubled late twenties and early thirties, I sought therapy, including doing outpatient alcohol treatment through Hazelden. I went through a number of therapists, all well-intentioned, kind and compassionate, but each focused on my problems. As I focused on the problems in therapy, then tried to work out the solutions in my life, it seemed my whole life was problematic.

It wasn’t until I found John Desteian and his Jungian approach that I began to appreciate my virtues. Though I continued to grapple with anxiety and depression, I dealt with them as a whole person experiencing debilitating symptoms, rather than as a “depressed person” or an “anxious person.” This insight, which came over years, allowed me to increase the flow of water in my stream so I could metaphorically rise above them. That is, I continue to experience melancholy and anxiety, but as episodes in a full life, rather than as definitive of my life.

The Progoff work underscores and reinforces this understanding.

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Translating Metamorphoses, Travel, Writing

What Is My Life Reaching For?

April 1, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

On the last afternoon of the Intensive Journal Workshop we had an exercise focused on what our life is reaching for. In the first morning we had defined the current period of our life: in my case the time after Kate’s retirement. By the last afternoon we had worked ourselves into the next period of our lives. Since we were newly in this next period, this exercise asked us to feel, below the conscious level, where our lives wanted to go.

Here is my sense of what my life is reaching for in this next period:

1. a bountiful, sustainable nutrient dense harvest of fruit and vegetables.

2. a way to use the Great Wheel website to advance the Great Work through literature, science and political activism.

3. a third phase (third lifetime) writing portfolio with short story writing credits as a floor for selling novels.

4. a schedule for translating and commenting on at least several books of the Metamorphoses

5. still more of a stable, wonderful marriage, regular visits and communication with kids and grandkids and friends.

6. more mutual travel opportunities with Kate.

As I work in the inner movement of my life, I can feel a quieting, a confidence that who I am and what I do is enough-no matter the outcomes. This feeling has grown stronger since Kate retired and continues to strengthen with time.

In my third lifetime I will be calm, steady, productive.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Retirement, Third Phase

Three Lifetimes: What to Do?

April 1, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

The process of reintegration begins now. These intensive journal workshops mark an end to one period of life and the beginning of another. That’s by design. The period I was in when I got to Tucson began when Kate retired, when I left Tucson I had begun a new period, her retirement in the past, and what’s in the present and future is life in the third phase for both of us, together.

BTW: A big aha on the idea of the third phase which came while listening to a cd by Ira Progoff (Intensive Journal creator) speaking about the process of the journal’s development. He noted that in society’s not all that long ago, the average lifespan was thirty to forty years. At some point in that life a death/rebirth ritual would occur and the initiate would emerge an adult member of the society with a particular role to fill.

In contemporary civilization two realities make that clear process difficult, not impossible, but difficult. The first is the secular nature of society. We have stripped away the culturally specific religious practices by uprooting ourselves from the context in which those practices had unquestioned authenticity. So the ritual elements of traditional culture simply has no weight in the modern psyche.

The second reality is the one that directly bears on the third phase. Progoff notes that with modern life spans an individual might live two or three of the lifetimes available to a member of a traditional society. Each full lifetime requires a death/rebirth ritual to adjust/reconfigure the image the self carries as its primary identity. We’ve created two fundamental images for the first two phases: student and worker/parent. We have no fundamental image for the third phase, or, in Progoff’s analysis, our third lifetime.

One of the key tasks in the intensive journal workshop itself is to come up with an image for the next phase of your life. I’m not sure I have it yet, though the Greenman has come to me.

The Celtic triskele (see above) can serve as symbol for this tri-fold life that each of us now is heir to. The bottom two spirals are the beginning pair: student and worker/parent. The third life, the third phase, sits atop the first two, growing out of them, but beyond them.

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Third Phase

Gee. That’s Interesting. Watch Out.

March 29, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Hare Moon

Denver. Realized I never got back here on the big dream I had. After working with it in a couple of different ways, here’s the nub of what I got: In retreating, I advance. The dream called me to consider the time just before my decision to re-enter the ministry with the UU’s.

It was, in many ways, a poor decision and, as I considered it over the retreat, probably caused me to lose almost a decade by turning my focus away from my real work: writing, gardening, politics, home life.

It shared a characteristic with my original decision to go into the ministry, also a poor one. My fascination with the sophisticated and intricate intellectual disciplines of first the Christian church (especially biblical study) and then the emerging movement of liberal religion in the United States entranced me. I confused my very real intellectual excitement with vocation. The ministry was not the vocation; the intellectual engagement was.

What this means is that I have to guard myself well when I get intellectually stimulated. A tendency, no, my pattern, is to seek out institutions that utilize that discipline and try to join them.

Instead, when I retreat from institutional involvement, I advance because I do my own work, on my own time and in my own way. Thus, leaving the ministry let me begin this focus on writing. Then, leaving Unity and giving up the UU ministry except for the occasional preaching assignment let me get started again on the writing.

But, I picked up the Sierra Club and the MIA. Why? Because both areas fully engage my intellectual interest. My passion for the Great Work on the one hand and beauty on the other pushed me into the institutional involvement.

Of course, I’m not saying these were wasted years. Any of them. I did real work, engaged difficult political, religious, organizational and educational challenges. However, what I am saying is that following my intellect toward institutional engagement has been a mistake. One I no longer have to continue.

Now, in the third phase, I have fully retreated to home and study, to self-directed work. So, I have advanced at last.

This is why, in part at least, this retreat basically affirmed what I’m already doing. It has taken me 40 plus years to learn this lesson. About time, I’d say.

The third phase, then, will be the first period of my life when I will engage life fully as I am. This retreat marked the end of a transition period that began roughly when Kate retired and which is now over.

Now we can live this new life, Kate as earth mother and quilter, me as, well, I don’t have the image yet, but I’m searching for it.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Travel

Land of Enchantment

March 28, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Hare Moon

Santa Fe. The adobe here catches the eyes, then the scent of pinyon smoke and the art galleries. Also, the number of thin gray-haired citizens moving around with purpose, as if channeling Georgia O’Keefe. It’s easy to imagine a chunk of this Latin influenced culture breaking off and taking root in other places. An emphasis on beauty, use of native products and Latin American diffusion carried by sophisticated Latinos, artists, writers and outdoor enthusiasts. Maybe as Chaco Canyon was to the pueblo cultures of the 850-1150 period.

By this time in the trip the Garmin, once unwelcome, has made me her bitch. I hang on her every word, follow her exactly. I think the voice model they hired might have been a dominatrix at some point. It does take away the anxiety of navigating, especially in cities and off the main highway systems. I like that.

When I drove from Holbrook to Gallup at 4 am yesterday, a sickle moon hung in the sky with Venus about 4 degrees away in line with the bottom point of the sickle. It is an image that I will work with in the journal. The pueblo people emulate the clouds, building up communities, then dissipating and moving on. This moon hung in a clear sky and it was not difficult at all to stand with the pueblo people and the dine of the last thousand plus years and see with them the blessing. The clouds created by the heat of the day would extend this beauty into the blue reaches of a sunlit sky.

Our kiva sees the same moon and planet, sees clouds in the day and the procession of stars at night. Yes, our seasons are different, but plants grow in both our kivas and so do animals. We are different, yet we are the same.