Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Friends

Yama

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                                Waxing Garlic Moon

Still learning about fruit tree management.  Gonna go out and inspect the fruit trees one by one on a ladder this morning.  Then, mid-morning, the bees.  Later, tai-chi starts up again.

A busy week ahead so tomorrow is a Latin day.  I will be in the story of Pentheus for some time, Book III: 509-730.

Death.  A friend whose brother is dying and whose wife has been diagnosed with cancer said the other night, “I can feel them circling.”  This is, I imagine, a frequent sensation as we enter this last stage of life, no longer attending weddings so much as funerals.

The wonderful mandala and one thanka we have at the MIA speak to this.  They both celebrate Yama, the Lord of Death.  In Tibetan Buddhism Yama has a distinct role, he moves us toward enlightenment by teaching us how to reconcile with our own death.  A key move for Yama involves getting each person to embrace their own death, not shrink from it, or fear it, but understanding it as only the end point to this particular life.  In Tibetan Buddhism this has importance because the dying persons emotional state at death has a lot to do with the next incarnation.

In my (our) case I find Yama an important god because coming to grips with our own death does liberate us (can liberate us).  Yama represents that sacred force moving within us that wants us to live today because we know we may (will) die tomorrow.  When our fear of dying crimps our will to live (fully), then death has taken hold of us too early.  Instead, by accepting the eventual and definite reality of our own death, we can paradoxically gain new energy for living a full, rich, authentic life.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Humanities, Politics

An Unforgivable Sin?

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                    Waning Last Frost Moon

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.” – Albert Camus

Dogs behave like dogs.  Ticks like ticks.  Ravens steal.  Osprey fish.  Shark keep moving.  Even the heart beats, the liver and the kidney detoxify, the stomach and the gut digest and eliminate.  The nose smells.  The ear hears.

We are the only creatures who, at a super-organism level, can refuse to be what we are.  It is both our glory and our damnation.  When we resist the impulse to violence, the credo of self first and the will to domination we become creatures of wonder, covered with grace and filled with light.  When, though, we take more than we can eat, steal more than we need from mother earth, use our evolved brain to imprison other creatures when we do not need them for food, then we walk to the mouth of the River Styx and throw ourselves in Charon’s boat.

Here is the first and greatest sin, perhaps the unforgivable sin.  We imagine ourselves apart from nature, as unique and special beings, exempt from evolutionary history and immune to natural consequences.  While it is true that our great technical and scientific skill seems to partition us off in our own special province, it is not so.  Why not?  Read an article about peak oil.  Consider the consequences of peak water.  Look at the struggle to find precious and rare metals, needed for sophisticated electronic devices.  It leads the Polymet Corporation to the conclusion that not only could they find them in our wonderful northeastern Minnesota, they must mine them.  Must.  Or else.  What?  No more cell phones, laptops, tablets?

Consider the moment of peak rare earths and metals.  What then.  Mother earth only has a certain cache of elements and their combinations, a cache configured in the fires of solar fusion and flung out in the processes that created our solar system and our world.  We do not, can not, make more copper, barium, lithium, nickel.  What gives corporations the arrogant assumption that they can use this store of minerals for their own private purpose?  What gives humanity the temerity to arrogate to our uses all the fossil fuels, all the stored carbon, all the metals gathered in mother earth’s body?  If this question seems naive, then ask how extinction might feel, extinction because we refuse to recognize our limits and our real location in the community of creatures and the world of things?

So, I invite you to go outside this memorial day weekend and find a flower, a tree, a bird, a dog.  Sit with them for a while.  Notice if they try to take more than the universe has allocated for their use?  Notice how they appreciate the water, the sun, the sky, a friend.  Then watch one of us.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Politics

A Paradox

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                                       Waning Last Frost Moon

Groceries.  Bees.  Check in for cruise.  That’s my day today.  Well, I might watch a bit of the 500, just see how it goes.

It Broke From Within (see post below) is based on a quote from a p.r. piece for an early Walker project that read:  Remember France?  It broke from within.  That can happen here.

It goes on:  We can only protect our own country within by making more of us more understanding of each other’s freedom and each other’s work and possessions.  We must learn to place a high value on the things that we have created and built and which we would inevitably lose through disunity and social revolution.  Nothing is more important to us than those civic institutions, of which the art center is one, that create a broader appreciation of our common bonds–our homes, our work, and our personal expressions.

At first I read this as an artist’s statement by Goshka Macuga and wrestled with its obviously conservative tone, especially in the sentence:  We must learn to place a high value on the things we have created and built and which we would inevitably lose through disunity and social revolution.  The first we here seems to encompass all, all Minneapolis, all Twin Cities, all Minnesota, all USA while the second we encompasses those who build and create, mostly the upper classes, who then, the third we, stand to lose things during a period of disunity and social revolution.

Then I realized that, no, it was not an artist’s statement, but a statement from the Walker Art Center fund drive brochure in 1941.  Oh.  Well, it makes sense then. However, in that time between first reading it and realizing it was a fund drive brochure quote, I did consider a conundrum, a paradox that dogs my thinking and my working life.

It is this.  Since the mid-60’s I have considered myself a political radical, willing to act outside the law if necessary to protest and resist unjust laws and unjust governmental or corporate actions.  I’ve not only considered myself a radical, but have, on many occasions, been a direct action activist.  What I’m saying here is that my political sympathies and my political work lie considerably left of center and left of liberal.

Here’s the rub.  I love art.  I love being around art and talking to other folks about art.  Especially in the context of a museum.  I love the outdoors and mother earth.  I love being outside and talking with others about being outside. I love the garden and growing things, working with bees.  I love my family, keeping them close and supporting them.  I love the classics in literature and music, too.  I love them enough to learn Latin and translate a 2000 year old Latin text.  These are all conservative impulses.

Art in museums and the purpose of a docent lies in admiring and sharing the work of artists over thousands of years and vast spans of geography.  This requires, quite literally, conservation and an appreciation for the past.  Working on behalf of mother earth and our great outdoors, even gardening and beekeeping, are, by definition, conservative.  That is, they act to conserve our natural world through good stewardship.  Loving family is a time honored conservative theme, because it too, quite literally, preserves and conserves our  species.  Even religion, which has been an important part of my life for a long time, entails conforming ones life to an often ancient code and deposit of tradition.

So.  There it is.  Radical leftist in politics.  Conservative in many of the areas about which I’m most passionate.  What’s that?  They’re categorically different uses of the word?  Well, maybe, but I think the underlying theme suggested in the Walker Brochure tries to argue for a universal conservative impulse, one oriented toward stability and fear of social chaos, yes, but also toward preserving the best of what we have learned, of what we have come to believe important.

Here is my current thought.  While I love art, nature, and family and will and do act to protect and nourish them, conservative intuitions, I also recognize that not all folks have equal access to art, to the natural world, even to stable families.  Those of us who have “created and built” must understand that all wish to do so.  That the culture and the families we love must see to it that others have that privilege, too.

We also must recognize that while we cherish certain institutions and achievements, others have them, too, often ones we have not recognized.  Jazz is a good example.  So is the native american’s delicate dialogue with the natural world.  So is the rich extended family life of the Latino culture.  They wish to conserve the things they have created and built just as much as we of the middle-upper and upper classes want to conserve ours.

It is this tension between what could be and what it is that drives the difference between the radical and the conservative.  And ever will.

Faith and Spirituality, Politics

A Sucker. One Born Every Minute.

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                         Waning Last Crescent Moon

So.  Last Wednesday I drove into Minneapolis for the last regular legcom meeting of this year.  We’d been going at it since January, once a week, with all the prep work and other matters (legislative hearings, visits to legislators, conferences, boning up on the issues) and everybody would, I know, be ready for a rest.

First, though, I had to pick up Wanda Davies at Victoria and County Road C in Roseville.  In my rush to get out the door I oriented myself toward the street I knew that intersected with County Road C, Snelling Avenue.  That was how I ended up waiting in the parking lot of the Holiday station.

While I was waiting, a woman in a disheveled Whiskey Sour Notes t-shirt approached me.  Her car had blown a tire on the road.  The trooper gave her two hours to move it and she needed to get a can of the stuff that inflates your tire.  She’d found somebody to take her out there after she’d bought it, but the total was $50.00.  She had skin lesions on her face that in retrospect may have been meth craters, though her teeth looked good.

Anyhow I reached in my wallet, gave her the $50 I had plus my name and address.  She said she’d repay me.  When I told Kate, she said, “You’re always a sucker for a hard-luck story.”  Yeah, I am.

As I’ve reflected on it now, her anxiety, which was real, might have been a drug jones as much as worry about her vehicle.  I don’t know.  Even so, I’d rather risk being wrong than refuse an authentic plea for help.  It’s only money.

Oh.  Yes, I did pick up Wanda after a phone call or two and we had the meeting.  And were glad to be finished with the session.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Writing

I Shrugged

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                              Waning Last Frost Moon

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists … it is real … it is possible … it’s yours.” – Ayn Rand

Sounds pretty good at the start, doesn’t it?  Don’t let your fire go out?  Even the hero in the soul could be an archetypal reference, one that is pro-Self.  Then, Rand goes completely off the rails.  Lonely isolation because the life you deserved has been beyond reach.  The world you desire can be won.  It exists and so on.  This is the most specious sort of pseudo-logic.

First of all.  Life you deserve?  Oh, who said?  There is no metaphysical realm filled with wonderful fulfilling lives created especially for you and your desires.  That’s simply a happy talk version of heaven, the old pie in the sky idea, just not when you die, but delivered now, right now.  Fast food, fast destiny.  Delivered to your home.

A world you’ve never been able to reach?  So.  If you haven’t reached it yet, why not?  Because you haven’t believed in it enough?  Because you don’t have the right gender, color, sexual preference?  Could it be that the life you want and don’t have is one fed into the culture by vapid self-help gurus like Ayn Rand?  Who says you can have whatever you want?  What’s good about that?  That’s the adolescent girl screaming at a rock concert or an adolescent boy watching hockey or football, pumping his fist and imagining.  Is it possible that the dream you have is not your dream, but the dream of a culture with achievement as its number one value?

I’m no stranger to this thought.  I dreamed of becoming a published author, admired for my prose and my inventive fiction.  I wanted it.  I haven’t got it.  Is my life over because I don’t have what I dreamed?  Far from it.  My dream, and others I’ve had like it, came into my Self via a male focused culture, one that said, Be all you can be.  You can do anything.  B.S.

I can’t, for example, run a 4:00 minute mile.  I can’t, for example solve Fourier Transformations.  I can’t paint the next great American painting nor am I able to put on a white coat and figure out what’s the matter with you.  Would I like to be able to do these things?  Sure.  Is not desiring them what puts them beyond my reach?  No. It’s my limitedness, the peculiar package of skills and abilities I had from birth and have accrued over years of life experience.

We each have limitations; they make us unique.  The trick is not desiring a life you “deserve”, it is finding the life that only you can live, the peculiar, one-off life you have to offer to the world and to the rest of us.  The big difference here is the inward look goes toward self-knowledge, toward humility, toward knowing what only you can do.  This boot-strap, Horatio Alger, American mobility notion only pulls you further and further away from self-knowledge.  Instead, your life becomes an attempt to shoe-horn yourself into a cultural vessel, one not designed for you, not at all, but one designed to keep the culture moving in the direction it knows.

You are different.  You deserve nothing.  The hero in your soul will not perish in lonely isolation because you don’t get what you deserve.  The hero in your soul perishes when it uses its power and energy to cram you into somebody elses version of what you deserve.

In summary:  I don’t like Ayn Rand.

Art and Culture, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Poetry, Politics, Writing

Higher Education Does Not Need The Humanities. But, We Do.

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                    Waning Last Frost Moon

On a pile of essays, yet unread, sits one at the top, “The Great River of the Classics”, by Camille Paglia.  She is my heroine, an outspoken advocate for the content of the humanities, the deposit of art, music, literature and theater that flows from Western civilization’s beginnings in the fertile crescent, a river with a delta now rich with islands and streams, a fan of human experience at its most intense and intimate that nourishes the ocean that is Western humanity’s collective conscious and unconscious.

Egypt’s splendor, the profundity and innovation of the Greeks, the ordered ambition of the Romans, the spirituality of the Celts, the deep feeling of the Russians and the Germans, the list is long and has depth.  Gilgamesh.  The Egyptian Book of the Dead.  The fragments of the Pre-Socratic.  Jewish texts.  Christian and Muslim texts.  The pyramids.  The parthenon.  Rome.  The pantheon. Fra Lippa.  Giorgio. Botticelli.  Michelangelo. Da Vinci.  Petrarch.  Erasmus.  Francis Bacon.  Titian.  Brueghel.  Boccaccio. Chaucer.  Beowulf.  The poetic eddas.  Ovid.  Turner.  Poussin.  Rembrandt.  Barye.   Tolstoy.  Dostoevsky.  Singer.  the Baal Shem Tov.  Racine.  Shakespeare.  Marlowe.  Haydn.  Mozart.  Beethoven.  Brahms.

And the many, the very many left out of this brief evocation.

Perhaps the humanities do not pass the test of occupational preparedness, a test now applied to departments in higher education.  Just yesterday an academic group released a study the dollar value of varying university degrees based on earnings over time and starting salaries.  In many colleges and universities humanities departments look like low hanging fruit when it comes to the budget ax.

So.  If humanities degrees result in less earned income over a student’s life, does this make them, ipso facto, less valuable?  Obviously.  If, that is, the only yardstick is dollars.  No, I’m not going to make the argument that dollars are a grubby, undistinguished measure; each of us has to eat, reside somewhere, raise our children and nourish our dreams.

Even the fact that the humanities stood at the very center of the project of higher learning at its inception does not privilege them now.  The needs and values of the middle ages were different from ours today.  No, the humanities must stand valuable by today’s standards more than they must reflect the values of past centuries.

It may be that the university is no longer the place for the humanities.  It may be that higher education’s mission in contemporary life involves primarily occupational learning, a sort of advanced vocational training.  Institutions focuses change over time.  Their work must meet the needs of those whom they serve or they have no reason to exist.

It does not bother me if higher education strips out the humanities.  Let the music department perish.  Banish the philosophers, the artists, the literati, the linguists and language crowd, let history go, too.  Leave the ivy covered walls with only economics, business, pre-law, pre-med, engineering, architecture, agriculture, veterinary science, family and child psychology.  Keep those subjects that inform the workers of today and tomorrow and let the fluff go.  Keep the hard stuff, abandon the soft disciplines.

Why don’t these changes bother me?  Because an artist does not need an art department, she needs fellow artists and places to display and sell her goods, but art departments, no matter how good, no matter how well intentioned, are not necessary to artists.  Work is.  Literature, too.  Writers write because they must, because words and ideas matter to them.  No writer writes because there are good writing programs.  Of course, they can learn things in those programs, but writing does not depend on English departments.  Music, too, is part of the beating heart of culture.  Musicians, whether trained in universities or not, will make music.  Musicians will and do get trained in many other places than higher education.  Philosophers are stuck with the sort of minds that go to the root of things and they will dig deep without philosophy departments.  They need other philosophers, yes, but there are books and airplanes.

The humanities are of, by and for humans.  Because they are of our essence, they will survive diminished or even eliminated university and college support.  Will they be poorer?  Probably.  For a while.  But not for long.  We need music to fill our souls.  We need literature to grasp the many ways there are to be human.  We need painting and sculpture and print making because beauty satisfies an essential yearning of the human spirit and because we need to experience the interior world of others as much as we can.  We need those among us who will ask the difficult, the unpopular questions and pursue them where they lead.

We need all of these things; they do not need higher education.  It will be poorer without them, less reflective, more insular, more satisfied with apparently easy answers.

What might happen is this.  After the humanities have been ejected from higher education, humanities practitioners and scholars will meet, find they still need each other.  An idea will occur to them.  Why not have a place where the humanities can be taught?  An institute, maybe.  A gymnasium.  An academy.  Or, maybe something new.  A virtual gathering space for artists and scholars, for writers and teachers.

Out of these experiment might grow, what?  I don’t know.  Perhaps an educational institution with its primary mission immersing its students in the Great River of the Humanities, a baptism by art.  Could happen.

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Myth and Story

Horticulture

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                              Waxing Last Frost Moon

Gardening commends itself in several ways, but two are most important to me.   Having life tuned to the seasonal and daily rhythms of heat, light, rain, snow, even frost like we have predicted for tonight, grounds me.  If the frost comes and I have nothing outside to protect, it is a passing phenomenon of little interest.  With delicate plants to protect I know what it means, cold enough to cause ice crystals inside plant cells to burst.  Likewise drought is of no notice to me if I live in a condominium or on a city lot where my grass and a tree or two are my only contact with the plant world.  With a vegetable garden, though, the plants dry up, don’t produce.  I have to consider the drought, see that my plants get adequate water.

When the rains come, followed by warming days and the seeds leap up through the soil, when the potato eyes push a stalk and early leaves through to the surface, when those leeks nurtured since early April stand up and begin to fatten, it matters to me.  Their work, much like the bees, comes from their essence, not from anything I do, but, also like the bees, I have a role, to protect them, to see they have what they need.  We work together, the vegetables, the fruit trees, the currant and gooseberries bushes and the bee colonies.

The food that comes from our garden does not see us through the winter, though some of our crops, like potatoes and garlic for example last that long, but eating close to the land, lower down the food chain, happens more naturally when some substantial part of the diet comes from home.  So, the food alone serves as a final link to the growing process, but as a present symbol of the food available in the vegetable world, it paints into our world color that needs to be at our table all year round.

This, then, has come to pass as my new faith, a link with the earth and its fruits, a role in caring for them and the constant reminder of our dependency, our interdependency on it all.  When I began to work with the Sierra Club three plus years ago, I did it to put my political experience to work on behalf of the living world, in part at least as a thank offering for the sustenance I have received from it all these many years.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

At Peace

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                    Waxing Last Frost Moon

Woke up this morning feeling the week past.  Intellectually and physically tired.  Gonna take a day off to play, sleep.  Maybe go to the Walker, which I haven’t visited in far too long.

We have a large truck gate in the front section of our 6 foot high chain link fence.  It opens to ten feet wide to allow delivery trucks, mobile lawn mowers and other wide things into the back where the orchard and the garden are.  It’s open today because we’re having five cubic yards of mulch delivered.  To open it, because it’s used infrequently, I had to dig out the accumulated soil in front of the two panels that create the gate, just so they could swing out.

Being tired, in a good way, with things done, matters accomplished gives me a feeling of peace.  I like it.

Aging, Art and Culture, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

What Get’s You Up In The Morning?

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                         Waxing Last Frost Moon

Several years ago, maybe twenty, I sat down with my friend Lonnie Helgeson at the Walker cafe, a table overlooking downtown Minneapolis and the Sculpture Garden.  Lonnie, I said, I could die now.  I feel good about what I’ve done with my life and would have no regrets.

Lonnie looked at me, thought a moment, then asked, “But Charlie where’s your passion?”

Oh.  Yeah.  A passionate man would not declare he was ready to die, he’d be asking, what’s next!

Now, at 64, I can honestly say, “What’s next!”  Not sure what was going on at that moment in my life, but I think I’d hit a caesura, a pause in the melody of my life, a rest stop on the way.  While there, I mistook the rest stop for a destination, rather than a place to catch my breath, consider what direction my path now lead.

Older now and several caravan serai of the soul moments later, I welcome those times when life ceases to press with urgency, when the TV or  a novel or a long vacation beckons.  These are moments of consolidation, a time perhaps to welcome the god Janus for a good look back and a strong gaze forward.

It feels like one may be coming.  Last night I finished my literal translation of Ovid’s story of Diana and Actaeon.  The legislature ends this session (we think) on May 20th or so.  The touring season begins to loosen as schools close down for the summer.  Then I’m left with the bees and the gardens, the novel, too, of course.

These kind of moments when the pacing changes dramatically often yield breaks.  Often, as I’ve looked back over my life, I’ve responded to these breaks with melancholy, a drifting down, moving into a sense of purposelessness.  What do I do now?  I might die.  That would be ok.

Probably where I was that afternoon long ago having lunch with Lonnie.

The melancholy is ok, too.  It’s an old friend, one I’ve come to appreciate as a gathering in, a time to be with myself, in myself.  The melancholy slows down my appetite for life, forces me to pay attention to subtler, inner things, so when I reemerge, I’m ready for another road on this one-way trip.

So, if you talk to me a month from now and I seem a bit distracted, maybe a little down, you’ll know I’m really just resting, getting ready to come out of my corner.  Again.

Aging, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Health

That Old Achievement Bugaboo

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                Waxing Last Frost Moon

Deciding to take a gamble on the weather, with the aid of the forecasters, Kate planted some frost sensitive plants today:  coleus, especially.  She also planted artemisia, Jacob’s Ladder, alyssum and purple wave petunias.  Mark weeded.  Meanwhile I was in St. Paul doing my next to last session with Leslie.

Tonight was Tai Chi.  When I arrived, there was no one else there except the first teacher I encountered and an advanced student.  Nobody else showed up, presumably due to mother’s day.  That meant I had a personal class with two teachers.  It was a revelation.  This teacher, the one I met the first night of class, has a style that connects with me.

She spoke about learning Chinese, listening to the words at night before she went to bed and in the morning before class and recommended, again, since she had done the same thing at the one class she taught, that I practice morning and night.  Just immerse yourself, she said.  We come to these things with such an achievement orientation and we have to jettison it, let go of mistakes, think of them as occurrences, concentrate on the process.

Tai Chi has 13 different moves, a vocabulary of movement, a style of movement rooted in another culture.  I’ve learned 5 of them so far.  Well, sort of learned them.

It was a good class. What I needed at this point.