Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, US History, World History

These Strange Times

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Lugnasa                                                   Hiroshima Moon

Pope’s butler accused of theft.  Wait.  The pope has a butler?  Shootings yesterday at Texas A&M.  The Sikh Temple in Wisconsin last week.  Aurora the 20th of July.  Can anyone else hear a tear in the moral fabric of the universe?

Not to mention that yesterday the stock market was down because of news from Asia.  Asia?  What happened to the euro?  It’s true that bad news always happens and good news is not, usually, news at all.  Still.

Let’s throw in the news from  Europe’s Cryosat that the polar ice has begun to retreat

(at) a loss of 900 cubic kilometers of ice in the last year. That’s 50 percent more than computer models predicted would melt.

A lack of ice is good news for shipping, and oil and gas exploration, but dark ocean water warms the air above more than reflective ice, a “positive feedback” that accelerates warming. Research suggests the Arctic is warming 2-4 times faster than the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. So what? This warming is nudging the jet stream north, to the tune of 1 mile a year, 18 feet/day.   (paul douglas weatherblog)

Predictions of the end times have a 100% failure rating (so far), so I’m not going there, but bizarre times?  Yes.

Of all of these, the news I understand least are the three shootings.  Like the man here who killed his three daughters, there may be a psychological explanation.  Certainly there is a psychological explanation.  Has to be.  But explanation does not serve.  Tracing the inner path to these crimes leaves us with the crime in the end.

I’d like to know, if anybody does know, the incidence of these or similar crimes in other cultures.  Are we truly aberrant or is it a statistical phenomenon, a law of large numbers reality?

Of all these, the news that worries me the most comes from the cryosat satellite.  This summer was miserable for us and horrific for much of the country.  In this case I understand the cause.  I drive one.  So do you.  I use electricity.  So do you.  We have treated global warming as a topic for next year.  For the next generation.  Guess what?

It is next year.  And we’re the next generation.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, US History

The Growing Season Begins to Wind Down

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Summer                                                             Hiroshima Moon

On Wednesday we move from the growing season emphasis of early summer to the harvest emphasis of late summer.  The Celtic calendar marks that change on August 1st which begins the season of Lughnasa, a first fruits time.  Yes, harvesting has happened before this, but now the inflection is on crops for sale, trade or preservation.

[ in precipitation in during the growing season (after Meehan et al. 2004 and Bowen et al. 2005)]

If any of you saw the opening ceremony of the Olympics, the first, agrarian phase of Great Britain before the industrial revolution is the time the Celtic calendar marks.  It is not a calendar for an industrialized or a technological society though it has an important place in both.  Industrialization and technology both move us away from direct experience of the
natural world and especially from the source of our food.  The Celtic calendar gets its seasons from the botanical and meteorological rhythms, not the work day or the academic year or the never asleep world of the internet.

Those other rhythms, the Taylorized day or the instantaneous cyber world, lead us away from natural rhythms into a cultural space dominated by rationality, science and human control.  In the Celtic calendar the natural world rules, just as it does yet today, though we hide ourselves from it with thermostats, electric lights and high speed broadband.

This is not an either/or situation; there is a dialectic between the world of human artifice and the world which brings the thunder and the lightning and the rain, which grows the food, which gives us night and day.  Yet.  So many of us, in our air conditioned, wired, well-lit by electricity homes, obscure or forget or ignore that our food grows in the soil, the flesh of mother earth.  That it depends on water either from rain or from irrigation, this dependent of rain and replenishment of hidden aquifers.  That the sun which gives food the energy we need does so without human intervention or assistance.

All of our civilization has as its foundation, its literal without which nothing support, the vegetative world.  And we do not control it.  We can help it, nurture it, bless it, curse it, but we cannot make plants grow.  We can only provide or protect the conditions under which they do so.  In our amnesia about this simple, stark fact we pave over farmland, alter the chemical conditions under which plants grow, change their genetic patterns trying to extend our control, but all this begs the question.  How did the vegetative world get along without us?

The answer?  Just fine.  This is not a rant, this is a reflection of our current reality.  It is the hope of ancientrails that it can serve as one reminder.  One reminder of the essential, unique and healing power of the world beyond our control.

Faith and Spirituality

Reefed Sails

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Summer                                                       Hiroshima Moon

Not sure, after decades, how melancholy creeps up on me, or descends on me, or floats up from within, but it always comes as a surprise, a worrying intrusion, slowing things down and making the day seem long.  Often the night is longer, though this time, sleep has not been a problem.

A heaviness, a pushing down from the head, into the arms, weighing down the limbs, making them slow to move.  A sensation of molasses, of inner opacity.  Clarity gets lost and motivation seeps away, down, down, as though a drain were in the floor, eagerly taking the will, the drive and venting it out through a series of pipes, sewer pipes no doubt.

My eyes downcast, as if burdened by shame.  Even breathing labors.

Where did this come from?  Where will it go?  Why used to matter, but the repetition and the suddenness and the inexplicability have left me more with resignation.  This is the inner weather of the moment, a low pressure center moving through my soul at its own pace and with its own agenda.  Reef the sails and stay below deck.

 

Cooking, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Health

A Dream, Become Real, Become Dream

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Summer                                                Hiroshima Moon

“Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the action stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.” – Anais Nin

Horticulture.  When we moved in here now 18 years ago, we decided to spend money upfront on landscaping, figuring we could enjoy it over the life of our tenancy rather than putting in as an amenity at the time of a sale.  We hired a landscape architect from Otten Brothers and he put in a basic plan.  Two wild prairie patches on either side of a manicured lawn.  Norway pines, a spruce or two, some amur maples, a genus maple, an oak, some river birch.  Near the house he put on narrow beds planted with shrubs like euonymus, a dwarf lilac, shrub roses, viburnum among others.

A boulder retaining wall in the front shored up a long bed like a peninsula into the green ocean of our yard.  In the back we had them cut a three tiered garden, each tier marked off with boulder retaining walls and divided near the house by steps made of rail-road tie size square lumber.

The rest of our property, all now that is our “backyard”, was part woods and part scrubland covered with black locust trees, thorny and not visually appealing though very good for fence posts.  The first two years after our move I spent cutting down trees, using a commercial wood-chipper to  grind them up and hiring a stump-grinder to come in and rid us of the stumps.  The scrubland became, gradually, a place where we could build a shed, plant a vegetable garden and I dreamed of making it an expanse of prairie, as I had wanted to do with the entire property when we moved. Continue reading A Dream, Become Real, Become Dream →

Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld

The Big Blue Brain

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Summer                                                   Under the Lily Moon

Oops.  The Human Brain Project has a featured article in this month’s SA.

The blue brain project was an early work created, like the Human Brain Project, at the Brain and Mind Institute.  Don’t know what they’re smoking over there in Switzerland, but it must be powerful stuff.

The blue brain project has a feature article in Scientific American:

 

*”Reconstructing the brain piece by piece and building a virtual brain in a supercomputer—these are some of the goals of the Blue Brain Project.  The virtual brain will be an exceptional tool giving neuroscientists a new understanding of the brain and a better understanding of neurological diseases.

The Blue Brain project began in 2005 with an agreement between the EPFL and IBM, which supplied the BlueGene/L supercomputer acquired by EPFL to build the virtual brain.

The computing power needed is considerable. Each simulated neuron requires the equivalent of a laptop computer. A model of the whole brain would have billions. Supercomputing technology is rapidly approaching a level where simulating the whole brain becomes a concrete possibility.

As a first step, the project succeeded in simulating a rat cortical column. This neuronal network, the size of a pinhead, recurs repeatedly in the cortex. A rat’s brain has about 100,000 columns of in the order of 10,000 neurons each. In humans, the numbers are dizzying—a human cortex may have as many as  two million columns, each having in the order of 100,000 neurons each.

Blue Brain is a resounding success. In five years of work, Henry Markram’s team has perfected a facility that can create realistic models of one of the brain’s essential building blocks. This process is entirely data driven and essentially automatically executed on the supercomputer. Meanwhile the generated models show a behavior already observed in years of neuroscientific experiments. These models will be basic building blocks for larger scale models leading towards a complete virtual brain.”

A reasonable caveat:  I’m a big fan of IBM’s Brain and Mind Institute (BMI) and the Blue Brain project. Initiated in May 2005, the Blue Brain project is an attempt to to model the mammalian cerebral cortex with computers. The intention is not to re-create the actual physical structure of the brain, but to simulate it using arrays of supercomputers. Ultimately, the developers are hoping to create biologically realistic models of neurons. In fact, the results of the simulation will be experimentally tested against biological columns.

But I take exception to the recent claim that IBM has created a simulation that is supposedly on par, in terms of complexity and scale, with an actual cat’s brain. The media tends to sensationalize these sorts of achievements, and in this case, grossly overstate (and even misstate) the actual accomplishment.

Bees, Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work

Tigers and Bees and The Great Mesh of Being

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Summer                                                   Under the Lily Moon

Thursday night Kate and I watched Conflict Tiger, a movie by Sasha Snow that followed the same story retold in the book, Tiger.  It’s a powerful, gritty movie about the reality of life in the taiga.  The characters in the movie, especially Yuri Trush and Ivan Dunkai, have a powerful presence, Trush as the hard-bitten but compassionate eco-policeman and Dunkai as a shamanic character with intuitive grasp of the tiger and taiga learned practical wisdom.

(Ivan Dunkai, Sasha Snow)

Today I did bee business.  Moved six honey supers, put two on the south colony and took the remaining four into the third garage bay.  The trailer on our lawn tractor is a handy piece of equipment.

Two colonies:  the south, filled with bees, boiling up out of it like angry vengeance, not wanting a stranger pawing around in their home; the other, docile and less populated.  When the south colony residents went into their angry buzz and started slamming against the veil and gathering on my right glove, my body zoomed back to last fall when I made a mistake.  You may recall that I decided to replace a honey super on a hive without veiling up?  OMG.  WTF.  OUCH.  My heart rate went up today.

Since I use nine frames in ten frame hive boxes, the bees often construct comb in the empty spaces and they had done this in the south colony.  Since I had to reverse the hive boxes on that colony today–this forces the bees to fill up both hive boxes with brood which makes for a better crew to harvest and make honey–one of the chunks of non-frame comb fell off.  It had honey it.

It’s now on the kitchen table.  Fresh honey in the comb.  Worth that bit of pit-a-pat.

Bee keeping is a collegial activity.  I keep the frames clean and coming while the colony builds up, adding sugar syrup if necessary.  Once the honey flow starts, if the colonies are strong enough, I put on honey supers and harvest the honey they make that is in excess of what they need to survive over the winter.

In other words I provide a home and its maintenance, they pay the rent with honey.  It is nothing less than a partnership with both parties putting in their own labor and each party getting benefit.

It is, in that way, a very tangible micro-instance of the relationship we have with our mother, the earth.  In that macro relationship we are the dependent party, yet we have work we put into the relationship, too.  It can be constructive work or destructive work, we choose, but the feedback systems in play make destructive work dangerous, too often causing mother to remind us of our place in the order of things, the great chain of being.

In fact the great chain of being does not run from earth to heaven, rather it runs around the skin of the earth, more like a great mesh.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Translating Metamorphoses

Aha Moments

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Summer                                                   Under the Lily Moon

In the long ago faraway I took symbolic logic.  My freshman year of college.  I’d never struggled academically and German had already taken my measure in the first semester, so I was in no way ready for another problem.

Larry Hackestaff was the professor, a philosopher who carried a six-pack of Bud attached to his belt through the plastic rings holding it together.  He was a young guy and he enjoyed the campus gatherings which were 1950’s typical boozy events with beer kegs and purple Jesus.

Six weeks into symbolic logic my mind had turned to mush.  This stuff just didn’t make sense to me.  Not because I wasn’t trying.  I studied hard, but I wasn’t getting it.  After my debacle with German, my self-image was in trouble.  I took my green copy of our text to the library for one last go, before our first exam.

Somehow that evening, the propositions and logical symbols and proofs and fallacies jumped off the page for first time and entered my brain.  Never worried about logic or my self-image in that way again.

I’ve been studying Latin for 2 and a half years now, starting almost from scratch and aiming toward my goal of translating Ovid’s long poem, The Metamorphoses.  The grammar made sense to me; the vocabulary is not difficult, but the application of the two in translating Ovid has proved hard.

Lots of reasons for that, reasons that reflect my still developing grasp of both grammar and vocabulary, the nature of poetic Latin and, I learned yesterday, my own overly analytical approach to the task.

I wrote down every word and every possible meaning and case or conjugation.  Then I began to assemble a translation, matching the singular neuter ablatives with other singular neuter ablatives, checking out the various meanings of the words and locating verbal forms and their possible use in the sentence.

This was satisfying in one respect.  I ended up with a lot of notes and information.  And I imagine that did me some good.  I had, however, missed the primary point Greg had been trying for over a year to get me to see.

I saw it yesterday.  Look at the verb.  Translate it by itself.  Find a noun that is the subject of the verb.  Find an object if there is one.  Everything else modifies one of these three.  Greg has championed this “mechanical” style of approaching translation as best for novices.

I believed him.  I thought I was doing that; but, I wasn’t.  Now, I see it.  The next 10 verses fell into place quickly.  It was an aha moment even greater than that one at Wabash all those years ago.  More satisfying, too.

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

I’m So Glad

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Beltane                                     Garlic Moon

Be Glad You Exist, the Greek inscription I mentioned a few posts ago, got me thinking.  A persistent prod in American culture is the I’m not doing that well enough, or fast enough, or soon enough or with the right attitude.  Not studying enough, eating too much, not working enough, not working out enough, not relaxing, not being charitable enough or financially successful enough.

It’s an argument from lack that has as its premise that jockey metaphor I came up with a month or so ago.  In case you forgot, I did until just now, I suggested that many of us take on board, sometime in childhood, a jockey who rides us, rides us hard, always pushing us toward the next, the better, the hoped for, the not yet achieved.

This argument from lack is the jockey’s prod, his quirt that comes out when he senses flagging will or decreasing purpose.

But, what if Be Glad You Exist was the baseline?  Just that.

Then we might start not from a place of lack but from a place of adding, of completing, of maturing, of enriching.  Moving ourselves not with the lash, but with a model more like Maslow’s where the underpinning opens new possibilities, like the emergence of the butterfly, say, from the caterpillar.  A caterpillar is not a lesser butterfly, but its necessay precursor.

Orienting ourselves this way (I realize I’m writing about myself here, but maybe a bit about you, too.) does not require the scorched earth of bad diet, bad language skills, inadequacy of any kind; rather, it could have Be Glad You Exist as the ground of our being.  Sounds like a good thing to me.

Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Travel

Be Glad to Exist

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Beltane                                         Garlic Moon

A Greek bowl in the alternately wonderful and frustrating Constanta musuem of archaeology and history had this inscription:  Be Glad To Exist.  Those Greeks.  Had it going on so early.  And now?

Be glad to exist and carpe diem amount to a satisfactory life philosophy.    I finished the book Masters of the Planet, an excellent summary of current findings and theories about human evolution.  The author added this to a summation of cognitive theory:  “We are ruled by our reason, until our hormones take over.”  Fits with the Greco-Roman fortune cookie life path.

While on my way to Constanta Tuesday, I returned to Bucresti Nord and ate breakfast there.  As usually happens to me at some point on a trip like this, I do something I never do at home:  eat at McDonald’s.

It felt like being in American terrarium, eating a sausage McMuffin and drinking the still not very good version of coffee.  Inside the terrarium I looked out at a Romanian world:  a board of all the departures and arrivals for Bucresti Nord, a currency exchange shop, Schimb Valutar, Romanians going about their mornings off to work, running, sitting, waiting, flirting.

The cut of the suits, the occasional very Slavic physiognomy: eyebrows, squared off jaws, thick necks, serious all remind me of the latter days of the Soviet Union when apparatchiks still roamed the countryside, conducting the business of a centralized state and a planned economy.

It occurred to me, as it has before and like my hero Scott Nearing proposed, that the middle way would be best, a place between the grim and often inefficient (therefore grim?) Soviet communism and rapacious, winner take all, screw the little guy late stage capitalism now regnant.

In other words, let capitalism have the non-essentials designer cloths, fancy watches, restaurants, but not groceries, hotels but not homes, minute clinics but not personal health care, boutique education but not public education, a gated community or two, but not urban planning.  Give capitalism the margins and let the money enchanted compete and scrabble and become rich there.

The rest of us, whose lives themselves are our focus, those of us glad to exist, could read, write, paint, sculpt, build cars, houses, care for the health of others, teach, grow and distribute healthy food.  We might, probably would, have less material wealth, but we would have life itself.  And think how short that is.

 

 

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

A Consolation of Philosophy

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Beltane                                                         Garlic Moon

The philosophy department at Ball State resided in a brick building littered with the remains of other days.  Religion was there too.  The chair of the Philosophy department Robert (his last name has fled for the moment), a buzz cut positivist, an ornery, no see it, no believe it kinda guy.  Let’s just say metaphysics were taught under sufferance in this department.

Bob drove me out of philosophy, convincing me that the most pressing questions of the day were what hot meant, or cold.  Couldn’t see it.  Not then, not now.  But then I didn’t explore much more, now I’ve been in the wide world and know there are more things than that dreamt of Bob’s dreary positivistic philosophy.  Much more.

In fact, if I’d listened to my self, I would have known it then, did in fact, but didn’t know I knew.

Many of us disenchanted with postivism found a real ally in Alfred North Whitehead, the creator of process philosophy.  I used to think I understood it, now I’m not so sure; but, I knew this about it, Whitehead said the universe was alive.  And that made sense to me.

Still does.  In some deep place it made a whole lotta sense, because one October morning a chill hit me as I left that brick building, a class in metaphysics just finished.  The next step, the one over the threshold into the quad, never happened, at least not in my consciousness, because my consciousness was otherwise occupied.

My heart filled up, my mind expanded, the whole of myself plugged itself into the throbbing matter of the cosmos.  I was one with the whole and it with me.  A sensation of light and vastness and yet intimacy became my reality.  Just for a moment.  I don’t know how long it lasted and at this remove, some 45 years later, I couldn’t reconstruct that aspect if I had to.

Since that time, if I remember to recall this, I have never felt alone.  The universe can be known through one flower, one bird, one puppy, one rock, one college sophomore, that much I learned for sure that day.  And more.

The universe can not only can be known (or felt); it knows (feels) back!  Now this is not revolutionary nor advance news.  Mystics before and after me have had similar experiences, remarkably similar, in fact.  The positivists and their ilk might explain this away through brain chemicals, but even if that were to turn out to explain this experience, it would only serve to under write its power.

It just occurred to me today that long ago moment on the quad, in the chill of an October morning, might have hints for how to live my third phase.