Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel

Harvest

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Lughnasa                                                                   Moon of the First Harvests

As we settle in to the season of Lughnasa, we can look back over our lives and anticipate the harvest festivals current and those to come.  They’re a time to consider the notion of harvest, of a growing season completed and the crop taken in.  What in your life have you been nurturing, feeding, weeding, making sure it gets sun and water and space? Is it time now to start picking the fruit?  Worth considering.

As is, too, the notion of what you may plant for the next growing season.  More time for travel?  More reading in a certain area?  More time with family or a particular person or a particular set of people?  More time devoted to your health whether exercise, diet or meditation?

Whatever your crop you can take a cue from mother earth.  What does your crop need to flourish?  What will give it a good start?  What kind of nourishment will it need along the way to get its roots and leaves in place?  How much space (time) does your crop need, apart from others?

Maybe next Lughnasa or as soon as Mabon (Fall Equinox) or Samhain (Summer’s End) you’ll have some fruit ready to pick.  If you do, celebrate it.  Have a bonfire.  Buy yourself or cook yourself a special meal.  Go on that trip.  Harvest time is festive.

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Friends, Our Land and Home

Kona

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Summer                                                                  Moon of the First Harvests

Kona died this morning.  Both Kate and I spent time with her just before she died.  She was alert and responsive to the end.  She died knowing we loved her and in the crate she knew as her safe place.

(Kona)

We cried, both of us.  Yes, in spite of an end obvious long ago, the actual loss still opens a chasm between the living dog and the dead one.  That chasm represents the never will agains.  And those made me cry.  I would never again feel her nuzzle into my hand.  Never again see her smile.  Never again see her run the trails in our woods.

Her corpse no longer retained her; it was a symbol now, not a reality.  This is a wonder to me.  When I spoke with her about a half hour before she died, she looked at me, put her nose in my palm, caressed me with her muzzle.  Kona was 100% there.  Then, she was gone.  The light left her eyes and her body no longer moved.

The wonder is this, that life has a magic about it, seen most clearly after it is lost.  That which was Kona was there, then not.  Yes, her memories live on, that’s true.  But Kona does not.  The personality, the somewhat aloof I’m living life as I intend to personality of the sighthound, has vanished.  Just like that.

(Rigel, Gertie, Kona)

Life is a miracle, ordinary in its profusion and ordinary as long it exists, yet when it has gone, then we know.  So, each death gives us a moment to reflect on the precious gift we have.  The one carrying us forward into tomorrow.  A gift others give to us, too.  Each death is an opportunity to affirm and celebrate life and living.

Kona’s father was a whippet champion named Drum.  When we picked up Hilo and Kona from the breeder, the puppies and the parents were watching Animal Planet.  We brought them home and they began a series of escapes from the property, going under the chain link fence in pursuit of prey or delight, often both.

We held them on our laps when they were young.  Hilo would squirm, sit up, stretch, jump down.  Kona, the much larger of the two, would lie quietly, happy to be there.  

In her early days Kona was a predator.  I remember one day Kona came up on the deck, dropped something there, then ran back out into the woods.  The something was the still warm and clear eyed head of an adult rabbit.  Why she brought it to the deck I don’t know.   Over a long period Kona would kill rabbits and we would pick up the dead rabbits, put them in a plastic bag and dispose of them.  This never deterred Kona.  She just kept at it.

Hilo died three years ago of kidney failure and was never much of a hunter.  She liked to be with her people.  Kona kept to her self, finding places to sit nearby, sometimes with us, often not.  She kept her own counsel and determined what her day would be like, pretty much independent of us.

After her death this morning, I went out into the garden and sat on one of the raised beds.  Gardens heal.  Surrounded by life and life producing food, the cycle of life was concrete.  Kona fit into this cycle.   It helped me remember that at some point the light in my eyes will go out, too.  And, more.  That will be fine, it will fit into this cycle.

(Vega and Kona)

Kona had privileges the other dogs didn’t.  She would go with me into the garden, mainly because we could count on her not to dig holes in the garden beds.  She would also be outside on our brick patio with us because we could count on her to stay around the house.

She has been part of our lives for 12 plus years, as real and regular a part of our lives as we are to each other.  True she was a dog, but as a companion and fellow traveler on this pilgrimage she was with us, part of our pack as we were part of hers.

We travel on now with one less pilgrim immediately in our presence, yet at the same time, the whole pack with us, all 17 dogs, two parents and two sons.  Amen.

 

 

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings

Primal

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Summer                                                                 Moon of the First Harvests

Kona lives though her mobility has been greatly diminished.  She is, however, alert and responsive.  We get down with her and talk to her on a regular basis, letting her know that we love her and are with her in this part of her journey, too.  It’s the light in her eyes, the Kona-ness of her presence in those eyes, I think, that forces me not to put it out.  At least that’s a big part of it.  Another part is not breaking trust.  She has trusted me to care for her all these years.  To care for her.  Not kill her.

If you differ with me on this, I understand.  I can see how caring might reach to euthanasia, the whole control around end of life debate has many testimonies to that effect, even in humans.  Why I feel so strongly on this is not clear.

It’s strength oddly enough reminds me of one other moment in my life, the one in which I knew I needed to be a parent.  It was a strong, primal feeling, dominant.  The need became overriding, pushing other concerns into the background.  It wasn’t compulsive, at least I don’t think it was, but it was so urgent.  The best word I can use to describe it is primal, that is, it came from a part of me so deep that it bypassed subconscious and conscious thought to arrive full borne in my psyche.

The same process has surfaced in me around euthanasia.  I have no reasons, no arguments, no explanations.  For me, it is forbidden.

Just to be clear, really really clear: there are no religious or political sentiments attached in either case.  This is something from the veldt or the cave.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

A Wabi-Sabi Soul

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Summer                                                                             Moon of the First Harvests

The first yellows and browns began to show up in the gardens a couple of weeks ago.  One dicentra has turned completely.  A few hemerocallis have yellowed leaves.  The process of maturation leads on past fruiting bodies to the dying away either of the whole plant, counting on seeds to carry its generations forward, or of its above ground components stalks and leaves after sufficient energy has made its way into the root or tuber or corm or bulb, sufficient energy to ensure a new beginning in the next growing season.

In this sense you could say humans are more like annuals.  We die away, leave the field entire and only our seed lives on.  There are though those artists, poets, painters, playwrights, architects, writers, composers, musicians, engineers who store energy in their works, works which often disappear for a season or a century or even a millennia only to be unearthed in some latter day renaissance (rebirth, after all).

Not sure what it says about me but my sentiment, my inner compass points toward fall and winter, toward the longer nights and the shorter days, toward the cold as opposed to the heat.  A part of me, then, a strong and dominant part, sees the yellows and the browns not as grim harbingers but as the colors of the inner season only weeks away.

I don’t have quite the patience right now to explain, but I believe I have a wabi-sabi soul, a soul made content by the imperfect, the accidental, the broken and repaired, the used, the thing made real by touch and wear.  Fall and winter are the wabi-sabi seasons.  Their return gives me joy.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Retirement, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Being Human

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Summer                                                             Moon of First Harvests

The morning after.  The Woolly feeling lingers here, a gentle mantle over the back, around the fire pit where we gathered.  A primary, perhaps the primary, purpose of the Woollies is to see and be seen.  No invisible men allowed.  We have bum knees, wonky shoulders, weak legs, poor eyes and sore backs.  These are acknowledged, not for sympathy, but for recognition that we are each the sore back, the poor eyes, the weak leg, the wonky shoulder, the bum knee.  And that we are none of us only or even mostly our ailments, more and mostly we are the ones who have spent this 25 year+ journey together, time that included wholeness, able-bodiedness and now includes physical decline.

We’re not exactly a support group.  We don’t try to fix each others problems (usually).  We do go in for empathy, but not too much because too much focuses the group on one while the whole has been and is the most important.  We’re not a group of friends, or, at least, not only a group of friends, rather we are fellow pilgrims, traveling our ancientrails in sight of each other, calling out from our journey and hearing the other call out from theirs.

Though our ancientrails intersected less in times past, as we move into third phase life they intersect more and more.  How to make this transition.  How to create a life anew when work is no longer the primary lodestar.  How to look death in the face, unafraid, even welcoming.  No, not suicidal welcoming, but unafraid of what is common, ordinary, part of the path.  We look at each others hearts, hear the pulse of each other’s blood.  This is what it means to be human.

 

Aging, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Memories, Our Land and Home, Third Phase

Home

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Summer                                                       Moon of the First Harvests

Home.  Back in the early 90’s when we lived on Edgcumbe Road in St. Paul, I felt a sense of homecoming when I crossed Ford Parkway.  I had crossed into home turf.  It’s taken a long while for a similar feeling to take hold here in Andover, but now, as I turn off Highway 10 onto Round Lake Boulevard, that sense of homecoming greets me.

Yes, it’s marked by Baker’s Square, Wendy’s, Conoco, Burger King and a Holiday station, but, they’re our franchises, there for our use.  The feeling gets even stronger going up Round Lake and begins to thicken at Round Lake itself where the water is on the left and the peat bog fields of Field’s Truck Farms are on the right.  Those fields are the remains of an old lake, eutrophied completely, a process that has advanced a good ways in Round Lake.

As I turn onto 153rd Ave NW, our property shows up about 1,000 feet in and I see the 6 foot chain link fence we had installed because Celt, our earliest Irish Wolfhound, climbed the four-foot fences to go greet passers-by on the street.  This particular fence was put in place after a derecho felled a large poplar and destroyed the one we had originally extended from four feet to six.  There is, too, the truck gate, 10 feet wide that we had installed because we wanted to get trucks from nurseries and our own trucks back onto our property.

The trees have grown up, grapevines have covered them, the prairie grass has morphed over time but has a pleasing current configuration.  On the six foot fence itself, the border of the prairie grass, grows our wild grapes.  Wild grapes that we pick in the fall for jams and jellies.

The driveway, the sloped driveway that creates its own stories in the winter, goes up to the three car garage that makes our house look as if we live as an adjunct to the garages.  On the right going up is a rusted and unused basketball hoop, an emblem, as at so many homes, of a boy, now gone.  In the garage itself we have a unique five stall dog feeding set up that we used when our pack was at its peak and we had five Irish Wolfhounds at once.

Do you see what I mean?  Home has an accretion of memories, memories attached to physical things like lakes and peat bogs, fences and basketball hoops.  This is not somebody else’s memories but our memories, our family’s memories.  It is those memories, those thick layers of past embraced constantly in the present, that make a home.

Inside the house are the same layers of memories, of guests and friends and immediate family, of dogs and workmen, nights and days, meals and passion.  It is the thickness, the particularity of it all, that makes this our home and not someone elses.  After 20 years, we have laid down many layers of smiles, tears, hard work and love.  That’s why this is home.

Faith and Spirituality, Health

Good Enough

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Summer                                                            First Harvest Moon

Last time the Woollies gathered at Woodfire Grill we got on the topic of Alzheimers.  Warren said many people, around two years in, gain a sense of peace about it.  “I don’t want to gain peace.” one of us said.  That interchange stayed with me, bouncing around, providing background when I read these two quotes recently.

The first one is from a blog I’ve referenced.  A link to it is on the right and in the quote. The second is from an NYT’s book review.

“In the last month or two, some of that special feeling—my ability to live in the present, my sense that my life is worthwhile even if I can’t accomplish that much, my sense of joy in living—has been diluted, and I’ve wondered why.  Had I slipped back into old patterns, lost the new sense of emotional richness?”   Watching the Lights Go Out  July 6, 2013

“Like Freud, Mr. Grosz is fond of literary allusions, and he’s nimble at excavating the psychological subtext of literary classics. He reads Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” as “a story about an extraordinary psychological transformation.” One of the lessons it teaches, he argues, is that “Scrooge can’t redo his past, nor can he be certain of the future. Waking on Christmas morning, thinking in a new way, he can change his present — change can only take place in the here and now.”   NYT book review of the Examined Life by Stephen Grosz

No, I’m not going to be here now.  Not that.  I’m sensing in these two quotes and in the conversation at the Woollies a profound realization, the one behind the Zen insistence on the now and, I think, these two observations as well.  It’s remarked on most clearly in the first quote.  “my sense…my life is worthwhile even if I can’t accomplish that much…”  There it is.  Right under our nose.

The key to inner peace is not so much living in the present, although that has obvious psychodynamic benefits, but in grasping our true place in the cosmos.  Our achievements do not define us.  Our capacity to do and act does not define us.  Our existence, our very ordinary existence, is sufficient.  Enough.  Adequate.  Good enough.  That’s what the author of the Watching the Lights Go Out discovers, that’s what Grosz suggests when in his reading of the Christmas Carol.  It was not Scrooge’s skills as a money lender and miser that he needed, but the simple acts of human kindness that he could engage in Christmas morning.  He only had to be Scrooge, not a role, bad or good.

And, in the end, if we get to this realization through Zen, knowing ourselves, psychoanalysis or Alzheimer’s, is the quality any different?

 

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Writing

Whole

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Summer                                                                   First Harvest Moon

Without the Latin I’ve had considerable time to focus on revising Missing.  I’m finding the rhythm of garden work and writing very satisfying.  I can work outside in the earlier morning, then revise until lunch, and pick up the revising again after lunch and until I work out.  This means a steady pace, one that leaves me feeling whole at the end of the day.

Feeling whole means that I’ve kept up with my commitments.

There’s a part of me that feels bad about letting the Latin lie, I’ve put so much energy into it up to now, but the feeling of wholeness I’m gaining suggests I had spread myself too thin.  It may be that I’ll work on the Latin only after garden work falls away sometime in September, then drop it again in May.  I like to adjust my life to the seasons and that would be another way to do it.

 

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld

Nature and Nurture

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Summer                                                                New (First Harvest) Moon

We just had a gully washer.  We called’em that back in Indiana though I didn’t know what
a gully was for a long time.  The rain was intense, coming down in sheets from a black sky.  Some thunder.  Looked like a hurricane.  Good for the crops.  We said that back in Indiana, too.

Kona, our oldest dog, now 12 years +, has begun a decline due to a cancer lodged in her right shoulder.  I looked outside today, watching the rain pound the orchard and our flower and vegetable gardens, and thought of the close bond between caring for animals and caring for plants.  They go together, and raising a family does, too.  Nurture is part of nature, not separate, as the false dichotomies of science and popular wisdom have it.

There is nature without nurture, but there is never nurture without nature.  And there is never good nurture that is not part of nature, that is, nurture that takes with total seriousness the lived way of another being and attempts to provide some guidance, some aid, some assistance so that that nature might be fulfilled.  At its best nurture leads the other to become the richest and most it can be on its own terms, that is, in its nature.

Kona, like all the sighthounds with whom we’ve shared our lives, has gone her own way, decided what suited her best, and she’s done it with our support:  annual physicals, regular medications, good food, shared naps and nights on the couch, a sister to grow up with (Hilo, who died three years ago) and other dogs to form a pack.  This is, or at least I like to think it is, nurture in support of nature.

When nurture opposes or distorts nature, then terrible things can result.  To stay in the dog world, look at Michael Vick and dog fighting.  In the human world think of the despair of all those students taught to the high stakes tests who fail.  Or, the soils burned and leached and flogged by agriculture methods that nurture only to destroy.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, GeekWorld, Our Land and Home, permaculture

Garden Diary: Beginning of the Soil Drenches and Foliar Sprays

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Summer                                                            New (First Harvest) Moon

When we installed the landscaping, we asked for low maintenance.  I still remember the skeptical look on Merle’s face.  “Well, I can make it lower maintenance, but there’s no such thing as no maintenance.”  In those first years I deadheaded, sprayed Miracle Gro, pruned the roses and planted a few bulbs.

Gradually, the land drew me in and I got more interested in perennials of all kinds bulbs, corms, tubers and root stock.  Fall became (and remains) a ritual of planting perennials, most often bulbs.  Fall finds me on a kneeler, making my prayer not to the Virgin Mary but to the decidedly unvirgin earth.  Receive these my gifts and nourish them.  And yes, I agree to help raise them.

Kate always planted a few vegetables but at some point we merged interests and expanded our vegetable garden.  That was when organic gardening, permaculture and now biodynamics began to interest us.  We futz around using some organic ideas like compost and integrated pest management, some permaculture design with plant guilds and productive spaces closest to the building that supports them and now some biodynamics (or whatever the right term is).

As I understand it, biodynamics works to produce the highest nutrient value in food by moving the soil towards sustainable fertility. This requires applications of various kinds of chemicals, yes, but in such a way as to increase the soil’s capacity to grow healthy, nutritious food and to do that in a way that maintains the soil’s fertility from year to year.

This is very different from modern ag which has a take it out and put it back approach to soil nutrients.  In that approach modern ag focuses on nutrients that produce crops good for harvest and the farmer and food company’s economics, not the end consumer’s dietary needs.  Biodynamics works at a subtler level, looking at the whole package of rare earths and other minerals necessary for healthy plants and the kind of soil conditions that optimize the plants capacity to access them.

Today I did a nutrient drench called Perk-Up.  A nutrient drench goes onto the soil and encourages optimal soil conditions, a large proportion is liquified fish oil and protein.  I also sprayed on the leaves and stalks of all the reproductively focused vegetables a product called brix blaster which encourages the plants to focus their energy on producing flowers and fruit.

The whole vegetable garden got Perk-up.  The reproductive vegetables in our garden are:  tomatillos, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, sugar snap peas, cucumbers and, for some reason, carrots plus all the fruits.  I only sprayed the vegetables since the strawberries have just finished bearing and I haven’t decided whether or not to spray the orchard this year.  Since I made up more than I needed, I also sprayed all the lilies which are heading into their prime blooming weeks just now, plus a few other miscellaneous flowers blooming or about to bloom.

Tomorrow I will spray another product that encourages vegetative growth on the appropriate vegetables:  kale, onions, chard, beets, garlic and leeks.

This year my overall goal has been to jump up a level in the production of vegetables, increasing both quantity and quality without increasing the area planted.  Next year I’ll continue what I already think is a successful program for them and expand to the fruits and, maybe, at least some of the flowers.

As I’ve said elsewhere, horticulture is a language and it takes time to learn.  The plants and the soil speak to me all the time.  I’ve had to immerse myself in a lot of different disciplines to learn their language.  I’m not a native speaker, nor am I completely fluent but I’m well past the beginner stage.