Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Writing

On My Platter

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Winter                                                                      Moon of the Winter Solstice

Today is distribution day for the manuscripts of Missing.  As I said before, I have some anxiety about this, but I know that facing this anxiety and going ahead anyhow is its only solvent.  It’s exciting to me to be 65 and still have cutting edge growth on my platter.  The anxiety is merely a mental clue that this work matters to me.  A lot.

On my platter.  A cliche.  Yes.  But meaningful, as many cliches are.  Overly the last year I’ve though about my platter, just what I want to serve myself every day.  What are the main food groups in my day to day life.  Let’s assume the broad base of the food pyramid consists of family, financial matters, home, food and exercise.  This is the stuff that forms the essential nutrition.  Next up from this base level are dogs, garden, bees, Woolly Mammoths.  Friendly and interdependent relationships with other humans, animals, insects and plants.  This level provides intimate feedback on a regular basis.

Then come increasingly idiosyncratic activities:  reading, watching movies, listening to music, visiting art museums, travel.  Finally come the core activities in which I not only participate but actively create:  this blog, writing novels, translating Latin and putting together tours at the MIA.  Oh, well, the food pyramid breaks down here.  Maybe Maslow’s hierarchy does a better job at this juncture.

These last three writing, Latin and art have become the arenas in which I express the creative, generative aspects of myself, those aspects Maslow calls self-actualization.  Utilizing either the food pyramid or Maslow, engaging this work is only possible if the base, the friendly and interdependent and, too, the more solitary levels are in place and functioning.  Then the work that becomes play, the work that transcends labor can happen.

Latin, art and creative writing.   These are now the core of my work and, I think, will remain so for as long as I’m healthy.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Third Phase

13 Baktun

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Winter                                                               Moon of the Winter Solstice

Another take on the end of the world.  Embrace it.  A website I saw suggested that the world did end on the 22nd.  The Mayan long count, 12 Baktun*, did roll round and stop.

But.  Only to start over again.  13 Baktun started on the Winter Solstice according to the article cited below.

So, we have just begun a new cycle of 394.26 tropical years.  This Winter Solstice was closer to the millennial transition than either New Year’s or even the turn of a century.

How will your life be different in the 13th Baktun?  Like me, you’ve lived all of yours in the 12th.  Those of born before 2000 are in a unique position in that we have lived through a centennial transition, a millennial transition and now a Baktunal transition.

Of course, if you’re a die hard rationalist you’ll note that one Baktun is like any other.  Well, maybe so, but they do give us, these chronological inflection points, opportunities to look back and assess and to look forward and hope.  Not a bad thing.

Why not give it a shot?  In my case I can look back over the 65 years spent in this last Baktun, my whole life, and consider its arc.  I can look forward to spending all the remaining years of my life in the 13th Baktun.  That means my aging will occur in a brand new chunk of time.  A chunk of time that I can influence as an elder, perhaps give it a positive shove before I return my atoms to the universe.

And, yes, I also embrace the circular, never-ending, achronological great wheel in which the seasons come and go talking of Michelangelo. On the great wheel of my life I have just passed Summer’s End this year, moving into the great fallow season.  There too my task is to prepare the ground for the next spring, that spring when I am a memory.

What will you do with your next Baktun?

 

 

 

 

 

*Wikipedia.  A baktun (properly b’ak’tun, English pronunciation: /ˈbɑk ˌtun/[1], Mayan pronunciation: [ɓakʼ ˈtun]) is 20 katun cycles of the ancient Maya Long Count Calendar. It contains 144,000 days, equal to 394.26 tropical years. The Classic period of Maya civilization occurred during the 8th and 9th baktuns of the current calendrical cycle. The current baktun started on 13.0.0.0.0 — December 21, 2012 using the GMT correlation.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel

Winter Solstice, 2012

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Winter Solstice                                                           Moon of the Winter Solstice

It’s here.  It’s here.  It’s finally here.  The longest night.  The sun has begun to set and the darkness will be with us for 15 hours and 14 minutes.  Had we been a resident of the British Isles or somewhere in Scandinavia, it would have been even longer. (and is, today.)  It’s no surprise then, that in the old religions of these countries that the Winter Solstice took on an ominous portent.

(source)

Think about it.  The last crop had come in at least two months ago, probably longer.  There was no prospect of a growing season even starting until the next April or early May.  And the nights had begun to grow longer and longer.  As the cold grew more intense and the daylight diminished, it could seem possible that never again would the ground be warm, the plants green.  You and your children might starve.

Yes, so far the sun had always returned but what would happen if the gods who controlled its coming and going no longer desired its return?  The gods lived in their own ways and to their own designs.  It could easily happen that we humans were not included.

So for some the Winter Solstice became a season of dread, followed by an increasing sense of relief as the sun escaped whatever was holding it back and began to ascend once again for a longer time each day.  Thank the gods.

You know the stories about holidays of light, those holidays that both reassure and, through principles of sympathetic magic, lure the sun back from its melancholy.

There is, however, another way to come to this long night.  This way takes the long night as good as the longest days of the Summer Solstice.  It celebrates the darkness, that fecund place where babies grow, bulbs germinate and creativity unfolds.

It sees this night as different from all other nights in that we set it aside as a holynight, a night that stands in for all other nights, for all those moments of darkness when richness and life and new beginnings collect, gather strength.

Yes, of course, we need the light.  The growing season.  The warmth.  And that time has it holyday, the Summer Solstice.  A celebration of light and fire and the profusion of plant life.

It may be harder to celebrate the dark.  It frightens us sometimes, reminds us of the coming darkness in which the sun will never again rise.  And of those for whom such time has already come.  There is no shame in this fear; it is universal.

But note this.  It especially cannot be assuaged by the message of Sol Invictus, the all conquering sun.  The darkness is coming, for each and every one of us.  Far more powerful then to embrace the darkness, not as over against life and the human spirit, but as friend, as necessary companion.

This is the darkness I celebrate tonight, the longest darkness of year.

 

 

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality

Out of the Corner of Your Eye

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Samhain                                                          Moon of the Winter Solstice

Ever have a fleeting moment of intense interest in something?  Say, military planning or the Tang dynasty or who was Zoroaster anyway?  Intense here means wanting to stop that moment and pick up a book on the Roman epic poem then another then another then Roman epic poems or the reverse order.  Just intense longing to know, to scratch an intellectual itch because you. need.  to. know.

Perhaps you see a scene on a TV show that reminds you of a movie that suddenly you have to see.  Or, maybe a scene in a movie inspires a trip to somewhere, say New York City in the summer of 1968 or a slide in an art history lecture about the churning of the sea of milk finds you tickets in hand for Siem Reap, Cambodia on the next plane out of Bangkok.

An artifact or a magazine photo makes the four corners area and its pueblo dwellings, the mystery of the Anasazi the focus of your next vacation.

A painting hanging here says we must hold fast to the dream that reason will prevail.  That seems off.  What will prevail are these momentary infatuations, these long lost loves of places and people and books.  Reason has had its shot.  Heard round the world.  Now let dreams themselves have a chance to prevail.

Reason works in pounding engines and the quiet electronic transfers within computers great and small, but when dreams float into the mind.  Well, then.  The dream sweeps reason into a corner, where it well might do something productive, but not because anyone cares. At least not at that moment.

We must that dreams and their reasons will prevail.  That a dream filled with temples shot through with roots of the Kapok tree can merge with Times Square when the ball is about to drop and make a world chained to the past and open to the future.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story

Considering the Massacre of the Innocents

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Samhain                                                                Moon of the Winter Solstice

Since Christmas is a festival of the incarnation, a festival of a great God becoming human in the form of a baby, we can take this wonderful mythic idea and use it, especially now, as a filter for the news around us.

(Egon Schiele, Death and the Maiden)

Think of it.  Each baby born a potential or an actual god.  Each one.  How might we know?  Who’s to say?  A great God, an omnipotent God, could conceivably inhabit as many babies as ever are born.  So, it’s possible we might be wrong if we judge a child to be not a God.  We might even misjudge ourselves.

How would this perspective change your life?  Have you ever considered that you might be a god or a goddess?  How would you know?  Not sure.  The baby we’re talking about grew up to be a guy, a carpenter, then the ruling authorities arrested him as a troublemaker and executed him.  If that’s the profile, it might fit a good many of us, even those of us not fortunate to be so threatening to the status quo that we go through life with no fear of arrest or execution.

It seems we ought to err on the side of caution.  That is, each person born, each infant is not a child of god, but a god themselves.  We could then practice the Indian namaste, roughly, the god in me bows to the god in you.  How about that for a holiday ritual?

Looking for the gods and goddesses in your lives and acknowledging them with folded hands, a slight bow and namaste.  Might be good.

Then, of course, we have to parse out the killing of all the children.  How could we do that?

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality

Remember

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Samhain                                                             Thanksgiving Moon

It is the first night of Hanukkah.  I recommend this op-ed piece in the NYT to clarify the roots of this most well known of Jewish holidays and perhaps its most misunderstood.  We celebrate Hanukkah here and by mail with the grandkids.  Dreidels and menorahs and the evening lighting of the candle.  Kate recites the prayers in Hebrew.  Sometimes I join in.

Judaism has always felt right to me.  I love the sonority of Hebrew, the unflinching demands for social justice, the beauty of the torah scrolls and the long unwinding of Jewish history that they represent.  Judaism has an authenticity rooted in its long, well-documented history and in its adherents who, whether observant or not, often not, still retain its cultural stamp.

You can do much worse than basing your life on the Exodus story, the patriarchs of Genesis and their powerful wives, the story of Deborah, driving tent spikes into the head of an enemy commander.  These are powerful stories, people shaping and people making.

The holocaust, of course, burns with the most intense heat in near time history.  Its memory, which could have been paralyzing or demoralizing, found Jews and their allies worldwide declaring, Never again.  Out of that awful moment came, after a difficult birth, the nation of Israel.

While I may have differences with Israeli policy and strategy concerning Palestine, and I do, I fully understand and celebrate the homeland for this wandering people; fated, it seemed to live only in diaspora.

Jewish or not, lift a cup of cheer and good will each time you see a menorah over the next few days.  Celebrate this people and their often surprising stories of survival against long odds.  Hanukkah is one such story.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

The Humanities. Another post.

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Samhain                                                                        Thanksgiving Moon

I’ve spent my whole adult life within the ambit of the humanities.  At an early age, perhaps junior high, the notion of a liberal arts education took hold.  An education in disciplines for which an inner passion, a vocation, burns will produce the best person.  Not, necessarily the best job.  Just the best person.

Note, not a better person.  But, the best person possible.  Why?  Our passions call from us the sum totals of our powers, render them available and useful.  Therefore we might reach a peak of human potential, one described solely by our own history and our particular genetics.

Yes, this is a fuzzy idea, full of the wishy washy and the self-indulgent.  Yes, it seems to come down right beside the point of an education, at least today’s education.  Today it seems apparent to everyone that an education should enable you to get ahead.  Get going.  Start maximizing, not necessarily yourself, but your earning potential.

That is a far different thing from becoming the best person you can be.  This is the person as tool, as instrument, sharpened and lubed for the truest fit in the gears of our economy.  Not insignificant and a surprising number of people prefer to be tools, used by managers and companies, getting financial and status rewards along the way.  Even so, tools, like their machines, need to be guided, shaped, aimed.

What is an appropriate, healthful, just, socially useful aim?  Ah, now we have the entered the realm of the humanities.  Weighing the lessons of one historical era against another’s.  Investigating the variety of ways in which we can be human.  Reading the tales and legends and novels and poems of others, so that we might know ourselves.  No bomb will know where it should be dropped.  Or why.  Is the expansion of health care services to a population a wise, just act?  How can we decide whether to go further than our moon?  What brings beauty into our life?  Who creates it?

Should the state interfere with individual’s nutrition?  Exercise?  Only with careful and sustained study of the human story can we make these kind of decisions.  Ethical decisions. Aesthetic decisions.  Social policy decisions.  Even space exploration decisions.

Imagine.  How might we decide as a world to engage a mission to Mars.  Incredibly expensive.  Dangerous.  Exciting.  Adventurous.  I might begin with reading the diaries of Rogers and Clark.  The journals of James Cook.  Zeng He.  The navigation methods of Polynesian islanders.  Examining the archaeological record of human migration.  What do we need to know?  How have we come to know such things?  What are the unexpected results of exploration?  Are they cautions?

Of course, the politics and the economics of the day will press hard upon the answer, too.  Here, too, the historical record, political history and economic history of joint endeavors would prove instructive.

My point?  Neither the scientific feasibility, the economic practicality nor political realities can make us want to go.  Can make us search for a way through the inevitable difficulties and barriers.  Only decisions shaped by our common humanity, in the present and in the past, can guide us.  Can make us decide it’s worth it, no matter what.

I don’t know.  Perhaps this is all special pleading, the sentimental journey of one long committed to a life lived with books, ideas, art.  All I can say is that the ancientrail of the humanities has been a rich vein for me.  For my whole life.  And continues to be.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings

Moving Up the Emotional Scale

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Samhain                                                      Thanksgiving Moon

I have a spotter in the world’s least emotional state, Singapore.  Long term resident, sister Mary.  Singapore, along with much of Asia, loves campaigns to improve public behavior.  Mary spotted several current signs that attempt to deal with Singapore’s emotional flat line.  Here they are:

This last one reveals a major part of the problem.  No, not the sunflowers.  But, soar like an eagle, dream believe achieve, learn from the best.  These make happiness a tool for success.  Ain’t gonna work.  Happiness happens.  It’s a secondary outcome of other attitudes and behaviors.  Check out the positive psychology folks for example.

See Martin Seligman’s work at his website:  authentic happiness.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays

Holidays

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Samhain                                                                   Thanksgiving Moon

A holiday, a holy day.  A festival.  Lights.  Gifts.  Banquets.  Feasts.  Holiseason, that long season from Samhain through Epiphany, includes so many.  We know why, those of us in temperate climates where the nights get longer and longer until the day fades into a few hours of weak, cold sun.

And yet. The Winter Solstice, less than a month away now, celebrates what the other holidays bravely front with lights and smiles.  The darkness.  In the dark.  Afraid of the dark.  Blackness.  Dirt. Hecate. The Underworld.  Cerberus and Charon, Acheron and Lethe.  The awesome Stygian oath.  Death, not life.  Life is bright, daylight, sunshine.  Death is night, darkness, moonshine.

My own nature tends toward the dark, a melancholic soul, its shores washed by rivers running through the underworld of the psyche.  I feel at home as the cold grows and the darkness become dominate.  This feels to me the way I imagine the beach must feel to those who love the sun.  A place to relax. To just be.

What does a holiday really represent?  It is a memory, an anniversary of an idea, a placeholder with significance itself.  Christmas, with no known anchor in history, commemorates the Christian understanding of a monotheistic God assuming human form, an incarnation.  Thanksgiving has a generalized idea behind it, a combination of national solidarity, harvest festival and family gathering.

A holiday may, too, identify an event that can occur on only that date.  July 4th is such a date, for instance, as are birthdays.  The Winter Solstice and all the solar holidays are such holidays.  But, taken from that perspective, they are astronomical facts, rather than religious moments in themselves.

Over time though even such particular events accrue meaning.  Some of the meaning for solar holidays accrues due to their position in the larger astronomical reality of seasonal change.  So Spring equinox takes on the flavor of renewal, resurrection, rebirth.  The summer solstice the growing season and the fall equinox, the harvest.

The Winter Solstice then takes part of its character from the cold, the dark, the bleakness of the fallow season.  In early farming cultures it also signified, in its end, the return of the sun and the gradual increase of light and warmth that promised another year of agricultural growth.  It has, perhaps peculiarly among the solar holidays, a distinctive dark aspect and a distinctive light aspect.

It is its dark aspect that I celebrate.  It fits my more hermetic, introverted self.  There is, too, as I said above that melancholic stream acknowledged best in a holiday of the dark.  Meditation takes me down and inside my self, a time of quiet darkness, an intimate moment.  Darkness, too, is necessary to so many plants, bulbs and seeds alike, time to germinate, just as ideas sow themselves in the rich fields of the unconscious.

It’s the best time of the year.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Great Work

An Important Message for a Season of Indulgence

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Samhain                                                               Thanksgiving Moon

source

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, he wordlessly picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.

The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles roll

ed into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full.. The students responded with a unanimous ‘yes.’

The professor then produced two Beers from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar effectively filling the empty space between the sand.The students laughed..

‘Now,’ said the professor as the laughter subsided, ‘I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things—-your family, your children, your health, your friends and your favorite passions—-and if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house and your car.. The sand is everything else—-the small stuff.

‘If you put the sand into the jar first,’ he continued, ‘there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life.

If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff you will never have room for the things that are important to you.

Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness.

Spend time with your children. Spend time with your parents. Visit with grandparents. Take your spouse out to dinner. Play another 18. There will always be time to clean the house and mow the lawn.

Take care of the golf balls first—-the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the Beer represented. The professor smiled and said, ‘I’m glad you asked.’ The Beer just shows you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of Beers with a friend.