Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities, Weather +Climate

Ring a Ding, Hear Them Sing, Holiseason Is Here!

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Samhain                                                                      Fallowturn Moon

Geese honking, flying in some direction, no longer always south.  Trucks with rickety wooden sides piled high with split oak come into the cities to sell firewood door to door.  Golf carts head south on flat bed trucks.  Irrigation company trucks haul air compressors behind them to blow out irrigation systems.  Bee colonies board trucks headed for California, Texas, Florida where crops can be pollinated over our winter.  Signs for various aspects of deer processing go up.  County Market near us has been advertising sausage mixes and consultation with experts.

Soon the early Christmas trees attached to the tops of cars will appear on Round Lake Boulevard, cut at the cut your own place north of us.  The skies have already turned gray, the wind chill.  Snow comes first in this month, too.

All Hallow’s today.  In one interesting variation on this theme I found that in some traditions this is the day the souls of those who died in the last year are judged.  Cheery thought, eh?

We have entered, according to my sacred calendar, holiseason.  It stretches from Samhain to Epiphany and includes Samhain, All Souls, Día de los Muertos  Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s and Epiphany but also Hanukkah, Posada, Deepavali (Diwali), Advent, Boxing Day, the Mayan 5 useless days at the end of the year and my favorite, my low holy day, the Winter Solstice.

So light those candles, dig out the decorations, crank up the holiday music and let’s party like it’s Holiseason 2012.

Faith and Spirituality

Who Are You?

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Fall                                                                             Fallowturn Moon

Review in the Strib this morning of a book of essays focused on identity.  What makes you you?  Just finished three weeks on the Odyssey and the Greeks were pretty clear about it: name, lineage, home, story.  So, Odysseus was of Laertes line, an Ithacan by birth and the Iliad in part and the Odyssey almost completely tells his story.  Know the content of the Odyssey combined with some of the Iliad and you will know who Odysseus is.

This image represents one way of thinking about it.  What would you have on your list?  Or, would it be an object, a painting, or a belief system.  What?

That would not hold for us, would it.  I’m Charlie, of the line of Curtis Ellis, originally of Oklahoma, later Indiana and for most of my life Minnesota.  What would constitute my story, I wonder?  That is, what parts of my life, strung together in a narrative could meaningful describe my life?

Of course, those are all aspects of my life, but are they constitutive of my identity?  A very interesting question to me, especially when you layer it within the broader question of American identity.  What is it?

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Poetry

What He Said

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Fall                                                                Harvest Moon

Hamatreya [excerpt]

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

EARTH-SONG

 

“Mine and yours;
Mine, not yours.
Earth endures;
Stars abide–
Shine down in the old sea;
Old are the shores;
But where are old men?
I who have seen much,
Such have I never seen.

“The lawyer’s ded
Ran sure,
In tail,
To them, and to their heirs
Who shall succeed,
Without fail,
Forevermore.

“Here is the land,
Shaggy with wood,
With its old valley,
Mound and flood.
But the heritors?
Fled like the flood’s foam.
The lawyer, and the laws,
And the kingdom,
Clean swept herefrom.

 

“They called me theirs,
Who so controlled me;
Yet every one
Wished to stay, and is gone,
How am I theirs,
If they cannot hold me,
But I hold them?”

Faith and Spirituality, Memories, Woolly Mammoths

The Terrible Silence

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Fall                                                                     Harvest Moon

“I can not image being in Bill’s shoes tonight – trying to accept the finality of her (Regina’s) death and the terrible silence that must be filling the space with the passing of his lover.”    Stefan Helgeson by e-mail

Stefan is a poet and a good one.  His phrase, terrible silence, stuck with me, rattled around. Death causes our friends and lovers to go mute.  They can no longer respond to us.  No more tenderness exchanged at bed time.  No more joint decision making.  No more grocery lists.  Just.  Terrible silence.

This is true and it lasts.  My mother has been deaf to my questions and care for now over 48 years, longer than she was alive.  Death is final and final in a brutal way.  It brooks no second chances, no wait a minutes.  It finishes what life has wrought.

Then we are left with memory.  It is no wonder the ancient Greeks, those of Homer’s era, believed true immortality came only through the poet.  The poet could provide aid to memory, verses hammered out in a form for easy recall.  The poet chose the words and the perspective through which an individual, from Achilles to Paris, would be remembered for all time.  This alone bestowed immortality.

We have more tools.  Cameras.  Voice recordings.  Easily available pen, ink, paper.  Computers and digital storage.  But, I don’t know that we have better tools.  Though a picture may be worth a thousand words, it doesn’t mean as much as a thousand well-chosen words.

So, for all of you who read this and knew Regina, write.  Write about her.  She wrote.  Now take up the pen and write.  In this way Regina can live for a thousand years.

 

 

Faith and Spirituality

Aha

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Fall                                                             Harvest Moon

Enlightenment.   Chop wood, carry water.  I got it.  Today.  Suddenly.  While the air was cool, the sky clear.

(Isra Box)

Here’s how. Gertie knocked the back door off its track a couple of nights ago.  Not bad for a 45 pound dog.  But.  Had to get it back on.  I’m not a handy guy.  Never have been and never aspired to be.  That means I greet these kinds of tasks with a dread reinforced by all those damned nights I had to help my dad bail out the basement of our house, bucket by bucket.  He refused to buy a sump pump.  Not to mention the days mowing our yard with the old, clunky push mower.  He wouldn’t buy a power mower.  But, hey.  That’s then.

The perverse privilege of screwing ourselves up with things that happened long, long ago is part of what makes us human, I know.  And I wouldn’t want to make myself less human.

Then.  I had the strip of rubber coated aluminum off.  It holds the door in place.  I remembered that I usually get frustrated, want to move onto something I prefer to do.  Remembered, too, that that feeling was not necessary.  That I could stay with the door until I finished.  There was no hurry.  No next thing.  There was only this thing.

That was it.  Satori. Not exactly be here now, although that is a result.  But, not the cause.  The aha was nothing.  It fitted me into the task and nothing else.  I finished the door in an unhurried manner, but efficiently.  Also.  It worked.  Hey.

When chopping wood, chop wood.  When carrying water, carry water.  When fixing the door, fix the door.  When revising the novel, revise the novel.  When being with your love, be with your love.

 

 

 

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

Ora et Labora

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Fall                                                               Autumn Moon

Frost last night, but no freeze.  Either way, not too damaging for us.  Our harvest of above ground bearing vegetables and fruits is almost over.  Left are root crops like leeks and carrots, a few onions, some beets and a late crop of kale and chard.  All of these are frost hardy, even freeze hardy.

I have another leek dish to make, a leek gratin.  Will have several leeks left after that so I may have to return to the chicken pot pies or leek and potato soup.  Both are good.

All in all a good gardening year except for the failure of my bee management plan and the theft of our honeycrisp crop by those #$!%XXX squirrels.  Looks like I pulled out a save with the bees by going with over wintering.  Just no honey this year.  Next year.  Good thing Artemis honey is not a for profit business.

Ruth Hayden commented on our gardening and bees as not about poverty, but “…about creativity.”  In the broadest sense, yes.  In the particular though Kate enjoys the Iowa farm mom aspect of putting food by:  drying, canning, freezing, storing.  Both of us enjoy and I find essential the spiritual aspect of gardening, the close connection to the soil, to the source of our food, to the seasons, to the vagaries of weather and the changing of climate.

You might say our garden is our church, or, better really, our meditation and our sutra, our bible.  Ora et labora.  Work and prayer is the Benedictine motto.  I like it too.  Work as prayer, especially work with plants.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Third Phase

Mabon and the Fall Equinox

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Fall                                                                                           Harvest Moon (I changed this name when I discovered the Harvest Moon was the closest full moon to the Fall Equinox)

 

Autumn
by T. E. Hulme

A touch of cold in the Autumn night
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded;
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.

 

My thoughts

This Equinox I’m offering some resources from around the web that speak to this, the second harvest holiday.  This is the liturgical fall, as I said yesterday, as opposed to the meteorological fall which occurs September 1st.

The crone aspect of this holiday strikes me especially this year.  Why?  Because it honors the triple goddess [maid-mother-crone] in her final form of three. The final form, that is, until the new year begins. She begins the year as the maid, shifts with the beginning of the growing season into the mother and then, with the coming of fall enters the crone.

I don’t go further with the triple goddess idea (from Robert Graves) than its emphasis on the seasons recapitulating  the main phases of human life.  In this way the fall turn of the goddess into the crone, the wise woman/healer, marks the seasonal reminder of the Third Phase.

My own version of the three is:  Student, Family (householder in the Hindu tradition), Third Phase (retirement in the Hindu tradition, but in a different sense than our own, about which there is no cultural consensus.  Hence, for me, the third phase).  The crone encourages an inflection in the third phase that I like i.e., a sense of fulfillment, of gathered wisdom, of grace gained from an expected and welcomed transition.

This is also the season of age passing onto death.  Death marks the end of the third phase and since it does, preparation for dying is an essential aspect of the third phase.  An essential, perhaps the only essential, realization here is that death is and that it comes for us all.  Though essential, this is a truth difficult to grasp in its deeply personal sense and once grasped, to accept.  It requires wisdom, patience and gentle resignation, all characteristic of the crone as I have come to understand her.

She could just as well be he.  A wise old man, the one on the block that others come to.

This is the season of harvest.  Enjoy the fruits of your labors.

Mabon

Aging Goddess

The triple Goddess – worshipped by the Ancient Britons, is now in her aspect of the aging Goddess and passes from Mother to Crone, until she is reborn as a youthful virgin as the wheel of nature turns.
At the Autumn equinox the goddess offers wisdom, healing and rest.

Apples
To honour the dead, it was also traditional at Mabon to place apples on burial cairns, as symbolism of rebirth and thanks. This also symbolizes the wish for the living to one day be reunited with their loved ones.
Mabon is also known as the Feast of Avalon, deriving from the meaning of Avalon being, ‘the land of the apples’.

Mabon Traditions

The Wicker man
There was a Celtic ritual of dressing the last sheaf of corn to be harvested in fine clothes, or weaving it into a wicker-like man or woman. It was believed the sun or the corn spirit was trapped in the corn and needed to be set free. This effigy was usually burned in celebration of the harvest and the ashes would be spread on the fields.

‘The reaping is over and the harvest is in,
Summer is finished, another cycle begins’

In some areas of the country the last sheaf was kept inside until the following spring, when it would be ploughed back into the land. In Scotland, the last sheaf of harvest is called ‘the Maiden’, and must be cut by the youngest female in attendance.

To close:  a prayer, written by Kathleen Jenks of the wonderful website Myth*ing Links:

Kathleen was a professor at Pacifica and is now a private consultant.

As autumn returns to earth’s northern hemisphere,
and day and night are briefly,
but perfectly,
balanced at the equinox,
may we remember anew how fragile life is —-
human life, surely,
but also the lives of all other creatures,
trees and plants,
waters and winds.May we make wise choices in how and what we harvest,
may earth’s weather turn kinder,
may there be enough food for all creatures,
may the diminishing light in our daytime skies
be met by an increasing compassion and tolerance
in our hearts.
 

Warmly,

Kathleen

 

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

Are You Trying To Start a Movement?

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Lugnasa                                                        Garlic Planting Moon
Presented Homecoming:  Faith of a Pagan at Groveland UU this morning.  They’ve honored me by having me come regularly for over 20 years.  Fewer and fewer times as I’ve moved away from the ministry, but still, each year, at least once, often twice.

There’s something about an immediate audience that makes writing fresher, harder, cleaner.  During the discussion after the presentation I found myself explaining my reimagining faith project and the more I said, the more enthused I became.  Strange, I know, but that’s what happened.  Partly I could see connections, heads nodding.  This was taking root as an idea.

“Are you trying to start a movement?” one long time Grovelander asked.

Made me stop and think.  No, I’m not.  But I’m trying to get clear enough to write down my thoughts, make them into a book, because I feel  this reimagined faith needs to be part of everyone’s inner tool kit.  I don’t mean it needs to replace your Buddhism or Christianity or Judaism or Sikhism.  It can be an adjunct, a both/and.  Or, like me, it can be whole deal.

An essential awareness of and responsiveness to the world in which we live, the planet on which we depend has too often been lost, especially in developed countries.   Now, too, developing countries like the BRIK nations.  Unfortunately, those are the very spots where this kind of earth mindfulness is most needed.  These countries are the ones that make decisions large and small that effect the future of human life on this planet.

Another Grovelander, a young Macalester student, challenged my pushing off against Christianity as an example of a metaphysic that distances us from the world.  She was right.  This message needs to penetrate especially religious and economic ideologies, be attractive rather than repulsive.  Yet still strong enough to bite.  Not an easy task.

But, hey?  If it was easy, someone would have already done it.

(illustration above:  The Green Knight Gesso tells the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the Green Knight’s perspective. The old ways are parting for the new, yet in the ancient there is wisdom to learn and to be retained. The Green Knight is symbolic of ancient wisdom.)

Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Our Ordinary Wonder

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Lugnasa                                                          Garlic Planting Moon

What to say?  The wound so deep, the insult so grievous.  Nothing.  Nothing.  Nothing.

I remember that elevator ride with my mother, she on the gurney her face tortured by her brain in agony.  She had already begun to move away, fast, from the one who walked with me to the ice cream shop not far from our house and bought me a sundae for my good grades.  Who held my hand when I was scared.  Who taught me to watch the spider out our kitchen window as a wonder of the universe.

The phone call.  Unexpected in February.  My sister, normally in Singapore, here for a visit.  A call from Alexandria, long abandoned home.  Dad died.  Just died there sitting in a chair.  Winked out.  Gone.

None escape. None. It is this truth, underscored with bright black lines by the death of the one’s we love, that creates the wonder.  Our lives.  Brief.  Random.  Often, as the Odyssey says, filled with pain and suffering, yet still.  Still. Glorious.  Radiant.  Precious.

Sometimes I think these things.  Feel them.  But do not say them.  Now, now I do.