Winter New Moon of the New Year
A librarian in Eagan, part of the metro area here, has an interesting project underway. Do your memoir in six words.
Gonna give it a try: Diggin, writin, organizing. Readin, travelin, fantasizin. Hmmm. nope, too corny. Went in and down, not up. Better, but still… Walked along the boundaries. That should do it.
Winter Moon of the Winter Solstice
Something new seems to be happening. Not sure if I’m reading the rustling in the ether of our culture right, but it feels like the Great Wheel may have begun to reemerge. Not in a Wiccan or alt-pagan way, though that’s certainly there, but in a from the ground up way (so to speak).
A friend called me tonight to wish me a salubrious solstice. Kate wants to do a fire tonight. First Universalist has a solstice celebration as do many UU congregations. There has been, for a while now, solstice celebrations on the continent. I’m most familiar with ones in Scotland and Sweden.
These celebrations, rituals whatever we might call them are not confined to the Winter Solstice though the spreading knowledge of Christmas’s relationship to the Saturnalia, itself a winter solstice holiday, has given the Winter Solstice a cultural leg up, as has a more general appreciation for the other festivals of light around this time: Deepavali, Hanukkah, Christmas trees and home decorating–neither one of which has any obvious link with the Christian holiday.
I don’t know quite how to go about measuring the cultural penetration of solstice and equinox awareness, or the depth of its relation to individual’s religious yearnings, but my own sensibilities suggest the penetration has gone far past the surface and has, for some folks, like myself, reached the point of religious sentiment.
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, in a somewhat ham-fisted way, changed its holiday traditions focus from a sort of Victorian dress up for Christmas to what is now called a Winter Lights celebration.
I’d be interested to know what you think, what you see from your standpoint.
Winter Moon of the Winter Solstice
Darkness has fallen. The solstice has begun. The longest nights of the year occur over the next few days.
The summer solstice, now a half year away in either direction on our orbit around Sol, has faded, faded, faded until the longest day of the year has become the longest night; in the other direction, toward which we move, the summer solstice is a half year away.
Starting now, we will begin, second by second, minute by minute, then hour by hour to turn ourselves toward the light until, at the moment of light’s triumph on June 20th at 6:09 pm, we will begin again a sure glide into winter.
On the Great Wheel it is neither the longest night nor the longest day by itself that matters, rather it is the certainty of their coming, light followed by increasing darkness, darkness followed by increasing light. This reality, as metaphor, reminds us that no light is so fulsome that it is without darkness and no darkness so total as to be without light.
Too, we can see our lives as a turn of the wheel. In late winter we quicken, growing small within the mother. We emerge during Beltane, the sun’s heat and the day’s length increases and we mature, grown into adults, as the turn moves toward Mabon and Samain, summer’s end. Our lives develop fruit and we harvest; as Summer’s End moves toward the Winter Solstice, our hair turns gray and our bodies decline. In Winter we move toward the darkness, back to the enveloping womb that is our mother, the earth.
Tonight we celebrate the winter season of our lives, the time when our life finishes its run. This bears no sorrow, nor any fear, since we know that on the morrow, as it has since time begun, the light will again gain strength. Living or not, it will shine on us, too.
Samain Moon of the Winter Solstice
“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say let your affairs be as one, two, three and to a hundred or a thousand. We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.” – Henry David Thoreau
(Walden Pond, 2010)
When I bought my farm up near Nevis, Minnesota, Thoreau and I would have been on the same page. The Peaceable Kingdom had its own well, a septic system and heat provided by the forest I owned. Of course, that year the simple life saw a divorce, the temperature hit -50 and a heavier yet reliance on beer and scotch.
Don’t get me wrong. I think simplicity is a beautiful thing. Then again, so is complexity. If my body simplified itself, there wouldn’t be much me left. If my consciousness simplified itself, the rest would slip away.
There will always be, of course, the few who take the Taoist monk approach, a life lived close to nature. There will be, too, those folks who just find wilderness better company than the rest of us and who’s to say they’re wrong?
Me, though, I love samsara, this whole roiling, boiling mess we have for a place to live. I love computers and television and movies and books, philosophical and political thought and action. I love relationships, messy and unwieldy and complicated as they can be. I love art, often complex and difficult.
I suppose this means I’ll never have a Walden experience or the insight of wandering through the Tao. I’m ok with that. If you need simplicity, then seek it, make it so.
As for me, give me complexity or give me, well, what? Greater complexity.
Samain Moon of the Winter Solstice
My cousin Leisa, second youngest of all the Keaton cousins (mom’s side of our family), has had an aneurysm found, repaired and then slipped into a coma as a result of a stroke. Part of her skull has been removed to reduce pressure on the brain from swelling and a second aneurysm has been found, too small to repair right now.
This is eerily reminiscent of Mom’s stroke back in 1964. Mom was 46, though, younger than Leisa who is in her late 50’s. Here’s the link: Mom had two congenital aneurysms, one just below each temple. In 1964 stroke care and aneurysm repair had no where near the sophistication, armamentarium and clinical experience available today, 47 years later.
Mom might have survived her stroke, might even have had her aneurysms discovered before one burst, with 2011 treatment. Leisa’s fortunate in that regard, though no one ever wants to test the standard of care.
Even sadder and more distressing my friend Jane’s daughter, Em, 42, died this week of lung cancer. Never a smoker, a runner, a healthy lifestyle in place she never really had a chance. She received a diagnosis of stage 4, meaning metastatic, in 2008. She rallied and did well for a time, but the disease had become too well established and finally overwhelmed her.
Death and suffering are common notes in the symphony of each of our lives, bass notes, struck down in the resonant lower registers of our souls. No matter how common, how usual or how expected both reverberate, clang around in our depths.
Reading Em’s Caringbridge entries brought me to tears, the anguish of a younger mother’s death; one I know, know too well. Loss can throw us down a dark well; it did me, one it took several years and a lot of help to crawl up from.
The hope we all can share and that those who will grieve us can, too, is the multiple ways in which our lives continue to ripple out through our children, our family, our extended family and friends, through our work and our works. As far as I can tell, this legacy is our immortality.
Samain Moon of the Winter Solstice
Christopher Hitchens died. An honest man, Diogenes would have stopped searching. He faced death as a non-believer, a man whose God Is Not Great made him a name in the theist–anti-theist debates of this millenia’s early days.
His angry anti-religious bias fit in well with the Richard Dawkin and Sam Harris crowd, agreeing with their totalizing, methinks-they-protest-too-much screed. If religion is so bad, why has it persisted for so long? A scathing atheist has backed himself into a metaphysical box, one much like the box he insists all religionists occupy.
To adamantly claim God’s non-existence is just as silly and unwarranted as the claim of God’s existence. Neither can have, by definition, empirical validation, so, in each case we enter the realm of faith, of conjecture believed because it feels right, true.
Faith in its purest forms is a beautiful aspect of human culture, allowing us to transcend the often bleak realities of the day-to-day, finding a blissful reality where others see only pain and boredom. Marriage, for example, requires faith in another human being, another human being as wonderful and amazing as yourself and as awful and horrible.
Monotheism as practiced in the dominant Western religious traditions is only one item on the menu of faith as offered by human culture and even it comes in three flavors: Christian, Jewish and Muslim. The ancient traditions of the West synch up better with the pluralist pantheons of India, Nepal, Tibet, Africa and the indigenous Americas.
Monotheism, rather than religion per se, seems the better target, since it makes definitive and often absolute claims, claims which sometimes pose as divine law, unbreachable and final. The nature of monotheism’s claims rather than its actual content or institutional form are the problem.
With one deity and one book the temptation to sure knowledge, certain dogma too often overwhelms these believers, though in all three traditions there are, too, the more measured, more humble ways. In fact, strange as it may seem given the all too charged dialogues of the past twenty years, the liberal orientation–former mainline Christianity, reform Judaism and the Sunni/Sufi mainstream Islam–is numerically dominant.
Samain Moon of the Winter Solstice
Samain in Lima, Peru. We came back through Lima from a point on the far side of the city just as evening fell. Even there, Samain’s pale memory, Halloween, saw children in Mickey Mouse costumes, princess costumes, carrying plastic pumpkins, many of them walking toward a large shopping mall in one area, a Halloween party rocking the joint.
These Latin cultures have a certain affinity with Samain as a festival when the veil between the worlds thins and the dead can cross, come back to visit family or to haunt them. Cemeteries had fresh flowers at grave markers, grass had been cut, masses said, loved ones remembered. In the White City, the vast and prominent cemetery in Guyaquil, Ecuador, the mausoleums and the multiple, tall columbariums, the markers climbing the hill in the back all speak to an engagement with death, a sort of living and ongoing engagement with death, so very different from the sterile, hospital based, don’t look culture we’ve created here.
Next week, a week from Wednesday, comes the Winter Solstice and Samain will be at an end. In sorting material about the Winter Solstice, about Yule, about Saturnalia and even Deepavali and Hanukkah the emphasis is mainly on Sol Invictus, as the Romans called him, the Unconquerable Sun. An emphasis on the long march of daylight that begins on the longest night.
Another, equal concept celebrates the Winter Solstice as the longest night of the year, the culmination of a steady progress by darkness to push back the realm of light. Both have their mirror in the human mind. The light of reason shines itself on the questions we have about the way things are. How things work. Why this happens and that does not. Yes.
But. A child lives in the warm dark for nine months before coming to the light. Ideas often lie hidden, tucked away somewhere in the darkness of the mind, back there fermenting, gathering weight. Dreams sometimes pick those ideas up and play with them. Too, our life is not all rational, not all light, perhaps not even very much so.
Most of life comes from the irrational, the emotional, the intuitive and to worship the light can be a denial of these important elements in our everyday life.
The Great Wheel shows us the way. We need the fallow time, the restfulness of winter and the cold, just as we need the sunny time, the growing season, the time of thinking. These needs are not occasional but persistent, coming into our lives again and again and again just as the earth wheels through the sky, repositioning the sun’s light. Blessed be.
Samain Moon of the Winter Solstice
The holidays. We’ve got no decorations up. No Christmas or other holiday music plays here. We did all of our shopping online.
When I was at Best Buy a week or so ago while hunting for a device to download pictures to Kate’s i-pad (no joy on that front even now), Christmas music played and, as I said here after that, I responded, singing along, even getting the little uptick in the heart that comes with the commercial or family holiday all Americans celebrate at this time of year.
I do miss some of the over doing, present wrapping–ok, I don’t miss present wrapping, decorating the tree–well, I don’t miss getting the tree, putting up the tree or the occasional nasty surprise like the one my friend Mark discovered when he watered and watered this year’s tree only to discover the pan had cracked and water had leaked out under the tree skirt, nor do I miss taking down the tree, cleaning up the fallen needles, Christmas music–responding in the store meant something to me, but only because I’d spent 40 days away from the US and this is one strong cultural tradition, over saturation spoils the effect, church services–well, I bailed on those a long, long time ago.
So, maybe I’m not too sad about our ascetic approach to the holidays. Besides, the holiday that now means the most to me, the Winter Solstice, comes along now, too, and I do celebrate that one with candles, meditation and writing.
There is, though, a powerful need for reflection, for love, for warmth in all its manifestations. Sergio, our guide on a tour in Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the Americas, explained that winters there, where the nights are long long long, often results in depression.
Another argument for a Ge-centric faith, one that acknowledges the darkness, relishes its nurturing power, rejoices at the return of the light and doesn’t have to get overly metaphysical about it.
These brave festivals of the light like Deepavli, Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule and even New Years all respond to the same fundamental astronomical fact, the lengthening of night and the ancient fear that the sun may not return. In that sense they’re all good, but why not acknowledge, first, the fundamental reason for the season, axial tilt?
Samain Moon of the Winter Solstice
Jon sent these two links. Wish I’d had’em when I owned that farm up near Nevis, Minnesota. I might still be up there, motoring around on some of these very clever inventions. They show what an ingenious mind can do when rethinking what appear to be over and done with ideas.
http://opensourceecology.org/
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/
Makes me wonder what other ideas need a complete rethink. Computers have followed a pretty standard architecture up to now, one based on a central processing unit. I read an article in Scientific American last week about a neural computer which, in essence, gives each unit of a computer a cpu, allowing for massively parallel processing as an integral part of the design. It’s modeled on, but not attempting to replicate, the human brain.
How about housing? Cars? Or, my personal quest and long time obsession, religion? The family? Electrical generation? I’m interested in distributed generation where a cul de sac or an apartment building or a couple of blocks city residential units might get their electricity from, say, a combination of wind, solar and geo-thermal units sited in their immediate vicinity.
Here’s another one that could use a complete overhaul, reimagining: nations. The nation state is a relatively new phenomenon, most experts date its rise somewhere around 1800, perhaps a hundred years earlier in the instance of Portugal and the Netherlands. In the wake of the globalization of economic life national boundaries have much different meanings that they did, say, 50 years ago.
Let’s go back to religion for a second. Over the last several years, 23 to be exact, I’ve wrestled with the hole left by Christianity in my life and sought to fill it through what I call a tactile spirituality, one wedded to the rhythms of the seasons, of flowers and vegetables, of bees. This direction took its initial impetus from an immersion in Celtic lore while I sifted for writing topics.
Then, I began to follow the Great Wheel of the seasons, a Celtic sacred calendar focused on 8 seasons, rather than four. That led me to integrate gardening with my sacred calendar. In the wake of these two changes in my life, I began to see the vegetative and wild natural world as more than tools for food or leisure, rather I began to see that they were my home, that I lived with them and in them, rather than having them as adjuncts to my anthropocentric life.
This whole change, this rethink of what sacred and holy mean, what the locus of my spirituality is and where it is, has had a long maturation, much thought and experimentation. My hope is that my reimagining might provide a common religious base, a sort of ur-religion, which all humans everywhere can embrace.
As in times past this base religion could certainly have others layered on top of it, its essence after all is to be non-exclusive. What I hope further is that reasserting, inviting, even luring others to see the sacred and the holy in our planet and its other living beings, they will be more likely to join in to see it healthy and vital.
Samain Moon of the Winter Solstice
Snow. And darkness. So different from spring and the lengthening days of South America. The darkness and the snow both make me feel at home, rooted in the season that my genes tell me ought to be going on in December.
Cold seems to have abated and I’ve been working on my nativity presentation. Now I end with the depression era photograph by Dorothea Lange. The mother and her children. A universal and timeless theme.
I’ve just created my first slide show, this one done in the presentation format of openoffice.doc because that’s the software I have on my laptop. (it’s free.)
It gives me the ability to project full view images which I could not do in the .pdf format I used when I checked out the projector on Thursday.
The whole nativity story, of course, comes into the Jesus narrative as an afterthought, a reflection that such an important guy must have had a special and memorable birth. Not an unusual phenomena in history, but it does make the familiar stories and images very much in the realm of myth and archetype and not history.
The big idea I take away from the nativity narratives is the incarnation. God becomes human. Especially in a monotheistic faith this is an extraordinary idea, mind blowing. Seemingly impossible. Debate over just how it was possible occupied the Christian church until the Chalcedonian council when competing ideas got sorted and the notion of Jesus as both fully human and fully God became dominant.
In m own breakaway syncretism I put the notion of incarnation in synch with the Hindu namaste. The God in me bows to the God in you. This way we don’t have to wrestle with the unusual task of fitting an omniscient and omnipresent being into a frail human vessel. Instead, each of us is a splinter of the divinity, a chip off the old divine block. We don’t have to pray upward and outward to reach the holy, rather we can go down and in, plumbing our depths, depths which have their roots in the sacred river.
No matter how you understand it this holiseason represents and celebrates the divine human. Sounds about right to me. Lets go caroling.