Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Myth and Story

The Ultimate Traveler

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Summer                                                                             Solstice Moon

In my own travels I often look to find myself as the other, therefore to see myself more clearly.  When in Angkor, for example, the quarter mile long bas relief sculpture, which culminates in the churning of the sea of milk by Vishnu, made the religious worldview of these 1100 A.D. Khmer Hindus evident.  What they imagined, I could see, just as a visitor to any Catholic church can see paintings of saints, views of the Last Judgment, or a man on a cross, covered only with a loin cloth, a crown of thorns on his brow.

On the streets of Bangkok vendors sold for less than twenty U.S. cents fruits I had never known existed:  jack fruit, durian, dragon fruit.  Alleys less than three feet wide ran between store fronts filled with men’s, women’s, children’s clothing, plumbing supplies, watches, toys, home furnishings.  The crowds packed into the places were large and hot.  Not at all like the Mall of America.

(Voyager’s 1 and 2 at the heliopause where the sun’s magnetic field hits the pressure of interstellar winds)

But.  There is no place on earth I can go where the influence of the sun cannot reach me.

Now this 35 year old pilgrim, on a trek to San Arcturus, or a Holy Well in the midst of the Orion nebula, will soon leave the sun’s influence behind.  Forever.  No magnetic field.  No warmth.  The heliosphere in the rear view mirror.  The solar system in the rear view mirror.  At least as we know it.  The Oort cloud is considered by some to be the true outer boundary of the solar system, but that boundary is still some 14,000 years away.

This human artifact has positioned itself as other by virtue of its madeness.  It was not crafted by the furnaces of the big bang, or the stellar ovens that crunch out elemental particles.  It was not made by the collision between planetary bodies or asteroids or volcanic activity.  No, it was made by human beings out of materials created in all those ways.  And now we have returned them to their origin, refashioned and able to talk about their experience.

But, ironically, Voyager is, exactly, the universe reflecting on itself, seeing itself, knowing itself.  Its pilgrimage is the same one Apollo inscribed on the doorway over his Delphic temple, Know thyself.  Only in this case the pilgrim is the universe, voyaging not to experience itself as other, but as its self.  Thus, Voyager can be seen as a metaphor for our inner journey, where we try to move beyond the Oort field of the Self, in order to better know the Self.  An equally daunting  trail.

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings

Eudaimonia

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Summer                                                                     Solstice Moon

 

A word about pursuing happiness.  Or meaning.  Yes, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  I know.  Right there in the founding documents.  An ur-right.  One equivalent to survival and liberty.  Well, who wouldn’t be pleased to find happiness?  I doubt I would.

Now this may be because I have a northern European genetic predilection to dysthmia, could be.   And, in fact, I think that’s the case.  This is not, however, my point here.

Happiness doesn’t strike me as a desirable state, at least not for any length of time.  Why?  Because it has the flavor of arrival, of sufficiency, of finished, of done.  Happiness comes to the human life like the finish line model of retirement, once we get there that’s all we need. After that, we coast.  Play golf.  Smoke cigars.  Travel.  Watch TV.

No, I’ll go for a more Greek idea, eudaimonia.  Composed of two Greek worlds, eu (good) and daimon (spirit) Aristotle and the Stoics after him promoted it as the end of human life. As such it has often been translated as happiness or welfare, but perhaps a better phrase is human flourishing.  Or, without getting fancy, why not good spirit?  Both have an active turn, taking us toward enrichment, fullness, striving within a humane ambit.

Now there you have an internal state worth cultivating.  It’s the difference between a noun and a gerund.  Happiness vs. flourishing.  I would much rather flourish than be happy.  Much.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Third Phase

the moon

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Summer                                                                    Solstice Moon

The super moon has come and gone, the moon only its normal lunarity tonight.  Deciding that each moon at perigee is a super moon strains the adjective too far.  The marginally larger and closer moon would be truer.

The lead up to the super moon did reignite my never far dormant moon watching passion.  This Japanese ritual seems very well suited to life’s third phase.  Quiet, dignified, can be done without glasses at home.  No money changes hands.  A glass of tea, or a shot of single malt, a beer.  Some cheese and the moon beside us on the deck.

As our closest neighbor in the overwhelming emptiness that is our universe, the moon has a special place, a unique place in our lives.  It illumines the night, goes through its phases each lunar month, defining tides and creating romantic moments.

I’m finding it hard to describe why the moon fascinates me so much.  Not about astronomy.  Or moon walks.  Something about its floating, silvery presence.  A silent partner to the dark its moods changes with the seasons.  The floating harvest moon, round and large and orange differs from the white full moon that passes through the cold skies of the winter solstice time.  The moon of the summer can preside over long evenings outside, a dim lantern providing just the right amount of just the right kind of light.

It also figures in story and myth.  The goddess Diana and her crescent moon, which appears in so many portraits of the virgin mary, especially our Lady of Guadalupe.  Lon Chaney’s version of the Wolfman:  “Even a man who is pure at heart, and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”

Not quite getting there and I’m tired.  Will try again soon.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities, Third Phase

Outside, Inside. Again.

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Beltane                                                                          Solstice Moon

Summer is its own creature, a season apart from the others, especially here in the north.  Things grow.  Outside has only insect barriers, no cold or ice or snow or chill.  Yes, rain and thunder and tornadoes and derechos. Yes.  But only occasionally.  Usually the sun shines, heat climbs, jackets and boots stay in the closet.

It is now, finally, summer.  In three days the summer solstice will arrive, midsommer as celebrated in Scandinavia.  Here, this year, it will almost mark the beginning of our actual summer.

With the bees and the flowers, the vegetables and the woods, now the fire pit and visiting kin you would think I might love the summer.  And I do, in my way.  I appreciate it, look forward to it, enjoy it.  In particular I like working outside, planting, tending, harvesting.  Having the self expand out into the world beyond the house feels good, extends my understanding of who I am and of those whom I love.

Still, I will celebrate not the light on the day of the summer solstice, but its opposite, the beginning of night’s gradual increase.  I don’t know whether it’s my northern European DNA, or the mysterious lure that drew me north ever since reading Jack London, or a tendency toward melancholy, or a more general sense that my most vital activity occurs when the nights grow long and the temperature falls.

What I do know is that as the shadows lengthen and twilight comes sooner, my inner life begins to deepen, ideas bubble out of my interior.  My creative self flourishes.  It just occurred to me as I wrote this that attention outside draws me away from myself and from the inner work, undoubtedly a good thing, but as I sense the need for outside attention wane, my inner world grows more demanding.

If this is in fact the way it is, then I’m glad, for it means my inner life and the progression of the seasons have begun to synchronize in a powerful, subconscious way.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, permaculture

It’s Growing On Me

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Beltane                                                                                    Solstice Moon

Becoming a horticulturist takes time.  Time learning plants, learning pests, learning flowers and vegetables and fruit.  Learning soil, chemicals.  Time with hands in the soil, with seeds and transplants and irrigation.  It takes failure.  Those tomatoes with the yellow leaves.  The potato leaves shredded by the Colorado beetle.  Over mulching that garlic. (which I did this year.)  It’s been a long time now since I started down this ancientrail.  Slow at first.  That garden at the Peaceable Kingdom.  Heating with wood there, too.

Small efforts on 41st Avenue in Minneapolis and Sargent Avenue in St. Paul.  Some more on Edgcumbe Road.  Mostly flowers.  Then this property.  We hired a landscape architect who laid in the first beds, added some elevation changes, planted the first plants, designed the early iteration of irrigation and rolled out the new lawn.  After that I learned about perennials, trying to get a seasonal symphony, color throughout the growing part of the year.

There was that two year correspondence course from the University of Guelph in London, Ontario.  It was good, laying down the conceptual basis for much of the work, though I feel I’ve under utilized what I learned in it.  Anyhow I have a A.A. degree in horticulture as a   result.

Kate started planting vegetables; I focused on flowers.  Somewhere in there I cut down the locust, as I said a while back.  Bought a big roto-tiller and tried the traditional surface of the earth garden.  Not good.  Got the raised beds.  They helped a lot by keeping grass and other things out of the soil.

That permaculture business made sense to me.  Design your gardens, your whole home around the way nature lays out the land in your area.  Become one with the land and use it to your advantage while giving back to it.  We’ve done some of that but I think it would have been better years ago, when we were just starting, still young enough to have the personal strength to work it.  It’s very complex and required more learning than I felt like giving it.

Now I’m focused on the bio-dynamic agriculture and horticulture of International Ag Labs. I would characterize my approach as pragmatic and eclectic, trying to integrate material from the traditional world, like the Guelph course, the more theoretical models like permaculture, organic and ag labs into usable information for our property.  There is just one permanent goal:  improve the land while providing ourselves with nutrient rich food.

The land and the plants will teach if you see what you’re looking at.  I’m still learning the language of our land.

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

Outside Inside

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Beltane                                                                          Solstice Moon

Bagging apples again this morning.  Another hundred done, a hundred yesterday, at least that many, maybe more to go.  I don’t know how practical this would be for a commercial operation but for our purposes, it’s time well spent.  I have noticed that there are leaf rollers on many leaves and some of the baby apples have already been eaten into by either an insect or something else, but for the most part the trees are healthy and the baby apples are, too.  I also noticed that apple production seems heaviest on branches off branches that attach to the trunk.  Not sure what that means.

Outside and inside.  So this was outside, working with the apple trees, individual apples, leaves, watching as the sky grew cloudy and dark, feeling the heat begin to build.  Using my hands, opening the ziploc bag, placing it around the apple, sealing it with two fingers, checking the seal, moving on to the next apple, checking for fruit I missed.

All the time, too, I thought about how to create a ground cover that would keep the orchard neat, beautiful.  We had clover, but it didn’t fight off the grass and the grass keeps coming. Kate fights it, but the battle is a losing one.  We need a different solution.  I’m thinking suppression with high quality landscape cloth and thick mulch.  Javier, maybe.

Inside.  I’m writing this, reflecting on the time outside.  Trying to fit together a foreground/background idea that has popped up over the last day.  That is, when outside, my thoughts often turn inside, I become meditative, while inside, I often stay on task, up at the conscious level and it takes an effort to get inside.  So, in a sense, when I’m outside I’m inside and when I’m inside I’m outside.  Just a curious bit right now.

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

Quiet

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Beltane                                                                             Solstice Moon

Night has fallen, quiet has over taken our already peaceful neighborhood.  Today has just watched yesterday slip into its pajamas, ready now for the long sleep, our past as dead and gone as any mortal perished.

[Gulácsy Lajos – Daughters of the Night (1900)]

I have surfed again on the oceans of mood, now back to shore ready to resume life again.  Writing. Translating.  But first finishing up the work that must be done now:  finish the transplant aids, bag the apples, put down some jubilate along the rows of seedlings.  The natural world does not allow for waiting.  It has its pace and either you adapt to it or it will ignore you.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Memories

Memories

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Beltane                                                                     New (Solstice) Moon

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve had interactions with folks from Alexandria, Indiana resulting from a reader posting a blog entry, a 50’s boyhood, to an Alexandria Facebook site.  It’s been interesting.  The most interesting interaction has come from an old classmate who found my memories romanticized.  You can see her comment under Who.

(1st)

I wrote her and in doing so discovered that she was a girl (then) who had done very well in our class, but didn’t (apparently) get the recognition she felt she deserved.  I had to reflect that could have been true.  Sexism (though not named) was alive and well back then and I’m sure it effected teacher’s perceptions and other students opinions.  It may have helped me to some awards and recognition.  Impossible to parse out now at this remove, but I’d never thought of it until she wrote.

Having said that I want to add that happy memories are not necessarily romanticized.  That’s a word used by an outside observer.  As resident in those memories, they were happy.  Being a kid among kids is a great way to spend time when you’re young.  Sure, we had our hassles, too.  Our arguments and fights.  I remember one incident where a next door neighbor pulled my pants down in front of my friends.  This was the nuclear option at the time.  I thought life was over and I could never face anybody again. Until the next day of course.

(3rd)

Once my life moved away from Monroe Street it began to take on a more serious, turning toward adult tone.  We had a house on Canal Street, one  we owned, rather than rented.  In junior high I remember a fight with Rodney Frost, a bad one by the standards of the day. (low)  Rodney died several years ago and my first memory when I saw his obituary was of that 6th grade fight near the junior high school.

Girls remained a mystery for me well into college, so I had the normal ration of pre-teen and teen angst over dating, sex and self worth.  Those were not happy memories.  My father and I began to part ways emotionally during junior high, a fact I credited only much later to a growing unease he had with my intellectual maturing.  When this distance had reached its maximum, around my senior year of high school, my mother had a stroke and died seven days later.

(4th)

Those months and the years following them were more than unhappy times.  They were a constant struggle for self-worth capsized often by grief and the estrangement I had with my remaining parent.  This was just the way it was.  Do I wish it could have been different?  Of course.  Do I know it won’t be.  Yes, I do.

That period and its attendant miseries are now in my past, but they are in my past and they show up whenever I visit that period or that place, Alexandria.

(third phase)

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Third Phase, Writing

Rejecting Ariadne’s Gift

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Beltane                                                               Early Growth Moon

I skipped some steps in my life education.  And I did that post-college when I was hungry for intellectual stimulation and found the cheapest source for it in seminary.  Instead of noticing what had my full attention, studying scripture with the tools of higher criticism, I followed my radical political passions into the ordained ministry.

Following the 60’s slogan, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, I embarked on a decades long immersion in political work.  I believed and still do believe that political work is important and necessary, a responsibility  of a citizenry that would remain free as well as a corrective to social injustice cooked into the current culture.

But.  I also believe that when the creative life, the one where the Self you have been granted by the random, but highly particular thrownness you have experienced, finds its highest and best purpose, it equals the level of urgency of political action.  Why?  Because each of us are precious, unusual, unique and as a result need to offer the world what only we can provide.

This is at best a dilemma, at worst it can create paralysis or misdirection.  In my case I followed one path, political action, from college through my early 40’s.  That I did this through the church is only a happenstance, a function of the odd synchronicity of my time in Appleton, Wisconsin and a minister there, Curtis Herron, who knew United was, at the time, a politically engaged seminary.

My rationale for being in seminary, drenched in the zeitgeist of the 60’s, led me to pick up on all the threads that led through the labyrinth toward a political minotaur.  They were bright threads in those years, the early 70’s, and had the additional compelling flavor of righteousness, a dangerous route to follow, but one I pursued anyhow.

The threads I left lying on the ground, less bright and flavored not with righteousness but with tradition and imagination, came to me as I soaked up literary criticism, the history of the Pentateuch, the redactions of the gospels, the tradition criticism and form criticism so useful in the Hebrew scriptures, even the brief exposures to Hebrew and Greek.  Had I stuck with them, followed the literary and creative impulses they roused in me, I might have neglected some political work, but found my way to writing much sooner.

But I didn’t.  Now I’m in my late 60’s and, thanks to another lesson I’ve simply refused out of stubbornness and fear to learn, how to sell my finished work, have nothing to show for having finally picked up the threads less bright, yet the ones more in touch with my full Self.  Although it may sound like it, I’m not whining here, just observing the length of time I spent on one section of the labyrinth, not because I didn’t have help, but because I couldn’t discern the true help I did need.

Now, finally, I have all the threads in my hand, I’m following them to the end, aware that there is still ahead the Minotaur, a last battle.  When will it come?  I don’t know.  The labyrinth still has turns ahead and the way, the ancientrail, is dimly lit.

 

Faith and Spirituality

Color

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Beltane                                                                                     Early Growth Moon

Saw John Desteian this morning.  We discussed the numinous after I described the moment that had brought me to see him–Back out, Kona sick, Kate gone, bee packages arrived, weather dank, all of which has resolved, but at the time I felt overwhelmed.  Dark.

I told him thanks for what he’s done for me over the now 25+ years that I’ve seen him.  Guided me through the miserable end of the marriage to Raeone through the transition out of the ministry, into marriage with Kate, but most important into a deeper and more dynamic relationship with my Self.

We didn’t schedule another session because I answered the question of where’s the color in my life.  In Kate, Kona, Rigel, Vega, Gertie, the vegetable garden, the orchard, the perennials, the Woolly Mammoths: Bill, Tom, Scott, Stefan, Charlie, Frank, Paul, Jim, Mark, Warren, art, writing, translating, exercising.

I experience the numinous at various points in all of these settings though the most frequent, the most important moments occur with the world of plants.  In place of the relationship with an autocratic though loving external to this reality god I now have a visceral, deeply personal relationship with the all, that is, the all on which I am dependent and with which I am, at the same time, interdependent.  I mean by this that my life depends on photosynthesis and I can feel that dependency when I walk through the garden.  The interdependence manifests there, too, with planting, thinning, tending, harvesting.

(Young Jee)

This immediate experience I have in the garden only seems to be about this land, though it is, certainly, about this land.  It is in this land and on this land that I connect physically, emotionally, spiritually to the ever changing elements of the cosmos, those all borne out of that big expansion so long ago, still migrating, still on pilgrimage throughout the vastness of the universe.

This fills me with awe and a sense of my incredibly tiny presence among all this, yet, it also affirms my unique and individual presence, a never before amalgam of stardust and history, fated for this time, thrown into this time to use Heidegger’s wonderful phrase, and gifted with the particularity that only I can express.

Thus, I am a tiny piece of a gigantic and dynamic whole and at the same time an individual, one of a kind, offered to this time as a one and done gift.  This is, of course, not just me, but all of us, all of everything, enjoying our moment, contributing what we can, then fading back into the tapestry, yes, but a tapestry whose design is different because we have been.

Color.