Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

Gifts and Talents

August 21, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Waning Honey Extraction Moon

Kate and I had a conversation the other day about talent. Two of her sisters make their living playing classical violin. They have talent. A lot of it. BJ went to Julliard and Sarah to Curtis, both academies for topflight talent. They both graduated and have been able to work using their training. BJ makes a living as a classical musician in New York City, the hotspot for classical music today in the same way Vienna was at one time in Austria. Sarah teaches violin and does the occasional solo spot with orchestras of the second tier.

Kate and I had/have above average intelligence and have been able to work making use of those gifts, Kate in pediatrics and me in various religious, political and artistic positions.

Even so, in all four of our cases, we had enough talent to peer over the transom into the gifted realm, but not enough to participate in it. This is a ruling contradiction of life, no matter what your level of talent, wealth or status, there is always someone more talented, more gifted, wealthier and higher up the status ladder. Always. Even if you’re Itzhak Perlman or Bill Gates or Merrill Streep, you have to contend with Paganini, Andrew Carnegie or Sarah Bernhardt. History can always serve up an exemplar who achieved more, acted better or accumulated more wealth than thou.

This problem cannot be solved by saying don’t peek, don’t stand on the chair and try to see into the room where the door closed before you. No, we all peek because we can’t help it. We imagine, fantasize, try to pull ourselves up a little bit, maybe we can squeeze through, even if it’s only to the room where the jobs pay $15.00. Or maybe to the room where the cool kids are. Or the ones with enough food. Or the Noble Prize. Or authors with books on the NYT bestseller list.

Here is the one and true solution. Know thyself. Work within yourSelf, demanding from that Self the best it has. Not the best it wishes it had, not the best others seem to have, but the best Self you have. In this way you offer the world that unique gift, you.

This solution also solves the problem of transom peeking. You will still wonder, fantasize perhaps, what might have been, but you will not be driven to either envy or despair because you have as much as work as you can handle already. Being you.

Neither does this mean that you settle for mediocrity, less than the person you have the Self to become. One of the most negative aspects of envy or despair is the demotivation it produces. The, if I can’t be like her, or him, then I just won’t bother path.

No, your path, the ancient trail that you must walk is this: know your Self and follow its lead, only that ancient trail can lead you to the gift only you can offer the rest of us.

Humanity needs all the gifts of the whole species.

We have enormous challenges today. Climate change. Hunger. Religious and racial discrimination. Wars. Economic ups and downs. We cannot afford to leave the talents and vision of even one woman, one ethnicity, one age to waste.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Humanities, Letters, Myth and Story

Looking Backwards

August 13, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Full Honey Extraction Moon

Over the last week plus I’ve watched the Starz Network version of the King Arthur legends, Camelot. I get it streaming from Netflix. Each time I watch this program I get a shot of creative juices, similar to the ones I got when I first read the Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Those didn’t inspire me to write about the King Arthur material, an area that gets reworked a lot, but it did cause me to think about my own heritage, my ethnic heritage and what might be there as a resource for writing.

At the time I chose to emphasize the Celtic aspects of my bloodline, Welsh in the instance of the Ellis line and Irish through the Correll’s, my father’s father’s mother’s family. The Celts have a rich pool of legends, religious ideas and quasi-historical accounts. Most have heard at least something about druids and faeries, both part of the Celtic past. There are, too, holy wells, a Celtic pantheon and the series of holidays known as the Great Wheel which I celebrate.

I’ve not done much with the German side of my heritage though it is, arguably, more substantial since the Zikes and the Spitlers, my mother’s and father’s mother’s families respectively are both German. The Keatons, my mother’s father’s family, we think have an English connection though it’s proven difficult to track down.

The legendary and religious aspects of the ancient Celts and Germans are what interest me, the more recent history not so much and by recent I mean from the Renaissance forward.

Roman and Greek mythology and legend has also fascinated me since I was young and my Aunt Barbara gave me a copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology. Through out my life at various points I’ve read such works as the Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod’s Theogony, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, amazed at the richness of these stories.

As you know, if you read this blog with any regularity, that lead me to learn Latin, which I am doing, so I could translate Ovid’s great work, the Metamorphoses, for myself. The distance between a translated text and its English version has interested me especially since seminary. In seminary I studied both the Old and New Testaments extensively, learning in the process many techniques for analyzing ancient texts. It was my favorite part of the seminary curriculum.

When I observed yesterday to Greg, my Latin tutor, that the commentaries I’d found for the Metamorphose lacked a lot compared to commentaries for the Biblical material, he challenged me. “Well,” he said, “You could write a commentary to it.” I might just be able to do that.

When I mentioned it to Kate, she said, “Oh, and finish your novels, too?” And she’s right of course. I have more than one creative iron in the fire, plus other matters related to art and the environment.

Even so, the idea intrigues me. A lot. Now all I have to do is get very facile at translating.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Weather +Climate

A Season Bent Toward Darkness and Cold

August 2, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Waxing Honey Extraction Room

Since March I’ve driven home at 8 pm, each Sunday, from Tai Chi at the corner of Hennepin and Franklin. As March receded and April arrived, then May and June, the evening drive had light, then light in abundance, with the sun setting well after I got home. Now we are in Lughnasa, a full six weeks past the Summer Solstice. This last Sunday night the sun had begun to fall behind the trees as I headed toward Highway 252. The long downward slide toward the Winter Solstice is well underway, the days growing shorter and the nights longer.

This is my time, now, the season bent toward darkness and cold even while the heat of summer continues to swell the fruits of the garden. I can already feel the movement inward and down, the contemplative months reaching out from the future, beckoning my soul.

Once the harvest begins in earnest, which it did here in July with the garlic crop, the gardening year moves toward senescence, ripening proceeds the coming of brown withered stalks and leaves turning already to dust. Nature puts the bounty just before the fallow time. It is the fallow time though, the time after the sensuality of seed fertility has yielded to summer and produced crops, crops that finish the plants purpose for that season at least, in many cases forever, that leaves room for the imagination, writing its dreams on stubbled fields, carving its fantasies in clouds pushed down from the north, opening the heart to its own rhythm.

(Allison found this Van Gogh drawing. It even has the hint of melancholy the season brings in its train.)

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

Lughnasa 2011

August 1, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Waxing Honey Flow Moon

The third cross-quarter holiday in the Celtic calendar, Lughnasa follows Beltain and proceeds Samhain, thus it cuts the once much longer Beltain season, essentially the growing and harvesting season, in half. It marks the first fruits of the harvest, a time of gathering in and being nourished by the summer’s heat, the plants’ flourishing. Lughnasa apparently celebrates the god Lugh, a sun-god, though the relation between him and this festival is uncertain. The Catholics honor this pagan tradition through the feastday, Lammas, when parishioners bring in bread from the first grains harvested.

In the old days these festivals lasted a week or more, with farmers coming into the village from the countryside or meeting at a customary spot to set up a market. Feasting, drinking, games, searching for a mate or for work blended with the serious task of laying up sufficient stores to survive the winter, foreshadowed now by the earlier setting of the sun.

A remnant of these market fairs continues on in county fairs and state fairs where feasting, drinking, games, searching for a mate or work blends with honoring those who still provide our food. Yes, we have the grocery store now and no we don’t wonder about surviving the winter, at least many of us don’t, but the old need to come together and crown a Princess Kay of the Milky Way, to sculpt her in butter lingers.

Lughnasa here at Artemis Hives will find the honey harvest joining the tomatoes, the potatoes, beets, carrots, beans and onions. It also finds us reaping the harvest of new learning: Latin, Tai Chi, quilting techniques, potting and celebrating family. The dogs have become a calmer pack thanks to an investment of time over the last few months. Mark has made some progress towards a job and a healthier future.

Celebrate your harvest, too. Raise a glass of wine or water, eat a meal with friends and loved ones. Wear a flower garland and go the state fair or the farmer’s market. Why? Because these are things we humans have done for centuries, for millennia, they keep us alive and healthy.

Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Family

Progress In Tai Chi

July 31, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Mid-Summer New Honey Extraction Moon

Tai chi. Finally, I made some progress. Slow, but sure. Be patient with yourself they told us at the first meeting. I’m glad they said that. I’ve needed it and still get upset, want to quit, but keep coming back. This is a commitment to a new way of being in the world, a more physical, graceful way. A way I don’t often associate with myself.

Mark starts work tomorrow, an 8-hour day devoted to looking for work. We’ll pay him minimum wage for a devoted effort, an effort which can include looking at graduate programs, looking for work far away as well as for work close to hand.

Another hot, sticky day.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

Imagination

July 31, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Mid-Summer New Honey Extraction Moon

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.” – Albert Einstein

Logic revealed itself to me in Symbolic Logic I at Wabash College. Professor Larry Hackstaffe taught it and I struggled like a flopping fish for six weeks, right up to the first test. I studied and studied, but it made no sense to me. On the day of the first test I went in and Bam, it was there. Locked into place and flowing.

This anecdote shows a strange reality about logic. You have to learn how to use it and when you do the learning curve is not necessarily progressive, moving from one logical step to another, rather it proceeds in the manner of insight and intuition. After you get, logic will get you from A to Z and show you how you got there. You can also show others how you got there. You can use it suss out weaknesses in the arguments of others and in your own arguments.

Here’s the rub, though. Beginnings. Assumptions. What do you assume when you begin your logical journey? If we accept the two ideas of mortality and Socrates, we can use the famous syllogism, if all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal. If, however, we believe in, say, reincarnation, then this syllogism cannot make sense. Or, to take a more current example, if the debt ceiling is not a critical political issue to you, then all the arguments in the world about how to control it will be nonsense.

Logic has a power in its crisp, repeatable steps and its ability to say whether one thing truly follows from another, but it has only limited use in the realm of the good, the true and the beautiful. Truth, even. Yes, truth lies outside logic’s realm. Logical can tell whether you a conclusion follows from its argument, but it cannot tell you whether it is a good conclusion or a bad conclusion. That is the realm of value.

Imagination allows us, encourages us, to consider conclusions not dreamt of in your philosophy. Or mine. Imagination allows to go all non-Euclidean on geometry. It pushed past Newton and into General and Special relativity. Imagination flows into realms never conceived and into ideas never before entertained. Our imagination may be the most wondrous organ of all. The imaginal lobe, wherever it resides, dreams and schemes, rearranges and redesigns with no necessary allegiance to fact, truth, goodness or badness.

Imagination is dangerous, yes, but also beautiful. I’m with Einstein, I want to go every where.

Art and Culture, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Woolly Mammoths

To Bee, To Do

July 18, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Mid-Summer Waning Honey Flow Moon

Out to the bees in just a few minutes to slap on two more honey supers each, the six I finished varnishing yesterday while Mark put foundations in the frames. This will find six honey supers on colonies 2 & 3, while colony 1, the parent colony for next year’s only divide, will have four. Not sure if I’ll need more than these. I’m having to do this in the early morning, not the best time, but the only time I’ve got today.

At 9:15 Kate and I take off in separate cars for the Northern Clay Center. Our clay intensive starts this week, 10:00 to 4:30. I hope to learn how to make Japanese style tea cups and salad sized plates. Like tai chi working clay puts a premium on hand-eye co-ordination and sense of touch as well overall design skills.

A good while ago my spiritual journey had gone stale in the reading, meditation, contemplative modes I knew best. The next stage of my spiritual practice became gardening, working with the rhythm of flowers, soil, spades and trowels.

That practice went on for many years when Kate and I decided to add vegetables and the orchard with permaculture principles in mind. That added a good deal of oomph to the tactile spirituality, deciding to keep bees put animal husbandry into the mix. At this point my spirituality has become more and more attuned to the rhythms of growing seasons, plants and bees, all within the context of the Celtic Great Wheel.

With tai chi and clay my spiritual practice comes closer in again, my hands, my feet, my hips, my arms. Both clay and tai chi are paths on this nature focused ancientrail, though for me they are quite a bit harder. But that’s the push I need to grow.

After our first day at Northern Clay, I have my Woolly meeting tonight at Highpoint Print co-operative where we will make prints. One more step down the ancientrail of the mind/body link.

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

Queen of Relaxation

July 13, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Mid-Summer Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Our new pack Kona, Vega, Rigel + Gertie has begun to calm down. There are fewer tense circling moments, fewer snaps and growls. Life with dogs has its rhythms, just like life with vegainwater humans. Vega, our biggest girl, lays on the window seat, tail thumping, watchful, inviting me to come down and sit beside her, enjoy a moment of relaxation with her. She is a great role model for relaxation. The 4th of July fireworks season has moved into the past, or the future, and Rigel no longer barks at the night sky.

Our tiered perennial garden and its brick patio have gotten neglected in our push toward the orchard, vegetables and bees. It was my focus for so long and now it grows on its own, almost, with little help from either of us. It looks that way, too. I began this morning a three or four day project to clean it up, weed it, mulch it, arrange and clean up the furniture and potting bench. This involved, today, pulling the lovely green chive like grass that volunteers everywhere, then putting down a heavy blanket of birch leaves, sweeping the bricks and clearing litter off tables and benches, killing weeds growing in the brick crevices and emptying old pots into the compost.

There’s still plenty to do and I’ll get on with that tomorrow.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Literature

A Classic

July 6, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Mid-Summer Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Visiting the Inferno today, complete with air conditioning. The Inferno exhibit, illustrations of this section of Dante’s masterpiece done by a contemporary artist, Michael Mazur, hang in a print exhibition at the MIA. The Inferno, especially its introduction, has touched me deeply, as it has Western civilization. Here are two versions of its opening canto’s first lines.

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.

Midway the path of life that men pursue
I found me in a darkling wood astray,
For the direct way had been lost to view.
Ah me, how hard a thing it is to say
What was this thorny wildwood intricate
Whose memory renews the first dismay!
Scarcely in death is bitterness more great
But as concerns the good discovered there
The other things I saw will I relate.

Dante has uncovered that moment in our lives, come soon or late, when the way we had known, probably the one we had carried with us to that point unconsciously, the culturally given pattern for our lives, fails to work for us. The moment when I realized achievement and upward progress hindered my self-knowledge, that old gender roles no longer served as guideposts for intimate relationships, that the racial stereotypes I had grown up with were wrong, that the liberal politics I had received at the breakfast table could no longer explain the problems I saw in American society, that the Christian faith could not stretch wide enough to include even my own family, in that moment I set off with Dante, needing a Virgil to guide me through the underworld of my own changing Self.

This is the power of the classics, the mirror held up to our search, the challenge to our comfortable assumptions and, perhaps most important, suggestions about where the path may lead beyond them.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Myth and Story, Politics

Still Alive.

June 17, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waxing Garlic Moon

Oh, boy. I’ve not gone a day without a post in a long time. Yesterday went by so fast.

Worked on Latin for a bit, but a brightening day pulled me outside. I plucked tulip detritus out of a bed where some tomato plants needed to go. These were full grown ones, liable to produce tomatoes as opposed to my healthy, but still immature seedling started back in April.

At the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers meeting Tuesday I learned that honey filling what could be brood frames means the bees in colonies 2 and 3 felt crowded. I got out my honey supers, scraped them free of propolis, something I realized I could have done last fall, and excess wax, then plopped two each on 2 & 3. These are the colonies that will be allowed to die out over the winter. Colony 1 already has its 3rd hive box on with the queen producing brood at a quick pace. All three of these colonies started out on drawn comb which reduces the initial work load significantly and allows the bees to focus on brood raising, foraging and honey and pollen collecting.

All of this means Artemis hives have positioned themselves for the start of the honey flow.

Then it was quick get into my nicer clothes for a 3 hour stint at the Netroots Convention in downtown Minneapolis. I volunteered for service at the Sierra Club table in the convention’s exhibit hall. We highlighted our Beyond Coal campaign. I got into a snit with an organizer who felt that chairs should be anathema at tables. He feels this creates a climate that forces staff and volunteers out into the stream of traffic, pressing cards and information into people’s hands, getting names and addresses. At 64 standing on a concrete floor for 3 and 4 hours in a row is not something I choose to do. A chair gives me an opportunity to take a break now and then. Which I need.

The organizer’s view saw volunteers as numbers useful for gaining more numbers, rather than people. This is an instrumentalist view of the person, an error in judgment not unusual among utopians who willingly sacrifice today’s people in service of a better future. It ignores the true and only reason for organizing which is to gain a better life for others, a better life which begins in the present, not in some imagined or hoped for more powerful future.

Do we need to sacrifice to move our political ideas forward? Of course. Do we need to sacrifice our health and well-being? Only in extreme situations. Which the Netroots Convention in the Minneapolis Convention center is not.

After three hours of hawking underwear (I’ll explain later) and moving beyond coal as a source of electrical generation, I drove over to the Walker where I began a two session seminar at the Walker Art Center on THE BLURRING OF ART AND LIFE: IMPACT OF MASS CULTURE ON ART. Taught by an art historian from Hamline College, Roslye Ultan, this seminar approaches modern and contemporary art especially since Dada and Marcel DuChamp. There are ten or eleven of us in the class, all women save for me and all Walker guides save for me.

This means I find in myself cast in the unusual role of traditionalist. The MIA is an encyclopedic museum with an emphasis on the historicality and the geographicality of art from the earliest to the most recent, extending from a 20,000 year old Venus Figurine to a finished last year installation, Dreaming of St. Adorno by living artist, Siah Armajani.

Roslye takes her art historical cue from DuChamp who said he wanted to put art in the service of the mind. Rosalye has expanded on or extended this idea into an assertion that it is not the object that is the universal, transcendent work but the idea given form in the object. Seemingly entrenching my traditionalist orientation, I disagreed, holding out for the work of art itself as the what that transcended time.

She tried to tell me this was not right, but I am not easily budged by an argument from authority, so we had a tussle. A mild one. I backed off, as I often do in classroom settings, not wanting to waste other peoples time. In this instance, as the class progressed, I found the tussle invigorated the class, gave it an edge and increased my focus.

That was two instances of conflict in one day. On the drive home I turned them both over in my mind, like teasing a hole in a tooth. Was I too much in the argument with the organizer? Yes, my tone was over the top. Did I regret? Tone, yes. Content, no. I’ll apologize for the tone to him today. But not the need to treat volunteers as people not instruments.

The tussle in the class left me with no negative hangover. In fact, when I put the two together, I realized they meant I’m alive and still living. I felt good about that.